Tag: hit&run

President Donald Trump now says he’s willing to slap tariffs on all imports from China.

“We are being taken advantage of and I don’t like it,” the president said in a taped interview that aired today. Trump told CNBC’s Joe Kernen he was “ready to go to 500,” referring to the roughly $500 billion of Chinese imports brought to the United States in 2017.

Trump has already imposed a 25 percent import tax on about $34 billion worth of Chinese tariffs. A second round of 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese products will be the subject of administrative hearings next month.

Trump’s comments follow on the heels of White House trade adviser Peter Navarro downplaying the harm Trump’s tariffs have done to American businesses. Navarro told CNBC yesterday that the trade barriers are “much less disruptive than these headlines would suggest.”

From motorcycles to washing machines, prices of a range of products are climbing thanks to the taxes Trump has imposed on goods coming from China. And to what end? In his interview, President Trump railed against the “deficits” that we have with our trading partners. But trade deficits mean almost nothing. They simply mean that Americans trade more money for Chinese goods than vice versa, largely because Chinese goods are cheaper, which in turn affords Americans a higher standard of living.

Beyond that, America’s trade deficit with China is balanced by a huge capital investment surplus with China. In other words, we buy more goods from China, but China takes those dollars and re-invests them into our economy.

China is America’s biggest trading partner. Can Congress afford to stand by while the president increases import taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars, all on the basis of a flawed understanding of global trade? Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) has already called on congress to nullify Trump’s steel tariffs; and we can only hope that more of his colleagues will join his effort before the situation becomes more dire.

They say you can’t go home again. If you were from Castle Rock, why would you want to?

For about four decades now, Stephen King has been peopling this (fictional) little Maine town with vengeful witches, homicidally rabid dogs, political assassins, Satanic shopkeepers, telepathic ghost magnets, Polaroid portals to hellish alternative universes, and mutant rats the size of cows. It’s not quite the most accursed of the western Maine hamlets where King sets his works—that would surely be ‘Salem’s Lot, so thoroughly overrun by vampires that the handful of survivors burned it to the ground in the mid-1970s—but with 30 or so appearances in his novels and short stories, Castle Rock is clearly the most persistently malevolent locale in Kinglandia.

Hulu’s new series Castle Rock is clearly an attempt to answer a question that has occurred to nearly every King reader multiple times over the years: Do the folks in this town ever notice the unholy frequency with which their neighbors fall into quicksand pits, get ravaged by their house pets, or are driven insane by mundane household items purchased at pawn shops? As television critic Glenn Garvin explains, they most certainly do.

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A Democratic state senator in New Jersey warned this week that dispensaries would sell “sex toy oils with marijuana” if weed is legalized for recreational use.

State Sen. Ron Rice tells NJTV that if

we legalize recreational marijuana, right across the street from my office they’re going to put up stores. They want to call them dispensaries. They’re going to be stores that do retail selling of cupcakes with marijuana, candies with marijuana, sex toy oils with marijuana, lipsticks with marijuana—all those kinds of products that kids can get and people can get.

It’s not clear if anyone has tried infusing sex toy oils with marijuana. (Tom Angell, publisher of the pro-pot outlet Marijuana Moment, tells the Washington Examiner he’s never heard of such a product.) Rice may have realized that, because he said in an email to the Examiner that he’s worried about “marijuana infused oils, not toys.” One has to wonder why he made the connection between sex toys and marijuana oils in the first place.

Rice’s biggest concern is that he thinks marijuana is a gateway drug. “I’m five blocks away from Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, which is a predominant rich, upper-middle class…white community, college community,” he tells NJTV. “What we know is that when you legalize marijuana recreationally, the number of people who’ve never used any type of drugs goes up substantially in terms of drug use.” Though Rice opposes outright legalization, he thinks possession of small amounts should be decriminalized.

The legislature is currently considering a bill to legalize weed statewide. If it passes—and if no other state legalizes between now and then—New Jersey will be the 10th state to legalize recreational marijuana. Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, who was sworn in this year, said during his campaign that he would fight for legalization; he has yet to follow through.

Under Michigan law, Stephen Nichols was supposed to get a “prompt” court hearing to challenge the forfeiture of his car, which police in the town of Lincoln Park seized in 2015 because he was driving it without valid insurance. It’s been three years since then, and Nichols still hasn’t had his day in court.

Last month Nichols and two other plaintiffs filed a federal class-action lawsuit alleging that Wayne County police and prosecutors seize residents’ property and force them to wait months, sometimes years, for a hearing. The suit argues the delays violate the 14th Amendment right to due process.

