Tag: hit&run

Federal air marshals have secretly stalked about 5,000 Americans since March. None of these people were suspected of any specific criminal or terrorist activities, and the surveillance didn’t turn up any evidence of criminal or terrorist activities.

Nevertheless, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says the program should and will continue.

The Boston Globe reported over the weekend that the TSA’s program, called “Quiet Skies,” tracks fliers who weren’t even on terror watch lists, based on a vague concept of suspicious behavior. The air marshals themselves object to the program, and their union would like them assigned elsewhere rather than having to follow these people around. Some members of Congress have complained too, saying they weren’t been informed about the launch of this program. So this week, TSA officials have been having closed-door meetings with various lawmakers.

The TSA wouldn’t acknowledge the program existed until the Globe revealed it. Now that it’s been publicized, they’re quick to defend it. Spokesman James Gregory said Monday, “The program analyzes information on a passenger’s travel patterns, and through a system of checks and balances, to include robust oversight, effectively adds an additional line of defense to aviation security.”

It has other defenders, too. The Washington Post‘s editorial board gave it a quasi-stamp of approval with the “If it’s done right” disclaimer, noting that this system would allow the TSA to deploy air marshals to keep track of suspicious people rather than sticking them on large airliners to keep tabs on entire flights even when there’s no sign that anything may happen:

Among other things, the marshals employ behavior detection techniques similar to those that TSA agents use to evaluate all passengers at security checkpoints, such as watching for signs of excessive nervousness. Since airliners are spaces where no one expects privacy, it is unlikely the marshals’ scrutiny constitutes an illegal search. If the 90 days pass without incident, the scrutinized passengers are removed from the list and their files are closed and later purged, the TSA spokesman said.

The editorial highlights a behavior that the average person would find suspicious—”excessive nervousness.” But in practice, the TSA “behavior detection techniques” can find just about any behavior that anybody normally exhibits at an airport to be suspicious. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted on Monday, suspicion can be triggered by such behaviors as boarding late, sleeping on flights, or simply sweating.

ReasonTV pointed out the absurdly contradictory triggers in the TSA’s behavior detection systems. The short version: We’re all potential terrorists no matter what we do at the airport. But the longer version is funnier to watch:

In any case, the fact that this secret surveillance of 5,000 Americans uncovered nothing actionable is a sign that it is not, in fact, being “done right.”

Having delved a little deeper into the controversial tweets of recent New York Times hire Sarah Jeong, I no longer entirely buy the rationale that Jeong provided to The Times: that she was merely “imitating” the rhetoric of people harassing her. If she was trolling her harassers, I would have expected her to quote-tweet or reply to them, but many of the tweets seem to be generated by nothing other than Jeong’s own thoughts, or by items in the news.

I understand that she was experiencing a deluge of harassment at the time. That’s the internet: an ugly place for everybody, but especially for women of color (Jeong was born in South Korea). It’s awful, and people ought to think long and hard about how they might have handled such a situation. Have you ever lashed out in anger after someone was being mean to you? Do you think this should make you unemployable?

I still don’t think she should be fired, and further efforts to mine her old tweets for content that runs afoul of right-wing political correctness—oh no, she said bad things about the police, how dare she—play directly into the hands of a bad-faith smear campaign. Over the last 24 hours, it’s been incredible to watch an army of right-of-center Twitter users gleefully demand Jeong’s head out of some misguided sense of fair play—of forcing the left to “live by its own rules.” A much more productive use of their time would be to defend Jeong while pointing out leftist hypocrisy when warranted.

Speaking of which, the reaction to Jeong’s tweet among some left-of-center folks is a powerful reminder of a harmful lefty belief: that racism against white people is impossible. National Review‘s David French and New York‘s Andrew Sullivan (both, alas, white people—and men!) have both written articles about this reaction, which was evident for anyone paying attention to the Jeong news cycle on social media.

Most people probably define racism as harboring negative views about people based on their skin color or national origin, or treating them differently, or prejudging them, or making broad, stereotypical assumptions about them. But for the left, racism has to involve a structural power imbalance to count. White people as a group have never been oppressed, the argument goes, so they cannot suffer racism. White people can still experience oppression if they are female, gay, trans, disabled, etc., but they can’t experience racism. That’s how intersectionality works.

