Tag: hit&run

In British Columbia, retired road engineer David Pacey has pleaded not guilty to two counts of damaging flora, fauna or a natural object in a national park. Pacey has repaired and cleared of debris some five kilometers of existing trails in Kootenay National Park. He says officials at Parks Canada are just angry with him for doing the job they should be doing.

Last Friday I appeared for the full episode of Fox Business Network’s great weekly program Stossel, on which I was joined in conversation with the libertarian legend by Trump supporter Betsy McCaughey and Clintonite Jessica Tarlov for a full hour on the election, the final presidential debate, and the issues that no longer get discussed intelligently because the major parties have both coughed up unreconstructed statists. Among those issues are entitlements and the massive national debt, the latter of which, Hillary Clinton claimed at the debate, she would not “add a penny to.” Here is my response to that nonsense:

For more on this not-insignificant topic, please see my recent article “Debt Denialists: Democrats and Republicans fiddle while the balance sheet burns.”

An Oregon jury today acquitted seven people being tried for their roles in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year.

All seven were facing charges for conspiring to impede federal employees through intimidation, threat or force. Four had additional charges of having guns in a federal facility, and two were charged with theft of government property.

Among the acquitted were two sons of Cliven Bundy, famous for his role in an armed standoff with federal agents in Nevada over disputes on grazing fees the Bureau of Land Management insisted he owed. (Bundy himself was arrested in February over that 2014 incident, and a trial is ahead.)

The defendants were: Ammon and Ryan Bundy, Jeff Banta, Shawna Cox, David Fry, Kenneth Medenbach, and Neil Wampler.

Seattle Times summed up the background of the case:

In closing arguments that stretched out over two days, prosecutors stressed that the defendants were not being put on trial for their beliefs, and had an absolute right to protest federal government actions. But they argued that the defendants’ actions stepped over the line into a criminal conspiracy to occupy the refuge and — through the use of armed guards and other acts of intimidation — keep federal employees away from their offices south of Burns.

Bundy, in testimony on his own behalf, called the takeover a “hard stand” against the return to prison of two Oregon ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven Hammond, after a federal judge ruled that they had not served long enough sentences on arson charges.

The takeover ended peacefully as the last four occupiers surrendered on Feb. 11, but before that, on Jan. 26, LaVoy Finicum, a folksy, articulate rancher who had emerged as a spokesman for the movement, was shot to death by law-enforcement officials.

Among others arrested in connection with the case, 11 plead guilty and other face their own trials ahead in February. More details on the earlier guilty pleas from Oregon Live.

Oregon Live’s report from today, mostly written before re-deliberation in the case began this morning.

Oregon Public Broadcasting, which has been covering the case extensively, summed up the arguments:

The government relied heavily on testimony from law enforcement, including Harney County Sheriff David Ward, as well as dozens of FBI agents who responded to the occupation or processed evidence at the Malheur refuge after the occupation ended.

“At the end of the day, there is an element of common sense that demonstrates the guilt of these defendants,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Knight said during his closing arguments during the trial. “These defendants took over a wildlife refuge and it wasn’t theirs.”

….the defense sought to make its case about a political protest – one about protesting the federal government’s ownership and management of public lands.

“The people have to insist that the government is not our master; they are our servants,” Ryan Bundy said during his closing statement to the jury.

Some interesting elements of the trial as it unfolded:

• A juror was replaced by an alternate and deliberations began from scratch this week, after a juror sent a note to the judge asking: “Can a juror, a former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, who opens their remarks in deliberations by stating ‘I am very biased’ be considered an impartial judge in this case?”

• One of the defense lawyers was tased in court today, according to the Seattle Times:

Ammon Bundy’s attorney Marcus Mumford argued his client should be released from confinement while U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown said he must be returned to the custody of federal marshals since he still faced charges in Nevada.

Mumford’s protests in the Portland courtroom grew louder and louder until he was finally tackled and tased by marshals, according to Cox and another member of the defense’s legal team. The judge ordered the courtroom cleared.