In addition, Wayne County prosecutors offer to settle cases out of court for $900, leaving owners to choose between getting their vehicle back quickly, even if the case against them was bunk, or shelling out even more money for a lawyer and waiting months to get their means of transportation back.

“[Nichols] still hasn’t had any hearing,” Shaun Godwin, attorney for the plaintiffs says. “The law says prosecutors have to bring a case promptly, but it’s just been in limbo for three years.”

The two other named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Adam and Ryan Chappell, are a father and son, respectively. According to the suit, the younger Chappell was borrowing his dad’s car one day in July 2016 when Wayne County sheriff’s deputies saw him pull into a medical marijuana dispensary in Detroit. The cops pulled him over as he left and seized the car. No marijuana was recovered from the car, and no criminal charges were filed in the case, according to the lawsuit.

“Basically they alleged in the police report that he responded to a question and said he bought $15-worth of marijuana, but there’s no mention of recovery of any marijuana in the police report,” Godwin says. “Of course my client says that didn’t happen.”

Chappell’s car was one of hundreds impounded by the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office for visiting a medical marijuana dispensary.

The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office reported in 2016 that it surveilled 32 medical marijuana dispensaries, performed 634 investigatory stops of cars leaving dispensaries, and impounded 467 vehicles as part of Operation Push-Off, a local law enforcement initiative targeting drugs, prostitution, and drag racing funded by licensing fees collected from the state’s medical marijuana program.

According to state reports, Wayne County law enforcement received $473,256 in Medical Marihuana Operation and Oversight Grants in fiscal year 2016 and $483,132 in 2017.

Chappell was then handed a notice that the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office intended to forfeit his car, unless he paid a $900 out-of-court settlement fee or filed a claim to contest the seizure within 20 days, along with a $250 bond. (The bond requirement has since been eliminated by the Michigan state legislature.)

The settlement offer is standard in forfeiture cases under Operation Push-Off.

William Maze, a Detroit attorney who handles asset forfeiture cases, says Nichols’ three-year wait for a hearing is an outlier. Most cases, he says, only take three to four months. More problematic are the suspicionless seizures of cars made by police and out-of-court settlements dangled in front of owners by the prosecutor’s office.

“The bigger issue with Wayne County forfeiture is—for drugs, prostitution and drag racing—they’re seizing the vehicles on sometimes the flimsiest of evidence or no evidence at all, just the mere allegation that someone went to a drug house or dispensary,” Maze says. “They don’t find anything in the car or on the person, but they take the vehicle and offer to settle with the owner for $900. They set the number at $900 because they know it’s low enough that the person can’t afford to hire an attorney to fight it for that.”

The Chappells decided to fight. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office waited 72 days to file a forfeiture complaint against Chappell’s car under the Michigan Controlled Substances Act. It was not until February 2017, roughly seven months later, that a judge dismissed the complaint and ordered the police to return Chappell’s car.

When Chappell finally got it back, the suit says, he “discovered that the driver’s side window of the vehicle had been left down, the battery was dead, the tires were flat, that damage to the exhaust and transmissions systems had been caused and marks left on the undercarriage of the vehicle consistent with the vehicle having been lifted by a fork lift.”

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property—cars, cash, even houses—suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner is not charged with or convicted of a crime.

Law enforcement groups say asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime by cutting off the flow of illicit proceeds. But civil liberties groups say the lack of due process protections for property owners and the perverse profit incentive created by asset forfeiture lead police to target everyday citizens instead of cartel kingpins.

As Reason reported, nearly 1,000 people in Michigan had property seized and forfeited last year without ever being charged with a crime.

The Michigan legislature is considering a bill that would require police and prosecutors to obtain a conviction before they could seize property. The bill is similar to legislation that in recent years essentially abolished civil asset forfeiture in Nebraska and New Mexico. Most U.S. states have passed some form of asset forfeiture reform in the last five years or so based on bipartisan civil liberties concerns.

Settlement agreements like the ones in Wayne County are not unusual, but civil liberties advocates and even some state lawmakers have said they essentially amount to a shakedown. Before Albuquerque ended its asset forfeiture program, it would force owners, even innocent owners, to pay $850 to recover their cars. In Albuquerque resident Arlene Harjo’s case, the city offered to return her car for $4,000 after her son was arrested for drunk driving. In Mississippi, a Reason investigation showed prosecutors would often settle with defendants, agreeing to charge them with lesser crimes in exchange for keeping their car. The IRS had a nasty habit of seizing small-business owners’ bank accounts under obscure anti-money laundering laws, and then offering to drop criminal prosecution in exchange for a large chunk of the money.

