Tag: hit&run

Today Donald Trump decided to shield thousands of files about the JFK assassination from public scrutiny.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the same thing happened last October. The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 instructed Washington to declassify everything by October 26, 2017, but it also allowed the president to withhold documents on national security grounds. At the last minute, Trump bowed to pressure from the intelligence community and kept more than 368,000 pages under lock and key. But he also gave the agencies until today to review those files, at which point he’d decide whether to release them.

There are a lot of serious historians and journalists—and, yes, a lot of kooks too—who’d like to get their hands on those documents. But they’re going to have to keep waiting. Today Trump announced that “the continued withholdings are necessary to protect against identifiable harm to national security, law enforcement, or foreign affairs.”

Trump’s order also set up yet another deadline. If the agencies want to keep anything classified past October 26, 2021, they need to make their case by April 26 of that year. So in another 36 months we’ll get to do this will-they-won’t-they routine yet again.

This isn’t just of interest to conspiracy theorists and conspiracy debunkers. The assassination was central to the history of the American ’60s, and there are plenty of details around it that haven’t been filled in. And even if you don’t care much about the assassination, you should want the government to have at least enough respect for transparency to stop hoarding information about an event that happened nearly 55 years ago.

That same JFK Records Act that set the original deadline also requires agencies that withhold files to produce “an unclassified written description of the reason for continued postponement” of each file. At the very least, you should want them to cough those up. We were supposed to have them last October.

Before today’s announcement, Jefferson Morley, author of a recent biography of former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, asked a bunch of people who have written about the assassination whether they thought Trump would reveal the remaining files. Since I wrote a book about the history of American conspiracy theories, he included me in the roundup. My comment:

Asked about the April 26 deadline, Jesse Walker, author of United States of Paranoia, wrote “I know better than to try to predict the behavior of Donald Trump. All I’ll say is that I hope some advocate of government transparency can get booked on Fox and Friends that morning.”

Oh Fox News booker, where were you when we needed you?

The United States is supposed to be the “land of the free,” a country where individualism and private property are sacrosanct. Yet as Veronique de Rugy observes, it’s difficult to maintain this belief while watching Courtney Moorehead Balaker’s newly released movie, Little Pink House.

The film portrays the real-life story of the determined families who fought to protect their homes in New London, Connecticut, during and after city officials’ shameful attempts to evict them starting in 1998. Shockingly, in 2005, it was the Supreme Court that inflicted the ultimate defeat to the homeowners, who lost everything in the process.

View this article.

A 14-year-old boy from Barrington, Rhode Island, has been charged with distributing child pornography after he shared inappropriate pictures of a 13-year-old female classmate with friends. The girl has also been charged—albeit with the lesser crime of disseminating indecent material.

The two teens swapped nude photos of themselves using Snapchat, according to eastbayRI.com. The boy then saved the images, showed his friends, and even created a fake Snapchat account in the girl’s name. One of the girl’s classmates saw the account and alerted authorities at Barrington High School, including School Resource Officer Josh Melo. Earlier this month, the police charged the boy with felony distribution of child pornography and cyberstalking, and the girl with the minor offense of “sexting.”

What the boy did was very bad, and “cyberstalking” might technically fit the bill here, given the fake account. But it still seems harsh to threaten a 14-year-old with jail time and registry on the sex offender list. What he did was wrong, but it’s hard to argue he’s a predator, or a danger to other kids.

In an op-ed for The Providence Journal, attorney John Grasso wrote that the police could have charged the boy with sexting instead of child pornography, as they did with the girl.

If convicted, the boy will be a felon and a registered sex offender — everlasting consequences that I suspect this boy was unaware of when he allegedly decided to use cyberspace to pass around sexually explicit photographs of a girl his same age to other kids his age. …

Sexting exists as an option to law enforcement when the police decide to exercise discretion. Child pornography is a felony that puts jail on the table. Sexting is a status offense. Kids who commit status offenses don’t go to jail. Child pornography requires sex offender registration. Sexting specifically does not. Child pornography is the very deep end of the cyberspace quicksand.

