Tag: hit&run

An employee of the California Department of Motor Vehicles spent hours asleep most workdays for almost four years, according to a state audit. Despite that, she’s still employed. And that’s just the most eye-popping moment in a report that detailed several instances of “misuse of state time and property and economically wasteful activities” that together cost tapayers more than $200,000.

From February 2014 to December 2017, the unnamed data operator “likely slept for at least three hours each day” for a total of 2,220 hours of misused time, the report says. The employee’s frequent naps cost the state “more than $40,000 in salary for her wasted work time.”

The constant sleeping forced the woman’s colleagues to pick up her slack. Data operators are expected to process an average of 560 documents per day, but she was only able to average 200, so her colleagues had to “take on her unfinished workload.” The work she did do was subpar and mistake-ridden, according to her employee evaluations.

So why did she keep her job? It’s not as though her supervisors had no idea what was going on. But they either underestimated her ability to snooze for long periods of time or just didn’t care enough to do something about it:

During the investigation, the employee’s supervisor stated that because she woke up the employee three to four times each day, she believed the employee missed only 20 to 30 minutes of work time daily. However, four witnesses reported consistently observing the employee sleeping at her desk for hours at a time during work hours, rather than the 20 to 30 minutes estimated by the supervisor. In fact, two of these witnesses estimated that the employee slept for a minimum of three hours each workday because the supervisor did not consistently wake up the employee even when the supervisor was aware that the employee was sleeping.

Starting in February 2015, the employee’s bosses repeatedly warned her that sleeping on the job was unacceptable. But she kept doing it, and they took no action to stop her. The supervisors may have thought she had a medical condition, but they didn’t even take the correct steps (such as requiring her to undergo a medical examination) to address it.

In January 2017, the woman received a release from her physician “indicating that she could perform her duties,” the report says. Nonetheless, “she continued to sleep at work and failed to meet the unit’s production standards.”

After the state auditor started investigating the case, DMV officials said they couldn’t take action against the employee because “previous corrective memorandums” issued to her “did not contain the appropriate language necessary for such disciplinary action.” In March, the employee was finally issued a memo with “the necessary language” to let the agency penalize her if she keeps sleeping on the job. The DMV has also said it’s working with human resources to decide her ultimate fate.

But even if this woman learns to stay awake during business hours, that will barely scratch the surface of why Californians generally hate the Department of Motor Vehicles: its long lines and mind-numbing paperwork. Next month, lawmakers are holding a hearing to discuss the DMV’s wait times. Hopefully the bureaucrats who attend won’t sleep through it.

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously to ban single-use plastic straws, making it the second major American city to do so.

The ordinance outlaws not just plastic straws, but also plastic splash sticks, toothpicks, and cocktail sticks, which would have to include those little swords and umbrellas. Other straw bans typically target food service businesses, but this one will prohibit anyone, including grocery stores and other retailers, from selling plastic straws.

“The negative environmental impacts of single-use plastics are astronomical,” bill sponsor Katy Tang said in a statement. “San Francisco has been a pioneer of environmental change, and it’s time for us to find alternatives to the plastic that is choking our marine ecosystems and littering our streets.”

Like all good straw bans, the text of Tang’s bill mentions the questionable statistic that Americans use 500 million straws a day. This statistic comes from a unconfirmed 2011 phone survey of straw manufacturers conducted by a 9-year-old. Market analysts think the actual number is far lower.

Violators of San Francisco’s plastic straw/sword ban will face between $100 and $500 in fines, depending on the number of violations. While an explicit exemption for disabled people—many of whom lack the motor skills to drink or eat without a straw—is not included, the bill does say that “strict compliance” with the law is not required when it would “interfere with accommodating for any person’s medical needs.”

This makes it less punitive than the straw ban in nearby Santa Barbara, which has no disability exemption and even allows for the possibility of criminal sanctions. In other ways, though, San Francisco’s straw ban is quite restrictive. Unlike Seattle’s straw ban, for example, San Francisco’s does not allow straws made from most compostable bioplastics.

