Tag: hit&run

It began with murder defendant Denver Fenton Allen asking Floyd County, Georgia Superior Court Judge Bryant Durham Jr. to appoint him another public defender. But before the hearing was over, Allen had told the judge to go fuck himself, told him to suck his dick, threatened to kill the judge’s family and bragged about having a “big old donkey dick.” Not to be outdone, the judge said Allen looked “like a queer,” ordered him to masturbate in the courtroom, “guessed” he was going to find him guilty, and told him he would find out how “nasty” he could get.

Their message is simple: Vote Libertarian. Inspired by the trending “Trump Girls” who “broke the internet” this week, a bevy of liberty-minded women have been snapping and sharing selfies that support peace, freedom, and the Libertarian Party presidential ticket. These “babes of liberty”—that’s the name you can find them under on Twitter and Instagram—join a growing number of Gary Johnson and William Weld supporters across the country. 

As Brian Doherty noted here yesterday, Johnson is polling well for a third-party candidate in many key battleground states. In a three-way match between Johnson, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump, Johnson pulled 11 percent. His appeal was strongest among younger voters—22 percent of millennials favored Johnson, just shy of the 24 percent who were Trump supporters—and not dependent on gender or marital status. Eight percent of married female respondents said they would vote for Johnson, and 10 percent of unmarried female respondents said so. Among unmarried white women, Johnson’s support was at 13 percent. 

To spread the love for Johnson and other LP candidates, New Yorker Rachel Maisonet this week invited more than 200 women (and a few men) into a private Facebook group for “Lovely Liberty Ladies,” urging them to take a photo of themselves promoting libertarianism. By Friday, “Babes of Liberty” accounts had been launched on social media—the Twitter account has more 1,000 followers already—and group members were avidly sharing bios, beliefs, and boob shots with one another on Facebook. Both the racks and the resumes were impressive. 

If the goal is to garner #TrumpGirlsBreakTheInternet-level attention, the Babes of Liberty may have a ways to go. But if bringing together a bunch of bold, smart, and passionate libertarian women from around the U.S. was Maisonet’s goal, she’s already succeeded beautifully. Below, Maisonet and other babes of liberty talk to me about why they plan to vote Libertarian this November. 

In 1949, some folks started to worry that maybe Americans didn’t realize how good they had it. So the Ad Council—the fine people who later brought us slogans like “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” and delivered Smokey the Bear to our living rooms—decided to launch a massive campaign to sell American-style capitalism back to the Americans living under it. Members of the Ad Council (mostly retailers and other corporations at the time) sponsored a deluge of ads endorsing “the free enterprise system” and exhorting readers and listeners to learn about and defend “The Miracle of America.” 

One ad suggests you ask grandma how much the past sucked: “Today your purchase is sure to be delivered on time, but back in 1900, sometime it got there and sometimes it didn’t,” the ad declares, with whimsical doodles of dead horses to illustrate the point. “Today we have smooth easy ways to get you upstairs, but in 1900 you’d have been safer to walk.”

Another ad reminds you that when your piano is out of tune, you don’t chop it up and get a tin horn instead: “Our American way isn’t perfect. We still have our ups and downs of prices and jobs. We’ll have to change that. But even so, our system works a lot better than the second rate substitutes being peddled by some countries we could mention.”

Several drop some stats about the falling prices of goods: “In 1914…Pappa had to work 15 hours for the price of his shoes. Today…because of higher wages…because of increased production under our free competitive system…Pappa can get a better pair of shoes from the wages of 5 hours work.”

Utterly devoid of irony, the ads come across as boosterishly simplistic today. And many other ads in the series, which ran for more than a decade, endorse less freedom-friendly positions—such as massive increases in defense spending and protectionist policies—but the underlying point stands that markets make people’s lives better, more pleasant, and more hopeful. So this weekend, as you traipse around in inexpensive sturdy shoes, eat cheap delicious hot dogs, and watch the fireworks on your enormous TV in air-conditioned comfort, why not take a minute to appreciate the “miracle of America” with some vintage propaganda. 