The Wayne County Prosecutor’s declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. The Wayne County Corporation County, which represents county agencies, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t think President Donald Trump’s proposed Space Force is such a bad idea.

Tyson tells TMZ that some people are only against the Space Force because it was Trump’s idea, but “just because it came from Trump, doesn’t mean it’s crazy.” He says creating a separate Space Force would be similar to the Air Force splitting off from the Army and becoming its own branch in the 1940s. “Today, you’re not questioning, ‘why is there an Air Force,'” he argues.

So what does Tyson think the Space Force would be good for? Asteroid strikes, for one thing. “What happens when the next asteroid comes and it’s going to take us out? I’m going to want a Space Force to bat the thing out of harm’s way,” he says.

Such strikes are a genuine threat, albeit a very unlikely one. And the Observer‘s Neel Patel makes a decent case that the military would be more suited to plan and carry out the response to an asteroid than a civilian organization like NASA, particularly if the U.S. decided to fire a nuclear missile at the asteroid in the hopes of throwing it off course. The Space Force has also received the support of many officials, including Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. But it’s not a good idea.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which cited a 2016 study from the Government Accountability Office, there are currently “60 distinct entities that deal with assets in space.” In fact, as I noted earlier this month, the U.S. already has a kind of Space Force: the Air Force Space Command, which employs more than 36,000 people. Is there really a need to make the Space Command larger, or to add to the alphabet soup of space agencies?

There’s another problem. The U.N. Outer Space Treaty puts some limits on the militarization of space: It bans the use of weapons of mass destruction outside the Earth’s atmosphere, and it prohibits the installation of military bases on asteroids or the moon. But as the University of Kent’s Gbenga Oduntan writes, the treaty does not preclude member countries from deploying other kinds of weapons in space. If the Space Force triggers an extraterrestrial arms race, we could see “a total disruption of the agreed law that outer space is the common heritage of all humankind.”

TMZ, meanwhile, asked Tyson if he would be willing to serve as an adviser on the Space Force. “When the government calls, we all have a duty, if you have a particular expertise that can serve the nation,” he responded. “I think you need to serve.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister doesn’t think the social media company should censor Holocaust deniers. She wants the government to do that.

Zuckerberg drew criticism Wednesday after Recode asked him about fake news on the platform. Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, told the interviewer that he did not want to delete even something as deeply and personally offensive to him as Holocaust denial. “I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong,” he said. “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.” Zuckerberg was willing to take down pages engaged in actually organizing harm. But when a page limits itself to expressing offensive opinions, he’d rather lower its reach than expel it.

The comments were quickly criticized by people who believe Facebook had a duty to banish ideas like Holocaust denial.

In statement provided to CNN late Thursday evening, Zuckerberg’ sister, Randi Zuckerberg, said that she had a duty to weigh in as a leader of the Jewish community and someone who has “worked at the ground floor of social media.” She does not want to live, she writes, “in a world where tech companies get to decide who has the right to speech and get to police content in a way that is different from what our legal system dictates.”

“While it can be appalling to see what some people say,” she argues, “I don’t think living in a sterile, Stepford-like online community where we simply press the delete button on the ugly reality of how people feel is helpful either.” It would be “nefarious,” she said, for Facebook to selectively silence the public.

Unless, that is, it’s just following the law. “Rather than rally against technology,” she writes, “let’s recognize that this hate exists, that it’s not going anywhere, and use our anger as a rallying cry to call for legislation to make Holocaust denial a crime.”

Unlike in several European countries, America has no federal law criminalizing Holocaust denial. (There has been at least one case where a Montana man’s bigoted tweets were prosecuted under a broad defamation statute that existed in state law.) Nor can Americans use group libel—slander against an entire community based on religion, ethnicity, etc.—or a similar tool to pursue a defamation suit against Holocaust deniers.

So this would be a radical change in the law, one that would run into obvious First Amendment problems. As Reason‘s Robby Soave argues,

Policing hate on a very large scale is quite difficult given the frequently subjective nature of offense; we risk de-platforming legitimate viewpoints that are unpopular but deserve to be heard; and ultimately, silencing hate is not the same thing as squelching it.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister doesn’t think the social media company should censor Holocaust deniers. She wants the government to do that.