The bill also includes a ton of other non-straw-related regulations aimed at cutting down on single-use food containers. Starting in 2020, event planners will now have to make reusable cups available for 10 percent of attendees. That same year, businesses will be required to meet yet-to-be-determined targets for using recycled content in containers, cups, and other “food service ware.”

Tang’s bill also restricts city departments’ ability to issue waivers or exemptions for those claiming financial hardship.

A final vote enacting this ordinance into law is not expected until next week. But given the board’s unanimous sign-off, this is a mere formality. The straw ban will take effect in July 2020.

As I’ve written many times in the past, straw bans are a useless environmental measure. San Francisco’s is no exception. The United States is responsible for less than one percent of the world’s plastic marine waste, and straws make up a tinier portion of this still. The best way to cut back on plastic pollution in the oceans is to improve waste management systems in China and other parts of the developing world, not to tinker with individuals’ consumption habits in the States.

Despite the medical exemption, many disabled people will no doubt find it harder to have a drink out on the town. Able-bodied consumers will be inconvenienced too, although to a lesser degree. Meanwhile, straw-dependent bars, restaurants, and tea shops will see their costs rise even higher in the notoriously expensive city. These might not be life-altering hardships, but the government nevertheless shouldn’t be imposing them on people.

It may seem obvious that the right to keep and bear arms extends beyond your front doorstep. But the Supreme Court has never directly addressed that question, and federal appeals courts have disagreed about the extent to which the Constitution allows states to restrict public possession of firearms. Yesterday a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit added to the confusion by ruling that “the Second Amendment encompasses the right of a responsible law-abiding citizen to carry a firearm openly for self-defense outside of the home.”

The decision in Young v. Hawaii—which was written by Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain and joined by Judge Sandra Ikuta, with a dissent by Judge Richard Clifton—was especially striking because the full appeals court concluded in 2016 that “the Second Amendment does not preserve or protect a right of a member of the general public to carry concealed firearms in public.” Taken together, the two decisions imply that it is constitutional for states or cities to ban concealed carry but unconstitutional for them to ban open carry, which is consistent with the views of 19th-century legislators and judges but does not jibe very well with contemporary intuitions about which kind of arms bearing is more threatening.

Young is a challenge to Hawaii’s highly restrictive rules for carrying guns in public, which amount to a prohibition for all but a select few. Generally speaking, Hawaii requires that guns be kept at their owners’ residences or businesses. Concealed carry is allowed in “an exceptional case” when the local police chief determines that an applicant has shown “reason to fear injury to the applicant’s person or property.” Such exceptional cases are quite rare. Hawaii County, one of the defendants in Young, has never issued a concealed carry permit, while other Hawaii counties “appear to have issued only four concealed carry licenses in the past eighteen years,” according to a footnote in the 9th Circuit’s ruling. Permits to openly carry firearms, notionally allowed “where the urgency or the need has been sufficiently indicated” and the applicant “is engaged in the protection of life and property,” are nearly as difficult to obtain, in practice limited to security guards and people in similar occupations.

The plaintiff, George Young, unsuccessfully sought a carry permit from Hawaii County on two occasions in 2011. Young filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that the state’s requirements for a carry permit violated his Second Amendment rights. U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor disagreed, ruling that Hawaii’s prohibitive law “does not implicate activity protected by the Second Amendment,” which “establishes only a narrow individual right to keep an operable handgun at home for self-defense.” Young appealed to the 9th Circuit, which had already rejected a constitutional right to concealed carry but had explicitly left the issue of open carry unaddressed.

The distinction between open and concealed carry is based on the Supreme Court’s observation, in the landmark Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller, that “the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues.” But by and large, as Judge O’Scannlain points out, those courts did not say such laws were constitutional because the Second Amendment has nothing to do with carrying guns in public. Rather, they ruled that legislators had the authority to ban a form of public carry that was perceived as especially threatening

In 1840, for instance, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld a restriction on “the evil practice of carrying weapons secretly,” while making it clear that a comprehensive ban on public carry would be unconstitutional. The Georgia Supreme Court took the same position six years later. “So far as the act of 1837 seeks to suppress the practice of carrying certain weapons secretly,” the court said, “it is valid, inasmuch as it does not deprive the citizen of his natural right of self-defence, or of his constitutional right to keep and bear arms. But …so much of it, as contains a prohibition against bearing arms openly, is in conflict with the Constitution, and void.”

Several years later, the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld that state’s ban on concealed carry, saying the law was “absolutely necessary to counteract a vicious state of society, growing out of the habit of carrying concealed weapons, and to prevent bloodshed and assassinations committed upon unsuspecting persons.” The court noted that the law “interfered with no man’s right to carry arms…’in full open view,’ which places men upon an equality. This is the right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”

Nowadays, I suspect, the attitudes reflected in these decisions and in the laws they upheld, based on the assumption that people carrying hidden weapons were up to no good, are more or less reversed, at least as far as the general public is concerned. While many people are alarmed by the sight of an ordinary citizen openly carrying a gun, concealed carry is discreet by definition and generates less concern. Yet judging from state laws, legislators continue to view concealed carry as more problematic than open carry. While 31 states allow people to openly carry handguns without a permit (in some cases only if the weapon is unloaded), only a dozen or so allow concealed carry without a permit.

Taking a broader view, all but nine states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island) allow lab-abiding members of the general public to carry firearms for self-defense, either without a permit or with one that can be obtained by meeting a short list of objective criteria. Young implies that limiting that right to a favored few, as the states with discretionary carry permit policies do, cannot be reconciled with the Second Amendment. “The right to bear arms must include, at the least, the right to carry a firearm openly for self-defense,” O’Scannlain writes.

In reaching that conclusion, O’Scannlain starts with the language of the amendment itself (citations omitted):

The fact that the Second Amendment protects bearing as well as keeping arms implies some level of public carry in case of confrontation. A right to “keep” arms, on its own, necessarily implies a right to carry those arms to some extent. For instance, in order to “keep” arms, one would have to carry them home from the place of purchase and occasionally move them from storage place to storage place. The addition of a separate right to “bear” arms, beyond keeping them, should therefore protect something more than mere carrying incidental to keeping arms. Understanding “bear” to protect at least some level of carrying in anticipation of conflict outside of the home provides the necessary gap between “keep” and “bear” to avoid rendering the latter guarantee as mere surplusage.

O’Scannlain considers discussions of the right to keep and bear arms in the late 18th century, in the run-up to the Civil War, and during Reconstruction, which contradict Judge Gillmor’s assumption that the Second Amendment protects nothing but “a narrow individual right to keep an operable handgun at home for self-defense.” To pick one particularly telling example, Chief Justice Roger Taney, in the shameful 1856 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, recoiled at the idea that black men were entitled to “the privileges and immunities of citizens,” which among other things would mean they had the “full liberty” to “keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Coming at the issue from the opposite direction, an 1866 report from the Freedmen’s Bureau described a Kentucky law that prohibited former slaves from carrying guns, complaining that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms as provided in the Constitution is infringed” by such restrictions.

O’Scannlain notes that Heller also implies a right to keep and bear arms that extends beyond the home (citations omitted):

Heller described the “inherent right of self-defense” as “most acute” within the home, implying that the right exists, perhaps less acutely, outside the home….Heller also identified “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings” as presumptively lawful. Why bother clarifying the definition of sensitive public places if the Second Amendment did not apply, at all, to any public place?

Once Anthony Kennedy is replaced by a justice who is more inclined to hear Second Amendment cases, there’s a good chance the Supreme Court will make those implications explicit, and this case could provide a vehicle to do so. If Young “isn’t reheard en banc, or the panel decision is affirmed on en banc rehearing,” Eugene Volokh observed yesterday, “then the case may well go up to the Supreme Court, since this decision reinforces a split among the circuits on the subject.”

A teen in Minneapolis has been running a hot dog stand, partly to raise money and partly because he likes having his own business. Jaequan Faulkner, 13, started his own little pop-up venture two summers ago, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

This summer he hit a snag. Someone called the Minneapolis Health Department and complained about the kid with the unlicensed hot dog stand.

It’s been that sort of summer, with snitches finding the dumbest reasons to call the cops and other authorities on other people, often kids and teens.

Faulkner’s story has a happy ending, though: Rather than shutting him down, the city decided to help him go legit. They gave him the equipment that the health department demanded to operate in compliance with city code (everything from meat thermometers to cleaning equipment), and they covered the $87 required for a “special event permit” to operate legally.

It’s nice that the city helped him, but there’s something a little unsettlingly self-promotional about its approach. The only reason this story has a happy ending is because of the kindness of some cogs in the city’s bureaucracy. This is a story about a teen’s entrepreneurial spirit, but it’s also a story of the noblesse oblige of those with the power to decide whether or not Faulkner can sell hot dogs.

Faulkner is an adorable, photogenic kid with a dream. He wants his own food truck someday. He’s a great story. He’s also an “innocent,” somebody easy to root for. That’s why stories like this go viral. That’s why stories about officials cracking down on lemonade stands go viral. That’s why lemonade manufacturer Country Time was widely praised for a summer program to pay the costs of permits so that kids can legally run stands.

Does Minneapolis treat everybody who needs a bunch of permits and equipment to do their jobs with such a charitable response? Look at all the business licenses Minneapolis demands. If your kid is selling candy bars to raise money for a band, the band director is supposed to register for a youth fundraising permit. And each kid selling candy is supposed to carry around an identification card with the name of the organization, the permit’s registration number and expiration date, and the telephone number for the appropriate office in the city government, in case any of those snitching grown-ups want to make sure you’re legitimate.

If you’ve got an arcade (or I guess a “barcade,” these days), each machine requires its own license. Heck, you have to get permission to put out a bench on a public sidewalk. It’s not all terrible, though. As of 2016, Minneapolis no longer requires special business permits to operate skating rinks, to run bowling alleys, to deliver milk, or to have a jukebox.

It’s genuinely great that Minneapolis was kind to Faulkner and didn’t succumb to bureaucracy’s worst tendencies. But ultimately, these officials want us to praise them for not being as bad as their own ordinances allow them to be. What happens to kids caught up in harsh government regs also happens to adults across the country every single day—and for them, it’s not about earning some extra spending money. If Faulkner gets that food truck when he grows up, he’s going to discover that many cities have deliberately hostile business environments because other businesses in town (restaurants) don’t want the competition.

And if he values his freedom, he won’t do something really crazy, like wrap his hot dogs in bacon.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is a thorn in the side of the GOP establishment. He has voted against so many bills, including measures championed by his own party, that in 2013 Politico dubbed him “Mr. No.”

Elected to Congress in 2012 at the height of the Tea Party movement, Massie is an MIT-trained engineer with 24 patents to his name. He founded SensAble Technologies, a pioneering tech company specializing in 3D scanning and touch computing.

He drives an electric car and lives with his family in an off-the-grid farmhouse, the subject of a new documentary produced by Free the People. But while Massie considers himself an environmentalist, he co-sponsored legislation last year to disband the Environmental Protection Agency. Solar panels may be the energy source of the future, he says, but that doesn’t mean we have to mandate or subsidize their use.

Reason sat down with Massie at FreedomFest in Las Vegas to discuss his battles with the Republican establishment, how Trump’s tariffs are breeding cronyism, why federal marijuana prohibition will come to an end, and the impact that he and his fellow libertarians in Congress are having on policy. A member of the GOP, Massie also explains why he won’t be switching over to the Libertarian Party anytime soon.

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San Francisco wants to ban workplace cafeterias. I’m serious.

On Tuesday, City Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí announced that they would be introducing legislation banning corporate campuses from maintaining cafeterias for their employees. The exact details are unclear as the bill’s text is not yet available, but the San Francisco Examiner says that Peskin will be using local social engineers’ favorite tool—the zoning code—to prohibit new “industrial kitchens” in commercial office buildings. Existing cafeterias would reportedly be grandfathered in.

To hear it from the sponsors, the point of the ban is to integrate San Francisco’s reclusive tech workers into the hustle and bustle of city life. It’s “about a cultural shift,” Safaí tells the San Francisco Chronicle. “We don’t want employees biking or driving into their office, staying there all day long and going home. This is about getting people out of their office, interacting with the community and adding to the vibrancy of the community.”

