Tag: hit&run

(Republican) president from 1981 to 1989, during a 1980 debate: “Open the borders both ways.”

(Republican) president from 2017 to the present, this morning: “We will close the Border permanently if need be.”

Latest Reason Podcast, editors’ roundtable edition: Let’s talk about all this and more!

Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch today tackle some of the thorniest questions in our country’s never-ending immigration debate: Does President Donald Trump have a point about the 1,700 percent jump in asylum seekers? Does Hillary Clinton have a point about the left abetting the populist right through failures of both policy and engagement? Do high immigration levels lead to the very degradation of social trust that certain people (cough, cough) keep yammering on about?

Along the way we also discuss balloon murder, Steven Pinker’s hair, and our own insufferable Thanksgiving political conversations.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Hide the Horror’ by Asthmatic Astronaut is licensed under CC BY NC SA 3.0

Relevant links from the show:

“‘We Will Close the Border Permanently If Need Be,’” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Trump’s Border Lawlessness,” by Shikha Dalmia

“Donald Trump Fails to Confront the Truth About the Migrant Caravan,” by Shikha Dalmia

“Why the Obsession with the Migrant Caravan, Mr. President?” by Nick Gillespie

“The Factual and Rhetorical Silliness of Family Separation Whataboutism,” by Matt Welch

“Republicans vs. Reagan,” by Matt Welch

“Ideology Is Out, Identity Is In,” by Nick Gillespie

“Steven Pinker Loves the Enlightenment,” by Nick Gillespie

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With the unemployment rate at 3.7%—the lowest it’s been in almost 50 years—perhaps it’s a strange moment to be raising an alarm about a decline in the centrality of work in American culture.

Yet that warning has arrived, both in a new book by Oren Cass, “The Once and Future Worker,” and in a new report, “Work, Skills, Community,” by the “working class study group” of Opportunity America, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution.

The “Work, Skills, Community” report says, “the Great Recession of 2007-2009 seemed to lead many workers, especially men, to leave the economy on a permanent basis…among men, work levels are falling to historic lows.”

What are these men doing instead? “Well over half of prime-age nonworking white males receive some kind of disability benefit, and Medicaid likely allows many of them to fill painkiller prescriptions at minimal cost,” the report says. The report describes what economists call “inactive men,” who spend about two extra hours a day “socializing, relaxing, and engaging in leisure,” including “watching TV and movies.”

The persistence of unworking men at a moment of low unemployment is something that Cass, who was domestic policy director of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and who was also a member of the study group that produced the report, links to “deaths of despair”—the increase in fatalities from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.

If that is the scene now, when the economy is strong, imagine how bad things may get in the next downturn, writes Ira Stoll.

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A near-8-mile light rail extension from Sydney’s downtown to its eastern suburbs was supposed to be delivered by March 2019 at the cost of AUS$1.6 billion. Following a wave of scandals and setbacks, costs have swelled to a potential AUS$3 billon and completion will be delayed by more than a year.

The New South Wales state government has tried to shift most of the blame for this onto Acciona, the Spanish firm hired to construct the line. Officials have accused the company of turning downtown Sydney into a “war zone” and of purposefully delaying construction. And Acciona has certainly made mistakes—at one point in the construction it accidentally destroyed some AUS$500,000 in public art. The company and the government are now locked in a nasty legal battle over who should bear the costs of the project’s extra work and added delays.

Naturally, the company had been awarded another contract in the same state. For AUS$8 million, it is supposed to build an entrance to an entry road to a rural hospital.

“I’m not happy about it,” the state minister for transport, Andrew Constance, tells the Sydney station 2GB. New South Wales premier (akin to governor) Gladys Berejiklian—for whom Sydney’s new light rail line was supposed to be a signature achievement—is likewise “not happy” about the new contract.

If we accept the government’s line that Acciona is incompetent, wasteful, and deliberately sabotaging the multi-billion-dollar light rail project, then it’s shameful that it was awarded another contract.

There is also the possibility that, whatever its public pronouncements, the New South Wales government does not actually consider Acciona’s work to be substandard. (The company blames the problems on the government, saying it deliberately withheld key, cost-increasing information about the light rail extension until after the contract was signed.) But if that’s true, that means the New South Wales government has been cynically demonizing Acciona to cover up its own failings.

Neither possibility inspires confidence that the government will be able to bring the AUS$2.1 billion light rail project to completion without further slip-ups or scandals.

When it comes to reducing the federal deficit, take President Donald Trump neither literally nor seriously.