The girl is getting off easier, with the sexting charge. But charging her at all seems like a grave mistake. The only real wrong here was the fake account, and the pictures being shared without permission. The boy did that—the girl was just the victim.

Melo, the school resource officer, did not respond to a request for comment, but told eastbayRI.com this:

Officer Melo said there are Barrington Middle School students who have social media accounts and share information with more than 1,000 “friends.” He said it is very likely that the local students only know a few hundred of the contacts and could be communicating with other individuals who are dangerous.

“We know sex offenders are using these apps to talk to young kids,” said Officer Melo. “People are trying to befriend the kids online.”

This notion—that the internet is a particularly dangerous place where sex offenders are constantly targeting and grooming children—is a classic example of a moral panic. The sex offender registry is full of people who didn’t actually commit sex-related crimes (like the boy in this story), and sex offenders have lower recidivism rates than just about any other group of criminals. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “The single age with the greatest number of offenders from the perspective of law enforcement was age 14.” That’s because there are many kids getting in trouble for having sex with kids, and fewer adults.

Our zeal to punish kids for inappropriate but perfectly normal teen behavior doesn’t make them safer from sex offenders—it turns them in to sex offenders. That’s something everyone should keep in mind, especially given the public’s current enthusiasm for putting more cops in schools as part of a noble but misguided effort to prevent mass shootings.

While still an undergraduate at Columbia, future Wired magazine co-founder Louis Rossetto co-authored a 1971 New York Times Magazine cover story on “The New Right Credo.” In his view, liberalism, conservatism, and “leftist radicalism” had all proven to be bankrupt political philosophies, leaving their “refugees” to coalesce under a new banner: libertarianism. More recently, he is author of Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet, a crowdfunded novel he published with legendary designer Erik Spiekermann. Reason‘s Nick Gillespie talked with Rossetto about his new book and how his political predictions hold up in the era of Donald Trump.

View this article.

Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (and possibly President Donald Trump’s next chief of staff), landed in hot water this week for saying, on camera and in front of an audience, that lawmakers are more likely to listen to lobbyists who have made political contributions.

It is true, of course, that lawmakers are more likely to listen to lobbyists who have made political contributions. If it weren’t, one would be left to wonder exactly why so many unions, corporations, and interest groups cut so many massive checks to members of Congress every two years.

Specifically, what Mulvaney said—referring back to his time as a member of Congress, while speaking to a gathering of bankers in Washington, D.C.—was: “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Those 36 words are being treated as proof-positive that Mulvaney is bought and paid for by whichever powerful special interest was able to write the check with the most zeroes on them. The swamp has won. The game is rigged. Democrats in Congress have called for Mulvaney’s resignation, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who designed the all-powerful financial regulatory post Mulvaney now heads, has said those remarks are proof the Trump administration is the “most corrupt” in American history.

Warren might be right—the president playing golf and receiving foreign dignitaries at country clubs and resorts that he personally owns is certainly unprecendented—but that conclusion has little, if anything, to do with Mulvaney’s admission of something that everyone who pays attention to politics already knows.

In fact, Mulvaney’s comments are perfectly in line with his boss’ realpolitik views on the relationship between money and political power. Remember when then-candidate Donald Trump was asked during the GOP primary debates about his history of donations to Bill and Hillary Clinton? That’s a cardinal sin in the GOP, and it was meant to expose Trump as a phony Republican. But Trump shrugged and gave a honest answer. “I give to everybody,” he said. “When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.” And that’s not the only time Trump has said something like that.

That moment during the primaries was treated, briefly, as if it should somehow disqualify Trump from the campaign. As if a requirement for being president is an implicit agreement to go along with the lies that we’ve all agreed to tell ourselves about modern American politics. The idea that campaign contributions don’t influence policymaking belongs right up there with “entitlements are solvent for the long-term, America has achievable foreign policy goals in the Middle East, and every vote matters.” In fact, some of the most significant friction between Trump and the Washington establishment has been over the lies that the president sometimes refuses to tell, rather than all the obvious ones that he does.

