Tag: hit&run

Dana Nessel, a former prosecutor and current criminal defense/civil rights lawyer, wants to be the Democrats’ nominee for attorney general of Michigan. She released an ad this week touting her lack of a penis as a qualification:

“If the last few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that we need more women in positions of power, not less,” Nessel explains in the spot. “So when you’re choosing Michigan’s next attorney general, ask yourself this: Who can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting? Is it the candidate who doesn’t have a penis? I’d say so.”

It’s a deft ad, capitalizing on one of the largest news stories of the year to highlight a perceived advantage and to earn some free media. But it’s also a symptom of a broken two-party system, where the choice so often comes down to selecting the lesser of two evils. Just how low has the bar been set when you can run on a promise not to be a male sexual harasser?

Where do such false choices lead? To enthusiastic defenses of candidates accused of sexual misconduct with minors. Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore seems to have recovered much of the support he may have lost when he was first accused of molesting a teen. One big reason for that may be how many Democrats have been reticent to force out people accused of sexual misconduct in their own ranks. By covering for their colleagues, they offered Moore voters a fresh model of excusing a politician’s abuses.

It’s stunning, but not surprising, how quickly the clarity of judgment on such misconduct was lost when the accusations spread to the political world. Partisans’ tribal instincts have fueled a kind of whataboutism that hasn’t really taken off in Hollywood, making the cost of inaction comfortably low. As my colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown explained in The New York Times, “corporations are susceptible to the moral suasion of the public” in a way the public sector is not. So the jig is up for sex predators in Hollywood and the media a lot faster than for those attracted to the halls of government.

Sadly, Nessel’s lack of a penis doesn’t mean she’ll be unable to perpetuate a system that protects and promotes predators. The former prosecutor’s preliminary platform doesn’t even include an obligatory nod to substantive criminal justice reform in its Civil Rights Enforcement section.

In the last few years, Democratic candidates have become skilled in appropriating the language of criminal justice reform without offering much substantive in the way of actual policies. They earn the votes of many people who say they are concerned with the criminal justice system anyway, because “the other side” often doesn’t even bother to pretend to care about the issue. (President Trump, the other side’s boss, actively promotes police brutality.)

If it comes to it, Republicans can appropriate Nessel’s vote-for-someone-without-a-penis pitch too. At least one woman, state Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker, is running on the Republican side.

Next Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which poses the question of whether the government violates a baker’s right to freedom of speech when it compels him to produce a cake for a gay wedding despite his religious objections to same-sex marriage. Like most (all?) libertarians, I think this sort of coercion is wrong, although I’m not sure the relevant right is freedom of speech. The principle also could be described as freedom of religion or freedom of conscience. At bottom, as Scott Shackford has observed, the dispute is about freedom of association and freedom of contract. But one thing should be clear: It is the government, at the behest of an aggrieved gay couple, that is initiating the use of force. It is the baker, Jack Phillips, who is asking to be left alone. The question is whether he has a right to expect that—or, to put it another way, whether the government’s use of force is justified.

That point seems lost on The New York Times. In a recent story about the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is representing Phillips, reporter Jeremy Peters conflates the baker’s desire to avoid an implicit endorsement of gay marriage with a government ban on gay marriage. Under the headline “Fighting Gay Rights and Abortion With the First Amendment,” Peters says Phillips and the ADF are trying to “blunt the sweep of Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that enshrined same-sex marriage into law.” Obergefell said states must recognize marriages between people of the same sex. It did not say anyone is legally obligated to bake a gay wedding cake.

“We think that in a free society people who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman shouldn’t be coerced by the government to promote a different view of marriage,” ADF senior counsel Jeremy Tedesco tells Peters. “We have to figure out how to live in a society with pluralistic and diverse views.”

That stance, Peters suggests (citing “civil liberties groups and gay rights advocates”), is a cover for “a deep-seated belief that gay people are immoral and that no one should be forced to recognize them as ordinary members of society.” But whatever the ADF’s views of homosexuality, it is entirely consistent to say the government should neither ban gay marriage nor force people like Phillips to endorse it.