View this article.

Earlier this month, Philadelphia adopted a penny-and-a-half-per-ounce soda tax. The revenue from the tax will be used in large part to expand pre-kindergarten opportunities—a potentially dubious pursuit. A critic might note that spending tens of millions of dollars to expand pre-K in a city where even the most optimistic reports show city schools already fail to educate children and are routinely broke may not be the best idea.

Philadelphia’s soda tax isn’t the nation’s first—that dishonor belongs to Berkeley—and it likely won’t be the last. That’s because such taxes, once touted as an evidence-free way to reduce obesity, are now seen by cash-strapped cities as a fix-all for their often self-imposed budgetary woes. Baylen Linnekin offers critiques of a poorly thought out tax model.

View this article.

A raft of bills intended to restrict Californians’ rights to possess or exchange their weapons went to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk this week, and today he signed six and vetoed five of them.

Via a press release from the pro-Second Amendment Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), with descriptions that reflect their perspective, a list of the six signed and four of the five vetoed. (The last one on the vetoed list was not discussed by the FPC). The names in parenthesis are those of the legislator who introduced the bills. The [bracketed] interpolations are by me:

• AB 1135 (Levine): Bans common and constitutionally-protected firearms that have magazine locking devices.
• AB 1511 (Santiago): Criminalizes loaning of firearms between personally known, law-abiding adults, including family members, sportspersons, and competitors.
• AB 1695 (Bonta): Makes a non-violent misdemeanor [falsely reporting a firearm as having been stolen] a prohibiting offense.
• SB 880 (Hall): Bans common and constitutionally-protected firearms that have magazine locking devices.
• SB 1235 (de Leon): New restrictions on ammunition purchases; creates a DOJ database of ammunition owners.
• SB 1446 (Hancock): Statewide confiscatory ban on all lawfully-possessed standard-capacity ammunition feeding devices that hold more than 10 round; exemption for retired police

 The five vetoed by Brown:

• AB 1673 (Gipson): Would have redefined “firearms” to include objects that are not firearms [the bill would make legally a weapon “a frame or receiver blank, casting, or machined body that requires further machining or molding to be used as part of a functional weapon so long as it has been designed and is clearly identifiable as being used exclusively as part of a functional weapon.”]
• AB 1674 (Santiago): Would have banned buying more than one firearm of any type within a 30-day period
• AB 2607 (Ting): Would have dramatically expanded the reach of secret “Gun Violence Restraining Orders” [From the bill’s own language, it would “authorize an employer, a coworker, a mental health worker who has seen the person as a patient in the last 6 months, or an employee of a secondary or postsecondary school that the person has attended in the last 6 months to file a petition for an ex parte, one-year, or renewed gun violence restraining order,” greatly expanding the ability of the state to restrict gun possession rights absent any crime. The bill would have allowed for confiscation of existing owned weapons at the suggestion of a co-worker or boss, among others. The Los Angeles Times focused on that now-vetoed bill in a story this morning.]
• SB 894 (Jackson): Would have re-victimized victims of theft by criminalizing the failure to report lost and stolen firearms
• AB 1176 which would make “the theft of a firearm grand theft in all cases and punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for 16 months, or 2 or 3 years.”

In an emailed press release from FPC, they noted regarding the signed SB 1446 that its:

statewide, confiscatory ban on lawfully-possessed “large-capacity” magazines [can be evaded by] law enforcement interests [who] once again cut shady deals to exempt their retired members from the long reach of the new gun control laws.

Earlier this year, Firearms Policy Coalition, two other civil rights groups, and a number of individuals filed a federal civil rights lawsuit–captionedGarcia v. Attorney General Kamala Harris–that challenges California’s gun law exemptions for retired law enforcement officers on Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection grounds.

California should have already learned that bills like 1446 that require confiscations of widely and innocently owned items can be expensive (and pointless) to enforce from its past attempts to take away previously legally owned weapons from people whose later actions placed them in prohibited categories.

