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If you care about substantive policy debate, it’s not good for Donald Trump that The New York Times has published a few pages of 21-year-old state-tax returns showing he declared a $916-million loss in 1995.

Cue another week wasted with trivial distractions from what we should be talking about in the final month-plus of a presidential campaign. Care about foreign policy, government spending, and more? Maybe we’ll get around to hashing all that out after the election. But don’t hold your breath.

To be sure, a billion-dollar write-off is a lot of money and, as the Times suggests in the story’s headline, it means “He Could Have Avoided Paying Taxes for Nearly Two Decades.” This adds fuel to the fire that Hillary Clinton lit during last week’s presidential debate when she said that there are only sketchy reasons for Trump not to release his federal tax returns to the public, as presidential candidates have almost all done since 1976. A billionaire who doesn’t pay any taxes who dares speak for the common man! Ouch, even though there’s no reason to think there’s anything at all illegal or even fuzzy about Trump’s taxes. This will harden Clinton supporters in their contempt for Trump and it will do the same for Trump supporters toward Crooked Hillary, especially if a Clinton operative is unmasked as the leaker. For the record, here’s the Trump campaign’s official response:

Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes, along with very substantial charitable contributions. Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.

More here.

As I type, Trump and Clinton surrogates are duking it out on the Sunday morning shows, explaining why this unmasks Trump as a uniquely awful plutocrat or reveals him to be the single person who can dismantle our terrible tax code and replace it with something that will allow economic growth. This story, like the Miss Universe controversy that immediately preceded it, clearly puts Trump on the defensive. Given his softening in the polls after a weak debate performance and the rapidly approaching end of the campaign season (there are just 37 days leftt), the tax revelation forces Trump to engage an issue that has nothing to do with the core issues that put him in a tight race to the next president.

Whatever. Sucks to be Trump right now. But you know what? No laws apparently have been broken and this doesn’t even amble into the territory of bad judgment that many of his (and Clinton’s) actions do. As Seinfeld’s Kramer would note, most of us don’t even know what a write-off is, and Trump is the one who’s writing it off.

Far more important, this sort of story is a major distraction from actually serious issues tied to the current state of the world and the specific proposals that candidates have laid out in their bids to become the country’s next leader. As Matt Welch demonstrated with respect to foreign policy and failed military interventions, we already know that the “Media Would Rather Talk About Gary Johnson’s ‘Aleppo Moment’ Than a Damning New Report on Hillary Clinton’s Actual War.” And as Brian Doherty pointed out, it turns out that Gary Johnson’s trade-and-diplomacy vision for “has impressed even the foreign policy mavens at Foreign Policy magazine.” Even as Aleppo is now being besieged by Syrian government, Iranian, and Russian forces and the president has dispatched new troops to Iraq, neither Trump nor Hillary have engaged in meaningful foreign-policy discussion about the United States’ role in the world.

And consider this: According to the latest numbers from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Hillary Clinton would hike spending and taxes over the next decade from its already-upward trajectory and historically high levels, while Trump would reduce expected increases in spending but slash tax revenues by far more (thus resulting in yet-bigger deficits). If you care about this sort of thing, only Libertarian Gary Johnson has pledged to submit a balanced budget in his first year while reducing spending and simplifying taxes. Both major-party candidates have signed on to a host of new federal programs (such as paid family leave) and Clinton is pushing for free in-state tuition at public colleges and a doubling of the federal minimum wage. Where Clinton says she wants to expand Social Security and Medicare, two of the largest federal spending programs, Trump has said that he would leave benefits untouched. Neither bothers to offer credible ways to pay for such stuff.

Persistent and high levels of debt correlate strongly with lower-than-average economic growth, so now dig this:

Both candidates’ plans to increase the debt come on top of current law projections that already estimate that debt will grow by $9 trillion over the next decade. As a result, under Clinton’s plans debt would grow from nearly 77 percent of GDP today to over 86 percent by 2026; under Trump’s plans, debt would grow to 105 percent of GDP by 2026.

Note also that CRFB is talking about debt held by the public, a subset of overall government debt. When you add what government agencies owe each other (such as FICA taxes supposedly earmarked for Social Security, Medicare, and more that are spent on other things and replaced by IOUs), the gross debt owed by the government is at or above 100 percent of the economy. Read more from CRFB here.