That is the position taken by the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), the Cato Institute, and the Individual Rights Foundation, which jointly filed a brief in support of Phillips. As the headline over a recent Daily Signal story notes, “These Groups Support Gay Marriage While Backing a Cake Baker’s First Amendment Rights.” According to the Times, however, they are “Fighting Gay Rights…With the First Amendment.”

Peters also conflates government and private action in his discussion of National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a case the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear that challenges a California law requiring anti-aborton “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide information about abortion. Just as Masterpiece Cakeshop has nothing to do with banning gay marriage, the California case has nothing to do with banning (or restricting) abortion. Both cases are about the constitutionality of forcing people to engage in speech that violates their moral principles.

As Peters sees it, “the First Amendment has become the most powerful weapon of social conservatives” seeking to “roll back laws on same-sex marriage and abortion rights.” That gloss is not just misleading but blatantly false. If the ADF wins these cases, its victories will have no effect whatsoever on gay marriage or abortion rights. They will simply carve out some space for peaceful dissent from the social consensus on these issues.

Objectively speaking, Kinder Eggs are not particularly good candy. But with chocolate halves breaking open to reveal a tiny toy prize inside, Kinder Eggs are cool, from a kid’s perspective. And like many things made arbitrarily illegal, these chocolate treats have earned a kind of kitsch cache with U.S. audiences that transcends taste buds or age. So a lot of folks were excited when headlines last week announced that Kinder Eggs are finally legal in America.

But it’s fake news. While a modified Kinder Egg can now be purchased legally here, the original “Kinder Surprise” variety—the kind you’ll find for sale in other countries—is still prohibited, since embedding non-food-items in candy is still banned. The American Kinder Egg will feature two separate halves: one for eating, one with a toy inside.

As Gawker noted back in 2013, Kinder Eggs “have been banned in the States since long before they were first manufactured in the early ’70s” by Italian company Ferrero (also the masterminds behind Nutella). A ban on candies with embedded toys has been in place since 1938, when it was included as part of the omnibus Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Under the new law, confectionery products were prohibited from having “any nonnutritive object” either “partially or completely imbedded therein.” (An exception exists when “such object is of practical functional value to the confectionery product and would not render the product injurious or hazardous to health.”)

The Kinder Egg’s illegal status only seemed to up American enthusiasm for the candies, which were smuggled back from abroad in many an ordinary citizen’s suitcase over the decades.

I wonder how many knew they faced a fine of $2,500 an egg?

Yes: That’s the legal penalty for Kinder Egg trafficking. And Americans have been prosecuted for the crime, though this is rare; airport agents will generally just confiscate the eggs when found.

The blog Today I Found Out provides some more backstory, noting that Nestle challenged the embedded object ban in 1997 after the company introduced a Kinder Egg–like product called Nestle Magic:

When Nestle was preparing to launch the product, the FDA explicitly notified them it was illegal under the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, but Nestle disagreed, noting the product was completely safe so should be considered one of the exceptions. Their position was backed by a report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who did their due diligence on the candy and determined it, and the non-edible item inside, were not a choking hazard.

Nestle went forward with the product anyway. It also lobbied Congress to change the law. But after a long legal batttle, the company had to discontinue the product and pull it from stores.

Given the ugly turn U.S. immigration policies have taken recently, it’s almost refreshing to be reminded that other governments can be bad on the issue as well. Take Denmark, whose immigration authorities are charging an American professor, Brooke Harrington, with a crime for giving academic lectures.

Inside Higher Education reports that Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Copenhagen Business School, was charged with taking on illegal side jobs for giving speeches before Danish parliamentarians, tax officials, and law students at the University of Copenhagen.

This, officials say, violates her work permit, which only allows her to work at Copenhagen Business School.

“If I’d known what I was getting into, I really would have had second thoughts about coming here. Anyone in higher education considering moving here should be aware they’ll have to confront this,” Harrington told Inside Higher Education.

The charges came the same day the Danish Society for Education and Business gave Harrington an award for disseminating her research.

Harrington has had a long academic career studying international finance and tax havens, with teaching stints at Brown and Princeton. Her work has taken her to over 18 different countries, and she’s been tenured at Copenhagen Business School since 2010.