But this isn’t just a case of councilmen playing the pushy parent telling a kid to get out there and mingle. An element of protectionism is at work here too.

Many Bay City restaurants see corporate cafeterias as unbeatable competition for the lunchtime crowd. Forcing these workers back onto the streets in the middle of the day is supposed to increase their business.

“The historic model is that people would go to work, and then flow outside during lunch,” Peskin tells the Chronicle. “The idea here is to bolster, not only the restaurant business, but other ground floor retail businesses that are suffering.”

The Chronicle threw some shade on this idea in another article yesterday, pointing to other factors—market saturation, a lack of parking—that explain the tough times experienced by some San Francisco eateries. Nevertheless, the measure has earned the support of the city’s restaurant association.

Incredibly, San Francisco is not the first city to pursue such a policy. In 2014, the Bay Area community of Mountain View—home to Google—prohibited employers from fully subsidizing more than 50 percent of their employees’ in-office meals. Here too, local officials argued the ban was needed to protect local restaurants and retailers. The rule was not retroactive, so it had little effect when it passed. But when Facebook opens new office space in the town, it will have to be cafeteria-free.

This is neither the first nor the worst of San Francisco’s attempts to fix an imaginary problem with a petty restriction, but it just might be the most offensive to my libertarian sensibilities. Where you choose to spend your lunch break is not a public concern. Handwringing about struggling restaurants or atomizing social trends does not make it one.

If San Francisco politicos really want to give restaurants a helping hand, they could lessen the city’s tax and regulatory burdens. And if they want to make tech workers more active in city life, maybe—just maybe—they should stop writing bills that vilify them.

As the bodies of opioid users pile up in morgues across America, one newspaper columnist wonders if we should stop “accommodating” these “cunning” addicts:

Many years ago, I was in the home of a relative whose husband was a heroin addict, and hanging on a wall in the hallway was a poster that read: “Signs of a drug overdose.” It went on to list symptoms such as passing out, disorientation, shallow breathing, vomiting and muscle spasms. It instructed them to call 911 immediately.

I was aghast. It was like saying to the addict and their children that it’s OK to use drugs as long as you make sure someone knows how to save your life if you take too much.

Today’s version of that poster might read, “Make sure you’ve got naloxone in your medicine cabinet.”…

Placing so much attention on accommodating the drug addict does nothing to address the underlying problem of addiction. The truth is that America doesn’t know how to fix this opioid problem and meanwhile, it’s getting worse. But we cannot allow Narcan to become a crutch that allows us to shirk our responsibility to figure it out.

Of course, throwing drug users in jail isn’t the answer either. But there has to be something between locking addicts up and giving them a license to use drugs freely.

When I see a liberal newspaper columnist like the Chicago Tribune‘s Dahleen Glanton parroting the arguments of Maine Gov. Paul LePage—who made national headlines in 2016 by vetoing over-the-counter access to naloxone, on the grounds that making the overdose reversal drug widely available would simply enable opioid users to get high again—I wonder how we can move the conversation about drug addiction out of the late 1980s and into what should be a more compassionate present.

One way to do that might be to put opioid addiction in the context of some other conditions that lie at the intersection of psychology and physiology. Consider Type 2 Diabetes. There’s evidence that people are genetically predisposed to developing insulin resistance, but we also know it’s possible to reverse symptoms with behavioral modifications. Should we stop “accommodating” type 2 diabetics by providing them with access to insulin and metformin? Probably not: Behavior modification “works” in less than two percent of the type-2 diabetic population (and not at all for type-1 diabetics, who require insulin medication to stay alive regardless of what they eat or how much they exercise).

What about hypertension? It’s also reversible with dietary changes and exercise! But just as with diabetes patients (and metabolic diseases in general), long-term compliance with lifestyle changes is poor. Increasing cardiovascular exercise can lower cholesterol. Are we excessively accomodating people by giving them statins?

If you have any of those diseases and are offended by the suggestion that your sickness is your fault, or by the idea that providing you with medications allows you to continue living in such a way that makes medication necessary, imagine how you’d feel if I or someone else—your governor, say, or a prominent columnist at your city’s most widely read newspaper—suggested that your medicines are a crutch and making them available to you sets a bad example for people who don’t already have your condition.

