Tag: hit&run

Last week I had the opportunity to debate prostitution-decriminalization at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Obviously, I was arguing for full decriminalization—putting me in the ideological company of sex workers from Seattle to London to Taipei to Kazakhstan, as well as global human-rights and health groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the World Health Organization. Arguing for the Nordic model of prostitution law, in which paying for or advertising sex is prohibited but selling it is legal in limited circumstances, was Dorchen Leidholdt, director of the Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services at Sanctuary for Families.

You can listen to audio of the debate on Soundcloud, or watch the whole thing below.

If you’ll permit me a moment of naval-gazing… I was happy with my debate performance overall, especially considering I’ve never debated one-on-one before and am much better at arguing in text than in person. Where I think I failed was in getting bogged down in a back-and-forth about statistics. Leidholdt was armed with a bevy of them, mostly from disreputable studies carried out by anti-prostitution activists, and my impulse was to push back on these.

But for those who know little about sex-work issues, there’s not much to latch on to in a she-said/she-said over facts and figures. And without any frame of reference, “facts” showing that countries with legalized prostitution are plagued by terrible spikes in sex-trafficking seem more immediately credible, given that people are prone to believe all manner of horrors about anything related to sex. People seem to want to believe prostitution is inherently harmful, and studies and statistics are rarely powerful enough to overcome people’s implicit biases. But the concrete harms that criminalizing prostitution has on vulnerable people’s lives—the individual tales of hardship and horror that women and girls face under a system of criminalization—are harder to dismiss. Obviously different arguments work better or worse with different crowds, but in the future, I’d probably do better to avoid the stat-trap and stay more big picture when talking to general audiences… yes? no? Genuinely interested to hear what people think.

The New York Post headline reads “Trump campaign organizing voter suppression operations.” CNBC says “Here’s who Trump is targeting for his ‘voter suppression operations.'” Slate says “Trump campaign brags about its ongoing ‘voter suppression operations.'”

The basic idea presented in the headlines (Donald Trump is trying to prevent people from voting) is wholly inaccurate. But the inaccuracy is entirely the fault of the Trump campaign because that’s the term an unidentified campaign official used when talking to a Bloomberg journalist. CNBC and Slate at least had the awareness to put the term in scare quotes because they realize it’s not actual “vote suppression.” (And the text of the stories beyond the headline actually explains the truth.)

What’s actually happening is that the Trump campaign—in what appears to be pretty savvy operation (considering how outsiders perceive his candidacy as a populist insurgency that isn’t terribly competent)—is putting together targeted social media advertisements to try to encourage certain Clinton-leaning demographics to reconsider whether she’s worth their vote. They’re not trying to “suppress” voters. They’re trying to convince them not to vote.

The Facebook campaigns, explained to Bloomberg reporters Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, target Bernie Sanders supporters, women, and African-Americans, all very large blocs of voters Clinton needs in order to win. The campaign is doing its best to get information in front of these people that will remind them of the ways Clinton (and her husband) are not very good people. They report:

Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.

Based on polling, Trump is going to have to convince a lot of African-American voters and women to stay home. It should be very clear that this is not what “voter suppression” means, but because a Trump campaign worker used the phrase to describe it, that gives some media outlets clearance to be literal (“they said it, not us!”) and suggest there’s an especially sinister bend to what is in reality simply another iteration of extremely common negative political advertising.

Yes, fundamentally the blame is on Trump’s campaign for its poor choice of words, but it is yet another example of the media behaving deliberately dense and literal with what Trump (and supporters) are saying or doing. And then we wonder why these same people hold the media in such poor esteem. There are real fears out there of attempts to intimidate voters on Election Day (another good reason people should just mail in their ballots and we can get rid of this silly smugness-inducing public ceremony of voting). But that’s not what this is about. These headlines will ultimately feed the narrative that the media is “rigged” against Trump.