If convicted of these charges, all this could be put at risk. Under Danish immigration law, those convicted of working illegally in the country are barred from seeking permanent residency for a period of 15 years. A criminal conviction would also make it difficult for her to continue traveling and working abroad.

“For someone who does international research…this would literally be the end of my career,” Harrington told Inside Higher Ed.

Harrington is not the only person caught up in Denmark’s crackdown on foreign educators working off-site. Police have contacted three other Copenhagen Business School employees for working outside the university, according to the Danish newspaper Politiken, although it is not clear whether charges were filed in these cases. The newspaper also notes that University of Copenhagen, Technical University of Denmark, and Aalborg University employees have all sanctioned for similar violations.

The charges have sparked controversy within the Danish academic community. The Rector of Copenhagen Business School, Per Holten-Andersen, issued a statement calling it “the worst form of bureaucracy. We stand 100 percent behind our employees who are experiencing problems and offer advice and support.”

If convicted, Harrington will be expected to pay a 13,500 kroner ($2,100) fine.

The whole incident is a reminder that even in our connected, globalized world, there are a huge array of barriers to people living and working where they wish.

There are new insider rumors that President Donald Trump’s administration is going to see another shake-up at the top.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is not long for his job, according to multiple sources for Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times. The plan, the Times reports, would be for CIA Director Mike Pompeo to take over as secretary of state. Then they’re considering installing Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to lead the CIA.

As always with the Trump administration, be wary when rumors of people quitting or getting fired hit the press. This is a leak-prone administration, and frequently what comes out through unnamed sources are half-baked ideas, trial balloons, or just people within the administration trying to influence the president’s decisions by going to the press.

It should not be a surprise if Tillerman gets dumped. He and Trump clearly have been at odds for some time. An entire news cycle in October was consumed with a report that Tillerman called Trump a “moron.”

Cotton is one of the bigger champions of allowing the federal government to engage in domestic surveillance without a warrant, so the idea of putting him charge of the CIA might make more than a few folks blanch. He’s on board with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bill to formalize the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 authorities to snoop on Americans to fight crimes, beyond the intent of the legislation.

Cotton also is quite vocal about wanting regime change in Iran. Putting him in charge of the CIA could facilitate further American meddling in that country. We could see more voices for interventionism and even war from within the Trump administration.

On the other hand, Cotton has a nasty record of taking any number of authoritarian, anti-liberty positions. Getting him out of the Senate could arguably be an improvement in terms of lawmaking. He has been a supporter of harsh mandatory minimum federal sentencing for drug crimes and has stood in the way of reforms of the criminal justice system. And about those harsh crackdowns on illegal immigrants in America—Cotton thinks we have too many legal immigrants, buying into the inaccurate talking point that low-skilled immigrant labor is what is keeping Americans’ wages down. And he backs legislation to block online gambling. Cotton has been no friend of freedom as a senator.

Cotton has been so in tune with Trump’s worst authoritarian urges the administration might want to keep him where he is, given their challenges in building coalitions with lawmakers. Officials told The Times that there is concern that he’s more valuable to Trump in the Senate. If Cotton leaves the Senate to head the CIA, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (a Republican) would name a replacement to serve until next fall. Hutchinson initially endorsed Marco Rubio as president and has not been terribly thrilled with the way Trump has been handling himself as president.

Jeffrey Borrowdale, a philosophy instructor at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, made an appearance at a recent discussion of free speech and hate speech at the school. And a photo take of him taken with conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos turned up on Facebook. That was more than enough for the local Antifa chapter, Dan King writes.

Borrowdale is indeed the adviser for the school’s Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) chapter. He describes himself as a “bleeding heart libertarian, transhumanist, not a Nazi” and “a trans ally.” Antifa never elaborated on what views of Borrowdale’s justified its labeling of him as alt-right, other than the Milo photo.

“They’ve been trying to incite students against me since last fall when someone found the picture I took with Milo on Facebook,” he told Campus Reform on November 21.