Maybe there’s some value to maintaining this illusion, as Jonathan Chait suggests. “People in government might have always given their donors more influence over their decisions, but they at least pretended that was not the case in public,” Chait writes. “The Trump administration is not even bothering to put up a façade.”

But wasn’t that more-or-less the best argument for voting for Trump? He’s brash, chaotic, and in over his head, but lots of Americans went to the polls and said they preferred that to Hillary Clinton, an anthropomorphic façade in a pantsuit.

More to the point: if our politics have become corrupted by a pay-to-play mentality, isn’t it better for everyone to have it out in the open? That’s the only way it will change.

That’s why we should not regard Mulvaney’s remarks as just another gaffe, or another case of a Trump administration official “saying the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.” If Mulvaney is being truthful about how members of Congress view their relationship to deep-pocketed donors—and there’s no reason to believe he was lying—that doesn’t mean there’s no cause for concern. By one count, $6.5 billion was spent on the presidential and congressional elections in 2016, shattering the previous record of $6 billion that was set in 2012 (which, in turn, broke the record of $5.3 billion set in 2008, and so on and so forth). This is not going to stop, even though it would seem like every dollar spent getting someone elected to public office could be put to better use by doing almost literally anything else with it.

Yet, the money keeps flowing. Which can only mean one thing: All that spending is paying off in some way. Politically powerfully special interests don’t get to be that way by wasting their resources, after all.

What to do about this? One option might be to make more rules governing money in politics. But the people making those rules will be the very same individuals already compromised by the current system. More practically, the current Supreme Court seems unlikely to reverse the Citizens United ruling—and even if it did, campaign finance rules merely redirect political rent-seeking to other channels.

That rules and structure can’t keep money from influencing politics is most obviously true, ironically enough, in the very agency that Mulvaney now runs. The CFPB was designed to be completely insulated from the political process. It doesn’t even get its budget from Congress, as it is funded directly from the Federal Reserve. That would keep banking special interests from buying off the lawmakers who control the purse strings, or so it was thought. Those rules made the CFPB unaccountable to Congress, but they obviously have not shielded the agency from political influence—something even Warren would have to admit now.

The only way to get money out of politics is to get politics out of money. That’s easier said than done, of course, but unwinding the federal government’s ability to influence corporate balance sheets is the only surefire way to keep those corporations from trying to use the government to do exactly that. If you’re upset about Mulvaney’s remarks this week, and you believe he is telling the truth about government for, by, and of the lobbyists “who gave us money,” then the only solution is less powerful government.

When politicians no longer have the ability to make or break a business, they will spend their money trying to influence the people who do: consumers.

“Based on the advice of counsel, I will assert my 5th Amendment rights…” It looks like President Trump may be right about his “fix-it” guy and personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Trump said last week that he was confident Cohen wouldn’t “flip” on him (a statement that’s implication of guilt either went over Trump’s head or level of care). On Wednesday, Cohen invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a civil lawsuit filed by Stormy Daniels over alleged hush money paid by Cohen to keep quiet about a decade-old tryst with Trump.

“Based on the advice of counsel, I will assert my 5th Amendment rights in connection with all proceedings in this case due to the ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York,” declared Cohen.

In addition to Daniels’ lawsuit, Cohen now faces a federal investigation. Testifying in the civil suit—in which Daniels seeks to void the contract brokered by Cohen on the grounds that one party (Trump) claims to have no knowledge of it—could come back to bite him (or Trump) in the criminal case.

“Talking, when you’re the subject of an investigation, when they are thinking that this contract was a federal crime … is incredibly reckless,” lawyer Ken White (better known around these parts as Popehat) told NPR. “The only sensible thing to do is shut up and not make it worse.”