Even among the content-lite campaigns of recent memory, the 2016 general race has failed to generate much in the way of serious policy discussion. On the Republican side, Donald Trump bullied and vanquished his primary opponents by talking incessantly about the phantom menace of illegal Mexican immigration that peaked almost a decade ago and that 90 percent of Republicans didn’t even care about. At other times, we were treated to disquisitions about the size of his cock, his admiration of Vladimir Putin, and his apparent lack of basic legislative process. On the Democratic side, the Sanders insurgency goosed Clinton’s already-expansive vision of government so the former secretary of state is now promising just about everything to everyone without any pretense of paying for it. She is explicitly running as a continuation of Barack Obama, whose personal charm obscures the sad fact that over 60 percent of Americans agree the country is going in the wrong direction (only about 30 percent think it’s headed in the right direction). Gary Johnson, the most-successful third-party candidate in decades, has voluntarily stepped in more dog piles than he should have, but is at least bringing some serious policy talk to the campaign while also providing a counter to liberal and conservative visions of bigger government.

The Trump tax story will likely be joined by other “October surprises” sprung on the candidates. Here’s hoping the next bombshell will actually spur a substantive discussion about the policies we need to create a more free, more fair, and more prosperous society. But let’s not kid ourselves, right?

On March 18, 2011, an Illinois man named Elijah Manuel was asleep in the passenger seat of his car while his brother was driving when their vehicle was stopped by Joliet police for allegedly failing to signal. Here is how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit summarized Manuel’s allegations about what happened next:

A police officer detected an odor of burnt cannabis from inside the car. Without warning, the officer flung open the passenger’s door and dragged Manuel out. The officer pushed Manuel to the ground, handcuffed him, and then punched and kicked him. The officer then patted down Manuel, and in one pocket found a bottle of pills. The pills were then tested by officers who had arrived at the scene, and these officers falsified the results to show that the pills were ecstasy. Based on these results, Manuel was arrested. In grand jury proceedings on March 31, the police continued to lie about the test results.

On April 1 the Illinois State Police Laboratory confirmed that the pills did not contain ecstasy; the lab further confirmed that the pills did not contain any other controlled substances. Yet the state’s attorney’s office was apparently not informed about the those test results because Manuel continued to remain incarcerated and then, on April 8, he was arraigned on felony drug charges. It was not until May 4, in response to a request from Manuel’s public defender seeking the results of any such lab tests, that the prosecution finally moved to dismiss all charges. After spending 48 days in jail based on bogus accusations about non-existent illegal drugs, Manuel was finally set free on May 5.

This Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case arising from Manuel’s ordeal. At issue in Manuel v. City of Joliet is whether a federal “malicious prosecution” claim filed by Manuel is recognizable under the Fourth Amendment.

Manuel filed suit in April 2013 against multiple Joliet officers, as well as against the city, charging them with malicious prosecution and illegal pretrial detention in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. Specifically, Manuel filed suit under Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code, which provides a federal cause of action against any state or local official, including a police officer, who “subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.”

Unfortunately for Manuel, his federal suit was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. In December 2015 that court ruled against Manuel on the grounds that “federal claims of malicious prosecution are founded on the right to due process, not the Fourth Amendment.” Furthermore, “there is no malicious prosecution claim under federal law if, as here, state law provides a similar cause of action.” In short, the 7th Circuit slammed the federal courthouse doors in Manuel’s face.

This week’s oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court will focus on whether or not the 7th Circuit got it right.

There is good reason to think that the 7th Circuit got it wrong. For starters, that court is an outlier on this issue. Nine other federal appellate courts have ruled that malicious prosecution claims are recognizable under the Fourth Amendment. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit noted in Becker v. Kroll (2007), “We have repeatedly recognized in this circuit that, at least prior to trial, the relevant constitutional underpinning for a claim of malicious prosecution under [Section 1983] must be ‘the Fourth Amendment’s right to be free from unreasonable seizures.'” Had Elijah Manuel been detained in the 10th Circuit, or in any one of eight other federal appellate jurisdictions, his malicious prosecution claims could now move forward in federal court.