For each of the past 152 days, Gary Johnson has been asked what it’s like to be a “spoiler.” For the past 47, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee has been forced to revisit the deadly six-letter word “Aleppo,” with the additional twist over the previous 28 about whether he can even name a single foreign leader. It’s not particularly fun to be ridiculed on a daily basis as a “fucking idiot” (Bill Maher), “laughable” (Stephen Colbert) and “around 80 percent sure that he’s running for president” (John Oliver).

Then in recent days a particularly unpleasant new line of inquiry has been added to the mix. What does it feel like, reporters and even libertarian fellow travelers are asking in light of Johnson’s September-October polling slide from 9 percent to 6, to be a failure? The question has stung candidate and campaign staff alike. For someone who is both a fierce competitor and a cheerful loser—Johnson has played chess against a computer just about every day for the past two years without winning even once, for example—the answer can oscillate between bewilderment, defiance, and Zen. On Tuesday, when swatting around Facebook Live softballs from the publisher of his slim new book Common Sense for the Common Good: Libertarianism as the End of Two-Party Tyranny, Johnson responded to an innocuous question about climbing Mt. Everest with a pretty direct metaphor for his campaign:

What Everest says, and everything that I’ve done in my life, and everything that all of us do in our lives, is just put one foot in front of the other. I mean that’s the key to living, and in that context, you know what? Things go wrong, every single day of our lives something goes wrong. Do you crawl up in a ball, do you declare yourself a victim and give up? Or you know what, get up the next day, smile on your face, it’s part of the process….It’s about the process, it’s not about the end result; you can’t predict the end result. But what you can predict is that if you get involved in the process, and you keep after it, that’s what you should consider success. So climbing mountains, being involved as the Libertarian nominee for president….

Johnson returned to the mountain metaphor a little while later when I asked him in an interview whether he would either do anything differently in this campaign looking back, or whether there were any moments that surpassed all previous expectations. After stressing that he’s a strictly no-regrets kinda guy, he said this:

It is what it is. And you can certainly look at mistakes, but to think that you as a human being are not going to make mistakes, by that I mean little mistakes? Yes, of course. But in the context of moving forward—well, that’s the other part of the equation, too, which is, man, you’ve got to keep moving forward. How does it turn out? I have always believed that life is a process, and you cannot set a life-or-death goal of getting to the top of the mountain, or you’re gonna blow your brains out if you don’t get there. You put yourself in position to get to the top of the mountain—you’re physically fit, you’re not ill, you’re doing all the right things—and in that context using that as analogy, that’s always worked in my life. Always. And come Election Day, that’s what I did in this cycle, and everybody I was associated with.

“It is what it is” is the same formulation Johnson has used previously when asked about the surely irritating rise of independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin in the Johnson-campaign-headquartered state of Utah.

In the course of our short interview, Johnson veered from bullishness to fatalism, gratitude to near-bitterness. Here’s a selection:

There’s a lot of anxiety in the libertarian universe right now about the 5 percent threshold, for obvious reasons. First, are you anxious about it yourself; like, do you feel like you’re gonna clear that well, is it something that you’re worried about, how are you focused on it?

Well,…I thought we had the opportunity to be at 5 percent in 2012! Based on being on the streets right now as opposed to 2012, there’s twentyfold the response today…than there was in 2012. Will that equate to 5 percent? I don’t know, we’ll see.

If you had a choice between 5 percent or winning a state, what would it be?

…First of all, if I’m gonna win one state, I may very well win eight states. I think it’s a water-level-raises-all-boats kinda thing. So that’s the—New Mexico? You know, we’ll see. But polls, I understand polls, I got my degree in political science. I understand polls. I understand right now that the poll shift from registered voters a couple of months out to likely voters; because it shifted to likely voters, which underweigh young people and independents, that’s really where our polling has [been strongest]. That’s the factor involved in the drop in polls. […]

You were talking to me yesterday when we weren’t in an interview situation about media people and the question of “What’s it like to be a failure?”…It’s amazing to watch the different kinds of interpretations of what this campaign has been—kind of a Goldilocks thing of, “Oh, it has exceeded all expectations,” “it undershot all expectations,” “it is where it is.” How do you assess where you’re at right now compared to expectations?