Trump says he’s worried about the growing gap between how much the government spends and how much revenue it takes in—as well he should be, with the deficit on pace to surpass $1 trillion during the current fiscal year. This is a new thing for him. Trump came into office declaring himself the “king of debt” and showed very little concern for deficit spending as his Republican allies in Congress cut taxes and busted through spending caps to boost the budgets of both the military and domestic programs. That combination caused the national debt to rise more than $2 trillion on Trump’s watch.

Now the president “is changing his tune on the budget in public statements,” write Josh Dawsey and Damian Paletta in a lengthy piece published Sunday by The Washington Post.

Trump’s inner deficit hawk allegedly emerged last month, when he abruptly ordered his cabinet secretaries to prepare plans for 5 percent across-the-board cuts. In private meetings and at public events since then, Trump has made repeated comments about the need to pay down the debt, Dawsey and Paletta report from conversations with 10 administration officials.

Still, one of the biggest impediments to Trump’s interest in cutting the deficit is Trump himself. Publically, the president has promised not to touch entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicaid—indeed, protecting those programs from supposed Democratic efforts to change them is a prominent message at nearly every Trump rally. And privately, the Post notes, Trump has taken Pentagon cuts off the table.

Of course, entitlement spending is the biggest single driver of America’s long-term deficit. Absent any changes to current law, those two programs alone will run a $100 trillion deficit over the next 30 years while the rest of the government will run a slight surplus, according to Congressional Budget Office projections. Military spending, which Trump urged Congress to hike to an all-time high earlier this year, will total $718 billion next year and dwarfs all other non-entitlement spending in the federal budget.

In other words, it’s very difficult to be serious about balancing the budget without at least acknowledging that Social Security, Medicare, and the Pentagon will have to be part of the solution.

Beyond those big-picture problems, any attempt to bring the federal government’s spending and revenue into balance will likely be stymied by the fact that Trump doesn’t seem to understand the numbers he is dealing with. In a telling anecdote from the Post‘s Sunday story, Trump was reportedly surprised to learn that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earns a mere $200,000 annually. Trump guessed $5 million and suggested that raises should be in order.

This fits into a pattern for the president. In July, Trump tweeted that his steel and aluminum tariffs would help pay down the national debt. The problem, as I wrote at the time, is that the tariffs are expected to generate about $21 billion this year, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. The national debt is $21 trillion.

The same problem blows a big hole in Trump’s plan to shave 5 percent off all federal departments except the Pentagon. That sort of reduction in discretionary spending would save about $70 billion next year—or about 7 percent of the expected $1 trillion deficit.

Cutting $70 billion in discretionary spending is nothing to sneeze at, of course, and it’s surely heartening to hear that Trump is interested in addressing the federal government’s out-of-control spending. But the deficit is reaching such astronomical heights that it’s realistically not possible to address it while keeping military and entitlement spending out of the discussion.

Even if Trump were serious about slashing federal spending, Congress’ desires are ultimately more important—and Congress clearly wants to spend more money on pretty much everything. Last year, for example, the Trump administration made specific proposals for cutting food stamps, farm subsidies, and other discretionary programs. Overall, the proposed 2018 budget aimed to reduce federal spending by about 9 percent over 10 years.

The Republican-controlled Congress instead hiked spending by $400 billion. Trump then signed the budget deal.

Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced on November 26 that he had used CRISPR technology to edit the genomes of embryos who have now been born as twin baby girls.

Keep in mind that He’s research has not been published or otherwise independently verified. Even publication is no guarantee of truth, as the 2006 South Korean human cloning fakery should remind us.

That said, He claims to have edited embryos’ genomes for seven couples during fertility treatments, with one pregnancy resulting thus far. He says his goal was not to cure or prevent an inherited disease but to disable a gene, called CCR5, that forms a protein doorway that allows HIV to infect a cell. People who inherit this trait naturally resist HIV infection.

He says that he practiced CRISPR editing on mice, monkey, and human embryos for several years before applying his techniques to human embryos. In these cases, the male parents were all infected with HIV and were seeking to make sure that their offspring would be immune to becoming infected with this virus. In one twin, all of her cells were edited so as to knock out the CCR5 gene; in the other, only some cells were. This means that the second twin could still become infected with HIV.

To edit the embryos, He says, his team injected a single sperm into each egg to create an embryo and then added the CRISPR construct to some with the instructions for precisely editing the CCR5 gene. After the embryos had grown for three to five days, He took cells from each embryos to check to see if the editing had worked. The couples involved could choose to try implanting either edited or unedited embryos.