That’s not been Trump’s opinion on pleading the Fifth, at least not in the past. “The mob takes the Fifth,” Trump said at one 2016 campaign rally. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”

Here was Daniels’ lawyer’s response:

This is a stunning development. Never before in our nation’s history has the attorney for the sitting President invoked the 5th Amend in connection with issues surrounding the President. It is esp. stunning seeing as MC served as the “fixer” for Mr. Trump for over 10 yrs. #basta

— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) April 25, 2018

Trump’s lawyer is scheduled today to tell the court how the president, who is also named in Daniels’ lawsuit, plans to respond. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood “scheduled a noon conference to hear how lawyers are preparing to review large amounts of data for attorney-client privilege after the April 9 raids on Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen,” notes the Associated Press. The lawyer has previously said in a letter that Trump “will make himself available, as needed, to aid in our privilege review on his behalf.”

FREE MINDS

Protecting online free speech from Congress. Today, Congress is slated for a showdown on “The Filtering Practices of Media Platforms.” Like any foray by legislators into technology, the efforts are unlikely to lead anywhere good. But it’s an important topic, as digital publications and platforms face shifting legal liabilities for their content monitoring and filtering practices in the wake of FOSTA becoming law.

“Public attention to this issue is important,” suggests the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), as “calls for online platform owners to police their members’ speech more heavily inevitably lead to legitimate voices being silenced online.” EFF submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee, which will conduct today’s hearing, arguing against Congress encouraging stricter online censorship.

We all want an Internet where we are free to meet, create, organize, share, associate, debate and learn. We want to make our voices heard in the way that technology now makes possible. No one likes being lied to or misled, or seeing hateful messages directed against them or flooded across our newsfeeds. We want our elections free from manipulation and for the speech of women and marginalized communities not to be silenced by harassment.

But we won’t make the Internet fairer or safer by pushing platforms into ever more aggressive efforts to police online speech. When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier.

FREE MARKETS

TV prices could soar under Trump’s tariffs. After years of tumbling prices, we can expect to start seeing televisions get more expensive again. President Trump’s proposed tariffs on all sorts of Chinese imports would include a 25 percent tax on TVs and parts used to make them. The Consumer Technology Association predicts the Chinese TV tariff would not only raise rates for Chinese-made TVs by 23 percent but cause a price hike of 4 percent on all TVs sold in America. In 2017, 35 percent of all imported flat-screen TVs and components came from China, the association says.

QUICK HITS

• Former colleagues say Ronny Jackson, President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, crashed his work car while driving drunk and prescribed drugs like candy. This morning, Jackson said his colleagues’ accusations are false but he withdrew his nomination anyway.
• The porn as “public health threat” hoopla is now hitting Missouri.
• New York is the latest state to consider a “free range parenting” bill.

See, this is Fake News. This is one-sided, government-approved propaganda being spread uncritically and unquestioningly by private news sources who refuse to report both sides of the story. https://t.co/6uLq7ywiUX

— Mistress Matisse (@mistressmatisse) April 25, 2018

• Hemp is showing some promise for fighting cancer.
• “Culture is power”: Columbian sex workers explain why they launched their own newspaper.
• More trouble for MSNBC host Joy Reid.

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (@NACDL), with funds from Charles Koch Foundation among other sources, launches 4th Amendment Center to “create a new, more durable [4th Amendment] for the digital age.” https://t.co/xmLnOUtYN0 pic.twitter.com/A6Bv42R7lR

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) April 25, 2018

• Gender-neutral bathrooms hit Hoboken.
• The venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz are launching a dedicated crypto fund.
• “An enormous statue of Jesus in Poland just got internet antennas and no one’s sure why.”

