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Philadelphia Ordered Restaurants Closed. Then the City’s Mayor Went Out To Eat in Maryland.

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Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney publicly apologized on Monday after he was busted for sneaking across the border to enjoy a meal at a Maryland restaurant over the weekend.

Restaurants and bars in Maryland are allowed to offer limited indoor dining—capacity is capped at 25 percent of what would normally be allowed in an attempt to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Establishments elsewhere in Pennsylvania are operating under similar restrictions as well. But in Philadelphia, indoor dining is still fully forbidden under restrictions imposed by the city government—the one that Kenney runs. The city’s ban on indoor dining, which was extended in late July amid fears of a “second wave” of COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia, is scheduled to be lifted on September 8.

But Kenney apparently couldn’t wait that long. A sharp-eyed restaurant-goer caught Kenney dining indoors in Maryland on Sunday. The photo quickly went viral, and Kenney’s office confirmed to a local TV station that the mayor had gone south of the border to visit “a restaurant owned by a friend.”

On Monday, Kenney issued a more substantial apology via his Twitter account. “I felt the risk was low because the county I visited has had fewer than 800 COVID-19 cases, compared to over 33,000 cases in Philadelphia,” he wrote. “Restaurant owners are among the hardest hit by the pandemic. I’m sorry if my decision hurt those who’ve worked to keep their businesses going under difficult circumstances.”

Kenney is right to point out that the coronavirus risk is not the same everywhere at all times, and it certainly makes sense for different jurisdictions to adopt policies that reflect that. But his do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach to COVID-19 undermines the legitimacy of the harsh restrictions Philadelphia has imposed on its own restaurant industry and demonstrates a callous disregard for how those policies have impacted the city’s residents and businesses. Kenney can drive across the border to Maryland easily, but a Philly bar can’t pick up and move to Delaware to escape the city’s lockdowns.

If nothing else, Philadelphia’s ban on indoor dining certainly fails what I’d call the Burgermeister Meisterburger Yo-Yo Test—a reference, of course, to a memorable scene in the most libertarian Christmas movie ever made. The test is a simple one: If a public official can’t avoid breaking his or her own laws—even, as in Kenney’s case, the spirit of the law—then they’re probably bad laws.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has created fertile ground for arbitrary and meaningless restrictions on economic activity. Worse, it’s not clear that lockdowns have helped curb the spread of the virus. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum noted last week, both Arizona and Georgia have seen COVID-19 cases decline by roughly the same degree in recent weeks despite adopting far different strategies in July—Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey ordered gyms, bars, movie theaters, and water parks to close and imposed strict limitations on restaurants, while Georgia mostly allowed people to decide for themselves whether it was safe to go out.

The pandemic has also created an opportunity for public officials to meddle in even sillier ways, like when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, told bars they couldn’t serve alcohol without also selling food—and then tried to regulate what types of food actually counted as, well, food. He’s also threatened to ban not only indoor dining but also outdoor dining in New York state, which would likely condemn thousands of restaurants to failure. There is no clear public health benefit to any of that.

Bars and restaurants were always going to have a hard time surviving the pandemic as more people voluntarily socially distanced and cut back on their spending in the wake of an economic downturn; public officials should avoid making the crisis worse with arbitrary rules. And if you can’t resist playing with a yo-yo, maybe don’t make it illegal for your constituents to do the same.

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Poll: Americans Worry COVID-19 Vaccine Approval Is Politicized

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According to new survey by the Harris Poll and the invaluable health news website STAT, a majority of Americans are concerned that the White House might pressure the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into prematurely approving a COVID-19 vaccine to boost the president’s chances of winning the election.

“Seventy-eight percent of Americans worry the Covid-19 vaccine approval process is being driven more by politics than science,” report the pollsters. “The response was largely bipartisan, with 72% of Republicans and 82% of Democrats expressing such worries.” The poll was conducted August 25–27 and surveyed 2,067 people.