Since then, Borrowdale said activists have been sending him threatening messages, publishing his personal information on social media, tearing down or defacing fliers for his YAL group and urging students to infiltrate and disrupt YAL meetings.

View this article.

More than 500 retired state and public school employees in Pennsylvania are collecting six-figure annual pensions, including one of the men jailed for his role in covering up the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal at Penn State University.

Gary Schultz, a former vice president at Penn State, was sentenced to two months in jail earlier this year after pleading guilty in March to a charge of child endangerment. Even so, he’ll be collecting a $330,000 annual pension for the rest of his life. He is one of 20 former state employees getting more than $250,000 annually from a state pension system facing a $70 billion shortfall, according to an analysis of state pension data published this week by Maddie Hanna of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Philly.com published the list of the 500 pensioners pulling down more than $100,000 annually, 124 of them former Penn State employees. Rodney Erickson, the school’s former president, gets $477,000 a year, biggest pension in the state. Another 143 of the six-figure pension recipients worked at other public universities in the state.

Those big pension payouts are outliers, of course. The average retiree gets about $27,000 annually, according to the Inquirer review. Still, they are rightly being scrutinized as the state (like many others) tries to address a budget-busting pension crisis.

Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled state house and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf came together earlier this year to pass a series of reforms that included some caps on big pensions and changes to how future employees will have their retirement benefits funded. Those modest reforms will help reduce long-term liabilities, but because they only affect new hires, it will take decades for the current debts to disappear.

Annual payments into that system will cost Pennsylvania taxpayers more than $4 billion this year. Those contributions will continue to grow annually through the early 2020s—accounting for as much as 10 percent of the state’s whole budget by 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal—before leveling off and eventually declining over the course of several decades as current enrollees stop collecting benefits when they die.

Still, the big pension payouts in Pennsylvania pale in comparison to what some retirees in other states are getting. As I reported last month, more than 62,000 California retirees get pensions in excess of six figures, including a handful of pensioners who get a cool $1 million (or more) each year for doing nothing.

The comparison isn’t apples-to-apples, though. Most local government workers in California are included in the state pension system, while Pennsylvania only puts state workers and employees at public schools and state universities in the state-run pension systems. There are another 2,500 local pension plans in Pennsylvania to cover the retirement costs of municipal workers (that’s about a quarter of all municipal pension plans in the entire country), and many of those local retirement accounts are in even worse shape than the state-run plans are.

That means the Inky‘s data, while useful, is not a complete picture. There are surely many more public sector workers in Pennsylvania getting golden nest eggs partially funded by state taxpayers.

If you’re looking for another reason to take the plunge and finally buy some bitcoin, check out Nobel Prize-Winning economist Joseph Stigltiz’s new interview with Bloomberg, in which he says it should “be outlawed” and warns that the government “could crack down at any moment and then [bitcoin] collapses.”

Stiglitz is the George Costanza of economists: Every instinct he has, do the opposite. In 2002, he coauthored an infamous paper concluding that “the risk to the government from a potential default on [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] debt is effectively zero.” And it’s almost a decade to the month since he was in Caracas praising Hugo Chavez’s economic policies.

Speaking of Venezuela, Stiglitz also told Bloomberg that bitcoin “doesn’t serve any socially useful function.” While it’s true that cryptocurrency’s world-altering potential won’t be fully realized until the technology advances quite a bit, it’s already enabling the citizens of that country ravaged by socialism to obtain life-saving food and medicine.

Is it that Stiglitz is an advocate of expansive government power in all contexts (he’s also urging the U.S. to outlaw cash), or is it that he’s too arrogant to bother trying to understand the most successful free-market money system running on the internet? I say both. (Fellow Nobel Laureate Paul The-Internet-Will-Be-About-as-Useful-as-the-Fax-Machine Krugman is also a bitcoin skeptic.)

One of the great pleasures of observing bitcoin’s rapid rise in price and prominence is that it’s sending elite economists into fits of confusion and stoking their insecurity. (“We ought to just go back to what we always have had,” Stiglitz told Bloomberg.)

