Tag: hit&run

“America’s core institutions may not be in perfect health,” Zack Beauchamp wrote recently in Vox, “but they seem to be functioning well enough to constrain a president who’s gone after essential parts of its democratic system.” Yet if institutions have largely kept Trump from pushing presidential power in new directions, Jesse Walker replies, they have also let him intensify authoritarian policies that already exist. For proof, look to Trump’s wars abroad and his immigration crackdown at home.

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A 22-year-old student-teacher in West Hartford, Connecticut, has been arrested for having a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old male student at the school.

Tayler Boncal, who was 21 at the time, was charged with three counts of second-degree sexual assault, even though she was engaged in a consensual relationship with her purported victim. In fact, the 18-year-old’s parents said their son and Boncal are in love, and asked the prosecutor to drop the charges, according to WTIC TV.

Despite the fact that the age difference between the two is just three years, the relationship consensual—the victim initiated it, according to the arrest warrant—and neither party is a minor, this is considered a crime because Boncal held a position of authority at the school.

WTIC reports:

Police said their investigation began on Jan. 12 when they learned that she had the relationship with a male student from Conard High School.

She was employed by the district as a student teacher and assistant track coach at Conard at the time and living in New Britain during their relationship.

The West Hartford School System alerted New Britain police of the allegations after she was fired in December.

The young man asked Boncal for her number, they met up at her house, and as the reporter dutifully notes—because of course reporters must include the salacious, er, salient details—they fooled around on that first date (on Christmas) and “that led to sexual intercourse multiple times.”

A fellow student ratted on the boyfriend, and the school resource officer—the law enforcement agent who works in the school—reported the matter to the authorities.

Conrad High School Principal Julio Duarte sent a letter to parents stating the matter had been handled, the teacher was out, and “we will not tolerate any behavior that compromises the safety or well-being of our students. I hope you will not let the misconduct of this one individual cast a shadow over all of our staff members who demonstrate their commitment to our students every day.”

Now, clearly, the teacher should have recognized the danger she was putting herself in. Surely it was not a good idea to date a student.

But Boncal could face several years in jail for dating someone of a similar age—a fellow adult. If the relationship was inappropriate, it was inappropriate because of the nature of her employment at the school. She shouldn’t be facing criminal charges because of it.

• New poll: President Donald Trump’s approval rating now stands at 40 percent.
• “The Republican-led Congress is set to vote Thursday on a two-year budget deal that would include massive increases in military and domestic spending programs, reflecting an ideological shift for a party whose leaders long preached fiscal conservatism but have now embraced big spending.”
• House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spoke for over eight hours on the House floor yesterday in opposition to a budget deal that does not address immigration.
• South Korean President Moon Jae-in plans to meet the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un following the opening of the Winter Olympics.
• George W. Bush: There is “pretty clear evidence that the Russians meddled” in the 2016 presidential election.
• Bermuda has banned same-sex marriage just one year after legalizing the practice.

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llinois is in the midst of a debilitating fiscal and economic crisis. Because necessity is the mother of invention, crises can be restorative, forcing creative solutions. But not in Illinois, laments Steve Chapman.

Against a starkly unsuccessful incumbent Republican governor running in an unhospitable national environment, Illinois Democrats have the chance to win and, with control of the General Assembly, to devise serious solutions to intractable problems. Yet the Democratic race for governor has been notable mainly for the bad ideas it has elicited.

Illinois has endured two income tax increases in the past seven years. These changes haven’t ended the state’s economic drought, and it’s reasonable to assume they actually made it drier, argues Chapman.

But the leading candidates to replace Gov. Bruce Rauner think the only problem with the income tax rate is that it doesn’t go high enough.

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The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has suspended with pay Jay Rosenstein, a professor of media and cinema studies. Rosenstein, a critic of Native American sports mascots, followed members of a pro-Chief Illiniwek group into a bathroom at a basketball game and videotaped them. The school stopped using the mascot in 2007 but some fans still show up at games dressed like the chief.

John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), has died. EFF compactly but effectively eulogized him here.

His most prominent contribution to American political culture is his barnburning 1996 manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which was a central document helping establish a generic libertarian sensibility in the rising digital culture of the 1990s. (He was not alone in doing this, of course; Wired magazine, a cultural thought leader for that world, was co-founded by libertarian and friend of Reason Louis Rossetto.)

Some of his ringing words from that manifesto that marked him as a Thomas Jefferson for this century:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us…..

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means.

Barlow’s overall politics shifted to a more standard Obama-supporting sense that big government was a necessary and important counterpoint to corporate power (and the kind of general attitude that, well, government is good when it does good things and bad when it does bad things), as he began discussing with me in his 2004 feature interview for Reason. Still, he remained on the side of the libertarian angels when it came to the debate over net neutrality, even as EFF was not.

Barlow knew he was trying to create a cultural myth with his declaration of independence, later saying “I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.'”

While the question of exactly how libertarian the industries and industrialists of modern computer tech are, and how on balance its liberatory powers will overcome the surveillance powers of “turn-key totalitarianism” is still up in the air, Barlow’s work in staking out the reasons to see what we used to call “cyberspace” and is now just where we all live all the time as properly a realm of total human liberation was a vital building block of the world we live in. (That thought leaders in the “cyber” world are rapidly running away from the idea that, for example, free expression in the world of the internet is a primary good is unfortunate and shows that no ideological battles for freedom are ever fully won.)

Personally, Barlow was a delightfully loving grouch and after we met for that Reason interview, it was always a joy running into him occasionally in the next decade holding court and pontificating at Burning Man, where he was a beloved elder statesman of sorts.