One easy way for a person to indicate that she is on the left—that she’s woke, she gets it, etc.—is to make remarks that disparage white people. While these remarks seem ugly and offensive to most people, folks on the left who understand that anti-white racism is impossible are able to recognize the disparager as one of their own.

Ultimately, I suspect that’s what Jeong was really doing. She doesn’t actually hate white people; she was demonstrating that she subscribes to The Cause. Of course, it says something about this strain of leftism that one of the easiest ways to prove you’re a devotee is to make mean-spirited, troll-ish generalizations about other people.

Early on a Sunday morning in late May, Jose Garcia was walking to his car to grab a coffee mug when several armed agents in bulletproof vests approached and told him he was under arrest.

The arrest was part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweep that had picked up 162 people, including at least eight green-card holders like Garcia, who had lived in Southern California for more than 50 years and provided for his family by working three jobs.

ICE targeted Garcia based on a 17-year-old domestic violence misdemeanor, which he says happened when a neighbor called the police after overhearing an argument between him and his wife. The courthouse didn’t retain any documents describing the incident in any further detail, but Garcia’s guilty plea made him eligible for deportation.

Garcia’s ordeal happened at the height of the media storm around family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border. Thanks largely to the efforts of his daughter Natalie Garcia, his case received national attention. His Los Angeles–based attorney, Mackenzie Mackins, believes it was this media attention and the ensuing community support that led to an unusually quick resolution. After three weeks, a judge granted Garcia’s case and released him from county jail to return to his family.

“Mr. Garcia’s case is just one of many where members of our community, hard workers, have been picked up by ICE and targeted for reasons that are beyond comprehension for most Americans,” says Mackins.

Mackins also represents Sergio Quiroz, a 23-year-old college student whose mother brought him over the border from Mexico when he was seven months old. He hasn’t returned since.

Quiroz ran into trouble with ICE after a fight with an ex-girlfriend in 2017. He says he threw and broke her iPhone during an argument. She called the police, and he pled to the misdemeanor of simple battery. It’s not a deportable offense in itself, but it put him on ICE’s radar. The agency then used a detainer to pick him up from county jail, move him to a federal detention center, and put him on track for deportation.

“That’s why so many states and localities do not cooperate with ICE detainers,” says Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “They see ICE detainers as a way to cast a wide net to pick up people who should not be deported.”

Despite policy changes designed to increase deportations, the Trump administration has yet to match the deportation numbers from the early years of the Obama administration, during which Barack Obama earned the moniker “Deporter-in-Chief.”

Five days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing ICE to begin targeting “all removable aliens” living in the country. The Department of Homeland Security released a memo rescinding much of the discretion that ICE agents, prosecutors, and judges were previously allowed to exercise.

“The administration has basically unshackled ICE, given it free reign to do what it wants, and basically said no group is off-limits,” says Nowrasteh. “It’s sort of an effort to roll back the clock, in a sense, to go back to the way immigration enforcement was during the first three to four years of the Obama administration.”

The number of immigrants ICE has arrested and detained from the interior of the country has increased by about 30 percent between 2016 and 2017, but arrests at the border and the rate of deportations have slowed, while the backlog of pending cases has spiked. Mackins says that the lack of discretion emanating from the executive order and the DHS memo is causing a system overload.

“When you make everyone a priority, nobody is a priority,” says Mackins.

Activists and a couple of prominent Democrats have called for the complete abolition of ICE. But Nowrasteh thinks such a move would do little in itself to solve the immigration crisis.

“The abolish ICE movement is mostly an optical one of propaganda and slogan,” says Nowrasteh. “The problem is that if you abolish ICE now and do now change any of the other immigration laws that are on the books, another law enforcement agency is just going to do the same thing in about the same way, and you’ve really accomplished nothing.”

Instead, Nowrasteh suggests abolishing criminal prosecutions of unauthorized border crossing, instead treating such an act as an infraction on par with something like a parking ticket. He would also abolish Enforcement and Removal Operations, a branch of ICE, and shift all interior enforcement to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which should be tasked to focus only on serious violent criminals and national security threats.