It’s not hard to determine what sorts of background noise were feeding those concerns. On August 22, for example, President Donald Trump tagged FDA chief Stephen Hahn in a not-so-subtle tweet: “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”

Who does the public trust to provide accurate information about the development of a COVID-19 vaccine? Just 46 percent trust the president and the White House. The press is held in similarly low esteem, garnering the trust of only 47 percent of respondents. Confidence in the accuracy of social media is even lower, at only 29 percent.

Despite these misgivings, the poll reports that 68 percent of respondents said that they believe the FDA would only approve a vaccine that is safe. In addition, 67 percent said they would get vaccinated as soon as an inoculation becomes available. Indeed, 62 percent said that they are very or somewhat likely to get a COVID-19 vaccine that becomes available before the election.

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Philadelphia Ordered Restaurants Closed. Then the City’s Mayor Went Out To Eat in Maryland.

sipaphotosten914466

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney publicly apologized on Monday after he was busted for sneaking across the border to enjoy a meal at a Maryland restaurant over the weekend.

Restaurants and bars in Maryland are allowed to offer limited indoor dining—capacity is capped at 25 percent of what would normally be allowed in an attempt to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Establishments elsewhere in Pennsylvania are operating under similar restrictions as well. But in Philadelphia, indoor dining is still fully forbidden under restrictions imposed by the city government—the one that Kenney runs. The city’s ban on indoor dining, which was extended in late July amid fears of a “second wave” of COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia, is scheduled to be lifted on September 8.

But Kenney apparently couldn’t wait that long. A sharp-eyed restaurant-goer caught Kenney dining indoors in Maryland on Sunday. The photo quickly went viral, and Kenney’s office confirmed to a local TV station that the mayor had gone south of the border to visit “a restaurant owned by a friend.”

On Monday, Kenney issued a more substantial apology via his Twitter account. “I felt the risk was low because the county I visited has had fewer than 800 COVID-19 cases, compared to over 33,000 cases in Philadelphia,” he wrote. “Restaurant owners are among the hardest hit by the pandemic. I’m sorry if my decision hurt those who’ve worked to keep their businesses going under difficult circumstances.”

Kenney is right to point out that the coronavirus risk is not the same everywhere at all times, and it certainly makes sense for different jurisdictions to adopt policies that reflect that. But his do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach to COVID-19 undermines the legitimacy of the harsh restrictions Philadelphia has imposed on its own restaurant industry and demonstrates a callous disregard for how those policies have impacted the city’s residents and businesses. Kenney can drive across the border to Maryland easily, but a Philly bar can’t pick up and move to Delaware to escape the city’s lockdowns.

If nothing else, Philadelphia’s ban on indoor dining certainly fails what I’d call the Burgermeister Meisterburger Yo-Yo Test—a reference, of course, to a memorable scene in the most libertarian Christmas movie ever made. The test is a simple one: If a public official can’t avoid breaking his or her own laws—even, as in Kenney’s case, the spirit of the law—then they’re probably bad laws.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has created fertile ground for arbitrary and meaningless restrictions on economic activity. Worse, it’s not clear that lockdowns have helped curb the spread of the virus. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum noted last week, both Arizona and Georgia have seen COVID-19 cases decline by roughly the same degree in recent weeks despite adopting far different strategies in July—Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey ordered gyms, bars, movie theaters, and water parks to close and imposed strict limitations on restaurants, while Georgia mostly allowed people to decide for themselves whether it was safe to go out.

The pandemic has also created an opportunity for public officials to meddle in even sillier ways, like when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, told bars they couldn’t serve alcohol without also selling food—and then tried to regulate what types of food actually counted as, well, food. He’s also threatened to ban not only indoor dining but also outdoor dining in New York state, which would likely condemn thousands of restaurants to failure. There is no clear public health benefit to any of that.