No one who cares about civil liberties should cheer the newly minted creation of overwhelmingly harmless contraband. No compensation will be provided for the now banned over-10-capacity magazines, which must be destroyed, sold, or turned in by July 1, 2017. A brand-new excuse for police searches of the innocent is thus created, one with a built-in excuse for police to feel “endangered.”

I reported on versions of many of these bills passing the state Senate in May. 

I wrote in the Orange County Register in December about why California doesn’t need new gun laws.

Steven Greenhut wrote here about how most of these bills qualify far more as harassment of the innocent than any kind of insurance of public safety. Greenhut observed: “The number of guns owned by Californians has soared over the past two decades, and the population has grown dramatically—yet firearms-related deaths have fallen over the years. Is gun violence a problem of gun supply by legal owners or the behavior of criminals?”

Correction: The headline originally mistakenly said only four gun-related bills were vetoed today.

• Who should be Donald Trump’s vice president? Bernie Sanders, says Fareed Zakaria.
• “As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. And, sometimes, demonic possession.”
• Aspen Ideas Festival tackles campus free speech: views from Greg Lukianoff, Stephen Carter, and Michael Roth.
• Neil deGrasse Tyson’s idea for a country called “Rationalia” is pretty flawed.
• Why Republicans who endorsed Trump should publicly admit their mistake.
• Income inequality experts at the University of Berkeley make more than $300,000 a year.

For 17 years, Hannah Cohen and her family have traveled between their home in Chattanooga and Memphis so she could receive treatment for a brain tumor at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. After completing the end of her treatment on June 30 of last year, then-18-year-old Hannah and her mother, Shirley, made their way through Memphis International Airport to get on a flight home, as they had so many times before.

However, the Cohens did not make it back to Chattanooga that night. Instead, Hannah was locked up in a Shelby County jail, her face bloodied and bruised after a confrontation with Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents.

Her years of treatment left the teenager partially deaf, blind in one eye, and limited in her abilities to walk and talk. She also, according to her mother, can become easily confused.

When Hannah went through the metal detector at the airport, an alarm went off. Disoriented by the noise, she did not immediately cooperate with TSA agents who asked to conduct further screening.

Shirley Cohen tried to inform the agents about her daughter’s disabilities, she told television station WREG, but airport police kept her away. That’s when the situation between Hannah and the TSA officials became violent:

“She’s trying to get away from them but in the next instant, one of them had her down on the ground and hit her head on the floor. There was blood everywhere,” said [Shirley].

Security personnel arrested Hannah (though all charges against her were later dropped), and what should have been a night of celebration with family and friends because a night of terror and confusion in a jail cell.

A year later, the family is suing the airport, its police, and the TSA for damages, including medical expenses and emotional injuries. According to the lawsuit, they are asking for a “reasonable sum not exceeding $100,000 and costs.”

The defendants declined to comment, while TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz noted in a statement that “passengers can call ahead of time to learn more about the screening process for their particular needs or medical situation.”

Today President Barack Obama’s administration is publicly releasing some information about the collateral damage caused by using armed drones to try to strike down terrorists in foreign countries. Whether anybody believe the figures being provided is another matter entirely.

Today the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released numbers for what it claims are combatant and non-combatant deaths for drone strikes in countries outside of formal war zones. This means countries like Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, but specifically not Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.

The federal government says that out of 473 drone strikes in these countries, they’ve killed between 2,372 and 2,581 actual combatants and between 64 and 116 non-combatants. This formal recognition of the number of non-combatants killed is far below what independent observers to be an accurate accounting. The New York Times notes:

In a seeming acknowledgment that the long-anticipated disclosure would be greeted with skepticism by drone critics, the administration released the numbers on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. The use of a range of estimated civilian deaths underscored the fact that the government often does not know for sure the affiliations of those killed.

