“Which President Bombed Iraq Best” was originally
released on Dec. 8, 2014. The original text is below:
It’s often said that “you can bomb the world to pieces but you
can’t bomb it into peace.” The finalists for the coveted Best Iraq
Bombing Award beg to differ. From Tomahawk cruise missiles to
Predator drones, these Oval Office humanitarians have brought peace
to the very cradle of civilization no fewer than four times in the
past 25 years. Find out which of the
last four presidents war it best.
Approximately 1:30 minutes.
Written by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg. Hosted by
Gillespie. Produced by Bragg.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe
to Reason TV’s
YouTube Channel to get automatic updates when new material
goes live.
During its time in the national spotlight, Ferguson, MO,
received scrutiny
here at Reason and elsewhere for its use of fees and
fines to
generate revenue for the city government, a strategy that some
critics viewed as ratcheting up tension between law enforcement and
the community.
“When you have towns like those in St. Louis county that get in
some cases, 40 percent of their municipal revenue in fines and
fees, they have chosen a very expensive way of taxing their
population, one that creates maximum hassle and maximum hostility,”
says Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and
publisher of the blog Overlawyered.
But now, Bloomberg News
reports, the city actually is planning to increase fines to
address a serious revenue shortfall:
“There are a number of things going on in 2014 and one is a
revenue shortfall that we anticipate making up in 2015,” Jeffrey
Blume, Ferguson’s finance director, said. “There’s about a
million-dollar increase in public-safety fines to make up the
difference.”
Revenue from violations, which already represents the city’s
second-largest source of cash after sales taxes, will rise to 15.7
percent of receipts in fiscal 2015, from a projected 11.8 percent
this year, he said. In 2013, fines brought in $2.2 million, or 11.8
percent of the city’s $18.62 million in annual revenue, according
to budget documents.
Last month, Reason TV highlighted three of the country’s most
“fee-ridden” cities and pegged Ferguson at number two, but maybe
it’s time to move it on up to the top spot. Watch the video above
and decide for yourself.
“America’s 3 Most Fee-Ridden Cities” was originally
released on Nov. 24, 2014. The original text is below:
Fees, fines, and petty law enforcement: Little ticky-tack
violations can pile up quickly and are enough to drive even the
most civic-minded citizens crazy. But they can also create an
undercurrent of hostility between citizens and the government
officials who are supposed to serve them. Former Reason
writer Radley Balko uncovered a pattern of
overzealous fee-collection in the suburbs of St. Louis county
for TheWashington Post and speculated that the
overbearing law enforcement helped create a pressure-cooker
environment that finally exploded in the wake of the Michael Brown
shooting.
“When you have towns like those in St. Louis county that get in
some cases, 40 percent of their municipal revenue in fines and
fees, they have chosen a very expensive way of taxing their
population, one that creates maximum hassle and maximum hostility,”
says Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and
publisher of the blog Overlawyered.
Watch the video above for Reason TV compilation of America’s 3
Most Fee-Ridden Cities, listed below:
3. Detroit, