Tag: hit&run

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke—an avowed enemy of the Black Lives Matter movement, the “fake news” media, and basic civil rights for jail inmates—will be joining the Trump administration as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security.

While that’s no doubt good news for the citizens of Milwaukee—where Clarke stands accused of allowing an inmate to die of thirst after being denied water for 7 days—it’s a worrisome development for the country. Clarke, a Trump surrogate who campaigned fiercely for the president, opposes criminal justice reform efforts supported by libertarian-leaning Republican congressmen like Sen. Rand Paul, and is generally a civil libertarian’s worst nightmare.

“Reform flies in the face of getting tough on crime,” Clarke said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2016.

Consider Clarke’s recent tweets, in which he: criticizes the Obama administration for encouraging cops to be more careful about the use of force; claims that Trump’s recently difficulties represent “the establishment” trying to “nullify the will of We the People”; promises that Trump will “beat back the swamp people” who are mounting an “all out assault”; retweets someone calling The Washington Post a “serious threat and Enemy of America”; and applauds Attorney General Jeff Sessions for instructing prosecutors to apply mandatory minimum sentencing.

Simply put, Clarke is a crazy person who really doesn’t care very much about civil liberties, or perhaps, actively despises them. And he’s joining the Department of Homeland Security.

“We’re at a really interesting moment where public-private partnerships could blossom in a pretty dramatic way,” says Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “If we have technologies that are highly refined…we can anticipate a problem and fix it before it occurs.”

Goldsmith, author of 2014’s The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance, was the recipient of the Reason Foundation’s 2017 Savas Award for promoting public-private partnerships. (The nonprofit Reason Foundation is also the publisher of Reason.com.) As mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, Goldsmith trimmed $100 million from the city budget mainly by requiring departments of the municipal government to compete with private companies.

“The ideas…frankly, were from Reason,” states Goldsmith. “[Director of Transportation Policy] Bob Poole spent I don’t know how many lunches in Indianapolis when I was running for mayor and after I got elected kind of going through A to Z on how to privatize.”

Goldsmith states that one impediment keeping struggling cities from embracing public-private partnerships is a basic understanding of the goal. “[It] isn’t to monetize assets,” explains Goldsmith. “The goal is efficiency.”

At the national level, Goldsmith says public-private partnerships could be key to making President Donald Trump’s one trillion dollar infrastructure investment program successful.

“Regardless of how much money it is that Washington ends up [spending]… it can’t be done effectively without public-private partnerships,” Goldsmith states. “Both for purposes of paying back the money and for purposes of maintaining the asset.”

Click below to read more.

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In the wake of yesterday afternoon’s New York Times report alleging fired former FBI Director James Comey had memos documenting President Donald Trump asking for an end to an investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to get their mitts on them.

Today the senators sent a letter to acting FBI head Andrew McCabe requesting copies of any and all memos that Comey “created memorializing interactions he had with Presidents Trump and Obama,” as well as current Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and other top Justice Dept. Officials. The letter is signed by committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and crime and terrorism subcommittee chair Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and ranking member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island). They’ve asked for the memos by May 24.

Furthermore, the Senate Intelligence Committee is asking for Comey to appear before the committee in both closed and open sessions to give testimony.

This should not be taken to assume that impeachment is in the air, but it’s simply the first step in what’s probably going to be a very long process. Feinstein said the idea of impeachment should remain “off the table,” until they know more of whether any of the claims within the Times story are true.

It does very much seem, though, that the various scandals and outrages over Trump’s behavior and his administration are crystallizing over the question of whether he attempted to push Comey and the FBI away from investigating former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn on whether he had misled over his ties with Russia and communications with Russian officials. Without attempting to speculate as to whether this is a legitimate issue, it’s pretty easy to predict that this is going to be taking up a few news cycles. This morning Jacob Sullum analyzed whether or how the concept of “obstructing justice” would or could come into play here.

Read the letter yourself below. In the meantime, Trump has been quiet on Twitter for once, but in a commencement speech for United States Coast Guard Academy graduates today complained that “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a supporter of bipartisan criminal justice reform efforts, said that even though Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ sudden lurch rightward on mandatory minimums caught him off guard, nothing is going to stop the most libertarian Republican member of the Senate from trying to pass a lenient sentencing bill.

To that end, he and two of his Democratic colleagues have reintroduced the Justice Safety Valve Act, a bipartisan bill that would allow judges to sidestep mandatory minimum requirements if certain extenuating circumstances apply.

Still, Sessions’ apparent change of opinion on sentencing is dismaying, said Paul.

“Really, it surprised me how much [Sessions] is going in the opposite direction,” Paul told Reason in an interview.

