Tag: hit&run

Grade-school students typically return to school from summer break in August and September. Almost without fail, tales from the tragedy that is the USDA’s National School Lunch Program begin to filter out by the end of September.

Right on time, observes Baylen Linnekin, students and parents are reporting bug-infested lunches and meals seemingly developed to please the appetites of drunk college kids making a late-night snack run.

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While much attention was diverted by the political circus surrounding Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday and Friday, Congress passed a massive spending bill and another round of tax cuts that will combine to blow an even bigger hole in the federal budget. Lawmakers also found time to pass a bill restricting Americans’ access to prescription painkillers, something that’s likely to force people who are dependent on or addicted to opioids (a distinction seemingly lost on legislators) to seek out more dangerous alternatives.

Let’s start with the spending: Friday’s passage of the House Republican’s so-called Tax Reform 2.0 proposal will likely get heavy rotation in campaign ads over the next five weeks, even though the bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate. The bill does several things, but the key part of the proposal is the permanent extension of the individual and corporate income tax rate cuts enacted last year. Those lower rates are set to expire after 2025—reverting to their previous levels—but Republicans have been aiming for a permanent extension since before the final votes were cast on last year’s tax bill.

If Republicans still cared about deficits, Tax Reform 2.0 would be a non-starter. Having last year’s tax cuts expire in the middle of the next decade was a maneuver (or a gimmick, if you prefer) designed to limit the impact of tax reform on future deficits and the national debt.

Unsurprisingly, then, extending those tax cuts will add to the deficit. According to an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan number-crunching agency within Congress, the bill will add $631 billion to the deficit over a decade. While the JCT says an extension of the tax cuts will cause the economy to grow by about 0.5 percent in the years immediately after 2025, additional revenue from that growth will cancel out a mere $86 billion of the tax cut’s impact on the deficit. Other analyses of the bill by the left-leaning Tax Policy Center and the right-leaning Tax Foundation make similar estimates about the long-term effect on revenue.

The bottom line? Even when accounting for increased economic growth, Tax Reform 2.0 comes with a price tag of more than $500 billion added to the deficit—an amount future taxpayers will have to cover.

The bill is not without its charms. A proposal to created so-called universal savings accounts would allow Americans to create tax-advantaged savings accounts where they could stash up to $5,000 annually without having to deal with all the restrictions and limitations that come with similarly structured 401(k) and IRA plans now. Encouraging savings—especially savings that are partially sheltered from the tax man—would be a positive step that helps families plan for the future.

But if you needed further evidence that Congress doesn’t give a damn about planning for the country’s future, look no further than the passage this week, in both houses, of a $853 billion spending bill. About $600 million of the spending is directed towards the Pentagon—boosting the military budget to levels not seen since the height of the Iraq War.

The bill is now on its way to President Donald Trump’s desk. He must sign it before October 1 to avoid a government shutdown, which might be complicated by the lack of funding for his border wall.

The spending bill has raised the ire of the few fiscally conservative Republicans who sit in Congress. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) encouraged Trump not to sign the bill and blasted his fellow lawmakers for being “far worse than the politicians they once derided.”

This gigantic, wasteful, pathetic spending bill passed the House and Senate. @POTUS @realDonaldTrump said, “I will never sign another bill like this again,” about the last bill like this, the omnibus. He’ll now be put to the test. https://t.co/x3FpgmRemD

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) September 27, 2018

While the Kavanaugh hearings devolved into partisan acrimony, Congress was also serving up reminders of what happens when nearly everyone agrees. The Tax Reform 2.0 vote went mostly party line, but spending an obscene amount of money was, once again, a bipartisan affair in both the House and Senate.

So, too, was the passage of the Support for Patients and Communities Act, a much-touted bipartisan effort to address the opioid crisis in the most congressional of ways: by throwing money and more prohibition at the problem.

The final version of the bill, which passed the House 393-8 on Friday and now heads to the Senate, will spend about $8 billion on state-run opioid treatment centers and research into non-opioid pain killers. It also beefed up border security in the name of stopping the importation of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and other lab-made drugs.

But the bill may unintentionally increase demand for fentanyl and other drugs used by opioid addicts who can’t get a legal fix. Several provisions in the proposal would restrict access to prescription painkillers; other aspects of the legislation would increase penalties for drug manufacturers and doctors deemed to have over-sold and over-prescribed opioids.

As J.J. Rich, a policy analyst for the Reason Foundation (which publishes this blog) notes in the November issue of Reason, previous crackdowns on prescription drugs have actually made the opioid crisis worse.