Bars and restaurants were always going to have a hard time surviving the pandemic as more people voluntarily socially distanced and cut back on their spending in the wake of an economic downturn; public officials should avoid making the crisis worse with arbitrary rules. And if you can’t resist playing with a yo-yo, maybe don’t make it illegal for your constituents to do the same.

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Congress Would Like the CDC To Ruin Halloween

dreamstime_xxl_126033725

On the one holiday of the year it’s traditional to wear masks, Congress is nonetheless asking the CDC for coronavirus guidelines.

A bi-partisan group of 30 lawmakers wonder what protocols the little ghosts, goblins, and vampires should adhere to when—and if—they trick or treat. As The Hill reports:

“We are writing to ask you to update your Halloween safety guidance to include considerations related to COVID-19 so that Americans across the country know how to celebrate the Halloween season safely this year,” the members, including Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Ann Kuster (D-N.H.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), wrote to Redfield last week.

They want to know if kids should attend parties, or package treats for each other, or even participate in some kind of drive-by trick or treating.

“With the appropriate guidance from the CDC, Americans can celebrate Halloween throughout the month of October in ways that prioritize community safety and adhere to rigorous socially distancing requirements,” the members wrote.

By the time you’re prioritizing “rigorous” anything, you’re generally not talking about a super-fun event. If I were to venture a guess, I’d bet that the CDC will recommend that this year, kids celebrate on Zoom with all the joy their parents have experienced in staff meetings these past six months.

Maybe the agency could recommend some new games, like, “Who can suck their mask in the farthest?” Or “Green scream!” where kids compete to see who can create the scariest green screen background (or who can wear enough green paint to blend in except for their eyes and mouth—kind of a cool idea). “Pin the tracer on the virus-infected contact” is another game the scientists might recommend, but apparently this is too hard even for grownups to play.

Halloween was actually ripe for some re-imagining. In recent years it has morphed from the traditional kids-have-the-run-of-the-neighborhood night into an orgy of infantilization, whereby adults walk or even drive their kids house to house, stunting any kind of independence and bravery that might have taken root on this one thrilling night.

This year, they have the perfect excuse to stay home, lock the doors and simply load the kids up with candy (or  in some households, fresh broccoli florets and kombucha). Boo. Hoo.

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‘Who Funds the Rioters?’ Is Not a Question the Federal Government Needs To Ask

rtrltwelve179530

Last week, following President Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention acceptance speech at the White House, protesters surrounded Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and his wife on the streets of Washington, D.C. Video footage showed that the encounter grew tense, and the Pauls say they had to rely on the police to prevent the crowd from assaulting them.

These protesters deserve condemnation. It was wrong of them to make the Pauls fear for their physical safety. (They were also tactically confused: Why shout “say her name” at the senator who introduced a bill named after the “her” in question?) If the activists committed any crimes, they should be held accountable.

But some critics of these activists—including Paul himself—want the government to investigate the purported funding sources of the protests. As Paul explained in an op-ed for Fox News:

After we got back to our hotel room and some safety we heard something frightening. The “protesters” were staying on our floor—including the room next door to us. They were talking about their mob activities and even saying they thought we were here on this floor. We had to develop a 3 a.m. plan with the Capitol Police to get to safety.

My question is: Who are these people? Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in? Law enforcement needs to look at the funding of violent criminal activity like this.

And national Democrats need to confront it. It’s organized. It’s paid for. It’s violent. It’s not about Black lives or any lives; it’s about anarchy and destruction. The American people are starting to catch on and grow tired of it.

Rep. Ken Buck (R–Colo.) expressed a similar demand on Twitter.

This is misguided, for several reasons.

First, the notion that the violent protests cropping up in U.S. cities are funded by a secret, shadowy cabal is a myth. Conspiracy theorists on all sides of the political spectrum like to imagine that their enemies are financed by some secret puppetmaster but, in general, people who show up to protests are usually not paid actors. People engaged in militant, far-left activism may travel from city to city, and they may be loosely connected with other activists in a semi-organized fashion, but they probably aren’t sitting on some secret pile of money.