What Bitcoin has done for me: Taught me to take lofty titles with a grain of salt (professor, Noble Prize winner, etc). Your title doesn’t make you an authority on things you don’t bother to understand. https://t.co/PoXTGriqeL

— Alan Silbert (@alansilbert) November 29, 2017

In calling for bitcoin to be “outlawed,” Stiglitz demonstrated that he doesn’t understand that bitcoin is just code, which makes a global ban impossible. Thanks to the recently launched bitcoin satellite service, and a system in development for sending cryptocurrency transactions through radio signals, even shutting down the internet wouldn’t stop bitcoin.

Stiglitz is also unaware of one of cryptocurrency’s most important paradigm shifts: It turned money into speech, thus affording it First Amendment protection. In the most recent episode of Forbes journalist Laura Shin’s excellent Unchained podcast (published before Stiglitz’ remarks), the prominent venture capitalist Naval Ravikant (arguably the most articulate thinker in the crypto space) expounded on this point:

What bitcoin did is it turned code into money. So bitcoin is pure code—there’s no paper, there’s no guns, there’s no federal government. It’s just pure code. So to stop bitcoin you’ve got to stop code, and code is actually just speech. It’s just a bunch of numbers and letters that I write down and that the computer interprets. So you have to stop me from writing those numbers or letters down in a certain sequence and conveying them to other people, [and then] to stop them from loading it on a computer somewhere in the world, [and then] to stop someone else from then turning that into money. So you can’t control the way money flows unless you can stop the developers from…talking to each other, and thinking. And the regime that could do that would probably be one of the evilest regimes on the planet.

Thanks to a landmark 1996 ruling by Judge Marilyn Hall Patel and later affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court, there’s strong legal precedent for the idea that code is speech. Mathematician Daniel Bernstein, with assistance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had sued the U.S. government in 1995 for blocking publication of an encryption program he had written. “Computer language is just that, language,” Judge Patel wrote in her decision.

Upholding that principle, I believe, will be the most important free speech battle in the years to come.

I explored this topic in a recent video:

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Markets are much more effective handmaidens of social justice goals than government is, I argue in a New York Times piece responding to NBC’s firing of 20-year Today Show veteran Matt Lauer.

“Social media takes a lot of punches for enabling sexual harassment,” I point out, “but the past two months have shown that it has also provided consumers with an unprecedented power to make their market preferences heard loud and clear. And right now, the market is demanding that companies do something about sexual predators and pests in their midsts.”

Lauer’s dismissal is the latest in a long list of powerful private-sector men felled by recent revelations of workplace sexual misconduct—Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose, and Louis C.K., to name just a few. From my op-ed:

“Everybody knew” is the stomach-churning line we have heard about so many men revealed as serial sexual offenders in the workplace. And yet they held on to their cushy jobs for years. What changed? Companies like NBC, HBO, Netflix, CBS and the Weinstein Company are more vulnerable to our outrage than ever before.

While this gives many sides something to gripe about—that it didn’t happen sooner, that victims weren’t believed earlier, that this purge may ensnare the innocent—there’s an optimistic note we shouldn’t overlook: Consumers now have more power to make themselves heard than ever before. And this is forcing big corporations to reconsider how they respond to scandals, how they hold bad actors accountable, and the weight they attach to character—something those in political power have much less incentive to do.

To attest to this, look no further than Nancy Pelosi’s response to allegations involving Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), or the response from Alabama Republicans all the way up to President Donald Trump on child-chasing Roy Moore.

“Character may no longer count in politics and public service—if it ever did,” I write,

but it matters more than ever in the private sector, where consumer preferences prevail….As we observe and adjust to the sociosexual storm we’re all in, let’s appreciate the powers and paradigms making it possible: feminism, but also free markets.

Read the whole thing here.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Monday in a 10th Amendment case that pits the state of New Jersey against both the federal government and the biggest names in professional and amateur sports. It will be a constitutional clash between federalism and federal power.

The case is Christie v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. In a new video produced by the Federalist Society, I explain the legal issues at stake in this high-profile dispute. Does the federal government have the lawful power to prevent New Jersey from partially legalizing sports betting in its casinos and racetracks? Or does the 10th Amendment shield the state from the federal government’s reach? Click below to watch.