“It’s clear that the black market has claimed the economy ceded by restrictions on the legal market,” Rich notes, citing Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health show that pain reliever abuse rates have been flat since 2002. “When government restricts access to something people want, it drives demand to the black market. In this case, as opioids have become increasingly difficult to obtain legally in the last decade, users have switched to “diverted” prescription medications and illicit alternatives, including heroin. And just as Prohibition pushed bootleggers to switch from beer to potent bathtub gin, traffickers are increasingly adulterating their narcotics with potent synthetic opioids such as sufentanil—a substance that can be up to 500 times stronger than morphine.”

Have a great weekend!

Kanye West is no stranger to eliciting suprise and confusion. His latest play: pairing a Donald Trump MAGA hat with a Colin Kaepernick sweatshirt.

Trump and former 49ers quarterback Kaepernick go together like oil and water. Trump has, on several different occasions now, criticized Kaepernick’s protesting police brutality during the “The Star Spangled Banner.”

West donned this outfit on a trip to the office of music magazine The FADER. He apparently designed the Keapernick sweatshirt himself.

11am meetings, amirite @thefader @kanyewest pic.twitter.com/3gtkxzt4I6

— Andy Cohn (@andycohn) September 27, 2018

West previously caused a great deal of confusion among his fans when he said, just after the election, that he would have voted for Trump. After a series of meetings with the president and tweets about his love and support, West told late night host Jimmy Kimmel that his support was less about policy and more about being “fearless enough to break the fucking simulation.”

“It took me a year and a half to have the confidence to stand up and put on the [Make America Great Again] hat, no matter what the consequences were,” he said. “And what it represented to me is not about policies, because I’m not a politician like that, but it represented overcoming fear and doing what you felt no matter what anyone said.” Following one of West’s recent expressions of support, Chance the Rapper, himself the son of a prominent Democratic Party figure, tweeted that black people didn’t have to be Democrats.

Pairing Trump’s hat with a sweater that likely would incense Trump and many of his supporters suggests West himself is trying to break said simulation. And while his support for Trump makes him a minority among blacks in the U.S., there are likely quite a few Trump voters who support holding police accountable, even if they don’t like how Kaepernick has chosen to raise the issue. Cornell’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research reports that 86 percent of whites and 92 percent of blacks support the idea of independent prosecutors investigating police who kill unarmed people, and that equal numbers of both whites and blacks support a right to record police, as well as requiring police to wear audio and visual recording equipment on the job. The divergence in sentiment captured by West’s outfit concerns the extent of the problem and whose most hurt by it.

West is crossing the divide like a culture-war version of Nik Wallenda.

Prosecutors have dropped all charges against Tammie Hedges, the North Carolina woman who sheltered local pets during Hurricane Florence.

Hedges is the executive director of Crazy’s Claws N’ Paws, a volunteer-based nonprofit that takes in neglected or injured animals and finds them permanent homes. Though Crazy’s isn’t a licensed animal shelter, the organization is currently “renovating a shelter site,” Hedges told Reason last week.

With many residents in Wayne County, North Carolina, evacuating the area, Hedges realized the site was the perfect pet for pets to take refuge. She ended up taking in 27 animals—17 cats and 10 dogs.

Things went south several days later. Hedges says the county’s animal services manager demanded she turn the pets over willingly or he’d get a warrant. Hedges complied, but that didn’t stop them from arrested her days later. The Wayne County District Attorney’s Office officially charged her with 12 counts of “misdemeanor practice/attempt veterinary medicine without a license” and one count of “solicitation of a Schedule 4 controlled substance,” according to a county press release.

Hedges told the Goldsboro News-Argus that most of the charges were a result of her administering amoxicillin, which is used to treat bacterial infections, to some of the animals. She also allegedly solicited a donation of the painkiller tramadol.

Hedges’ story quickly went viral. Not only was it covered by several national media outlets, but a petition demanding she not be punished garnered more than 33,000 signatures. America seemed to be on her side.

On Tuesday night, the county announced that prosecutors had “dismissed” the charges. A statement from District Attorney Matthew Delbridge suggests that it was bad publicity and nothing else that prompted him to give up on the case.

“A passion for and the love of animals is laudable but does not excuse unnecessarily putting their health at risk when other, safer resources are available,” Delbridge said. He went on to accuse Hedges of “taking advantage of a dire situation to solicit money and opioid narcotics from our generous and well intentioned citizens.”

It’s good that Hedges won’t be treated like a criminal for helping pets. But Delbridge’s statement doesn’t address the larger problem: She never should have gotten in trouble in the first place.