Zuckerberg drew criticism Wednesday after Recode asked him about fake news on the platform. Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, told the interviewer that he did not want to delete even something as deeply and personally offensive to him as Holocaust denial. “I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong,” he said. “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.” Zuckerberg was willing to take down pages engaged in actually organizing harm. But when a page limits itself to expressing offensive opinions, he’d rather lower its reach than expel it.

The comments were quickly criticized by people who believe Facebook had a duty to banish ideas like Holocaust denial.

In statement provided to CNN late Thursday evening, Zuckerberg’ sister, Randi Zuckerberg, said that she had a duty to weigh in as a leader of the Jewish community and someone who has “worked at the ground floor of social media.” She does not want to live, she writes, “in a world where tech companies get to decide who has the right to speech and get to police content in a way that is different from what our legal system dictates.”

“While it can be appalling to see what some people say,” she argues, “I don’t think living in a sterile, Stepford-like online community where we simply press the delete button on the ugly reality of how people feel is helpful either.” It would be “nefarious,” she said, for Facebook to selectively silence the public.

Unless, that is, it’s just following the law. “Rather than rally against technology,” she writes, “let’s recognize that this hate exists, that it’s not going anywhere, and use our anger as a rallying cry to call for legislation to make Holocaust denial a crime.”

Unlike in several European countries, America has no federal law criminalizing Holocaust denial. (There has been at least one case where a Montana man’s bigoted tweets were prosecuted under a broad defamation statute that existed in state law.) Nor can Americans use group libel—slander against an entire community based on religion, ethnicity, etc.—or a similar tool to pursue a defamation suit against Holocaust deniers.

So this would be a radical change in the law, one that would run into obvious First Amendment problems. As Reason‘s Robby Soave argues,

Policing hate on a very large scale is quite difficult given the frequently subjective nature of offense; we risk de-platforming legitimate viewpoints that are unpopular but deserve to be heard; and ultimately, silencing hate is not the same thing as squelching it.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel thinks it’s a good idea for U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet again this year in Washington, D.C.

“I think it must once again become normal for Russian and American presidents to meet,” Merkel told reporters at a press conference today. She also believes that “in principle it’s always good for everyone when there are talks, particularly when there are talks between these two countries.”

Merkel’s remarks came a day after the Trump administration said it had invited Putin to visit Washington this fall. Though the German chancellor defended the idea, some lawmakers are less enthusiastic. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R–W.Va.) thinks Trump and Putin should “let the dust settle” from this week’s summit before planning a second one. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R–Tex.) wants to wait, too. “Maybe in a year or two,” he tells The Hill.

Controversy over Trump’s approach to U.S./Russia relations has abounded since Trump’s Monday meeting with Putin. At a joint press conference with Putin after the summit, Trump told the world that he accepted Putin’s claim that the Russian government did not interfere in America’s 2016 presidential election. After that provoked criticism from across the political spectrum, Trump claimed that he misspoke and believes Russia did interfere in the election.

Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov said Thursday he had not yet personally seen Trump’s invitation to Putin, but he added that “Russia was always open to such proposals. We are ready for discussions on this subject,” according to the Associated Press. Putin has not visited Washington since 2005.

Four years ago this week, police officers in New York choked Eric Garner to death after he passively refused to cooperate while they arrested him for selling black-market loose cigarettes.

Garner’s unnecessary and avoidable death inspired outrage, but so far there have been few consequences for the cops involved. The Department of Justice has been investigating whether the police violated Garner’s civil rights. Because of the federal investigation, the city refrained from moving forward with its own disciplinary proceedings against the officers involved.

But yesterday, after the Department of Justice said it didn’t object to the city moving on the issue, the New York Police Department (NYPD) announced that Officer Daniel Pantaleo, responsible for the deadly chokehold, and Sgt. Kizzy Adonis, his supervisor, will face an administrative trial next year.

NYPD critics and Garner’s family are upset that the city waited years to do anything. Whatever the Justice Department decides to do should have no bearing on whether the NYPD continues to employ these officers. If the Justice Department charges them, then it charges them. That has nothing to do with whether they should keep their jobs.

When The New York Post asked New York Mayor Bill de Blasio about this, he claimed that when other cities have quickly fired misbehaving police, the incidents were “exceedingly clear.” He added, “I think, each one has to be looked at in its own individuality, because sometimes there’s a situation where there’s not a lot of doubt.”

They’ve had four years to look at it. And the incident was captured on video. Let me politely suggest that the more likely explanation is that the city was hoping the Department of Justice would make the hard call so the NYPD wouldn’t have to come into conflict with New York’s powerful police unions.