LOOKING FORWARD

Bad news for sentencing reform in Trump commission nominee. Trump has nominated William “Bill” Otis to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the non-partisan group tasked with “reduc[ing] sentencing disparities and promot[ing] transparency and proportionality in sentencing” through data collection, analysis, and dissemination. Cato researcher Jonathan Blanks thinks this is a bad idea, noting that during Otis “has continuously lambasted bipartisan efforts to reduce sentences and remains a stalwart proponent of the ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric of the 1980s, warning of great crime waves that will follow widespread sentencing reduction. Otis marshals no empirical evidence for his claims—because there isn’t any.”

When you visit a grocery, literal-mindedness is a handicap. Apple butter is actually not a dairy product. Grape-Nuts cereal omits grapes as well as nuts. Corn dogs don’t need leashes.

The U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, however, is appalled that new forms of protein are being sold under names such as Beyond Beef and Impossible Burger. Vegetarian and vegan substitutes for meat have gained a significant share of the market, partly because of health considerations and partly because of aversion to killing harmless animals for food. So of course, writes Steve Chapman, the beef lobby and other special interests want the government to step in and protect them from the plant-based competition.

View this article.

Less than 24 hour before rap/footwear supernova Kanye West melted down the Internet by tweeting about his love for fellow dragon energy-haver Donald Trump, showing off his autographed #MAGA hat, scheduling meetings with Peter Thiel, and retweeting Chance The Rapper’s observation that “Black people don’t have to be democrats,” I was in a small podcasting booth with the one person I’d want to hear talk about Yeezy’s politics, superfan Kmele Foster.

On the latest dispatch of The Fifth Column, our mostly weekly, often slurry podcast, Foster provides insight into West, black-conservative identity politics, red-pilling YouTuber Candace Owens (who Kanye recently complimented), and the Joy-Ann Reid controversy. Also of potential interest during the discussion are my racist choice of infant toys, qualified defense of Rand Paul’s flip-flop on Mike Pompeo, and unified theory of Trolls vs. Bouncers. You can listen to the whole thing, including a cameo by Kat Timpf, here:

In California, the Berkeley Unified School District has placed on leave history teacher Alex Angell for bringing a deactivated bazooka to school. Video shot by a student shows Angell, who teaches advanced placement United States and world history at Berkeley High School, with the device, explaining how it was used.

Lawmakers in Tennessee passed a bill this week that would permit licensed cosmetologists to practice outside of salons, opening the door for on-demand services that connect makeup artists and hair stylists with clients who want service in their own homes.

This is common sense. Someone licensed by the state as a cosmetologist doesn’t suddenly lose that knowledge and training—a lot of training, since becoming a cosmetologist in Tennessee requires 2,000 hours of classes—the moment he or she steps outside a salon. But such common sense didn’t factor into the Tennessee Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners decision, nearly two years ago, to order a brand new on-demand beauty service to immediately shut down and pay a $500 fine.

The board targeted that business, Project Belle, after a brick-and-mortar salon in Nashville complained about its online ads. “I find this type of competition highly disturbing,” the salon’s owner wrote to the board.

Although the board eventually backed down from pursuing Project Belle, formally legalizing on-demand cosmetology services ensures that other startups won’t face the same legal pressure over something as silly as competing with salons.

The bill passed the state Senate unanimously and cleared the state House with an 81–6 vote. Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, is expected to sign it.

“Tennesseans will now have the right to enjoy concierge cosmetology services just like many other Americans,” said Armand Lauzon, CEO of Belle, in a statement. “Beyond that, it grants tens of thousands of cosmetologists access to the American dream by legalizing entrepreneurship in the industry.”

The convenience of something like Project Belle is the obvious selling point for customers, but Lauzon told Reason in 2016 that cosmologists using his service benefit too. They can set their own schedules, they don’t have to pay fees to rent space in a salon or spa, and they determine their own pricing. Project Belle takes 15 percent off the top, similar to how Airbnb operates.

“This important reform,” says Daniel Horowitz, an attorney who represented Lauzon in his dealings with the state board, “ensures that the Board of Cosmetology will be prevented from engaging in such lawless behavior ever again.”