Second, a mandate to monitor and investigate protest groups would give the federal government frightening license to target not just dangerous activists but also mere political opponents of the administration. Open-ended investigations into alleged funding sources—absent any evidence of larger financial crimes—strikes me as exactly the kind of witch hunt that many Republican critics of the deep state purport to oppose when the target is either Trump or a pro-Trump figure. If specific activists are arrested for violence, looting, or rioting, it may be appropriate—on a case by case basis—for law enforcement to ask questions about their specific circumstances. But any open-ended probe would pose a serious concern on civil libertarians grounds.

The frustrating reality is that much of the wanton property destruction following anti-police protests in cities like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis is opportunistic and only vaguely ideological. When public order breaks down, some subset of the population will rob stores, smash windows, and set buildings on fire. Others flock to protest in hot zones because they like the fight. These are the maladjusted, not paid foot soldiers in some wealthy villain’s war.

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Kentucky Authorities Offered Leniency to Breonna Taylor’s Ex if He Would Implicate Her in Drug Crimes

spnphotosnine964760(1)

They’re trying to “paint a picture of her which was vastly different than the woman she truly was,” says lawyer. Kentucky authorities’ defense for fatally shooting Breonna Taylor in a late-night raid for nonexistent drugs and drug money has always turned on the idea that Taylor—a 26-year-old emergency room technician who lived with her sister—was part of her ex-boyfriend’s alleged drug scheme. Now, new documents show how far they were willing to go to manufacture evidence for this narrative.

“On Tuesday, we were told Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover was offered a plea deal, which would have required him to say that Taylor was part of his drug operation,” Vice news correspondent Roberto Aram Ferdman noted yesterday, adding that “the family’s attorney shared a picture of a plea deal that appears to show it is true.”

To accept the deal, Glover would have had to sign a statement saying that Taylor was among several others who helped him in an “organized crime syndicate” as he “trafficked large amounts of Crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and opiates” in the Louisville area and sold it “from abandoned or vacant homes.”

If he agreed, the Jefferson County Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney was willing to shrink his possible 10-year prison sentence to only probation.

Even if Taylor had been part of this supposed “crime syndicate,” it wouldn’t justify what police did here, of course. They were still trigger-happy goons who did a middle-of-the-night raid, without announcing themselves clearly, as part of an unwinnable but endlessly violent, discriminatory, and abusive war on drugs that makes everyone less safe and routinely leads to avoidable tragedies like these.

But their actions are all the more appalling when you consider the weakness of their evidence that anything illegal was at Taylor’s house. In fact, they raided the home and killed Taylor as she had been disentangling herself from Glover, trying to move on from their relationship and whatever tangential involvement in his activities it may have brought.

But police and county authorities wouldn’t let her. They were insistent on casting the net as wide as possible and taking Taylor down with Glover—at any cost, apparently. And now that Taylor can’t defend herself, they’re trying to manipulate the legal system to get Glover to go along with it.

The attempt shows “the lengths to which those within the police department and Commonwealth’s Attorney went to after Breonna Taylor’s killing to try and paint a picture of her which was vastly different than the woman she truly was,” Taylor’s lawyer, Sam Aguiar, said.

Glover didn’t ultimately take the deal, offered to him in July, and rejects the idea that he is somehow responsible for Taylor’s death. “The police are trying to make it out to be my fault and turning the whole community out here making it look like I brought this to Breonna’s door,” he told The Courier Journal. “There was nothing never there or anything ever there, and at the end of the day, they went about it the wrong way and lied on that search warrant and shot that girl out there,” he said.

FREE MINDS

Antifa Airlines thwarted? President Donald Trump is again rambling on about insane conspiracy theories on national television, this time about how Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden is being controlled by a cabal of shadowy “thugs” that the president can’t talk about.

