Tag: hit&run

A scheduling mix-up caused a pro–Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) segment on Fox & Friends to be anything but.

This morning, the show’s hosts introduced congressional candidate and former Arizona Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat whose outspoken support for ICE has put her at odds with many in her party. After introducing the former congresswoman, hosts were surprised to hear a voice reply, “Good morning, I’m actually here to speak directly to Donald Trump.”

The voice belonged not to Kirkpatrick, but to Barbara L’Italien, a Massachussetts state senator and a Democratic candidate for Congress. As L’Italien continued her statements, it quickly became clear that she would not be delivering a message in favor of ICE.

“I feel that what’s happening at the border is wrong. I’m a mother of four and I believe that separating kids from their parents is illegal and inhumane,” she said of the Trump administration’s child separation policy. She then introduced herself by name.

Hosts Jillian Mele disagreed, saying that the children were already reunited with their families. While Mele’s premise is partly correct, the administration has only reunited a portion of the separated families and previously missed a deadline set by a judge.

Host Rob Schmitt asked for L’Italien’s identity as she said her name once again. Her screen then disappeared, cutting the interview short.

Following the appearance, L’Italien tweeted and read the full statement she’d hope to give on-air. She later explained that she made it to the interview after Fox News mistakenly reached out to her campaign staffers, believing them to be Kirkpatrick’s staffers.

“Over the process of getting the interview scheduled, they repeatedly showed very little grasp on the facts, down to whether or not Ann Kirkpatrick was still in Congress,” a source in L’Italien’s campaign tells ThinkProgress. “Fox News is where you go when you want to talk to Donald Trump, and Barbara felt she had an obligation to her constituents to take advantage of that opportunity. But this would not have happened to an actual news station. Fox’s lack of attention to the facts normally is a disaster for the country, it just so happened that today it was embarrassing for them.”

A policy that is scheduled to take effect next Monday prohibits smoking in and near public housing throughout the country, affecting 1.2 million households in units managed by about 3,300 local agencies. According to a 2016 Observer editorial, “it may be the most far-reaching, intrusive and over-reaching executive order of the entire Obama administration.” In a lawsuit filed today, six smokers who live in public housing argue that the ban violates their rights, exceeds the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s statutory authority, cannot be justified as a regulation of interstate commerce, and unconstitutionally commandeers state and local officials by ordering them to carry out federal policy.

The smoking ban, which covers low-income housing that is federally subsidized but owned and operated by local public housing authorities (PHAs), applies to living units as well as common areas and extends to a zone 25 feet around each building. The policy is the result of a 2015 HUD rule that aimed to “improve indoor air quality in the housing, benefit the health of public housing tenants and PHA staff, reduce the risk of catastrophic fires, and lower overall maintenance costs.” The lawsuit, which was organized by New York City Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment (NYC CLASH) and filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that HUD has no business regulating indoor air quality or trying to dictate what people do in the privacy of their homes.

“Anti-smokers claim that HUD’s smoking ban is a valid exercise of government power because there is no general ‘right to smoke,'” CLASH founder Audrey Silk says in a press release, “but that claim is intentionally misleading because the government doesn’t have the right to reach into our homes and dictate our personal behaviors and habits. This lawsuit is about defending the right to be left alone to engage in a legal activity in the privacy of one’s own home.”

The lawsuit notes that the Fourth Amendment applies to public housing and argues that enforcing the smoking ban will require warrantless, nonconsensual searches to detect violations. Furthermore, it says, the policy violates “the fundamental right to engage in a legal activity in a private home,” an aspect of liberty protected by the Fifth and 14th amendments as well as the Fourth. The complaint says requiring people to give up that right if they want to continue living in public housing violates the “unconstitutional conditions doctrine,” which says government benefits cannot be contingent on the recipients’ willingness to waive their constitutional rights.

The HUD rule also runs afoul of the 10th Amendment, CLASH says, because it demands that the state and local officials who run public housing authorities impose a policy conceived by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. “This is the exact type of explicit, naked ‘commandeering’ of state and local authorities that the anticommandeering rule was developed to prevent,” the complaint says. “The Smoking Ban is a federal regulatory program, or federal policy, and HUD has issued a direct command to the PHAs to implement and enforce this regulatory program or policy.”

Although HUD assumes that a tenant’s smoking within his own house, apartment, or mobile home endangers people in other units, it presents no evidence of such a risk. In any case, CLASH notes, regulation of smoking is part of the general police power exercised by the states (which notably have refrained from trying to ban smoking inside people’s homes), not the federal government. Whether someone smokes in the privacy of his home does not seem to implicate interstate commerce in a way that would justify federal action. Even if Congress had authorized HUD to ban smoking in public housing, CLASH says, “Congress may not regulate intrastate activities which do not have a ‘substantial effect’ on interstate commerce or are ‘completely internal.'”