You’d probably be angry, and maybe scared. You might wonder if people know how hard it is to replace deeply entrenched behaviors that started not with a declaration of “I’m going to live in such a way that I am more likely to develop a serious health problem” but more slowly and subtly, over years and under the influence of your environment, your community, your genes, and a thousand small choices that, taken alone, seemed inconsequential when you made them.

Despite everything we know about the neurological aspects of addiction, this is exactly how we talk about opioid users. Safe injection sites “would encourage and normalize heroin use, thereby increasing demand for opiates and, by extension, risk of overdose and overdose deaths,” U.S. Attorney Christina E. Nolan complained when local leaders in Burlington, Vermont, called for opening such facilities. “Government-sanctioned shooting galleries won’t solve the drug crisis,” Glanton wrote in her column just last week.

It is absolutely true that supervised injection facilities make intravenous drug use less risky. That is the entire point. Countries that allow them do so to reduce the danger for people who will die without them. It’s why we have seat belts in cars and lifeguards at the beach and condoms at college health centers and those glow-in-the-dark tabs in car trunks. The idea behind all these inventions and policies is that if we can make an activity less dangerous, we should, because helping people stay alive is morally and ethically preferable to the alternative. This is also why we give people statins and Metformin and hypertension medication!

And in all those cases—save unapproved opioid use—we accept the trade-off without even realizing that’s what we’re doing. Whether it’s because we can imagine ourselves benefitting from those forms of insurance, or because we all drive cars and expect to get old and develop cardiovascular disease, we support policies and technologies and social contracts that shield us from the most dire consequences of our own risky behaviors.

But for some awful reason, we have allowed prohibitionists to draw the line at drugs. Tens of thousands of our family members and neighbors die each year because of that concession. As Jacob Sullum wrote in March:

Naloxone indisputably saves people’s lives, and it would be unconscionable to block access to it based on speculation about how the availability of that lifesaving option might affect other people’s behavior. That is like banning seat belts or HIV treatment because the extra assurance they provide might encourage some people to behave more recklessly.

This is the logic of prohibition, which endangers the lives of drug users to deter people who otherwise might join them. One way it does that is by making drug potency unpredictable, which makes overdoses more likely, thereby increasing the need for naloxone. LePage is not wrong to think that making naloxone hard to get is consistent with this plan. He is wrong to think the plan is morally defensible.

By criminalizing both their behavior and the methods proven to help opioid users live longer—supervised injection facilities, easy access to opioid agonist treatments, clean needle exchanges—lawmakers have marked opioid addicts as lost to their disease, useful only as cautionary tales to people who are not sick with that particular disease. Can you imagine the uproar if officials talked about elderly, hypertensive swing-state voters the same way?

Glanton says we don’t know how to tackle this problem, but that’s absolutely wrong. France lifted provider restrictions on the opioid treatment buprenorphine, and in just four years reduced opioid overdose deaths by nearly 80 percent. The supervised injection facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, has reduced both opioid overdose deaths and the transmission of HIV in the surrounding area. In the 1970s, New York City’s methadone-on-demand program saved countless lives.

These policies keep more people alive longer than prohibition does. As a bonus, they don’t require people like Glanton, Nolan, and LePage to forfeit their prejudices against people they see as admonitory, or economically useless, or “cunning.” They can keep their contempt so long as they allow opioid users to access the health care their neighbors wish to provide. The real miracle of modern medicine is not that it fixes us; it’s that it allows broken people the chance to live normal lives.

Multiple outlets are reporting that the Trump administration has stopped publishing readouts of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders.

Republican and Democratic administrations have released such summaries for years, and they often serve as the only official description of the calls. The last readout, published in mid-June, summarized a conversation between Donald Trump and the prime minister of Hungary. Since then, no readouts have been released, even though Trump has spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the last two weeks.

CNN was the first outlet to report on the Trump administration’s decision, and the news was confirmed by The Wall Street Journal and CBS News. It’s not clear if the change is temporary or permanent. Readouts of calls will still be available to some officials.