A garbled memory of a viral rumor? A further attempt to portray Biden as soft on crime in advance of the election? A dog whistle for QAnon? Any way you look at it… WTF?

In related news:

Meanwhile, Biden asks America: “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?”

FREE MARKETS

Marijuana decriminalization vote in three weeks. A date has been set for the U.S. House vote on a bill that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level:

ELECTION 2020

A Military Times poll suggests active-duty troops aren’t too fond of Trump. It reports:

In the latest results — based on 1,018 active-duty troops surveyed in late July and early August — nearly half of respondents (49.9 percent) had an unfavorable view of the president, compared to about 38 percent who had a favorable view. […] Even with the steady decline, Trump’s popularity in the poll remains better than former President Barack Obama. Obama had a 36 percent favorable rating and a 52 percent unfavorable rating in a January 2017 Military Times poll. […] Among active-duty service members surveyed in the poll, 41 percent said they would vote for Biden, the Democratic nominee, if the election was held today. Only 37 percent said they plan to vote to re-elect Trump.

QUICK HITS

• More good news about the ability of masks to defeat facial recognition technologies.

• The latest research on COVID-19 fatality rates confirms that older patients make up a hugely disproportionate amount of deaths from the virus. “Patients 65 or older account for about 16 percent of confirmed cases but four-fifths of COVID-19 deaths,” notes Reason‘s Jacob Sullum:

The crude case fatality rate indicated by the CDC’s numbers (deaths divided by confirmed cases) is about 0.25 percent for patients younger than 50 and nearly 16 percent—63 times higher—for patients older than 64. While the overall crude CFR is 3 percent, the rates among adults range from 0.07 percent for patients in their late teens and 20s to 29 percent for patients 85 or older—more than 400 times higher.

• The Department of Homeland Security has “confirmed NBC News reporting that migrant children who had been separated from their parents were left waiting in vans for hours, in some cases overnight, while waiting to be reunited.”

• Vox’s Matthew Yglesias makes the case for building more housing and letting more people in.

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Congress Would Like the CDC To Ruin Halloween

dreamstime_xxl_126033725

On the one holiday of the year it’s traditional to wear masks, Congress is nonetheless asking the CDC for coronavirus guidelines.

A bi-partisan group of 30 lawmakers wonder what protocols the little ghosts, goblins, and vampires should adhere to when—and if—they trick or treat. As The Hill reports:

“We are writing to ask you to update your Halloween safety guidance to include considerations related to COVID-19 so that Americans across the country know how to celebrate the Halloween season safely this year,” the members, including Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Ann Kuster (D-N.H.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), wrote to Redfield last week.

They want to know if kids should attend parties, or package treats for each other, or even participate in some kind of drive-by trick or treating.

“With the appropriate guidance from the CDC, Americans can celebrate Halloween throughout the month of October in ways that prioritize community safety and adhere to rigorous socially distancing requirements,” the members wrote.

By the time you’re prioritizing “rigorous” anything, you’re generally not talking about a super-fun event. If I were to venture a guess, I’d bet that the CDC will recommend that this year, kids celebrate on Zoom with all the joy their parents have experienced in staff meetings these past six months.

Maybe the agency could recommend some new games, like, “Who can suck their mask in the farthest?” Or “Green scream!” where kids compete to see who can create the scariest green screen background (or who can wear enough green paint to blend in except for their eyes and mouth—kind of a cool idea). “Pin the tracer on the virus-infected contact” is another game the scientists might recommend, but apparently this is too hard even for grownups to play.

Halloween was actually ripe for some re-imagining. In recent years it has morphed from the traditional kids-have-the-run-of-the-neighborhood night into an orgy of infantilization, whereby adults walk or even drive their kids house to house, stunting any kind of independence and bravery that might have taken root on this one thrilling night.