My expectations—beyond my wildest dreams has this election or my candidacy gone forward. Everywhere I walk in this country now, I’m known. Everywhere!

And you’re offered weed. (Note: During his just-completed Facebook Live interview, Johnson volunteered in a humorous aside that “I get offered weed ALL the time.”)

And I’m offered weed, every single time. The guy who makes the pizza wants to put weed on the pizza, you know?

Do you feel confident that the Libertarian Party now is the third party in this country?

(Pause) Yeah, I think that, um, of course.

Now, you get back to this 5 percent, and just how much of a game-changer that is going forward—not for me, but for the party going forward….Regardless, I think that this is a game changer for the Libertarian Party. But it’s what the Libertarian Party does with this going forward. And you know, OK, Johnson’s a dismal, miserable failure. Um, I probably won’t even know that. I may not even listen to the news again for the rest of my life! So I’ll be in ignorant bliss.

Reason on Gary Johnson here. Below, here’s that Facebook Live video from Tuesday:

ExxonMobil is suspected by New York Attorney-General Eric Schneiderman of misleading shareholders about the damage that climate change regulations might do to its business prospects. Scheidnerman and nearly twenty other Democratic attorneys-general have joined together in an effort to prove these suspicions correct. Under New York’s capacious Martin Act, Schneiderman has issued investigatory subpoenas demanding that the company turn over various documents including those related to research results by company scientists and donations made to suspect academicians, think tanks, and advocacy groups. To date, the company has reportedly sent a million pages of documents over to the AG’s office for minions to comb through looking for malacious corporate dissent from the prevailing climate change consensus.

In August, Schneiderman issued another subpoena demanding to see records held by the company’s accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Exxonmobil refused, asserting an “accountant-client privilege” under Texas law. Now a New York Supreme Court judge has ruled that New York law applies and ordered the company to comply with Schneiderman’s subpoena. (Note the Supreme Court is not the highest level of New York’s judiciary.)

“We are pleased with the Court’s order and look forward to moving full-steam ahead with our fraud investigation of Exxon,” said Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman in a statement. “Exxon had no legal basis to interfere with PwC’s production, and I hope that today’s order serves as a wake up call to Exxon that the best thing they can do is cooperate with, rather than resist, our investigation.”

The Washington Post reports that the company plans to appeal the decision.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade of Texas issued a discovery order to Massachusetts Attorney-General Maura Healey to turn over documents that would enable him to understand how she, Schneiderman and the other Democratic attorneys-general cooked up their joint investigation of ExxonMobil’s possibly fraudulent behavior. The joint investigation is governed by what is called a Common Interest Agreement among the Democratic AGs. In his order Kinkeade noted:

Attorney General Healey’s actions leading up to the issuance of the CID [Civil Investigative Demand] causes the Court concern and presents the Court with the question of whether Attorney General Healey issued the CID with bias or prejudgment about what the investigation of Exxon would discover. …

The Court finds the allegations about Attorney General Healey and the anticipatory nature of Attorney General Healey’s remarks about the outcome of the Exxon investigation to be concerning to this Court. The foregoing allegations about Attorney General Healey, if true, may constitute bad faith in issuing the CID….

At the Attorneys General United for Clean Power press conference in March 2016 featuring remarks by climate warrior Al Gore, Healey did say:

Fossil fuel companies that deceived investors and consumers about the dangers of climate change should be, must be, held accountable. That’s why I, too, have joined in investigating the practices of ExxonMobil. We can all see today the troubling disconnect between what Exxon knew, what industry folks knew, and what the company and industry chose to share with investors and with the American public. We are here before you, all committed to combating climate change and to holding accountable those who have misled the public.

Could Healey’s statements be considered biased or prejudged? You decide

With regard to Judge Kinkeade’s discovery order to Healey, it would certainly be of interest to the public to see how its elected officials collude, ah, work with activists, ah, interested citizens to go after disfavored, ah, possibly fraudulent commercial enterprises. In any case, Healey has filed a motion asking Judge Kinkeade to vacate his discovery order.