Late last week, Sessions announced new instructions for prosecutors: he wants them to pursue the harshest possible sentence for a given crime. He said that federal attempts to change sentencing recommendations amount to “micromanagement from Washington.”

As Reason’s Matt Welch reported earlier, this came as a profound disappointment to Paul, who believes mandatory minimum sentences prevent judges and juries from exercising leniency in cases that merit it. On Friday, Paul released a statement criticizing Sessions’ new approach, which will “accentuate that injustice,” according to Paul.

Paul voted to confirm Sessions as attorney general, in part because he thought he had extracted certain guarantees from the former Alamaba senator: that Sessions did not believe the president had the legal authority to authorize drone strikes against American non-combatants on U.S. soil, and also, that Sessions would not attempt to bring back harsh sentencing.

When asked if Paul would attempt to talk to the administration about harsh sentencing and dissuade Sessions from his new course, the senator explained that he believes the best option is the legislative one: Paul and Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy (VT) and Jeff Merkley (OR) have reintroduced the Justice Safety Valve Act, which would give federal judges more flexibility when it comes to sentencing.

“I don’t think the attorney general is that sympathetic,” said Paul. “I think the greater likelihood is getting enough momentum… if something made it out of the Senate in a bipartisan way.”

Paul maintained that he has participated in conversations that give him confidence the president could support a reform bill like the Justice Safety Valve Act if it passed Congress.

“We could get the president to sign it,” he said.

In an op-ed for CNN, Paul wrote:

I urge the attorney general to reconsider his recent action. But even more importantly, I urge my colleagues to consider bipartisan legislation to fix this problem in the law where it should be handled. Congress can end this injustice, and I look forward to leading this fight for justice.

For more about the damage wrought by mandatory minimums, go here.

Before his victory in the Democratic primary last night, reform-minded district attorney candidate Larry Krasner had already earned the scorn of several former prosecutors (ADAs). Eleven of them wrote an open letter urging Philadelphians to vote against Krasner, filling their missive with political rhetoric like “alternative facts” and blaming a “European billionaire” (Soros) for Krasner’s success.

Krasner, who won with nearly 40 percent of the vote in a 7-way race, said throughout the race that the reforms and focus on civil rights he was campaigning on are the same issues that informed his 30 year career in law.

Now, current prosecutors are coming out to criticize Krasner’s candidacy, albeit anonymously. A number of them spoke with Philly.com—most were oblivious to the sentiments about the district attorney’s office and the criminal justice system that helped propel Krasner to victory.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” one prosecutor said, according to Philly.com. “It’s kind of hard to separate the person from what he said during the campaign. I don’t think he has much goodwill in the office, given the tenor and tone of what he’s been saying.”

What has Krasner been saying? That too often the district attorney’s office works to appear extremely tough on crime by seeking maximum penalties, that, as his campaign website said and the former ADA’s who wrote the letter disputed, the DA’s office was “driven by a win-at-any-cost culture that prioritizes high conviction rates and harsh sentencing over more effective approaches that are proven to reduce crime.”

“His idea of justice is different than the vast majority of people’s in the city,” another ADA, described by Philly.com as “higher up in the chain of command,” said. “We’re in a city ravaged by gun violence and violent crime. When your platform is civil rights and resisting Trump, well, that’s not the job of the prosecutor. Our job is to protect the city and keep people safe.”

While Krasner has promised not to cooperate with the federal government under Donald Trump (a promise that makes sense given Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ priorities so far), reforming the criminal justice sytem, not “resisting Trump,” was the central tenet of his campaign.

And as for violent crime in Philadelphia, it is at the lowest level it has been in the city in decades, and that’s according to police themselves.

“Everything we’ve seen from him during the campaign has been about how the DA’s Office is unethical and prosecutes terrible cases, and only he can fix it,” another anonymous prosecutor told Philly.com. “That’s a pretty broad [criticism], and it isn’t particularly morale-boosting.”

The current district attorney, Seth Williams, was indicted on federal corruption charges in March but intends to serve out his term, which ends in January. And recently, the state’s former attorney general, Kathleen Kane, elected in 2012, was also sentenced to up to two years in jail after being convicted of perjury and abuse of office charges.

Philadelphia residents are understandably skeptical about the integrity of their criminal justice system. Complaints from the criminal justice establishment about Krasner may be as effective as establishment complaints were against Trump.

Krasner responded to concerns from prosecutors after his victory last night, telling reporters that he respected everyone’s right to an opinion.