This year, they have the perfect excuse to stay home, lock the doors and simply load the kids up with candy (or  in some households, fresh broccoli florets and kombucha). Boo. Hoo.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2DgVcUy
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‘Who Funds the Rioters?’ Is Not a Question the Federal Government Needs To Ask

rtrltwelve179530

Last week, following President Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention acceptance speech at the White House, protesters surrounded Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and his wife on the streets of Washington, D.C. Video footage showed that the encounter grew tense, and the Pauls say they had to rely on the police to prevent the crowd from assaulting them.

These protesters deserve condemnation. It was wrong of them to make the Pauls fear for their physical safety. (They were also tactically confused: Why shout “say her name” at the senator who introduced a bill named after the “her” in question?) If the activists committed any crimes, they should be held accountable.

But some critics of these activists—including Paul himself—want the government to investigate the purported funding sources of the protests. As Paul explained in an op-ed for Fox News:

After we got back to our hotel room and some safety we heard something frightening. The “protesters” were staying on our floor—including the room next door to us. They were talking about their mob activities and even saying they thought we were here on this floor. We had to develop a 3 a.m. plan with the Capitol Police to get to safety.

My question is: Who are these people? Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in? Law enforcement needs to look at the funding of violent criminal activity like this.

And national Democrats need to confront it. It’s organized. It’s paid for. It’s violent. It’s not about Black lives or any lives; it’s about anarchy and destruction. The American people are starting to catch on and grow tired of it.

Rep. Ken Buck (R–Colo.) expressed a similar demand on Twitter.

This is misguided, for several reasons.

First, the notion that the violent protests cropping up in U.S. cities are funded by a secret, shadowy cabal is a myth. Conspiracy theorists on all sides of the political spectrum like to imagine that their enemies are financed by some secret puppetmaster but, in general, people who show up to protests are usually not paid actors. People engaged in militant, far-left activism may travel from city to city, and they may be loosely connected with other activists in a semi-organized fashion, but they probably aren’t sitting on some secret pile of money.

Second, a mandate to monitor and investigate protest groups would give the federal government frightening license to target not just dangerous activists but also mere political opponents of the administration. Open-ended investigations into alleged funding sources—absent any evidence of larger financial crimes—strikes me as exactly the kind of witch hunt that many Republican critics of the deep state purport to oppose when the target is either Trump or a pro-Trump figure. If specific activists are arrested for violence, looting, or rioting, it may be appropriate—on a case by case basis—for law enforcement to ask questions about their specific circumstances. But any open-ended probe would pose a serious concern on civil libertarians grounds.

The frustrating reality is that much of the wanton property destruction following anti-police protests in cities like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis is opportunistic and only vaguely ideological. When public order breaks down, some subset of the population will rob stores, smash windows, and set buildings on fire. Others flock to protest in hot zones because they like the fight. These are the maladjusted, not paid foot soldiers in some wealthy villain’s war.

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via IFTTT

Kentucky Authorities Offered Leniency to Breonna Taylor’s Ex if He Would Implicate Her in Drug Crimes

spnphotosnine964760(1)

They’re trying to “paint a picture of her which was vastly different than the woman she truly was,” says lawyer. Kentucky authorities’ defense for fatally shooting Breonna Taylor in a late-night raid for nonexistent drugs and drug money has always turned on the idea that Taylor—a 26-year-old emergency room technician who lived with her sister—was part of her ex-boyfriend’s alleged drug scheme. Now, new documents show how far they were willing to go to manufacture evidence for this narrative.

“On Tuesday, we were told Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover was offered a plea deal, which would have required him to say that Taylor was part of his drug operation,” Vice news correspondent Roberto Aram Ferdman noted yesterday, adding that “the family’s attorney shared a picture of a plea deal that appears to show it is true.”

To accept the deal, Glover would have had to sign a statement saying that Taylor was among several others who helped him in an “organized crime syndicate” as he “trafficked large amounts of Crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and opiates” in the Louisville area and sold it “from abandoned or vacant homes.”