As I reported when all this got started a year ago, ExxonMobil began disclosing its annual reports the possible risks to its business posed by climate change in 2006. That happens to be the same year in which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report definitively stated: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

With regard to the claim that ExxonMobil executives may have fooled shareholders, I earlier reported: “It is not as though shareholders and consumers had not heard for years now that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and that regulators were aiming to cut the use of such fuels. Nevertheless, ExxonMobil’s stock price has never fallen below its trading January 1, 2006 level even after acknowledging climate change as a possible business factor in its annual reports.”

The follies continue.

• New poll: Hillary Clinton 48 percent, Donald Trump 42 percent, Gary Johnson 5 percent, Jill Stein 1 percent.
• Another new poll: Hillary Clinton 44 percent, Donald Trump 41 percent, Gary Johnson 7 percent, Jill Stein 3 percent.
• “Inside the Trump bunker, with 12 days to go.”
• Twitter is laying off 9 percent of its workforce.
• Canada and the European Union are on the verge of signing a major free trade agreement.
• The Chicago Cubs won game two of the World Series last night against the Cleveland Indians. The series is now tied at 1-1.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily updates for more content.

In November 1999, presidential candidate George W. Bush sat down for a radio interview. A reporter asked him to name the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan, all of which had been in the news. He could come up with only one.

This was an embarrassing failure. Newspapers editorialized tartly about Bush’s grasp of international affairs. His rivals took him to task, with Vice President Al Gore saying that a president needs “the basic foreign policy knowledge necessary to protect America’s interests and security around the world.”

It’s hard to recall that we once lived in an age of giants who were expected to know the names of foreign leaders. Donald Trump is proof of how much our standards have slipped. He couldn’t find India if you dropped him at the Taj Mahal. Steve Chapman explains.

View this article.

Social Security is the largest single program in the federal budget. The retirement and disability program will cost about $950 billion this year, which is about 23 percent of the entire federal budget. Along with Medicare and Medicaid, these “entitlement” programs are already the main drivers of federal spending. Unless reined in, Social Security and its counterparts will eventually explode the federal budget. Unfortunately, few in Congress—and neither of the major-party presidential candidates—have any interest in acknowledging, let alone confronting, the problem with Social Security’s insolvency.

That it’s insolvent isn’t debatable. Social Security faces a $10 trillion funding shortfall. Since 2010, Social Security has been running a constant cash flow deficit, meaning that the taxes collected for the program aren’t enough to cover the benefits paid to beneficiaries. To fill the gap and keep the checks going out, the program has been drawing from federal trust funds. However, the government’s trust funds aren’t like trust funds in the real world. Trust funds in the real world contain assets; the government’s trust funds basically contain IOUs. What that means in simple terms is that the government already has to go further into debt to pay Social Security’s bills—and it’s only going to get worse, writes Veronique de Rugy.

View this article.

According to the latest American Values Survey, conducted last month by the Public Religion Research Institute, a record 63 percent of Americans favor “making the use of marijuana legal,” up from 43 percent in 2012 and 44 percent last year. That result, which was released on Tuesday, comes a week after Gallup reported that 60 percent of Americans think “the use of marijuana should be made legal,” a record for that survey, and two weeks after the Pew Research Center reported that 57 percent of respondents in its latest survey endorsed that proposition, yet another record. But as Washington Post drug policy blogger Christopher Ingraham notes, these results do not necessarily signal a clean sweep for the nine marijuana initiatives on state ballots a week from Tuesday, since the surveys use national samples and do not ask about production and distribution of cannabis.

A look at the latest initiative-specific polling suggests that marijuana will be legalized for recreational use in California, Maine, and Massachusetts, while Florida will become the first Southern state to recognize marijuana as a medicine. General legalization looks iffier in Arizona and Nevada, while medical marijuana intiatives seem headed for defeat in Arkansas and Montana. A lack of recent polling makes the outcome in North Dakota harder to predict. Here is the breakdown:

Recreational Marijuana

Arizona: Support for Proposition 205 in three polls conducted since my last update on October 6 averages 48 percent.