This effort has been widely denounced as unethical experimentation on human beings. Feng Zhang, one of the inventors of CRISPR editing, has called for a global moratorium on using the technology to create gene-edited babies. Some research suggests that while knocking out the CCR5 would help the twins resist HIV infection, they might become more susceptible to infection by West Nile virus.

But not all researchers joined wholeheartedly in condemning the use of CRISPR editing on human embryos. The Harvard geneticist George Church has said that he thinks that the research is “justifiable.”

One problem with CRISPR editing is that it sometimes introduces mutations far from the gene at which it is aimed at correcting. Such off-target mutations could obviously cause other problems. Researchers are working hard to make CRISPR editing ever more precise.

If parents were given the choice of implanting either edited or unedited embryos, and if they were adequately informed about the risks of using CRISPR technology, then that is where decisions about the ethics of using this technology should properly rest. There is no need for global moratorium.

Previous presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama ordered deadly drone strikes in countries where military action is formally authorized and in countries where it is not, and President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to be interested in stopping.

Spencer Ackerman of The Daily Beast has crunched the numbers. For the first two years of Trump’s administration, the military has increased the number of drone strikes in countries America is technically not at war in: Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Trump’s administration has launched 238 strikes in those places since 2017. During his first two years, the Obama administration launched 186. (As always when talking about secret drone strikes, these figures should be considered estimates.)

In particular, we saw a huge jump in drone strikes in Yemen—relevant given that America’s interventions in that country are so heavily tied with Washington’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. There is some good news, though: Drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen are now dropping again as we approach the end of 2018. The surge may have been a temporary spike, not a “new normal.”

One reason drone strikes increased is that the rules have been loosened up: Now drone strikes are allowed when there’s a “reasonable certainty” of hitting a particular senior terrorist rather than the “near certainty” previously required. As a result, there have been 35 drone strikes in Somalia in 2017, more than the 33 that took place there during Obama’s entire term.

Trump’s team has continued the trend of declaring anybody killed an enemy combatant unless independent sources raise enough of a stink. The administration isn’t even bothering to even give us the extremely undercounted tally of civilians killed by drones that the Obama administration half-heartedly put out during the final two years of his administration.

Meanwhile, in countries where military strikes are actually authorized by Congress, like Afghanistan, the bombs are falling like rain. In Trump’s first year as president, we bombed Afghanistan more than ever. As Reason‘s Brian Doherty noted earlier in this month, this tactic is intended to minimize our troops’ direct military contact in the country. We’ve seen more military strikes but fewer actual flights.

But we’re still risking military lives in Afghanistan without any evidence that we’re making anything better over there. On Saturday, Sgt. Leandro A.S. Jasso, 25, of Leavenworth, Washington, was killed in the Helmand Province, apparently after getting shot. The details are thin and his death is still under investigation. We do know that this was Jasso’s third deployment to Afghanistan after enlisting in 2012. That means he was barely of legal age when he joined the Army and yet had been sent to a war zone three times by the time he hit 25.

As Doherty thoroughly documented in Reason‘s August/September issue, our involvement in that country has become an incubator of costly boondoggles and dangerous corruption, not the “reconstruction” being sold to us.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) opposes the FIRST STEP Act, which includes sentencing reforms that are less ambitious than ones he enthusiastically supported just three years ago. Cruz has never offered a plausible explanation for this turnaround.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (SRCA) last February, Cruz was one of just five members who voted against it. He offered an unsuccessful amendment that would have eliminated retroactive application of shorter sentences for certain nonviolent drug offenders, a feature he said would doom the bill.

“If you want this bill to be more than a messaging press release, if you want this bill to actually to go into the United States Code, particularly given that we have an administration and an attorney general who have come out against it,” Cruz said, “I would suggest the way to maximize the chances of doing anything to fix the problem is to accept this amendment. Its chances of passing would rise dramatically.” Yet now that Jeff Sessions is gone and Donald Trump has endorsed the Senate version of the FIRST STEP Act, which includes several elements of the SRCA, Cruz is still opposed to the changes.

Cruz’s position is especially puzzling because not long ago he was pushing sentencing reforms that in some respects went further than the FIRST STEP Act. “The issue that brings us together today is fairness,” Cruz said in February 2015, announcing his cosponsorship of the Smarter Sentencing Act. “What brings us together is justice. What brings us together is common sense. This is as diverse and bipartisan array of members of Congress as you will see on any topic, and yet we are all unified in saying commonsense reforms need to be enacted to our criminal justice system. Right now today far too many young men, in particular African American young men, find their lives drawn in with the criminal justice system, find themselves subject to sentences of many decades for relatively minor nonviolent drug infractions.”