“One hundred percent of ICE resources should be focused on removing national security, violent, and property criminals,” says Nowrasteh.

Sergio Quiroz and his mother continue to fight his removal order. As for Jose Garcia, he’s back with his family but plans to finally obtain full citizenship to protect himself going forward.

“This is my country. I love it, and I want to stay here for as long as I can. I want to be buried here when the time comes,” says Garcia.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller.

Camera by Paul Detrick, Lorenz Lo, and Weissmueller.

“Flashing Runner” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial International License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/Resolute/Flashing_Runner Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions

“Building the Sled” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial International License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/Resolute/Building_the_Sled Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions

“Our Digital Compass” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial International License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/Resolute/Our_Digital_Compass Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions

“Roundpine” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial International License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/Resolute/Roundpine Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions

“Machinery” by Kai Engel is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial International License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/Resolute/Roundpine Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions

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President Trump’s trade war has hit an American fashion staple: blue jeans.

Bloomberg has interviewed Victor Lytvinenko of Raleigh Denim Workshop, a blue jeans company based in Greensboro, North Carolina. After Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum went into effect in June, the E.U. responded with a 25 percent tariff on several American goods, including bourbon, corn, and jeans. The European market accounted for $31 million worth of America’s jean sales—16 percent of the industry’s global exports. Lytvinenko is already losing European customers.

He’s not the only one suffering. Roy Slaper—owner of Roy Denim in Oakland, California—tells Bloomberg that the tariffs are “another blow” to an already fading industry. (In California, an increase in the minimum wage has already prompted apparel factories to either close or move elsewhere.)

And the jeans industry is hardly alone. This week U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer revealed plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, about half of the country’s imports to the United States. That’s more than double the previous rate of 10 percent. The proposed list of affected goods includes food, tobacco products, electronics, and even paper.

The National Retail Foundation has just released a statement decrying the proposed tariffs, which is says will “hurt U.S. families and workers more than they will hurt China.” It adds: “A broader, long-term strategy is needed that will bring about fair trade without punishing the wrong people. And those people are American workers and their families. They deserve better.”

An Oregon sheriff’s deputy is accused of taking a dead man’s guns and selling them.

In October 2015, a woman contacted the Marion County Sheriff’s Office following the death of her father, Steven Heater. Heater had several guns in his home, and his daughter wanted them secured. Sean Thomas Banks, who had been hired as a deputy in 2013, was sent in to assist. But police say he did more than that.

The Salem Statesman Journal reports that Banks told Heater’s daughter he would take the guns “for safekeeping.” But he did not give her a property sheet or a receipt for the guns, which were valued at $2,930. This is when police say Banks’ definition of “safekeeping” shifted:

According to police, he went on to sell and consign five of the shotguns, including a Remington 1100 shotgun, a Weatherby Orion 12-gauge shotgun, a Beretta 12-gauge shotgun, a Browning A5 20-gauge shotgun and a Winchester Model 23 XTR shotgun, at Tick Licker Firearms in Salem and Rich’s Gun Shop in Donald.

In July, Oregon Live reports, Salem police investigated Banks for forging a check. In the course of that investigation, police found a “suspicious firearms transaction” tied to Banks. The investigation was expanded, and additional transactions were discovered. On July 12, the deputy was placed on administrative leave.

Marion County Sheriff Jason Myers’ office reportedly became aware that the Salem police were investigating Banks in March. Banks was arrested last Thursday and charged with five counts of first-degree theft and one count of official misconduct. Although he initially denied the charges, he eventually admitted that he stole the guns and sold them.

The next mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, will be a Big Red Monster. Glenn Jacobs, better known to pro wrestling fans as Kane, secured a victory last night against Democratic challenger Linda Haney.