Many landlords, of course, include rules against smoking in their leases. But the HUD rule is different from a private landlord’s lease condition in several significant ways. First, HUD is compelling the actual landlords, the PHAs, to comply with its plan, which raises the 10th Amendment issues outlined in the lawsuit. Second, the landlords are government agencies, so enforcing the smoking ban raises Fourth Amendment issues. Third, the new rule is being imposed on smokers who already live in public housing, forcing them outside in the cold, rain, or heat, frequently in dangerous, high-crime neighborhoods, to indulge in a legal habit they have heretofore been permitted to enjoy inside their homes.

Silk says “public health zealots” are “frustrated by the holdouts who’ve refused to submit to their current coercive measures and quit smoking,” so they are “partnering with HUD to begin the despotic breaking down of front doors to reach them.” She warns that “it won’t end at public housing if they’re not stopped here.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) is “sounding an alarm” about the proliferation of blueprints for 3D-printed ghost guns, declaring that America is going to “get a lot less safe.”

Schumer’s comments came almost two weeks after news broke that the Justice Department had reached a settlement with Cody Wilson, a guns rights activist who created of the first ever 3D-printed gun. As Reason‘s Brian Doherty notes, the settlement allows Americans to “access, discuss, use, reproduce or otherwise benefit from the technical data” that the government had previously ordered Wilson’s company, Defense Distributed, to stop distributing. The settlement takes effect on August 1.

Schumer is worried this will allow people with 3D printers to create weapons from the comfort of their own homes. (If you’re interested, here’s a Reason video showing you how to do that.) “This online site shows you how at your home, with a simple 3D printer, you can make a plastic AR-15, an AR-10,” the senator said at a press conference yesterday, adding that these “very dangerous semi-automatic assault-style weapons” can be constructed “in your own basement.”

The New York Democrat also worries that 3D weapons will put Americans in harm’s way. “I am sounding an alarm that come August 1, America is going to get a lot less safe when it comes to the gut-wrenching epidemic of gun violence,” he said. “Ghost guns are not only scary, they’re outright dangerous in the way they can mimic the look and the capacity of a hardened, fully semi-automatic weapon.”

Many 3D plastic guns are relatively easy to make if you have a big enough 3D printer and the right blueprints. Often, they’re also unregistered and untraceable.

Prior to settling with Wilson, the federal government had argued that his company’s gun-making files violated the International Trade in Arms munitions export regulations. Defense Distributed responded by suing. As Doherty writes,

Defense Distributed’s suit claimed that this was was “censorship of Plaintiffs’ speech,” since the files in question consist of computer code and thus counted as expression. It also argued that “the ad hoc, informal and arbitrary manner in which that scheme is applied, violate the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments.” (The Second because the information in the computer files implicates weapons possession rights.)

Thanks to the settlement, Wilson and others will soon be free to post blueprints for 3D guns. But Schumer intends to fight the feds’ decision. “This decision to allow ghost gun blueprints to go unchecked across the internet will come back to haunt the feds and cost lives,” he said. “That is why Congress must take aim at stopping these websites before the damage is done.” A Schumer spokesperson tells the New York Post that the senator plans to announce a bill to do just that before the week is up.

Here’s a ReasonTV interview with Wilson from February:

A Portland food cart is closing down following harassment and alleged threats of violence from protestors who objected to the business serving federal immigration agents.

Since mid-June, demonstrators have set up an encampment outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in southwestern Portland to protest the Trump administration’s border crackdown. The protest, known as Occupy ICE PDX, spawned similar protests across the country; it succeeded in shutting down ICE’s Portland office for a week before police officers moved the demonstrators away from the entrances. An uneasy standoff has since developed between the remaining anti-ICE protestors and federal police.

Caught in the middle of this is The Happy Camper, a food cart that occupied a street corner directly across from both the encampment and ICE office.

Co-owned by couple Scott and Julie Hakes, The Happy Camper used to do steady business serving food to the federal agents who worked across the street. The two used the proceeds to help fund their non-profit Off The Grid, which supplies food and clothing to Portland’s homeless population.

Julie was initially supportive of the Occupy ICE protest when it started, according to comments she made the Willamette Week. But the Hakes’ attempt to “stay neutral and serve all who are hungry,” including ICE and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff who share the Portland office space, provoked anger from some anti-ICE demonstrators, who reportedly threatened staff at the food cart for failing to get on board with the struggle.