“The bottom line is people are entitled to their opinion,” Krasner said, “including people who left the district attorney’s office a long time ago, people who actually never had any dealings with me at all, people who have pursued careers after leaving the district attorney’s office that involve being paid to defend officers accused of corruption, they’re entitled to their opinions.

Krasner added: “And so are the many many assistant district attorneys in the office who’ve personally come up to me to encourage me, to congratulate me, to give me information over the years, and so are the many judges who’ve come up to me to congratulate me and tell me that I will have their vote.”

Krasner will face Republican Beth Grossman, a booster for asset forfeiture and former Democrat who served in the DA’s office under Lynne Abraham, the “tough on crime” Democratic DA who served from 1991 to 2010.

In the not too distant future most human babies will be born using eggs and sperm produced from the skin cells of their parents, claims Stanford University law professor and bioethicist Hank Greely in his book, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction. Basically, Greely is making informed speculation how in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) will progress over the next few years. And considerable progress has been made.

For example, Japanese researchers have turned skin cells from mice into eggs which they fertilized to produce embryos that were implanted into surrogates that then gave birth to healthy mouse pups. In April, Spanish researchers announced that they had made significant progress toward transforming human skin cells into viable sperm.

Harvard bioethicist Glenn Cohen and his colleagues described how “disruptive reproductive technologies” derived from IVG might evolve in a January article in the journal Science Translational Medicine. They go on to assert that “IVG raises vexing ethical and social policy challenges in need of redress.”

First let’s consider the biomedical benefits of IVG. One result would be the creation of an unlimited supply of early-stage embryos for research. In the reproductive realm, IVG could produce sperm or eggs for people suffering from various forms of infertilty, e.g., congenital and chemotherapy-induced. In addition, IVG could be used to prevent mitochondrial diseases by creating eggs without those mutations and boost regenerative medicine by creating patient-specific stem cell lines that could be used as transplants to replace diseased tissues and organs.

More speculatively, IVG could be used by same sex couples to produce genetically related children. In addition, since skin cells could be used to produce both sperm and eggs, they might be used to create single-parent children (Women wanting a boy would have to find a donated Y-chromosome.) In addition, there is the possibility that someone lift some cells left behind on a glass or comb by a celebrity and turn them into gametes without their permission. Furthermore, the ability to produce unlimited quantities of gametes and embryos will make it feasible to use genome-editing techniques to correct genetic defects and, perhaps, eventually introduce gene variants that could enhance physical and mental functioning.

Glenn and his colleagues observe that some religious believers object to the creation of embryos outside of human bodies and that doctrinaire anti-market folks oppose the “commodification” of human reproduction. Certainly, opponents are entitled to their opinions, but there is no ethical reason why their beliefs should be permitted to interfere with the biomedical and reproductive choices of those who don’t agree with them.

Safety concerns will be paramount before rolling out this technology. With regard to reproduction, one benchmark might be that the likelihood of producing birth defects in babies using IVG is no greater than IVF. As I explained in my Designer Babies and Human Enhancement lecture in Moscow:

Greely believes that in about 40 years half of all American babies will born using what he calls Easy PGD. At that time most people will use gametes produced from their skin cells to create scores of IVF embryos that will each have his or her entire genomes sequenced. Prospective parents will then choose among the embryos based on which combination of genetic traits they would prefer. Presumably they would tend avoid those embryos afflicted with debilitating genetic diseases.

Greely believes that Easy PGD will be extremely cheap, e.g., whole genome testing should fall to around $10 by the beginning of the next decade. Easy PGD would also make it possible for same sex couples to have offspring genetically related to both parents and it might even be possible for a person to have both sperm and eggs created from their skin cells, enabling them to be both mother and father of their child.

Interestingly, biologist Craig Venter, the leader of the group that raced the government to a tie in sequencing the human genome, and now founder of the life extension company Human Longevity, Inc. can sequence a fetal genome and give the mother “a picture of what her future child will look like at 18.”

“There is a yuck factor here,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University in The New York Times today. “It strikes many people as intuitively yucky to have three parents, or to make a baby without starting from an egg and sperm. But then again, it used to be that people thought blood transfusions were yucky, or putting pig valves in human hearts.” Just so.

Naturally, Glenn and his colleagues call for a vigorous ethical debate and government regulation of the technologies. I would gently suggest that a front page article in the Times means that a vigorous public debate is already taking place.

With regard to government regulation – there may be a role for it to the extent that safety issues cannot be handled by developers of the technology. However, the government should certainly stay far, far away from any eugenic efforts to tell people when and what sort of children they may have. The last time the U.S. government started meddling with the reproductive decisions of Americans, it didn’t turn out well.