Tony Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state, notes that public readouts are important for two reasons. “One is transparency,” Blinken tells CNN. “There is a public interest in knowing who he talked to and what they talked about. Secondly, these readouts help shape the narrative. If we aren’t doing a readout, but the other country is, their narrative is going to prevail.”

The change has sparked a chorus of disapproval on Twitter:

Wow, so much for transparency –> Exclusive: White House stops announcing calls with foreign leaders @CNNPolitics https://t.co/DK7srGEh9c

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) July 25, 2018

In Trump’s defense, he doesn’t want everyone knowing about the kleptocracy and the various other nefarious activities he’s doing during his “presidency.” https://t.co/t2n1vspPqb

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) July 24, 2018

Well, this too is very wrong.

Where are all those Republicans who believe in open, transparent & accountable government? https://t.co/u94CB964M7

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) July 25, 2018

Democracy dies in darkness. And information is light. Strange times. . .

— John MacKinnon (@rjmackinnon) July 24, 2018

Trump could talk to Putin every night. The White House decided to stop giving readouts of Trump’s calls. Deeply troubling https://t.co/mDcWftVt3n

— Frida Ghitis (@FridaGhitis) July 25, 2018

In the past, the White House’s versions of Trump’s calls have sometimes differed greatly from what other countries say happened. In early June, the Journal reports, the U.K. government’s readout of a conversation between Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May suggested that May had called Trump out over his tariffs on European Union goods. The White House’s readout left that out, saying instead that Trump “further underscored the need to rebalance trade with Europe.”

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is fighting to reform “legislative immunity” in his state, thanks to a scandal involving a member of the state legislature.

As Reason reported a few weeks ago, a body camera video surfaced showing state Rep. Paul Mosley (R–Lake Havasu City) talking with a deputy who had pulled him over. Mosley had been driving 97 mph in a 55 mph zone. In the video, the legislator declares that he can’t be penalized because of his “immunity as a government official.” He also brags, “Well, I was doing 120 earlier.”

The video shows the deputy giving Mosley his driver’s license, but not a speeding ticket. A search of traffic violations by the Associated Press appears to confirm that Mosley did not receive a ticket that day.

Gov. Ducey, a Republican, has now signed an executive order clarifying that lawmakers are not exempt from the repercussiosn of speeding. He tweeted yesterday that there is “bipartisan support” for reforming the legislative immunity provision in state law. And indeed, many Arizona Democrats fought to repeal legislative immunity in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, going back to when then–state Sen. Scott Bundgaard (R-Peoria) attempted to use his immunity after getting into a fight with his girlfriend.

The immunity in question is established in Article 4, Part 2, Section 6 of the Arizona Constitution. It currently states, “Members of the legislature shall be privileged from arrest in all cases except treason, felony, and breach of the peace, and they shall not be subject to any civil process during the session of the legislature, nor for fifteen days next before the commencement of each session.” As Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille has argued, the legitimate purposes of legislative immunity have since evolved into a “get out of jail free” card for politicians with less-than-legal personal habits:

What’s unfortunate here is that lawmakers historically granted themselves such immunity to protect against politically motivated arrests by the king, or governor, or whoever might try to lock lawmakers away to affect the outcome of a vote. These immunity provisions were legitimate protections against real abuses—or, originally they were, anyway. Too bad they’ve degenerated into a comfy privilege for lead-foot legislators with drinking problems.

The feds have killed another sex worker website. Federal prosecutors announced Tuesday that they had seized the website FlawlessEscorts.com and arrested two of its operators, Brandon Martin and Tameko Lindo. The pair are charged with money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering, which are the Justice Department’s go-to charges for sexually oriented entrepreneurs that they can’t get on other charges.

Prostitution is not illegal at the federal level. But using the mail or interstate commerce to promote it will put you in violation of the still-very-much-used White Slavery Act (now better known as the Mann Act) or the Travel Act. And if you accept or use any money from said promotion, that’s money laundering. If you ever talk about that with anyone else, that’s conspiracy to commit money laundering. In other words, charging people with money laundering can be a way to get around the fact that petty vice crimes are supposed to be left to states.