Furthermore, it makes little sense to say that the Fourth Amendment was not implicated in Manuel’s pretrial detention. He was arrested, indicted by a grand jury, arraigned, and incarcerated based on trumped-up charges that were ultimately dropped. He spent over a month behind bars after being arraigned on drug charges that the Illinois State Police Laboratory knew for a fact to be baseless. Put differently, Manuel was detained at length without probable cause, a classic Fourth Amendment violation. Indeed, as Manuel and his lawyers observe in their main brief to the Supreme Court, “where, as here, officers mislead magistrates to sustain detentions without probable cause, the detentions thus violate the Fourth Amendment just as surely as when misrepresentations cause detentions under an unfounded arrest warrant.”

In the words of the National Police Accountability Project, “Section 1983 provides a critical safeguard against official abuse, by deterring civil rights violations and, when that deterrence fails, compensating victims.” Elijah Manuel deserves access to this critical safeguard so that he may seek to vindicate his Fourth Amendment rights in federal court.

France has banned disposable plastic cups and plates, the first country to do so. The government had already banned plastic bags. The law will require “all disposable tableware to be made from 50% biologically-sourced materials that can be composted at home by January of 2020. That number will rise to 60% by January of 2025.”

Donald Trump is running slightly behind Hillary Clinton in Michigan. So he visited Novi, a metro-Detroit town five miles from where I live, yesterday. There were plenty of adoring crowds lined up to see him. And later on he tweeted to his swooning audience that:

Such assurances are more than a little rich coming from a Putin wannabe who digs Saudi Arabia’s Islamic sharia law because it makes it easy for men to get divorced.

As Mother Jones reported today:

The Republican presidential candidate praised the Islamic law, or Shariah, system during a 60-second syndicated daily radio commentary called “Trumped!” that he recorded from 2004 to 2008. In a January 2008 segment, Trump discussed a news story of a Saudi man who had divorced his wife for watching a television show while alone at home because, in Trump’s telling, the husband considered it tantamount to being alone with a strange man.

“Men in Saudi Arabia have the authority to divorce their wives without going to the courts,” Trump said. “I guess that would also mean they don’t need prenuptial agreements. The fact is, no courts, no judges—Saudi Arabia sounds like a very good place to get a divorce.”

Maybe that statement, made before Trump acquired any serious political ambitions, can be dismissed as the rantings not of a neo-reactionary in the making but a benign if loudmouthed shock jock. But not his comments in Novi that are false and malicious – and revealing of just how foul Trump is.

As I noted in my recent Reason feature, “Muslim in America,” the vast majority of Muslims in Dearborn are Shias who hate and despise ISIS even more than we do. Why? Because ISIS is a Sunni outfit that terrorizes Shias more than Christians and other infidels.

But that doesn’t stop Islamophobes – the people whom Trump is trying to court with his remarks — from making up stories about Dearborn’s ISIS sympathies. Indeed, last December in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting they spread a vicious rumor that Dearborn’s Muslims had held a pro-ISIS rally waving ISIS flags – and the only reason why the rest of the country didn’t know about this is because the mainstream media was refusing to cover it out of political correctness.

The reality was actually the opposite. As Factcheck.org pointed out then, Dearborn residents did indeed hold a march but it was an anti-ISIS march:

Local TV station WXYZ in Detroit reported on the anti-ISIS rally. Hundreds of Arab Americans attended, WXYZ reported. The station’s video report shows demonstrators chanting, “No more ISIS in the world!” Many carried flags or banners — but in opposition to ISIS, not in support of it. One of the signs reads, “99.9% of ISIS victims are Muslims.”

This is not the first time that there has been an anti-ISIS rally in Dearborn. There was also an anti-ISIS rally held there in March, as reported by the Detroit News.

Likewise, rumors that Dearborn’s Muslim city council has declared sharia law and ordained stoning of adulterers pop up with disturbing regularity – never mind that the council is not majority Muslim (it’s majority Arab American, including two Christians); it hasn’t imposed sharia law; and it most certainly hasn’t legalized stonings.

Indeed, after 9-11 even though George Bush (who had ridden to victory by earning close to 70 percent of the Muslim vote nationally) illegally put 1,400 Arab-American Muslims into indefinite detention, about 4,000 of Dearborn’s Muslims voluntarily signed up as translators and agents for the CIA and FBI to assist America’s fight against terrorism.