For more background, see my article, “Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?“

Free speech makes all kinds of people uncomfortable.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Pity the poor snowflakes—so sensitive they must be shielded from speech that might hurt their tender feelings.

Campus liberals? Nope. We’re talking about supposedly serious grown-ups, including some veterans and Virginia Rep. Rob Wittman (R).

Monday evening Wittman met with a group of tea party activists at American Legion Post 90 in conservative Hanover. Eugene Truitt—the post commander and an Air Force veteran—asked Wittman when Congress would act on a flag-desecration bill. Wittman said it could happen soon: “I continue to push the leadership to have it come to the House floor,” he said. “I do think it’s worthy of debate about what are the limits of freedom of expression under the First Amendment.”

Of course he does. Why should he be any different?

Last year Donald Trump tweeted a suggestion that anyone who burns the flag should face “consequences—perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” More than 213,000 people liked the tweet. Some veterans spoke favorably of the idea. (At other times, other veterans also have vigorously opposed it.)

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Pvt. Chelsea Manning was freed from military prison this morning, having served seven years of a 35-year sentence for leaking hundreds of thousands of military documents and diplomatic cables in 2010 to WikiLeaks.

She’d probably still be there if President Barack Obama had not extended mercy right before leaving office and commuted her sentence. Obama’s 11th hour kindness comes at the end of an administration that viciously went after leakers.

It’s been so long since Manning’s leaks and so much has happened since then that it’s easy to forget what exactly it is she released. Probably the significant leak that most people still might remember was what was known as the “collateral murder” video, which showed American military helicopters firing on a group of civilians in Baghdad. Two of them were reporters for Reuters, and apparently the helicopter pilots mistook their cameras for guns. The reporters (and others) died, and Reuters struggled to get information about what actually happened.

Manning exposed a lot more of the serious consequences of post 9/11 military interventions and even other important issues of government corruption—not just from the United States either. Multiple media outlets (including The New York Times and The Guardian) reported the contents of many of these documents. A lengthy list of information governments were keeping secret (and really shouldn’t have been) exposed by Manning can be read through here, compiled by Greg Mitchell, who wrote a book on Manning’s case and trial with Kevin Gosztola.

Over at The New York Times, Charlie Savage notes that Manning essentially pioneered what would become a small trend of mass document dump leaks. She’s the reason why we know what WikiLeaks is, honestly. And it’s worth wondering if we even would have had an Edward Snowden without the precedent Manning’s willingness to release this information at great risk to herself. Also an important reminder: Yes she was convicted of several espionage-related crimes, but she was acquitted of charges of “aiding the enemy.”

Manning will apparently be keeping a low profile for a little while. She was notably treated terribly in custody, both before she was even convicted and afterward. After her conviction she announced her gender transition and name change from Bradley to Chelsea. She complained that the military wasn’t very accommodating of her transition and even attempted suicide. There’s obviously going to be a bit of an adjustment period. But she did tweet/Instagram out a picture of her first steps after release.

Here’s an interesting reminder from 2013—Ron Paul said Manning was more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Obama was:

“While President Obama was starting and expanding unconstitutional wars overseas, Bradley Manning, whose actions have caused exactly zero deaths, was shining light on the truth behind these wars,” the former Republican presidential contender told U.S. News. “It’s clear which individual has done more to promote peace.”

It’s worth paying attention to the importance of whistleblowers as the Justice Department announces new efforts to find and prosecute the leakers within President Donald Trump’s administration. Given the extremely frequent occurrences of leaks within the White House and the administration as a whole, one wonders if there will be anybody left there if the DOJ succeeds.

The attorney general’s order to prosecutors to seek maximum sentences in drug cases is wrongheaded.

John Stossel writes:

President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, ordered federal prosecutors to seek maximum penalties for drug-related crimes.
This is both cruel and stupid.

It’s cruel because Session’s 5,000 prosecutors must now push for long jail sentences even for people who pose no violent threat and for some who are utterly innocent.

It’s stupid because it will cost America a fortune but won’t make us safer.

The U.S. already locks up more people than any other country. We have 4 percent of the world’s population but more than 20 percent of the world’s prisoners.

This happened partly because of bad reporting by people like me. Decades ago, my colleagues and I made people more terrified of crime than they need to be, by covering all the grizzly details of local crimes.

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The single-payer health care plan that cleared the lower chamber of New York’s state legislature on Tuesday would require massive tax increases to double—or possibly even quadruple—the state’s current annual revenue levels.

The state Assembly voted 87-38 on Tuesday night to pass the New York Health Plan, which would abolish private insurance plans in the state and provide all New Yorkers (except those enrolled in Medicaid and Medicare) with health insurance through the state government. The same proposal cleared the state Assembly in 2015 and 2016, but never received a vote from the state Senate.