Prior to announcing his mayoral candidacy in April 2017, Jacobs spent a long and seasoned career as a WWE star. He has also had a long and seasoned career as a libertarian writer and activist. In a 2009 open letter to Chuck Norris, he encouraged the onscreen Texas ranger to back measures to “End the Fed,” mirroring Ron Paul’s denunciations of the Federal Reserve. (Jacobs can be seen on the bottom of the page wearing a “Ron Paul Revolution” shirt.) Jacobs’ byline has appeared on several libertarian and quasi-libertarian websites, including the Future of Freedom Foundation, LewRockwell.com, and Rare. He spoke at the Young Americans for Liberty’s annual conference in both 2016 and 2017, and he has made several television appearances with the likes of Kennedy and Andrew Napolitano. He also co-founded a pro-market organization called the Tennessee Liberty Alliance.

Though he ran as a Republican, Jacobs’ campaign included many libertarian-friendly messages. During a May debate, for example, he argued that the Knox County government could not simply “incarcerate [its] way out of” the opioid crisis. After he entered the mayoral race last year, he told Rare that running for such offices is important to the liberty movement because change is most effective on the local level:

One hopes that Jacob’s new job will not overshadow his other responsibilities. He has yet to make it clear whether he will continue to serve out his term as the devil’s favorite demon.

Shaun King, the writer and Black Lives Matter activist, had a surprise visitor last night. Someone, his doorman called to say, had come to watch the kids.

King replied that he was not expecting any kind of babysitter. But the visitor was insistent. She had been sent by child protective services, she explained.

As King explained in a series of tweets about the encounter, the woman, “demanded to see three of my children. She called them by name. And said that she had to see them immediately.”

King told her to get lost, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She explained that she worked for New York Child Services, and was responding to a formal complaint contending that King and his wife had abandoned the children and allowed them to do drugs.

This might sound crazy. It’s actually dismayingly common. Over the course of their childhood, about 37 percent of American kids will receive a visit from CPS, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health. And if they’re African American, the rate is 53 percent.

That’s right: more than half of all African American children will be investigated.

King insisted the investigator connect him to her supervisor, and then explained to the supervisor that somebody—an anonymous critic of King’s writings, probably—had played a “cruel prank” on him and his family. Someone was wasting everyone’s time. But the supervisor didn’t care.

Anonymous reporting is allowed in many states. But just how reliable are these anonymous calls?

Diane Redleaf, legal director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare and author of the upcoming book, They Took the Kids Last Night, says that about one in four calls to child protective services are substantiated, but when it comes to anonymous reports, it is only one in 20.

What kind of person would deliberately traumatize a family by calling in a false accusation? Martin Guggenheim, an NYU Law professor specializing in child welfare, could not say conclusively. But he has heard of angry exes who call CPS repeatedly, knowing that each call triggers another investigation. “I once complained to the agency for being utterly insensitive to this problem and asked them to figure out a way to get some sense of whether a caller has made multiple reports that have proven to be unfounded, so that you not only save your own resources but save the parents from the horrible experience of being investigated countless times,” he says. “And the agency said we have to do it this way. We have no choice.”

But parents put in King’s situation have more of a choice than they think. By law, Redleaf said, they do not have to let the investigator in or let them talk to the kids. (This is something the investigators are supposed to inform the parents of.)

On Twitter, King explained that he had spoken with a lawyer, which is absolutely the right thing to do. But its still a terrifying position for a parents to find himself in, and an indictment of the entire CPS system.

“An anonymous troll has weaponized New York’s Department of Child Services against my whole family by filing false reports of neglect and drug use by our children,” he wrote.

Attempt to reign in milk madness fails. Can consumers tell the difference between dairy milk and its vegan alternatives, such as almond milk, cashew milk, and hemp milk? Consumers haven’t been complaining: Sales of soy, seed, and nut milks have grown tremendously this decade. But this trend has the dairy industry worried, and it has gone crying to the government for help. Now senators and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are backing a ban on calling non-dairy beverages milk. They even want to stop businesses from using the term to describe animal milk that doesn’t come from cows.

Democrats from Wisconsin first introduced the idea last year, with the so-called DAIRY PRIDE Act. This summer, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb took up the cause.

Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Cory Booker (D–N.J.) tried to stop the nut-milk madness this week. They introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have prohibited “the use of funds to enforce standards of identity with respect to certain food.”