• The feds had 15 informants among or in communication with the occupiers.

It’s worth remembering the behavior of the agents who shot and killed occupier LaVoy Finicum, who shot at him just as he exited his vehicle and before the notorious “reaching for a gun” motion that many in the public insisted justified the kill.

Vladimir Putin responded to accusations that Russia was trying to influence the presidential election in the United States, asking whether anyone could “seriously imagine that Russia can somehow influence the American people’s choice.” America was not, Putin insisted, some kind of banana republic. “Do correct me if I’m wrong,” he told the audience at the Valdai Club meeting in Sochi, a kind of Russian equivalent to Davos.

Putin called the idea of Russian interference one of the “myths” perpetrated by Western leaders, alng with the “Russian military threat,” which he called “a profitable business that can be used to pump new money into defene budgets at home, get allies to bend to a single superpower’s interests, expand NATO and bring its infrastructure, military units and arms closer to our borders.” John Kerry reiterated today that the U.S. intelligence community believed Russia was behind the hacked election-related emails released by Wikileaks. The United States has also accused Russia of trying to hack into state voter registration debates.

Putin also pointed to referendums and elections that “often create surprises for the authorities,” saying that at first when people didn’t vote the way mainstream parties and “official and respectable media outlets advised them to” the results were written off as anomalies, then as the result of “foreign, usually Russian, propaganda.” Putin said he’d like to have such a propaganda machine in Russia but that “regrettably” that wasn’t the case.

Accusations of Russian meddling in American elections follow similar ones made in Europe about Russia supporting far-right and far-left parties whose interests align with Russia’s. As with accusations of U.S. financial support for democratic causes overseas in places like Venezuela and Russia, they miss the point that such spending doesn’t delegitimize the underlying popular support for the parties and causes, just as more broadly free spending on domestic elections allows more ideas to compete in the marketplace. Arguments for guilt by association against political opponents are deflections, used when more robust, substantive arguments are unavailable or unappealing.

Indeed, Putin suggested the fear whipped up about Russia was an effort to distract voters. “The United States has plenty of genuinely urgent problems, it would seem, from the colossal public debt to the increase in firearms violence and cases of arbitrary action by the police,” Putin said. “You would think that the election debates would concentrate on these and other unresolved problems, but the elite has nothing with which to reassure society, it seems, and therefore attempt to distract public attention by pointing instead to supposed Russian hackers, spies, agents of influence and so forth.”

Putin also dismissed the notion that Trump was the Kremlin’s preferred candidate, calling it “complete rubbish” and insisting Russia was “by and large indifferent” to the election because it was ready to cooperate with any U.S. president that wanted to. Earlier this month, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultra-nationalist ally of Putin’s, said Hillary Clinton could spark World War 3, an argument since echoed on the campaign trail by Donald Trump. Clinton has argued for imposing a no-fly zone in Syria in order to create leverage to get Russia to the negotiating table, something U.S. military officials have warned could lead to war with Russia and Syria, and that Clinton herself has privately acknowledged would cost a lot of Syrian lives. Later, while taking questions from the audience, Putin spoke positively about Trump and his campaign, describing him as “quite extravagant.”

Putin brought the U.S. election up after pointing to the “mutual distrust” and “tensions” around the world “engendered by shifts in distribution of economic and political influence,” arguing that even in “advanced democracies” people did not feel they had actual political power. “Essentially, the entire globalization project is in crisis today and in Europe, as we know well, we hear voices now saying that multiculturalism has failed,” Putin said, blaming the situation on the “mistaken, hasty and to some extent over-confident choices made by some countries’ elites a quarter of a century ago,” and insisting globalization could have not only been accelerated but given “a different quality” that made it “more harmonious and sustainable in nature.”

It’s a misunderstanding of globalization Putin seems to identify in some of the U.S. actions that have contributed to global instability in the last quarter century but fails to see in his own ideas about realigning it. Globalization is and ought to be a process of freeing markets—of the open exchange of goods and services and the free movements of goods, services, capital and people. That process has created unprecedented prosperity, one in which remaining hardships which would’ve been marveled at a hundred years ago as utopian, are instead used by the political class around the world to argue for the imposition of controls that would reverse the unprecedented progress and deteriorate political, economic, and social conditions that have long been improving.

• More internal emails released by Wikileaks suggest some advisors were not in the loop as to how extensively Hillary Clinton was using her private email server to handle communications and at least one thought doing so was “f—king insane.”
• Russia’s Vladimir Putin praised Donald Trump for energizing votes who are “tired of elites” but denied any attempt to interfere with the election.
• Amtrak has reached a $265 million settlement in its deadly Philadelphia train crash from 2015 that killed eight.
• Police in riot gear are forcibly removing Dakota Access pipeline protesters camping on private property (to be clear: without permission) in North Dakota.
• To make sure you don’t get distracted from strangers screaming at you online by cute pet videos, Twitter is killing off Vine as part of its workforce reduction.
• The Department of Justice has charged dozens in a scheme where scammers pretended to be IRS or immigration officials calling people and threatening to fine or deport them unless they were sent money. The DOJ believes they had managed to scam at least 15,000 people out of more than $250 million.

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Halloween’s urban legends have a habit of absorbing other urban legends, so I’m not surprised to see that a rumor’s been going around about a Halloween Clown Purge:

See all those shares? Halloween + clowns + The Purge = social-media catnip. But look at the bright side: This isn’t anywhere near as popular as last year’s big rumor, the “Halloween Revolt.”

Remember the Halloween Revolt? Some “anarchist militia” that no one had heard of before was supposedly going to spend the night of October 31 luring cops into ambushes and killing them. Chunks of the media just ran with the story, treating it as a bona fide threat rather than a revamped gang-initiation urban legend mashed up with the resurgent fear of a war on cops. (Some versions of the story managed to work in a reference to The Purge too. The fear that young people are getting ready to reenact the violence of the Purge pictures is getting to be a perennial panic, and not just at Halloween; one such rumor even shaped police behavior right before the 2015 Baltimore riot.)

But while reporters have rushed to cover all kinds of clown rumors this year, sometimes leaving their common sense behind in the process, the clown-purge story has barely penetrated the mainstream media. Almost all of the outlets covering it are super-clickbaity sites in the more remote corners of the media ecosystem.

The cops have been quiet, too. Snopes notes that in previous “‘purge’ scares, local police typically weighed in to either pledge a close watch or debunk the rumors. Yet in this case, we’ve turned up no such assurances or debunkings from any law enforcement sources.” Snopes‘ search appears to be out of date: Police in Greenville, South Carolina—ground zero for the current clown scare—have now told the public that the clown purge isn’t a credible threat. But even that sort of skeptical statement remains rare. I certainly haven’t seen any sign that documents like this are circulating:

Why the difference? Who knows? Maybe a cop-killing anarcho-militia felt like a more urgent threat. Maybe the idea of a Clown Purge was so silly that even the 11:00 news was wary about covering it. Maybe the press is getting sick of clowns.

Or maybe this year, when it comes to scaring people, Halloween just can’t get out of the shadow of Election Day.

Obamacare may be “standing on the edge of a death spiral” according to Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman. Health insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act are set to rise dramatically in 2017, an average of 25 percent for middle tier coverage options. What does this increase mean for consumers, taxpayers, and the future of the ACA? Nick Gillespie sat down with Suderman to find out.

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The folks over at Wired invited President Barack Obama to guest edit the November issue of the magazine. The theme is Frontiers. I finally got around to reading the president’s introduction to the issue, “Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive.” I entirely agree with the president. In his essay, the president writes:

Let’s start with the big picture. By almost every measure, this country is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago, or even eight years ago. Leave aside the sepia tones of the 1950s, a time when women, minorities, and ­people with disabilities were shut out of huge parts of American life. Just since 1983, when I finished college, things like crime rates, teen pregnancy rates, and poverty rates are all down. Life expectancy is up. The share of Americans with a college education is up too. Tens of mil­lions of Americans recently gained the security of health insurance. Blacks and Latinos have risen up the ranks to lead our businesses and communities. Women are a larger part of our workforce and are earning more money. Once-quiet factories are alive again, with assembly lines churning out the components of a clean-energy age.

And just as America has gotten better, so has the world. More countries know democracy. More kids are going to school. A smaller share of humans know chronic hunger or live in extreme poverty. In nearly two dozen countries—including our own—­people now have the freedom to marry whomever they love. And last year the nations of the world joined together to forge the most comprehen­sive agreement to battle climate change in human history.

I reported on all of those positive trends and more in my book, The End of Doom. As a politician, President Obama will naturally hype policies like climate change regulation as part of his legacy. But setting that aside, all of his other claims about improvements in the human prospects are true. But where the president disappoints is when he tries to explain how all of this truly marvelous progress occurred. Consider:

This kind of progress hasn’t happened on its own. It happened because people organized and voted for better prospects; because leaders enacted smart, forward-­looking policies; because people’s perspectives opened up, and with them, societies did too. But this progress also happened because we scienced the heck out of our challenges. Science is how we were able to combat acid rain and the AIDS epidemic. Technology is what allowed us to communicate across oceans and empathize with one another when a wall came down in Berlin or a TV personality came out. Without Norman Borlaug’s wheat, we could not feed the world’s hungry. Without Grace Hopper’s code, we might still be analyzing data with pencil and paper….

Because the truth is, while we’ve made great progress, there’s no shortage of challenges ahead: Climate change. Economic inequality. Cybersecurity. Terrorism and gun violence. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, and ­antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Just as in the past, to clear these hurdles we’re going to need everyone—policy makers and commu­nity leaders, teachers and workers and grassroots activists, presidents and soon-to-be-former presidents. And to accelerate that change, we need science. We need researchers and academics and engineers; programmers, surgeons, and botanists. And most important, we need not only the folks at MIT or Stanford or the NIH but also the mom in West Virginia tinkering with a 3-D printer, the girl on the South Side of Chicago learning to code, the dreamer in San Antonio seeking investors for his new app, the dad in North Dakota learning new skills so he can help lead the green revolution.

That’s how we will overcome the challenges we face: by unleashing the power of all of us for all of us. Not just for those of us who are fortunate, but for everybody.

All of these sentiments are surely worthy, but the President has entirely missed the main motive forces behind rising global prosperity and health. They are the advance and expansion of the institutions of free markets, property rights, and the rule of law. Without the globe spanning networks of cooperation enabled by markets, almost none of the progress cited by the president would have occurred.

The only time he comes close to alluding to any economic actors at all is when he mentions a dreamer in San Antonio seeking “investors” for his new app. He offers no acknowledgement or understanding of the vital role played by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and inventors using markets to create and supply new products and services. Finally, look at the list of sorts of people whose help the president says is needed to clear hurdles. They nearly all work for government or nonprofits. Surely they will contribute to future progress. But the absolutely essential role of private business and industry is wholly overlooked.

I agree totally with President Obama that today is the greatest time ever to be alive. I just wish he had a deeper understanding of why that is the case and what is needed to insure that human progress will continue.

The Denver Police Department is currently in the midst of a long but carefully considered process as it rewrites its use of force policy. Of particular note is the new emphasis on the “minimum amount of force necessary,” rather than the current norm of placing limits on the most extreme measures police officers feel they need to take during a confrontation.

The Denver PD’s chief, Robert White, told the Denver Post that officers will be trained on how to keep their cool during specific high-risk scenarios they may encounter. Of the department’s evolving policy, White said to the Post, “I’m of the opinion it’s just not good enough for officers to take legal actions, but they also need to make sure those actions are absolutely necessary.”

Chief White says he expects some resistance from the rank-and-file over the new policy, which puts more strict limits on the use of force than required by the state and the federal government. But White insists that the changes to policy, which also now include a “duty to render aid” on someone who has been on the receiving end of police use of force, are necessary for maintaining the department’s integrity and community trust.

Denver’s Sheriff’s Department announced earlier this year that it would also be reforming its use of force policy, which now encourages deputies to deploy “verbal judo” to de-escalate potentially volatile situations. The Sheriff’s Department’s new policy also requires deputies to intervene if they witness a misuse of force, and to not restrict detainees’ breathing with their body weight during an arrest.

Though the Denver PD reportedly consulted with 14 other police departments and considered the recommendations put forth by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, some groups—such as the city’s Citizen Oversight Board—do not appreciate that the new policy is being written internally by the police department. White insists that the current draft is only that, a draft, and that it will be made public to allow concerns from the community to be considered before the final policy becomes official.

McKay Coppins at Buzzfeed is very impressed with the political machine might of renegade CIA Mormon former Republican Evan McMullin, who is polling strong in his home state of Utah. He believes, according to his headline, that “Evan McMullin Isn’t Just Running For President — He’s Literally Building A New Party.”

I don’t think the actual reported details, or recent American history (see the quick fade of the “Reform Party” in the wake of the last time an independent candidate, Ross Perot, did surprisingly well in a presidential run and then tried to spin a Party off that success) support that belief that a McMullin Party will be significant in America’s political future, though only time will tell, as they say.

But one of the details Coppins uses to support the notion McMullin has some real political machine savvy behind him doesn’t quite do so. Coppins writes that “According to his advisers, they’ve assembled serious state organizations across the country on a shoestring budget, enabling them to hustle their way onto 11 state ballots in the space of just 10 weeks.”

Let’s see how “serious” an operation one would need to achieve that.

Caveat: while unless one is a ballot access lawyer or professional, one might not be aware of certain specific tricks and complications with specific states. For sure that achivement is a sign that his campaign was able to hire a pro or two to read, study, and understand the specific requirements of the hows, wheres, and from whos of ballot access. It’s always a little tricky, by design.

But the surface money and/or signature requirements for the 11 states McMullin made are not particular signs of a juggernaut machine moving forward to flatted the GOP (or the Libertarians, perhaps their true target to begin with).

According to this very useful compilation of deadlines and requirements from America’s undisputed ballot access guru Richard Winger, longtime publisher of Ballot Access News, getting on those 11 ballots as an independent non-Party candidate (for the states where McMullin wasn’t merely adopted by an existing Party structure that had already done the work) required a total of 14,500 signatures collected and $1,500 dollars spent. (That is the dollars-as-dollars in the states of Colorado and Louisiana which allow a pure money solution, not the dollars that almost certainly had to be paid to professional signature gatherers, always a big expense for small parties or independents.) That’s 1,400 or so signatures a week, or 200 a day. Five petitioners working eight-hour days would need to net five signatures an hour to achieve that. It isn’t nothing, but I wouldn’t use it as proof of stunning organizational power.

Excluded from that signature tally is New Mexico, which was a special and interesting case; it had the highest signature requirements of any of the states McMullin got on, 15,388, and indeed originally the state’s secretary of state concluded his campaign failed to gather enough, then after a lawsuit permitted him on the ballot in a pre-trial settlement. But you can add that number as well for a fuller, yet still not staggeringly impressive, assessment of his machine’s ballot access power.

The New Mexico victory was won by the “Better for America” organization, which predated McMullin’s own personal organization and is officially now dormant.

As I wrote back in June, getting on the ballot from that point was a little difficult, but not impossible, and McMullin’s machine grabbed only the lowest hanging fruit.

Richard Winger at Ballot Access News details how even McMullin’s small successes were achieved:

in five of those [11] states, the ticket could not have got on the ballot if prior minor party and independent presidential candidates hadn’t won lawsuits against ballot access laws…

Not withstanding all the assistance that prior ballot access activism had done to benefit McMullin, the McMullin campaign has refused to join in any efforts to ease the ballot access laws. Even though he said he would sue states with unconstitutional ballot access laws, he did not do so.