“They’re guessing, too,” said Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who has tracked civilian deaths for more than a decade. “Theirs may be a little more educated than my guesses. But they cannot be completely accurate.”

Outsiders (depending on the group) estimate between 200 and 1,000 non-combatants have been killed by drone strikes outside of war zones.

The ODNI report predicts this criticism and says it believes its numbers are more accurate because it has better information: “The U.S. Government draws on all available information (including sensitive intelligence) to determine whether an individual is part of a belligerent party fighting against the United States in an armed conflict; taking a direct part in hostilities against the United States; or otherwise targetable in the exercise of national self-defense. Thus, the U.S. Government may have reliable information that certain individuals are combatants, but are being counted as non-combatants by nongovernmental organizations.”

Critics of America’s use of drones, though, say the government actually operates almost the opposite of what it just described. In The Assassination Complex, by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, sources tell them that the government frequently assumes that those it kills are enemy combatants unless it gathers evidence that says otherwise.

Regardless of how trustworthy the numbers are, it’s still a formal acknowledgment that the American government is killing innocent people in countries in which we do not have an active war. The larger question, though, is whether the American public actually cares. A Pew poll from 2015 shows that a majority of Americans—58 percent—support using drone strikes to target extremists. Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike all support using them in majority numbers, though in lower numbers among the Democrats and independents.

Read the ODNI report here.

Everytown, a political anti-gun group, participated in a summit of Hollywood creatives on the lot of Fox studios, led by Modern Family co-creator and showrunner Steve Levitan, on the topic of “gun violence prevention,” as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Also in attendance were Fox TV CEO Gary Newman and 20th Century Fox TV creative affairs president Jonathan Davis.

Levitan, who said he’s lost “a couple of friends” to gun violence, bemoaned the influence of the National Rifle Association while speaking to a room full of people that control much of what appears on network television today. I just have always felt that for a lobbying group like the NRA to have this much influence over our lawmakers is an indication that something is wrong,” Levitan said.

Levitan declared that the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by Antonin Scalia and “the likelihood of a Clinton presidency” meant there was a “real opportunity” for advancement of gun control. Levitan did not address how Clinton and Democrats’ opposition to Citizens United and unfettered political speech applied to the way they could use their roles in Hollywood to advance their preferred political speech.

The meeting, fortunately, was not the start of some kind of ill-advised campaign to purge entertainment of gun violence (the NRA has often argued portrayals of violence in popular culture are responsible for certain crimes). “Could Hollywood be a little more responsible in its portrayal of guns?” Levitan asked. “Probably. But entertainment is entertainment. I understand that and I’m not looking to come down too hard on that.” Levitan should make an effort to understand that gun ownership is a Constitutional right. “A right is a right,” you could say, and Americans shouldn’t look to “come down too hard on that.”

Although global temperatures fell rapidly from May to June as the El Niño Pacific Ocean warming event fades, June 2016 was nonetheless the second warmest June in the satellite temperature record, according to the press release from the University of Alabama Huntsville. June 2016 trailed June 1998 by 0.23 C, according to Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at UAH. Compared to seasonal norms, however, June 2016 was the 30th warmest month overall since the satellite temperature dataset began in December 1978.

June 2016 also was the second warmest on record in the Northern Hemisphere (0.51 C compared to June 1998 at 0.60 C above seasonal norms), but the eighth warmest June in the Southern Hemisphere and, despite the El Niño remnants, only the sixth warmest June in the tropics. The graphic below compares how temperature trends evolved during the big El Nino back in 1997/1998 and the current one that is now fading. If temperatures continue to decline as steeply, predictions that 2016 will be the warmest year in the satellite record will likely not come true.

Global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978: +0.12 C per decade

June temperatures (preliminary)

Global composite temp.: +0.34 C (about 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for June.

Northern Hemisphere: +0.51 C (about 0.92 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for June.

Southern Hemisphere: +0.17 C (about 0.79 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for June.

Tropics: +.38 C (about 0.68 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for June.

For monthly satellite temperature data go here.