The Cruz-backed Smarter Sentencing Act, like the FIRST STEP Act, would have reduced mandatory minimum sentences for repeat drug offenders; widened the “safety valve” that exempts some low-level, nonviolent drug offenders from mandatory minimums; and retroactively applied the shorter crack sentences that Congress approved nearly unanimously in 2010. Unlike the FIRST STEP Act, the bill Cruzs cosponsored also would have reduced the 20-year, 10-year, and five-year mandatory minimums for certain drug offenders to 10 years, five years, and two years, respectively.

The FIRST STEP Act would reduce the mandatory minimum for drug offenders with one prior conviction a bit more than the Smarter Sentencing Act (from 25 to 15 years instead of 20), and its safety valve provision is somewhat more generous (allowing as many as four criminal history points rather than two). It also clarifies, unlike the Smarter Sentencing Act, that the escalating mandatory minimums for drug offenders who have guns require prior convictions, rather than multiple charges in a single case. But Cruz in 2015 endorsed broader and sharper reductions in mandatory minimums as well as the retroactivity for crack offenders he now claims to find objectionable.

“We need to recognize that young people make mistakes, and we should not live in a world of Les Miserables, where a young man finds his entire future taken away by excessive mandatory minimums,” Cruz said then. “I want to commend Senator [Mike] Lee, Senator [Richard] Durbin, for their leadership on this. It’s not easy to bring together this broad bipartisan coalition, but it’s an issue that matters. It’s an issue of justice. I’m proud to stand together, and I hope that this same group, and an even larger group, can stand together in a few months at a signing ceremony where this legislation becomes law.”

Nowadays Cruz is doing his best to defeat that broad bipartisan coalition for justice, including his erstwhile allies Lee and Durbin. In a Houston Chronicle op-ed piece last July, Ames Grawert, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, said “the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions adamantly oppose” sentencing reform. “Cruz was for reform when it was popular with leading Republicans,” Grawert wrote. “Now it’s not, so he’s against it.” Yet Sessions is no longer attorney general, and the president supports the bill that Cruz is trying to block.

“Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes have contributed to prison overpopulation and are both unfair and ineffective relative to the public expense and human costs of years-long incarceration,” Cruz wrote in a 2015 essay published by the Brennan Center. “Given the undeniable costs and dubious benefits of mass, long-term incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders, Congress should take steps to give judges more flexibility in sentencing those offenders. The Smarter Sentencing Act of 2015, which was introduced by Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and of which I am an original cosponsor, is a significant stride in that direction. Among other things, the bill lowers minimum sentences, cutting them in half, to give judges more flexibility in determining the appropriate sentence based on the unique facts and circumstances of each case.”

Cruz seemed to believe all that at the time. Now he is allied with longtime opponents of criminal justice reform like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in support of dumber sentencing. A few years ago, Cruz bragged about taking “a significant stride” toward fairer penalties, but now he balks at a more modest first step.

A recent poll commissioned by the Justice Action Network found that three-quarters of voters agree with the position Cruz took in 2015. Why doesn’t Cruz?

Since 2015, when Reason first sat down with Adam Conover, host of TruTV’s hit show Adam Ruins Everything, a new president has taken office, a new media landscape has emerged, and some would say we’re inhabiting a new reality.

What’s it like to make a show that seeks to uncover hidden truths in the “post-truth era?”

“I guess what’s happened is that I’ve a little bit let go of the idea that we can reach everybody,” says Conover, who’s about to go on a live tour and is gearing up for the premiere of his show’s third season. “Certain people… the informational world they live in, it’s so distorted that it’s hard to get through.”

But most people still have a “deep down desire to learn, to know the truth,” he says.

In a wide-ranging interview with Reason’s Zach Weissmueller (full disclosure: Weissmueller is married to the show’s casting director), Conover shares his thoughts on the “response videos” to his work proliferating on YouTube, how he contends with the psychological defense mechanisms that prevent viewers from changing their opinions, the “de-platforming” of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and how big tech companies are changing our perceptions of reality.

The new season of Adam Ruins Everything premieres on November 27, 2018 and his live tour starts on November 28.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick, Justin Monticello, and Alexis Garcia.