The lyrics Barlow wrote to the music of his childhood chum Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead contributed to some powerful and enduring monuments of American culture; I’d finger “Cassidy” and “The Music Never Stopped” as the best of his best. He did important work as an artist and polemicist, and his songs will be sung both literally and figuratively for a long time to come.

SpaceX, the privately held space launch company yesterday successfully fired off its Falcon Heavy rocket at the Kennedy Space Center. The company points out that the “Falcon Heavy is the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, with the ability to lift into orbit nearly 64 metric tons (141,000 lb)–a mass greater than a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel.”

“I think it’s going to encourage other companies and countries to say, ‘Hey, if SpaceX, which is a commercial company, and it can do this, and nobody paid for Falcon Heavy, it was paid with internal funds,’ then they could do it, too,” he told reporters during at post-launch press conference. So far, SpaceX has raised $450 million from private investors and profits from a launch manifest filled with orders from both private and government customers.

The test launch payload included SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster with a space-suited mannequin dubbed Starman in the driver’s seat. The second stage of the rocket initiated a burn six hours after the launch that aimed to send Starman by Mars in an elliptical orbit around the sun. Apparently, the rocket overshot and the Roadster will be touring through the asteroid belt instead.

The Falcon Heavy’s payload capability is two times bigger than that of its American competitor, the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy Booster. Currently, the newish Russian Soyuz-2 rocket can deliver 8.5 metric tons into low earth orbit. The Russian’s Proton rocket can carry 22 metric tons into low earth orbit and Angara-5 launch vehicle will be able to deliver 24.5 metric tons. None of these missiles are reusable.

NASA’s Saturn V rocket was the most powerful rocket ever flown successfully. It delivered U.S. astronauts six times to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It could lift 140 metric tons (310,000 lb) into low earth orbit and deliver 48.6 tons (107,100 lb) to the moon.

After the Falcon Heavy launch, Musk said that the company is now turning its attention to test launching next year the BFR rocket (an acronym that now stands for Big Falcon Rocket) that would be capable of transporting 100 colonists to Mars.

Watch below again the amazing landings of the two reusable Falcon booster rockets at Kennedy Space Center.

• Leaders of both parties in the Senate arrived a two-year budget deal.
• Vice President Pence arrived in Japan ahead of the Olympics opening ceremonies in South Korea later this week.
• Joe Biden called President Trump a “joke” in response to the suggestion Trump was joking about calling Democrats treasonous.
• White House staff secretary Rob Porter has resigned after two ex-wives accused him of abuse.
• At least six people are dead after a magnitude-6.4 earthquake in Taiwan.
• SpaceX is livestreaming the Starman mannequin’s Tesla Roadster ride in space.

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After weeks of negotiation, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have reached the outlines of a spending deal that would avert a government shutdown.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the deal “the first real sprout of bipartisanship,” and said he hoped it would “break the long cycle of spending crises that have snarled Congress.” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s top Republican, called the agreement a “significant bipartisan step forward” and suggested that it could help “make 2018 a year of significant achievement for Congress.”

So how did the two sides finally come together? They decided to spend more—on everything. And they’ll worry about paying for it later (or maybe not at all).

The Senate bill would lift current federal spending limits by about $315 billion through 2019, according to The Washington Post. The bill also includes $90 billion in disaster aid funding, making for a total of roughly $400 billion in spending.

The deal placates Republican defense hawks by boosting spending for the military, lifting the spending cap put in place by the 2013 sequester agreement by $80 billion this year and $85 billion next year.

The deal pairs the boost in defense spending with a roughly equal increase in domestic spending. On the homefront, the plan includes $10 billion for infrastructure spending, as well as billions for federal health initiatives, including $6 billion to respond to the opioid crisis, $7 billion for community health centers, and a decade-long extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), up from the six-year extension Congress passed earlier this year.

All this additional spending will, of course, significantly increase the budget deficit.

The deal follows a House vote yesterday that passed a separate spending bill. But that bill was thought to be largely dead on arrival since the Senate would negotiate its own deal, which the House would eventually accept.

For the moment, however, it is not entirely clear whether the House will accept the deal. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said as the deal as announced that she and many fellow Democrats would oppose the deal unless there is a separate vote on immigration legislation. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has declined to make any commitment to holding an immigration vote.

Some House Republicans, meanwhile, have already objected to the bill on the grounds that it spends way too much money.

This spending proposal is disgusting and reckless—the biggest spending increase since 2009. I urge every American to speak out against this fiscal insanity. https://t.co/lbjN69LvOg

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) February 7, 2018

Amash is likely to be relatively lonely in his objections to the bill, however. In the end, this agreement, or something similar, will probably become law with plenty of Republican support.

Republican leadership in Congress spent the better part of the Obama years warning that mounting debt posed a dire threat to the nation’s future. But now, with control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, it looks likely that the GOP’s two most signifcant legislative achievements will be a tax reform law that raises the deficit by $1.5 trillion and a spending deal that increases the federal tab by hundreds of billions more.

In 2015, Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the massively popular comic strip Dilbert, boldly predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election.

“The reason I can see it coming is because I have studied this field of persuasion,” says Adams. “I saw this Trump character and he had the full tool set.” The 60-year-old Bay Area resident doesn’t agree with Trump on many political issues, but his prediction was enough for his to receive death threats from embittered Hillary Clinton supporters.

Adam’s new book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, is both a detailed analysis of how Trump reframed political rhetoric during the 2016 campaign and a guide to how all of us can communicate more effectively and persuasively.

Adams sat down with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in front of a live audience in San Francisco to talk about his book, his “extreme liberal” views, the popularity of his live broadcasts with followers via Twitter, and why Trump is a “master persuader.”

Click here for full text, and downloadable versions.

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