What’s more, Trump may think that he was the first one to come up with the bright idea of surveiling mosques, but the reality is that Dearborn’s mosques are already under constant surveillance. Indeed, just to keep the feds off their back, many of them have embraced a policy of complete transparency. They have installed video cameras to track everyone entering and exiting their premises and also started taping all their sermons and events.

This is not to say that they are not furious at the feds for many of its unconstitutional programs such as one that tried to turn imams into informants that I wrote about here and panicked by Trump’s suggestions to impose a travel ban on Muslims, subject them to “extreme vetting,” and stop all Syrian refugees.

But they don’t deserve to be vilified and demonized by a pathetic and desperate man trying to insult his way to the presidency.

Police called in over an apparently mentally ill homeless man who allegedly wielded a knife in front of spooked resident tried to run the man over with their vehicle before fatally shooting him. Police released video from three dash cams as well as 911 recordings related to the July incident late last month within an hour of the Sacramento Bee releasing footage taken by a witness of the shooting itself.

In one of the recordings, one of the officers is heard saying “fuck this guy” and suggesting he would try to run the man over. The second cop agrees. A little over thirty seconds later, the cops fire at the man 14 times, killing him. Police were originally called because the man, Joseph Mann, was allegedly staring at residents who were having coffee outside in a way that made them uncomfortable, as the Sacramento Bee reports. Residents say Mann then began to pretend he was typing on an imaginary keyboard and urinated his pants. Residents say they told him he had to leave. Mann responded by pulling out a knife described as a steak knife, and then residents called police. The resident who called told police Mann had a knife and also suggested he may have had a gun, saying he had seen Mann reach for something in his waistband he said “looked like a gun.” Dispatchers told police Mann was armed with a knife and a gun, but a gun does not appear on the footage nor did police find one after canvassing the area.

The incident, which happened days after high profile police shootings in Baton Rouge and Minnesota and the ambush on police officers in Dallas, led members of the Sacramento city council to demand to see the footage, but the city attorney advised them to wait until the investigation was over. Police released the footage only after the Sacramento Bee released footage taken by a witness. The two cops were placed on “modified duty” after the incident.

Watch the cellphone video:

And dashcams:

Hillary Clinton got the benefit of mens rea considerations from the FBI, so why doesn’t everyone?

Jacob Sullum writes in the October issue of Reason:

Hillary Clinton supporters should have a new appreciation for the legal concept of mens rea—usually translated as “guilty mind”—because it saved her from federal prosecution for using a personal email server as secretary of state. In recommending that the Justice Department not bring charges against the former first lady, FBI Director James Comey differentiated her “extremely careless” handling of “very sensitive, highly classified information” from other cases involving “intentional and willful mishandling.”

Not everyone gets the benefit of such distinctions. Consider the retiree on a snowmobile outing in Colorado who got lost in a blizzard and unwittingly crossed into a National Forest Wilderness Area; the Native Alaskan trapper who sold 10 sea otters to a buyer he mistakenly believed was also a Native Alaskan; and the 11-year-old Virginia girl who rescued a baby woodpecker from her cat.

The first two incidents resulted in misdemeanor and felony convictions, respectively, while the third led to a fine (later rescinded) and threats of prosecution. All three qualify as federal crimes, even though the perpetrators had no idea they were breaking the law.

View this article.

I get the criticism, and contributed to it: Libertarian Party presidential nominee looked bad while again brainfarting a not-particularly-hard TV question about the world he intends to president in. But there’s a galling media double standard at work here. You will find more examples of mainstream journalists calling Aleppo Moment 2.0 a “disqualifying” gaffe—here, and here, and here, and here, for example—than you will, I don’t know, EVEN MENTIONING THAT THERE WAS A MASSIVE AND DAMNING UK PARLIAMENTARY REPORT EVISCERATING HILLARY CLINTON’S PET WAR.