It’s not like she stole anyone’s animals. People voluntarily put them in her care during an emergency situation. And she appears to have taken good care of the pets. Not only were they given free medical care, but volunteers played with them, walked them, and cleaned up after them. Local volunteers are, in fact, often the people best equipped to save animals during disasters. A sensible system would recognize that, not charge the good Samaritans with crimes.

For the last 45 years, no writer has taken a bigger blowtorch to the sacred cows of American life than libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke.

As a writer at National Lampoon in the 1970s, he co-authored best-selling parodies of high school yearbooks and Sunday newspapers. For Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications, O’Rourke traveled to war zones and other disaster areas, chronicling the folly of military and economic intervention. In 1991, he came out with Parliament of Whores, which explained why politicians should be the last people to have any power. Subtitled “A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government,” this international bestseller probably minted more libertarians than any book since Free to Choose or Atlas Shrugged. More recently, O’Rourke published a critical history of his own Baby Boomer generation and How The Hell Did This Happen?, a richly reported account of Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 presidential victory.

O’Rourke’s new book, None of My Business, explains “why he’s not rich and neither are you.” It’s partly the result of hanging out with wealthy money managers and businessmen and what they’ve taught him over the years about creating meaning and value in an ever richer and crazier world. It covers everything from social media to learning how to drink in war zones to why the Chinese may be more American than U.S. citizens. He also explains why even though he doesn’t understand or like a lot of things about modern technology, he doesn’t fear Amazon or Google, especially compared to people who are calling for Socialism 2.0.

I sat down with O’Rourke to talk about all that, the good and bad of Donald Trump, and why being an “old white man” just isn’t what it used to be (and why he’s OK with that).

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California has passed a half-decent housing bill, if you can believe it. I wouldn’t call it libertarian bill, but it at least evinces an awareness that it’s a problem when local officials to block housing projects they don’t like.

S.B. 829—sponsored by Sen. David Chi (D–San Francisco) and signed into law yesterday by Gov. Jerry Brown—denies state funding and federal tax credits administered by the state to any city that requires local elected officials to sign a “letter of acknowledgement” before a subsidized housing project can move forward.

The target of the bill is Los Angeles, where city councilmembers must issue just such a letter before any new affordable housing funded by the recent Proposition HHH can go up in their districts. This veto power has unsurprisingly been used to wither keep unwanted housing out or to demand various perks and concessions from developers.

Needless to say, publicly funded housing is not the libertarian approach to sheltering low-income Californians. Nevertheless, it is the solution California is sticking to for the moment, and these arbitrary and politicized letters of acknowledgement have only made the process more sluggish and bureaucratic.

A recent Los Angeles Times investigation found examples of city council members refusing to issue these letters of acknowledgement because they felt their district had already accepted its “fair share” of affordable housing projects, or because they did not like the façade of planned apartment buildings. One councilman, Curren Price, even developed his own set of guidelines for what affordable housing developers would have to do in order to earn his letter of acknowledgement, including a requirement that projects on commercial corridors provide pocket parks.

Essentially allowing every member of the city council to write their own rules for new development has been incredibly frustrating for L.A.-area developers.

“With no standards to govern when the letter is issued, in one district a developer could get a green light; in another, the exact same project meeting objective criteria could be killed for no stated reason,” Shashi Hanuman tells the Times. Hanuman, an attorney for the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel, is helping to sue the city of Los Angeles over these letters.

Using the carrot that is state affordable housing funding to get localities to drop one small part of their byzantine rules for approving new housing is thus welcome. But it’s hardly sufficient, says Faizah Malik, another attorney with Public Counsel.

“We welcome the Governor’s signature on this important bill,” said Malik in a statement. But S.B. 829 “hasn’t removed any other processes that permit backroom vetoes, and it hasn’t taken steps to remediate for the harm that this illegal policy has caused.”

Indeed, even when affordable housing projects have the full-throated support of their local representative, California’s voluminous regulations give neighborhood NIMBYs ample opportunity to stall, shrink, or stop unwanted development.

One need only look at the controversy surrounding a planned apartment building for formerly homeless people in East Los Angeles, where a decade-long battle has been waged between local residents and Los Angeles County’s main transit agency, which is trying to get approval to build a below-market rate apartment building on a vacant lot it owns.

Despite having secured the support of Councilman Jose Huizer—whose district includes the proposed building—in early 2016, the project has gone nowhere, stalled first by appeals from angry neighbors who wanted a park on the site instead, later by a lawsuit from business owners worried about shadow and construction dust. The Los Angeles Times has called that suit “NIMBYism at its worst.”