It’s not clear whether the public will learn the outcome of the internal trial. New York State has some the country’s worst transparency rules when it comes to police conduct, including laws that conceal the contents of disciplinary records. Pantaleo’s history as an officer was being kept secret, but information was leaked last year to ThinkProgress that showed he had a history of bad behavior. New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board has recommended that Pantaleo be fired for Garner’s death.

A grand jury previously declined to indict Pantaleo for Garner’s death. This administrative trial is all about whether he’ll keep his job, not whether he’ll go to jail.

Highly potent fentanyl analogs are playing an increasingly prominent role in opioid-related deaths, accounting for one in five such fatalities during the year ending in June 2017, according to a new CDC analysis of data from 10 states. During that period, the CDC counted 11,045 “opioid overdose deaths” in those states, including 2,275 cases where fentanyl analogs were detected. The number and proportion of deaths involving fentanyl analogs “nearly doubled” between the second half of 2016 and the first half of 2017. This trend is yet another illustration of prohibition’s effectiveness, assuming the goal is to make drugs as deadly as possible.

Most opioid-related deaths now involve illicitly produced fentanyl. In the 10 states tracked by the CDC (Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), fentanyl was detected in 57 percent of opioid-related fatalities from July 2016 through June 2017. Fentanyl analogs showed up 21 percent of the time. The most commonly detected analog was carfentanil, followed by furanylfentanyl. Ohio alone accounted for 90 percent of the 1,236 carfentanil deaths in the 10 states during this period. The other analogs detected were 3-methylfentanyl, 4-fluorobutyrfentanyl, 4-fluorofentanyl, 4-fluoroisobutyrfentanyl, acetylfentanyl, acrylfentanyl, butyrylfentanyl, cyclopropylfentanyl, cyclopentylfentanyl, furanylethylfentanyl, isobutyrylfentanyl, and tetrahydrofuranylfentanyl.

The CDC notes that “carfentanil, the most potent fentanyl analog detected in the United States, is intended for sedation of large animals and is estimated to have 10,000 times the potency of morphine.” By comparison, the National Institute on Drug Abuse says fentanyl is 50 to 100 times as potent as morphine, while heroin is said to be about twice as potent as morphine. Prescription conversion tables indicate that hydrocodone (the opioid in Vicodin) is about as strong as morphine, while oxycodone (Percocet) is a bit stronger.

In other words, the crackdown on prescription analgesics is pushing opioid users toward increasingly potent substitutes: heroin (roughly twice as potent as morphine), which is often mixed with or replaced by fentanyl (50 to 100 times as potent) and fentanyl analogs (as much as 10,000 times as potent). Worse, the purity and potency of black-market drugs are highly variable and unpredictable, making consumers vulnerable to lethal dose miscalculation, especially when they are taking more than one substance at a time (as is typically the case in drug-related deaths). The wider the range of purity and potency, the greater the potential for fatal mistakes.

Prohibition contributes to this problem in several ways. It creates a black market where consumers don’t know what they’re getting, encourages dilution along the supply chain that dealers may try to counteract by adding fentanyl or fentanyl analogs to heroin, and pushes traffickers toward more potent drugs, which reduce the volume that must be smuggled for any given number of doses. Increased enforcement of prohibition magnifies these tendencies, exposing users to greater risks and feeding the upward trend in opioid-related deaths.

So how is Attorney General Jeff Sessions responding to the proliferation of fentanyl and fentanyl analogs? With increased enforcement, of course.

Last week Sessions announced Operation Synthetic Opioid Surge, which aims to “reduce the supply of deadly synthetic opioids in high impact areas” by federally prosecuting “every readily provable case involving the distribution of fentanyl, fentanyl analogues, and other synthetic opioids” in 10 U.S. attorney districts. This strategy may send more people to prison for longer periods of time and temporarily disrupt retail markets. But judging from a century of drug prohibition in America, Sessions’ innovative plan to arrest and imprison readily replaced drug dealers will not have a substantial and lasting impact on the availability of opioids or reduce the death toll associated with them. To the contrary, the enforcement pressure is apt to make drug use even more dangerous.

“When it comes to synthetic opioids, there is no such thing as a small case,” Sessions said in his press release. “Three milligrams of fentanyl can be fatal—that’s not even enough to cover up Lincoln’s face on a penny.” Based on the CDC’s estimate, the equivalent amount of carfentanil would be 0.03 milligram, or 30 micrograms, which is not even enough to cover Lincoln’s right nostril. Perhaps that is where the market is headed, with a little encouragement from drug warriors like Sessions.