If he agreed, the Jefferson County Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney was willing to shrink his possible 10-year prison sentence to only probation.

Even if Taylor had been part of this supposed “crime syndicate,” it wouldn’t justify what police did here, of course. They were still trigger-happy goons who did a middle-of-the-night raid, without announcing themselves clearly, as part of an unwinnable but endlessly violent, discriminatory, and abusive war on drugs that makes everyone less safe and routinely leads to avoidable tragedies like these.

But their actions are all the more appalling when you consider the weakness of their evidence that anything illegal was at Taylor’s house. In fact, they raided the home and killed Taylor as she had been disentangling herself from Glover, trying to move on from their relationship and whatever tangential involvement in his activities it may have brought.

But police and county authorities wouldn’t let her. They were insistent on casting the net as wide as possible and taking Taylor down with Glover—at any cost, apparently. And now that Taylor can’t defend herself, they’re trying to manipulate the legal system to get Glover to go along with it.

The attempt shows “the lengths to which those within the police department and Commonwealth’s Attorney went to after Breonna Taylor’s killing to try and paint a picture of her which was vastly different than the woman she truly was,” Taylor’s lawyer, Sam Aguiar, said.

Glover didn’t ultimately take the deal, offered to him in July, and rejects the idea that he is somehow responsible for Taylor’s death. “The police are trying to make it out to be my fault and turning the whole community out here making it look like I brought this to Breonna’s door,” he told The Courier Journal. “There was nothing never there or anything ever there, and at the end of the day, they went about it the wrong way and lied on that search warrant and shot that girl out there,” he said.

FREE MINDS

Antifa Airlines thwarted? President Donald Trump is again rambling on about insane conspiracy theories on national television, this time about how Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden is being controlled by a cabal of shadowy “thugs” that the president can’t talk about.

A garbled memory of a viral rumor? A further attempt to portray Biden as soft on crime in advance of the election? A dog whistle for QAnon? Any way you look at it… WTF?

In related news:

Meanwhile, Biden asks America: “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?”

FREE MARKETS

Marijuana decriminalization vote in three weeks. A date has been set for the U.S. House vote on a bill that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level:

ELECTION 2020

A Military Times poll suggests active-duty troops aren’t too fond of Trump. It reports:

In the latest results — based on 1,018 active-duty troops surveyed in late July and early August — nearly half of respondents (49.9 percent) had an unfavorable view of the president, compared to about 38 percent who had a favorable view. […] Even with the steady decline, Trump’s popularity in the poll remains better than former President Barack Obama. Obama had a 36 percent favorable rating and a 52 percent unfavorable rating in a January 2017 Military Times poll. […] Among active-duty service members surveyed in the poll, 41 percent said they would vote for Biden, the Democratic nominee, if the election was held today. Only 37 percent said they plan to vote to re-elect Trump.

QUICK HITS

• More good news about the ability of masks to defeat facial recognition technologies.

• The latest research on COVID-19 fatality rates confirms that older patients make up a hugely disproportionate amount of deaths from the virus. “Patients 65 or older account for about 16 percent of confirmed cases but four-fifths of COVID-19 deaths,” notes Reason‘s Jacob Sullum:

The crude case fatality rate indicated by the CDC’s numbers (deaths divided by confirmed cases) is about 0.25 percent for patients younger than 50 and nearly 16 percent—63 times higher—for patients older than 64. While the overall crude CFR is 3 percent, the rates among adults range from 0.07 percent for patients in their late teens and 20s to 29 percent for patients 85 or older—more than 400 times higher.

• The Department of Homeland Security has “confirmed NBC News reporting that migrant children who had been separated from their parents were left waiting in vans for hours, in some cases overnight, while waiting to be reunited.”

• Vox’s Matthew Yglesias makes the case for building more housing and letting more people in.

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via IFTTT