Video apparently taken by a female Happy Camper employee—and shared by a right-wing Twitter account—shows a demonstrator using a megaphone to call the staffer a “bitch” and accuse her of laughing at the victims of U.S. immigration laws.

According to Scott Hakes, the last straw came when protestors threatened his 21-year-old daughter for serving food to a DHS employee. “If they catch her outside the cart, they’re going to hurt her. They’re constantly cussing at her and screaming at her,” he told KGW. According to the owners, protestors also threatened to burn down the cart.

On July 20, less than a month after protests began, a post went up on the Happy Camper’s Facebook Facebook page announcing that the food cart would be shutting down. Reads the post: “We tried repeatedly to try to work out peaceful solutions with the organizations and individuals protesting, but it all came back to being told almost daily to either support the anti DHS agenda or suffer the consequences (Quote Unquote).”

Needless to say, threatening violence against third parties for not being sufficiently in favor of one’s chosen cause is inexcusable. It’s also remarkably counterproductive.

The Portland protest started as a focused demonstration against punitive immigration enforcement in general and the administration’s reprehensible family separation policy in particular. If some of its members adopt such a strict with-us-or-against-us stance that they are willing to harass a business’ employees just for serving food to their protest’s target, that can only damage public sympathy for a laudable cause.

In the middle of the Frank Capra classic It’s A Wonderful Life, there is a sudden run on the banks—just as George Bailey is about to leave on his honeymoon, naturally.

You remember the scene.

The hardy working-class folks of Bedford Falls rush to the ramshackle Bailey Building and Loan, determined to pull their money out of the institution. George defuses the situation by appealing to their common sense. The money his investors want isn’t in the safe, he reminds them, because it’s invested in other things. “You’re thinking of this place all wrong,” George tells one irate investor demanding to be paid the lofty sum of $240. “The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house. That’s right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Makelin’s house, and a hundred others.”

George is right, of course. And the analogy works in the modern world too. When stock prices climb, for example, the money made by investors doesn’t get sucked out of the market and tucked away into a vault. Sure, savings are important, but George Bailey knew what all saavy money managers do: Money has to be put to use to be any good. The wealth created by a near-decade of solid economic growth isn’t sitting in a bank somewhere. It’s in Joe’s business, and the Kennedy venture, and in Mrs. Makelin’s retirement account.

Which brings me to President Donald Trump.

Trump, in an interview that CNBC aired over the weekend, tried to wave away the potential negative economic consequences of his trade war by suggesting that “we’re playing with the bank’s money.”

As CNBC goes on to explain, the stock market is up 31 percent since Election Day 2016. Trump seems to believe that those gains give him the necessary flexibility to engage in a trade war.

To paraphrase George Bailey: Mr. President, you’re thinking of this place all wrong.

This notion that any losses incurred by a trade war won’t hurt because we’re only risking recent economic gains is a dangerous misunderstanding of how economies operate. That logic might work in one of Trump’s casinos—win a few hands of blackjack, and it’s easy enough to set aside your original chips and “play with house money,” as the saying goes—but the president is forcing ordinary Americans to risk economic gains they might prefer to put to other uses.

Trump might measure the success of his trade war by the consequences on the stock market, but that ignores the far more practical effects felt by workers and businesses from coast to coast. It ignores the jobs that could be shipped overseas to avoid tariffs, and the loss of jobs at businesses that simply can’t compete with artificially higher costs for raw materials such as steel and aluminum. The administration’s plan to slap tariffs on imported cars and car parts alone could reduce U.S. economic output by $59 billion, the Commerce Department was told at an administrative hearing last week.

Trump continues to escalate the trade war. On Friday, he also said he’s willing to impose tariffs on $500 billion worth of Chinese imports—in other words, just about all of them—after already hitting $34 billion of Chinese goods with tariffs earlier this year.

If that happens, the economic consequences of the trade war will outweigh the economic boost created by last year’s tax cuts, according to a new analysis from The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank.

“If all tariffs announced thus far were fully enacted, U.S. GDP would fall by 0.47 percent ($117.6 billion) in the long run, effectively offsetting one-quarter of the long-run impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” write Tax Foundation analysts Erica York and Kyle Pomerleau. “Wages would fall by 0.33 percent and employment would fall by 364,786.”

Just the bank’s money? Hardly.

This isn’t just an economic blunder; it’s probably a political blunder, too. After two years of touting economic growth and a rising stock market as proof that his administration is doing the right thing, it’s odd to suggest that those gains are only collateral against future mistakes. And it’s hard to imagine voters that voters will shrug off the costs of a trade war by saying “Well, it was just the bank’s money anyway.”