I write about the fundamental unseriousness of America’s “serious” political media over at CNN Opinion. Excerpt:

“This policy,” the conservative-led [parliamentary] committee concluded, “was not informed by accurate intelligence. In particular, the [British] Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element. By the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change. That policy was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-(Gadhafi) Libya. The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of (Gadhafi) regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.” […]

Aside from a handful of mostly ideological outlets, the US news media declined to even note that the Democratic presidential nominee suffered a comprehensive rebuke to her oft-repeated assertion that Libya represented American “smart power at its best.” As The Atlantic delicately put it, “The British public has been engaged in a debate about war that has been largely absent from the U.S. presidential election.” […]

[I]f there’s anything more obnoxious than cheerleaders for Donald “bomb-the-sh—out-of-ISIS” Trump mocking Johnson for foreign-policy ignorance, it’s supporters and enablers of Hillary Clinton rolling their eyes theatrically at a presidential candidate who was against the Iraq and Libyan wars in real time, who wants to pardon rather than imprison Edward Snowden, and who comports himself with occasionally awkward humility rather than with the polished and delusional omniscience that we’ve unfortunately come to demand in our presidential candidates.

Read the whole thing here.

Last week, Glenn Reynolds—the founder and proprietor of Instapundit.com—was suspended from Twitter after posting “run them down” while referring to protestors blocking traffic and harrassing motorists on Interstate 277 in North Carolina. He was reinstated in short order after deleting the tweet but the responses (pro and con) ran hot and heavy. Originally, authorities at the University of Tennessee, where Reynolds teaches law, indicated they would launch an “investigation” into the matter before saying, no, his expression was fully protected by the First Amendment.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie talked with Reynolds about the recent controversy, why cops get away with crimes that ordinary citizens don’t, and his fears that Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other online platforms are approaching “monopoly” status. A self-described libertarian, Reynolds isn’t calling for government intervention but he’s worried that the wide-open ethos of unbridled speech and flame wars is giving way to an online world that is every bit as over-policed and regulated as meat space.

Reynolds also lays out his case for why a Donald Trump presidency would likely be less awful than a Hillary Clinton one. But…is he actually voting for Trump?

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Libertarian Party presidential hopeful Gov. Gary Johnson may seem less than erudite when specific targeted questions about foreign hotspots and foreign leaders are dropped on him on live TV. Still, he has an overall foreign policy vision that has impressed even the foreign policy mavens at Foreign Policy magazine.

There, Emma Ashford provides some useful context on Johnson’s foreign policy acumen, focusing not on minutia but on the importance of principles.

She first points out, as Anthony L. Fisher did first here at Reason, that Johnson is far from unique in making ignorant-sounding gaffes about foreign policy. And Ashford notes that:

the foreign-policy approach offered by the Johnson-Weld campaign is not only a compelling alternative to the current orthodoxy, but is increasingly popular among Americans. A more restrained approach to foreign policy would see the United States involved in fewer unnecessary conflicts around the world, and a much stronger emphasis on diplomacy and other non-military solutions to global problems.

In contrast to Clinton’s liberal interventionist approach, it would avoid getting bogged down in civil wars like Libya and Syria. In contrast to Trump’s curiously aggressive isolationism, a restrained foreign policy sees trade as a positive, security-enhancing factor.

She’s exactly right that that is what an intelligent, balanced outside observer should understand and consider about the Libertarian foreign policy option. But she is also right that the salesmen the Party picked need to up their game:

in order to make a coherent case for restraint in America’s foreign policy, you have to explain why it will work better. Johnson, it turns out, is generally correct in his approach to Syria: U.S. intervention to alleviate suffering, in Aleppo or elsewhere, is unlikely to work and may well make the situation worse. ….But without knowledge of detail, he struggles to explain why.

Ashford pulls together some of the facts showing that, rather than a punchline, Libertarian foreign policy should be a great political selling point:

Polling throughout the election campaign suggests that many of these ideas resonate with voters. In one recent Chicago Council survey, only 27 percent of Americans believed that the United States does too little around the world, while 41 percent of respondents think the United States does too much. More than half of respondents think that other countries should solve their own problems rather than relying on the United States.”

Indeed, it’s likely that some of Johnson’s strongest bases of support come from his foreign policy leanings. Polls show that 36 percent of active-duty troops, many of whom have witnessed first-hand the foreign policy follies of the last decade, intend to vote for Gary Johnson, while 29 percent of millennials — a generation with a strong tendencies towards restraint — are planning to vote for him.

The Foreign Policy writer’s takeaway for Johnson is similar to Matt Welch’s here: that he has a powerful and resonant foreign policy message, and should try harder in the future to not give opponents or the general public a cheap, easy reason to doubt that.