S.B. 829 does nothing to address these kinds of roadblocks. Nor do they tackle some cities’ informal practices that impose a letter of acknowledgement requirement in all but name.

Take bill sponsor Chui’s own city of San Francisco, where a practice known as “supervisorial prerogative” has seen individual supervisors (San Francisco’s version of city council members) exercise an effective veto over new housing projects in their district.

Back in July, the Board of Supervisors bowed to this prerogative in voting to further delay approval of business owner Robert Tillman’s plans to convert a laundromat into a zone-compliant apartment building in the city’s Mission District after Supervisor Hillary Ronen—who represents the Mission—demanded a third shadow study be conducted on proposed building.

Tillman is now suing Ronen and the City of San Francisco over this delay.

In response in S.B. 829, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and members of the city council have begrudgingly said that they’ll repeal the “letter of acknowledgement” requirement for the approval of new housing projects.

To reiterate, publicly funded construction is hardly the ideal way end California’s housing woes. But absent some sort of free market revolution, making the approval of such housing subject to fewer political roadblocks, however marginal the change may be, is a small step toward sanity. This is California we’re talking about. It’s a miracle when anything gets built.

The fight to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh turned into bloody political theater after research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford accused him of holding her down and forcefully groping her at a high school party in the 1980s. Since then, other women have come forward to accuse the judge of past misconduct.

I won’t speculate here about what did or did not happen. But while information is still coming out, we can be responsible in the way that we react to the situation. Here are some of the most nakedly partisan, disingenuous, or completely useless reactions to the confirmation process:

‘Lying skanks’

Fox News contributor Kevin Jackson chose to stand with Kavanaugh by issuing a fiery rebuke to feminism and Kavanaugh’s accusers. This took the form of an impassioned Twitter rant:

I disagree. Feminists are their own worst enemies, and enemy of women.

Also, they want men to NEVER be believed. I’m not succumbing.

TO HELL with the notion that women must be believed no matter what. Lying skanks is what these 3 women are, and we ALL know more#TeamKJ https://t.co/qGVJLTv6QI

— Kevin Jackson (@KevinJacksonTBS) September 27, 2018

Fox has reportedly fired Jackson following the rant.

It doesn’t help anyone to accuse women of lying about sexual assault without explaining why you doubt them, and claiming that women who accuse men of sexual assault are just “skanks” contributes to an environment where victims decide not to report violence out of fear of retaliation.

‘Believe the victims’

Automatically believing women doesn’t make any more sense than automatically refusing to believe them. As Reason‘s Robby Soave has observed, Ford’s accusations have only refueled the mantra “believe the victims.” Mistakes happen; false accusations happen. If you weigh the evidence and conclude that neither has happened in this case, that’s fine. If you just leap to assuming they didn’t happen, that’s a problem. False accusations have stained the history of the American justice system, particularly in the case of white extrajudicial violence against black men. An untold number of black men have been convicted or even lynched after being falsely accused of sexual assault and misconduct.

Needless to say, my point isn’t that Kavanaugh is the victim of a modern-day lynching. It’s that it makes as little sense to assume someone must be guilty as to assume they must be innocent. Belief should never be automatic.

‘Tell me what boy hasn’t done this in high school’

On a CNN panel, a Republican woman said, “We’re talking about a 15-year-old girl, which I respect. I’m a woman, I respect. But we’re talking about a 17-year-old boy, in high school, testosterone running high. Tell me what boy hasn’t done this in high school. Please, I would like to know.”

This woman—and the others who have made arguments like that over the last couple of weeks—seem to be arguing that every high school boy has gotten drunk, pushed a teen girl into a bedroom, and forcefully groped her while keeping his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming. It’s one thing to doubt that this happened; it’s another to say that even if it happened it wasn’t a big deal.

A man can’t be a predator if he is supported by women

Kavanaugh was joined by his wife, former presidential aide Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, for a Fox News interview this week. There, she spoke to the character of the man she married.

The Kavanaughs are not the first to use this stand-by-your-man strategy. While several congratulated Kavanaugh’s wife for her outspoken support, others believed she was being used as a prop, especially in moments when her husband appeared to cut her off.

She made a point to say that “this is not at all characteristic. It’s really hard to believe. He’s decent. He’s kind. He’s good. I know his heart. This is not consistent with Brett.” And as his spouse, she’s certainly in a position have insight into his character. But a wife’s absolution of her husband’s alleged crimes isn’t exactly the final word. If it were, the same logic applies would apply to someone like Hillary Clinton, who also helped shield her husband from his accusers.