“No one buys almond milk under the false illusion that it came from a cow,” Lee said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “They buy almond milk because it didn’t come from a cow.”

Lee mentioned Hamptom Creek, the company behind vegan mayonnaise Just Mayo. It “was one of hundreds of increasingly popular alternative foods developed in recent decades, marketed to vegetarians, vegans, and people with food allergies or other health concerns,” he said Lee. But then,

as soon as Just Mayo started to win confidence, it started to attract the attention of top executives in the egg industry. Unfortunately, their intent was not to improve quality or reduce prices. It was, instead, to enlist the government in a pattern that would chill competition.

That pressure from the American Egg Board did indeed lead the FDA to go after Hampton Creek, but the product was eventually able to keep its name with some labeling concessions. “Under a 1938 Federal law,” Lee explained, the FDA has set “rules defining what does and does not qualify as a particular food product” and “anything calling its ‘mayonnaise’ has to have eggs in it.”

The new FDA rule “would ban the use of the term ‘milk’ for nondairy products” because “the FDA says milk is ‘lacteal secretion…obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows,’ and nothing else,” said Lee.

Whatever their original value, these labeling requirements are outdated and they are unnecessary. The amendment I am offering would protect consumers from these ‘standards of identity’ requirements, and they would protect them from this kind of abuse….The role of government in the market is to protect competition, not any one competitor.

The Lee-Booker amendment would have stopped federal funds from being used to enforce “rules against products simply because of their use of a common compound name—such as where a word or phrase identifies an alternative plant or animal source,” said Lee “In other words, it would protect products like ‘almond milk,’ ‘goat cheese,’ and ‘gluten-free bread’ from accusations of being illegally labeled.”

The amendment was voted down 84–14. The 14 dissidents included three Democrats and nine Republicans, including 2016 presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio.

“Must all language be literal?” asks Jibran Khan at National Review:

The FDA’s new stance would seem to suggest so. The pulpy juice of coconut has been called “coconut milk” for generations, because of its appearance. Peanut “butter” does not come from miniature cows. Gold and silver “leaf”—used for decoration in some teas, liquors, and desserts across the world—is not made of leaves at all, but from thinly hammered foils of those metals. People buy and use these items, and have for centuries, while fully understanding what it is they’re dealing with. Likewise, I don’t know of any case in which a customer has purchased soy or almond milk and then been outraged to discover it is not cow’s milk.

Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin does not agree. Speaking Wednesday, the senator called Lee’s amendment “an attack on dairy farmers across the country and in my home state of Wisconsin.” Taking federal action against non-dairy milk, she insisted, “ensures that when a consumer buys a dairy product, it will perform in recipes as expected.”

FREE MINDS

Euro-style “right to be forgotten” coming quietly to America? In Hudson County, New Jersey, “Presiding Judge Jeffrey Jablonski has issued a remarkable and unusual temporary restraining order,” writes The Volokh Conspiracy‘s Eugene Volokh. The judge says Google must “de-index [an] ‘explicit’ post-assault image from searches of ‘Greg’ and ‘Gregory Malandrucco’ and/or ‘Malandrucco” and stop permitting “the display of the subject image”:

The court papers make clear that the order is targeted largely at a Chicago Tribune blog post by columnist Eric Zorn about a police assault on Malandrucco and his friend Matthew Clark; the column contains photos of the two men with injuries to their faces. (The order was issued July 6, but I found it, with the help of the invaluable Lumen Database, only a few days ago, and just got the court documents; the order has apparently not been written about anywhere else.) Google has apparently not complied, and Malandrucco has asked Judge Jablonski to hold Google in contempt of court; the hearing on that will be held Aug. 17. Indeed, the request for the contempt sanctions, filed July 25, seems to have been accelerated by a remark by the judge at a hearing on July 24: “The concern that the court has is that there is not compliance with the [July 6] order.”

Read the whole thing here.