California: Support for Proposition 64 in two new polls averages more than 55 percent. The average for all eight polls conducted so far this year is 59 percent.

Maine: Two polls conducted in March and September found about 53 percent of voters favor Question 1.

Massachusetts: A new poll, completed last week, puts support for Question 4 at 55 percent. The average for September and October, based on four polls, is 53 percent.

Nevada: Support for Question 2 in two new polls averages 50 percent, slightly less than the seven-poll average for the year.

Medical Marijuana

Arkansas: A new poll, conducted last week, puts support for Issue 6 and Issue 7 (both of which would legalize medical use) at 45 percent and 40 percent, respectively.

Florida: Amendment 2 needs approval from 60 percent of voters to win. A new poll, sponsored by the Yes on 2 campaign and completed last week, puts support at 74 percent, about the same as the three-poll average for September. The 2016 average, based on 12 polls, is about 70 percent.

Montana: A new poll, completed on October 12, puts support for I-182, which would expand patient access to marijuana, at 44 percent.

North Dakota: I still can’t find polling specific to Initiated Statutory Measure 5. According to a 2014 poll, 47 percent of likely voters thought marijuana should be legal for recreational use.

Norman, Oklahoma, schools Superintendent Joe Siano says a teacher at Norman North High School “poorly handled” a classroom discussion on race. A student, who recorded the teacher saying “to be white is to be racist, period,” says she believes he was “encouraging people to kind of pick on people for being white.”

Last December, the most powerful print media voice on this here planet Earth (or so they believe), The New York Times, ran a nearly unprecedented front page editorial calling for a ban and buyback/confiscation of that ill-defined category of “assault rifle.” (See my commentary at the time, “New York Times Calls for Immense Expense and Political Civil War To Maybe Possibly Hopefully Reduce Gun Violence by a Tiny Amount.”)

The Times believed “Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.”

What effect did the Times‘s pulling out their biggest rhetorical weapon against those popular weapons have on popular opinion regarding such weapons?

Sorry, Times. A Gallup poll conducted earlier this month and released today finds “In U.S., Support for Assault Weapons Ban at Record Low.”

The details:

The fewest Americans in 20 years favor making it illegal to manufacture, sell or possess semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles. Thirty-six percent now want an assault weapons ban, down from 44% in 2012 and 57% when Gallup first asked the question in 1996….

Two years after President Bill Clinton signed a federal assault weapons ban in 1994, Gallup found that a solid majority of Americans favored such a ban. By the time the 10-year ban expired in 2004, Americans were evenly divided. And by 2011, public opinion had tilted against the assault weapons ban, with 53% opposed and 43% in favor. In Gallup’s 2016 Crime poll, conducted Oct. 5-9, opposition now exceeds support by 25 percentage points, 61% to 36%.

This is certainly an example of common sense on voters’ part, realizing that both the past (when we had for a decade a meaningless-in-stopping-crime ban on a set of such weapons) and the present (when as of 2014 such weapons are involved in fewer homicides than are bare hands and feet) give no weight to the notion that any public safety good would come from such a ban.

I had what many correspondents felt was the bad luck to have a book review appear in The American Conservative called “Gun Control RIP” right after the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting in 2012. (It was written before the shooting.) Surely, many told me, that vividly horrific public reminder that people can use guns to commit hideous crimes will mean that politically gun control is back in a big way, putting the lie to my review.

I stand by the review, for most of the reasons contained in it. 2012 had already been a year of many prominent and horrific public mass shootings; but as I wrote, “Americans have come to understand that such acts are still quite rare. More to the point, no imaginable public-policy solution will keep the occasional deranged criminal from doing evil with weapons.”

Jesse Walker reported for Reason back in 2014 on how after spikes in public upset over guns after publicized shooting murders, the mean of support for gun control seems to be falling lately to lower averages than it had been before the spike.