The bill might get a vote in the state Senate this year—for reasons that I’ll get into a little later—but the real hurdle for New York’s single-payer health care plan, like similar efforts in other states, is a fiscal one.

New York collected about $71 billion in tax revenue last year. In 2019, when the single-payer plan would be enacted, the state expects to vacuum up about $82 billion. To pay for health care for all New Yorkers, though, the state would need to find another $91 billion annually.

And that’s the optimistic view. In reality, the program is likely to cost more—a lot more.

Gerald Friedman, an economist at UMass Amhearst and longtime advocate for single-payer health care, estimated in 2015 (when the New York Health Act was first passed by the state Assembly) that implementing single-payer in New York would cost more than every other function of the state government. Even if New Yorkers benefit from an expected reduction of $44 billion in health spending, which Friedman says would be the result of less fraud and less administrative overhead, the tax increases would cancel out those gains.

To pay for the single-payer system, Friedman suggested that New York create a new tax on dividends, interest, and capital gains that would range from 9 percent to 16 percent, depending on how much investment income an individual reports, and a new payroll tax that would similarly range from 9 percent to 16 percent depending on an individual’s income.

It was a similar prescription for massive tax hikes that sank Vermont’s experiment with single-payer health care in 2014. Funding it would have required an extra $2.5 billion annually, almost double the state’s current budget, and would have required an 11.5 percent payroll tax increase and a 9 percent income tax increase. Voters in Colorado rejected a proposed single-payer health care system when they found out how much it would raise their taxes, and efforts to pass a single-payer plan in California (being championed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont progressive) are facing similar financial troubles.

Back in New York, a second analysis of the single-payer health care plan, suggests that Friedman’s projections significantly underestimate the cost of single-payer in New York (while overstating the savings).

According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Texas-based free market think tank, the annual price tag for the New York Health Act could be as high as $226 billion. In other words, it would require quadrupling the current tax burden in New York.

“While the New York Health Act would expand coverage to the uninsured in the Empire State, it would do so at a staggering cost that would drive hundreds of thousands of jobs out of the state,” wrote Avik Roy, who authored the FREOPP study. “The resulting economic crash would cause far more harm for lower-income New York residents than they would gain from acquiring state government-run health insurance.”

The gains would be quite limited, as Roy points out. In 2014, only 8.7 percent of New York’s population lacked health insurance. Transitioning to a single-payer system would disrupt coverage for millions of people—potentially forcing them to find new doctors and accept coverage that differs from what they would otherwise choose—in the name of extending coverage to that group of uninsured. Providing health insurance to those who cannot afford it is a noble goal, but there are less disruptive, less expensive ways to pursue that goal, Roy argues.

Despite Friedman’s promises of savings from less fraud and fewer administrative costs, the FREOPP study suggests that both costs would increase, as has historically been the case in government-run health care programs. (Read the rest of Roy’s detailed analysis here.)

Regardless of who is correct, one thing is clear: The New York Health Plan will be devestatingly expensive for the state, and for anyone who lives or works there.

Setting aside the important policy questions for a moment, the politics of passing single-payer in New York’s state Senate could get really whacky.

There are 63 seats in the upper chamber, so 32 votes are necessary to get anything passed. Right now, no one has 32 votes. Republicans hold 31 seats and Democrats hold 31, with one vacant seat in a heavily Democratic district set to be filled with a special election on May 23. It might seem like that would give Democrats the majority they need. But Senate Democrats are split into three factions, one of which—the Independent Democratic Conference, which has eight members—is part of the majority coalition supporting Republican leadership in the chamber.

Assuming there will be no Republican votes for it, passing the single-payer bill in the state Senate would require getting all Democrats to vote “yes,” despite the ongoing schism between the mainstream Democrats and the more moderate IDC members. There’s at least a pretty good chance that moderate Democrats will take a look at the cost of the health care plan and decide they can’t stomach it. The question is whether they will have a more powerful incentive to distance themselves from Republicans—either because of Trump’s down-ballot toxicity or because of the GOP’s floundering health care effort at the federal level, or for any other reason—and throw away an oddly compelling experiment in legislative politics in the process.

State Sen. Jeffrey Klein (D-34), the head of the Independent Democratic Conference, told The Huffington Post that he would support the single-payer plan because it would provide “peace of mind” for New York residents.

Doubling, or quadrupling, his constituents’ taxes might not have the effect that Klein thinks it will, but that’s between him and the people who elect him. There’s no timetable for the state Senate to take up the bill.