FREE MARKETS

Trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. The economy might be growing, but “corporate tax receipts are down for the year, while government spending is up,” notes NPR:

Even with a fast-growing economy, the Treasury Department expects to borrow more than $750 billion to pay its bills during the last six months of this year. “The federal budget deficit is ballooning, skyrocketing, soaring, whichever way you want to describe it,” said longtime fiscal watchdog Stan Collender, who blogs about federal finances as “The Budget Guy.”

“You’ve got a kind of perfect storm here,” Collender said. “You’ve got more spending. You’ve got less revenue. And the deficit is just getting bigger and bigger, to the point where it will be at least a trillion dollars every year during the Trump administration and beyond.”

QUICK HITS

Officers in Louisiana tell a man to get off tractor, saying he has a warrant. After the man refuses & asks to see the warrant (which the officers don’t produce) one of them steps into his tractor, puts him in a chokehold & kills him. https://t.co/DFskIFVHOc

— Maya Lau (@mayalau) August 3, 2018

• Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has said it will not detain pregnant women in their third trimester “absent extraordinary circumstances.” But “the agency appears to be violating that policy, over and over again,” reports The Daily Beast.

• The unemployment right is down to 3.9 percent.

It’s okay, @RobertGehrke, I don’t think you’re crazy. Siding with the Constitution is always the best way to go! #utpol https://t.co/hdxeA1X7Rn

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) August 2, 2018

While weathering criticism from Republican lawmakers and traditionally Republican special interests over his anti-trade policies, President Donald Trump has one somewhat unlikely ally: the head of America’s largest union.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, told Inside Trade his union and its members are “generally supportive” of the president’s approach so far, including the prospect of additional tariffs on Chinese imports. “Sometimes what’s good for the country may be bad for Joe or Jane in the short term,” he said, “but in the long term if it’s good for the country it’s good for everyone.”

Even if that were true, it might be a tough sell to Joe or Jane. But the consequences of the tariffs are more significant than Trumka suggests, sounding a lot like Trump administration officials who have likened reports of tariff-inflicted economic pain to “hiccups.” Trumka seems to realize that. Otherwise he would not have told Inside Trade that the federal government should commit to subsidizing industries that stand to lose as a result of Trump’s trade policy.

The White House has already outlined plans to spend $12 billion through a New Deal-era crop insurance program to subsidize the losses of farmers who may see lower prices for products such as soy beans because of the retaliatory tariffs China has imposed on American farm products. Covering all the losses—not just those affecting farms, but those affecting all industries, as Trumka suggests—could require as much as $39 billion, according to an analysis that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published this week.

“Offering a bailout to any single industry is a slippery—and costly—slope,” the report warns. “The best way to protect American industries from the damaging consequences of a trade war is to avoid entering into a trade war in the first place.”

Trumka’s some-pain-now-for-gain-later argument would carry more weight if Trump had clear, achievable goals. So far all Trump has to show for his trade war is a handshake deal with Europe promising not to escalate things farther. There are no planned negotiations with China, and Chinese officials recently told Politico they don’t even know what Trump’s goals are. The two sides are now getting farther apart, not closer, on trade. Canada is refusing to participate in this week’s conference on the North American Free Trade Agreement, and talks with Mexico don’t seem to be going well.

But at least Trump can claim he’s following through on his promise to shake up Washington. How many other Republican presidents would have Richard Trumka applauding?

The recent announcement that a now-defunct law firm will pay $600,000 to a former Costa Mesa mayor, and a current councilman and his wife puts to bed an ugly chapter in that Orange County city’s recent history.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to ignore the deeper statewide lessons from that controversy, which also spotlights the aggressive “playbook” that some police officials had used to muscle political opponents into submission.

The settlement came in a lawsuit filed in 2013 by former Mayor Steve Mensinger and Councilman Jim Righeimer and his wife, Lene, against Lackie, Dammeier, McGill & Ethir, an Upland firm that once represented 120 police unions across California and, according to prosecutors, was hired by the Costa Mesa Police Officers Association to do “candidate research,” which included intimidating and tracking Mensinger and Righeimer as the campaign turned nasty.

Punishing bad behavior is great, but shouldn’t these broader political tactics be subject to closer scrutiny, asks Steven Greenhut.

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