Other Republicans seem to be picking up the same line that the White House is pushing:

Lindsey Graham says on CBS that his voters will need to experience a little pain over the tariffs in order to win trade war with China.

Good luck with that message for the long haul.

— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) July 22, 2018

At the risk of overanalyzing anything Trump says for deeper meaning, his comments to CNBC also seem to be the first indication that the president believes this trade war might be something other than “good and easy to win,” as he famously tweeted in March.

After all, if he’s admitting the “bank” might lose some of its money—well, that’s a pretty clear acknowledgment that a trade war will have costs, right? His attempts to downplay those costs with a misunderstanding of how the economy works is scary, but at least there’s some indication that the White House is, maybe, starting to see a bit of reality.

Video captured aboard a charter bus in New Mexico last week shows a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent asking passengers if they’re American citizens.

On its way from El Paso to Los Angeles, the bus stopped at a checkpoint near Deming, New Mexico, roughly 70 miles from the Mexican border. The video, which was then posted to Facebook, shows a CBP agent asking passengers, “You a citizen?” and checking their documentation.

The agent’s actions are challenged by the woman taking the video, Los Angeles teacher Yolanda Varela Gonzalez. “I understand you’re not allowed to ask for that within 100 miles of the border,” she says. The officer claims he’s not doing anything wrong, but the woman disagrees. “You’re not supposed to be on here. You know you guys terrorizing people,” she says.

“We’re not even within 100 miles of the border. This is bullshit. This is what you guys do to everybody,” Gonzalez continues. “Living in Nazi Germany where you need to show your I.D. within the states, this is bullshit.”

It’s unclear whether Gonzalez was saying the bus was more or less than 100 miles away from Mexico, but since the incident occurred roughly 70 miles from the border, the agent’s actions were legal. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1946 allows immigration agents to “to board and search for aliens any vessel within the territorial waters of the United States and any railway car, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle.” Originally, agents could only conduct such searches within 25 miles of any “external boundary of the United States,” but a 1953 Department of Justice rule expanded the distance to 100 miles. The Supreme Court has upheld immigration agents’ extra authority in areas near the border. As far as the law is concerned, your Fourth Amendment rights essentially evaporate when you come close to a national frontier.

But just because it’s legal doesn’t make it proper, says American Civil Liberties Union New Mexico Communications Director Micah McCoy. “We believe people’s rights don’t just disappeared because they are by an international border,” McCoy tells KOAT.

Gonzalez agrees, telling KOAT that people shouldn’t have to live in fear of immigration agents. “It really boils down to how people are being treated regardless of how many miles it is, the fact that people are living in fear,” she says. “And yes, it’s racial profiling, and that is just a violation, any sort of racial profiling is a violation of human rights and civil rights.”

Footage from the second episode of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Showtime series, Who Is America?, shows just how much some officials will do to be perceived as tough on terror.

Cohen, posing as an Israeli anti-terror expert, approached an unsuspecting state Rep. Jason Spencer (R-Woodbine) to take part in an anti-terrorism video. Spencer has already faced a number of controversies over his (now-abandoned) burqa ban legislation and his warning to a black lawmaker that she could “go missing” over some comments criticizing Confederate memorials.

Playing off Spencer’s proposed legislation, Cohen convinces him that a way to successfully identify a terrorist under a burqa is to use a camera attached to a selfie stick to peer under her garments. Spencer tries to recreate the lesson while posing as a stereotypical Chinese tourist, which he does by shouting things like “dragon chopstick” and “sushi.”

The training escalates when Cohen informed Spencer that a successful tactic to avoid an ISIS kidnapping is to scream the n-word. Spencer gamely screams it repeatedly during a kidnapping simulation. At another point, Cohen tells Spencer that ISIS members are afraid of being perceived as homosexual. Spencer is then persuaded to pull down his pants and run at Cohen his buttocks out while shouting “America!” and “USA!”

Spencer later issued a statement claiming that he was “fraudulently induced” into participation and that the show “took advantage” of his fears that he would be attacked.

Republican leaders in the state disavowed Spencer’s actions. “Representative Spencer has disgraced himself and should resign immediately,” said House Speaker David Ralston, adding, “Georgia is better than this.” Gov. Nathan Deal also reacted, saying, “There is no excuse for this type of behavior, ever, and I am saddened and disgusted by it.”

Trump’s got his hand on the button, all right—the “send Tweet” button, that is. In a series of increasingly unhinged weekend statements that spilled over into Monday morning, the president insisted that his version of reality is the only one we can trust and that anyone who disputes it is simply beholden to the “Fake News,” the “Corrupt Media,” the “Department of ‘Justice,'” and “Crooked Hillary.” In Trump’s reality, talking loudly on Twitter counts as diplomacy, everyone was out to get Trump from the beginning, and anything negative published about not just Trump but about Russian antics in general is just spin from “13 Angry Democrats,” the “Fake News Media” (words he has tweeted disparagingly seven times since July 20), and others caught up in the FBI’s “Witch Hunt.”

On Monday morning, Trump fired off an array of repetitive and rambling tweets accusing Obama-era Justice officials of inappropriately seeking a warrant from a FISA court to look into Carter Page’s activities, using the infamous dossier—paid for and diseminated (at various points) by Trump opponents on the right and the left—as a pretense. Over the weekend, the FBI released hundreds of pages of files related to Page, an energy consultant who became an advisor to the Trump campaign and also a confidential informant to the FBI about Russia matters. They show the shadowy world of FISA courts used against Page in the exact same way that world is alway used.

If you have issues with the Carter Page FISA application, then you have issues with FISA generally, because there’s zero indication there’s anything unusual about this application, other than the fact that its target worked on a U.S. presidential campaign.

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) July 22, 2018

Trump also opined on Twitter over the weekened that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election was “all a big hoax” orchestrated by folks invested in Hillary Clinton becoming the next president.

I had a GREAT meeting with Putin and the Fake News used every bit of their energy to try and disparage it. So bad for our country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2018

And then there was—tucked between this typical fare—what seemed like a threat of nuclear annihilation against Iran. Cue the cable news and Twitterati with “We’re all going to die!”

Almost a year ago, Trump set off a round of panicked prognosticating when he promised to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea. But now North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the U.S. president are show-biz-style besties, posing for photos and singing each other’s praises despite the fact that little material has changed between the two countries.

Perhaps bolstered by this pseudo-diplomatic display, Trump tried the same tack with Iran, tweeting Sunday evening that if Iranian President Hassan Rouhani ever threatened the U.S., he would “SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Trump’s all-caps message continued with a declaration that America would no longer “STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”

His tweet seems to have come in response to recent Rouhani comments warning America not to mess with Iran.

But despite the freakout from folks stateside, the world—including Iranian leaders—shrugged.

“This is how seriously people take the United States of America these days. This is what our country has come to.” https://t.co/GlCoppacOM

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) July 23, 2018

Meanwhile, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen claims to have audio of the president discussing his payoff to alleged former fling Stormy Daniels. Trump responded by tweeting that it was “inconceivable that a lawyer would tape a client—totally unheard of & perhaps illegal. The good news is that your favorite President did nothing wrong!”

FREE MARKETS

Bitcoin badgered by bank cryptocurrencies? The European Union’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs is warning that “if banks and central banks were to issue their own cryptocurrencies it could be bad news for the likes of bitcoin,” notes Forbes.

“The arrival of permissioned cryptocurrencies promoted by banks, even by central banks, will reshape the current competition level in the cryptocurrency market, broadening the number of competitors,” committee members wrote in a new report. “However, the market power of banks in traditional banking services might be used to limit competition in the cryptocurrency market through pre-emptive acquisitions or predatory pricing schemes.”

QUICK HITS

• Sen. Rand Paul says he’s genuinely undecided about Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh.

• Will Mike Pence usher in the Handmaid’s Tale after all?

• The Summer of Snitches continues: White man calls cops on black man for “trying to break in” to the latter’s own business.

Hurricane season is underway in North America, with the worst storms likely between August and October. Americans who live inland may think they have nothing to worry about, because their homes will not be drowned in salt water. But they are at high risk anyway, writes Steve Chapman.

That’s because they will have to shoulder a large share of the cost of helping homeowners who live in the path of tropical storms. The National Flood Insurance Program, created in 1968 under President Johnson on the theory that the private insurance market couldn’t handle flood damage, presumed that Washington could. Like many of his Great Society initiatives, it has turned out to be an expensive tutorial on the perils of government intervention.

The program is set to expire at the end of July, Chapman notes, but Congress will undoubtedly renew it sooner or later. Correcting its perverse incentives, however, may be a bridge too far.

View this article.

The Iranian government is considering shutting down access to Instagram following the arrests of several girls for posting videos of themselves dancing on the site. One of those girls, Maedeh Hojabri, appeared on state TV and admitted to breaking moral norms though she said she did not intend to.