In this case, Martin, Lindo, “and others known, and unknown,” are accused of conducting or attempting to conduct financial transactions while “knowing that the property involved…represented the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity.” The core of the matter is that Lindo and Martin allegedly ran “an escort service” that “utilized various bank accounts” to deposit earnings and then used money in this accounts to continue operation of the business.

The case was a joint operation of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the New York City Police Department.

Martin and Lindo are not accused of “sex trafficking,” nor anything violent or involving minors. They are not accused of defrauding the women who worked for Flawless Escorts or of taking an unreasonable cut of their profits. The examples of horrific “rules” imposed on escorts were that they should “travel with multiple outfits and lingerie” and supplies that include candles and fresh towels.

But this is the kind of benign thing the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security, is increasingly spending its time on—taking down, one by one, any site that lets sex workers use the internet to attract and arrange appointments with clients.

This case started when a Mexican woman was detained and questioned at the Dallas/Forth Worth airport. She said she worked for two escort services, including Flawless Escorts. An investigation soon found Flawless Escort ads posted on the sex marketplace eros.com (which may explain HSI’s raid of Eros headquarters last fall). Cops also determined that the site was hosted by “a particular cloud computing company located in the Southern District of New York.”

Under the new law FOSTA, this cloud computing company could be guilty of a federal crime for knowingly facilitating prostitution advertising. But for now, at least, law enforcement has chosen to leave web hosting companies alone.

As of now, Martin and Lindo are imprisoned and the American website for Flawless Escorts has been taken down. Flawlessescorts.com.au is still functioning.

Apparently auditioning for the role of comic-book cop, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement that “the fatal flaw in Martin and Lindo’s alleged scheme was their underestimation of law enforcement’s ability to detect and halt their illicit activities.”

FREE MARKETS

Everyone is trying to teach Donald Trump economics…and everyone is failing.

Umm…no. Tariffs are taxes. And American consumers are the ones who get hit with U.S.-imposed tariffs. The fact that other countries are bad at economics—and harm their own people with tariffs and other protectionist schemes—does not justify our own economic incompetence. https://t.co/Ev5uzBRGFT

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) July 24, 2018

For the most part, Trump’s party seems OK with that. “Once upon a time,” writes Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, “Republicans warned against government meddling in the markets, picking winners and losers in the economy.” But “no more, it seems.”

FREE MINDS

Today in toxic and performative hissy-fits… People are angry at a Netflix series no one has seen yet, because it might be body-shaming. People are also angry at a short Dexter parody video that no one has seen in almost decade, because it comes from Dan Harmon, (liberal) creator of the popular TV show Rick and Morty, and this was yet another chance for scolds on the other side to try to score points. People are terrible. Moving on…

CORRUPTION WATCH

McCaskill milks political clout to get money for her husband. Businesses tied to Joseph Shepherd, the husband of Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), have taken in more than $131 million in federal subsidies since she was elected to Congress, according to a new investigation from the Kansas City Star. McCaskill was elected in 2006. That year, her husband’s income from real estate that relies on federal subsidies was somewhere between $1,608 and $16,731. Last year, these investments netted Shepherd between $365,374 and $1,118,158.

QUICK HITS

• CNN has obtained an audiotape in which lawyer Michael Cohen talks with then-presidential-candidate Trump about using cash to buy the National Enquirer‘s rights to a story about a former Playboy model’s alleged affair with Trump.
• A trial of viagra in pregnant women has led to 11 newborn deaths.
• The return of the men’s rights movement?
• The man behind the infamously disastrous and much-mocked Fyre Festival has been charged with fraud.
• “We do not take lightly the problem of gun violence,” writes Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain in a Tuesday ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Hawaii. “But, for better or for worse, the Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense.”
• More charges have been brought in the NXIVM “sex trafficking” case.
• The “first great novel of the opioid epidemic“?

BREAKING: Jason Spencer, the Georgia Republican who was on @SachaBaronCohen‘s show exposing himself, shouting the n-word and using a racist accent, has resigned.https://t.co/NGSZfBdtSt

— jordan (@JordanUhl) July 25, 2018