“Happy Whistle” by Scott Holmes is licensed under an Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/Happy_Music/10_Happy_Whistle
Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/Happy_Music/10_Happy_Whistle

“Symphony No. 5” by Gustav Mahler and performed by the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony is licensend under a Creative Commons Unported Attribution License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) Source: https://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.5_(Mahler%2C_Gustav)

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Sociopaths have haunted fiction since fiction began, and no wonder. Sociopathy is civilization’s greatest challenge. Richard III and Iago; Raskolnikov, Kurtz, Willie Stark, and Humbert Humbert; J.R. Ewing, Frank Underwood, and even HAL 9000. How do we understand the narcissist, the demagogue, the liar, the manipulator, the person without scruples or conscience? The creative imagination can probe dark places that psychology and medicine can’t reach. So I am not being cute when I say that Star Trek is a source of insight into the universe of President Donald Trump.

Star Trek—the original television series, at least—is a source of insight into many things, including genetic engineering, automated warfare, the divided soul, the qualities of leadership, and much more. Its leading obsession, however, was sociopathy, which in Star Trek‘s world—as in our own—is an ever-present danger, writes Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, for Reason.

View this article.

More than two weeks after Election Day, the 2018 midterms aren’t quite over. In Mississippi, neither Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith nor Democratic challenger Mike Espy received a majority of the vote on Election Day. As a result, they’ll face off tomorrow in the culmination of a race that’s come to be defined more by controversy than by policy.

The runoff follows the retirement of longtime Sen. Thad Cochran, a Republican, who had more than two years remaining in his term when he stepped down. GOP Gov. Phil Bryant appointed Hyde-Smith, who previously served as agriculture and commerce secretary, to fill Cochran’s seat. Meanwhile, a special election was scheduled for November 6, with the major candidates including Smith, Clinton-era agriculture secretary Espy, and state Sen. Chris McDaniel, a conservative who also ran for Senate in 2014.

On Election Day, Hyde-Smith won a plurality with 41.5 percent of the vote—but Espy wasn’t far behind with 40.6 percent. McDaniel’s 16.5 percent wasn’t nearly enough to win, but it was enough to ensure a runoff.

Policy-wise, neither candidate’s views are that surprising. Hyde-Smith is a boilerplate conservative, with her campaign website highlighting her opposition to abortion and illegal immigration as well as her support for the Second Amendment. Espy is a relative moderate on some issues, including immigration, where he supports border security but opposes President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall. As ABC News reports, Espy has said he’ll be more than happy to work with Trump “if it’s good for Mississippi.”

But the candidates’ policies have gotten significantly less attention than a series of controversies that have engulfed the race since Election Day. On November 11, Bayou Brief publisher Lamar White Jr. posted a video from November 2 in which Hyde-Smith says that if one of her supporters invited her “to a public hanging,” she’d “be on the front row.” Her remarks drew widespread criticism, given Mississippi’s history of lynching African Americans. Though she apologized, several companies who had previously donated to her campaign, including Major League Baseball and Walmart, asked for their money back.

The “public hanging” controversy was just the start. Another video from White, posted on November 15 but taken on November 3, showed Hyde-Smith making a joke about voter suppression. The candidate told supporters at a campaign stop that “there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”

Hyde-Smith has also faced criticism for attending a segregation academy—a private school originally established for white children who wanted to avoid the newly integrated public schools—and for sending her daughter to the same institution. CNN noted that as a state senator, Hyde-Smith co-sponsored legislation to honor “the last known living ‘Real Daughter’ of the Confederacy living in Mississippi.” Also last week, a 2014 photo posted to Facebook of Hyde-Smith wearing a Confederate soldier’s hat resurfaced.

To some observers, the race brought to mind last year’s special Senate election in Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones upset Republican Roy Moore. There are some similarities: Both Deep South states usually go Republican, and Trump carried each by a large margin in the 2016 election. And like Hyde-Smith, Moore was mired in controversy in the days leading up to the election. The controversies were rather different, though—he was accused of inappropriate behavior with underage girls, not potentially insensitive comments.

A recent poll has Hyde-Smith up by 10 points: 54 percent to 44 percent. But no other major polls have been conducted since Election Day, so Republicans are still on edge. “I think Espy supporters are probably a little more energized than Hyde-Smith,” Henry Barbour, the Republican National Committee’s national committeeman in Mississippi, tells Politico. “We don’t want to have an Alabama,” he adds.

It’s not that likely. According to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, Hyde-Smith has a greater chance to win, even if “observers might be surprised by how close the margin ends up being.” FiveThirtyEight, meanwhile, points out that “there’s not a lot of evidence that Hyde-Smith’s gaffes have thrown this race wide open.”

Whoever does end up winning will get to be a first—Hyde-Smith would be the first woman elected to represent the state in the Senate, while Espy would be the state’s first black senator. Regardless of the outcome, Republicans will have a Senate majority.