These defenses of Kavanaugh and Ford do not do justice to either. And they do more harm than good to sexual assault victims and the wrongly accused alike. At the end of the day, only actual evidence will either convict Kavanaugh or clear him.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted today to approve Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh’s nomination has been controversial. The judge, who currently serves on the U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, now faces multiple allegations of sexual misconduct dating back to his high school and college years. His first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, testified before the committee yesterday. When she was done, Kavanaugh offered a defense. Last night, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee announced they would hold their previously scheduled vote on Kavanaugh today.

The vote occurred along party lines: All 11 Republicans on the committee supported Kavanagh’s nomination, while the 10 Democrats voted no. Hours before the vote took place, several Democrats walked out of the committee room in protest.

The ultimate results of the vote were not surprising. The swing vote was Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who said Friday morning he would support Kavanaugh’s nomination. Flake’s announcement meant Kavanaugh enjoyed the support of each Republican on the committee. But moments before senators voted, Flake complicated things: He said he would vote yes in the committee. However, he wants the Senate to delay its floor vote for “up to” a week so the FBI can reopen its background check into Kavanaugh. It’s not yet clear whether the Senate will in fact arrange such a delay.

When the full chamber does vote, Kavanaugh’s confirmation is far from a done deal. Senators on the fence include moderate Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, as well as Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat up for re-election this November in West Virginia, which President Donald Trump carried in 2016 by a 41-point margin. Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, another Democrat up for re-election in a state Trump won, said today that he’d vote against Kavanaugh.

In a speech Thursday, Philllipines President Rodrigo Duterte, infamous for encouraging the summary executions of anybody suspected of involvement in drugs, admitted to his killings, kind of, sort of, maybe. From The New York Times:

He said he had challenged the country’s military and police brass to remove him from office if they were not satisfied with the way he was running the country.

“I told the military, what is my fault? Did I steal even one peso?” Mr. Duterte said. “My only sin is the extrajudicial killings.”

Well, that’s quite a sin. A spokesperson subsequently claimed that Duerte was merely “being himself, being playful, highlighting the point that he isn’t corrupt.” His foes are treating the quote seriously, though, hoping to use it as an admission that he’s responsible for all the deaths.

The police in the Phillipines have killed thousands in their brutal, doomed war on drugs. They acknowledge killing about 4,500 users and dealers, claiming they’re all justified uses of force—apparently the suspects all keep resisting arrest. Human rights activists put the death toll much higher, between 8,000 and 12,000. One political opponent believes it’s probably more than 20,000.

The International Criminal Court is currently investigating Duterte for “crimes against humanity.” He has responded by pulling his country out of the treaty that established the court.

He also promised that his brutal drug war will continue while he’s in office, racking up executions every single day. Take that as a reminder that our own drug war could be even worse. President Donald Trump, by way, says he’d like us to follow in Duterte’s footsteps.

Yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh lasted about nine hours (including breaks), but it could have accomplished as much (or as little) in half that time. Grandstanding, bloviating senators on both sides of the aisle were not content to make a point once when three, 13, or 20 times would do. Kavanaugh also was prone to repetition, which was only partly his fault, since the senators kept asking the same questions over and over again. This index gives you a sense of the hearing’s priorities:

Number of times Kavanaugh confessed to liking beer (in so many words): 7

Number of times Kavanaugh confessed to sometimes drinking too much beer: 3

Number of times Kavanaugh denied having alcohol-induced memory lapses: 10

Number of time Kavanaugh alluded to conflicts with the freshman college roommate who said he was a mean drunk: 4

Number of times Kavanaugh noted that the three people Ford has said were at the gathering where he allegedly attacked her do not recall the event: 15

Number of times Democrats called for an FBI investigation: 20

Number of time Kavanaugh dodged the question of whether he would support an FBI investigation: 12

Number of times Republicans quoted Joe Biden on the inconclusiveness of FBI investigations: 3

Number of time Democrats praised Ford’s courage: 13

Number of times Kavanaugh or a Republican senator complained that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) sat on Ford’s allegations for a month and a half: 12

Number of times Feinstein said she was respecting Ford’s wish for confidentiality: 3

Number of times Kavanaugh or a Republican senator argued that the allegations could have been investigated by the committee while maintaining Ford’s confidentiality: 5

Number of times Feinstein denied leaking the allegations to the press: 4

Number of times Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook came up: 5

Mentions of vomit: 8

Mentions of flatulence: 4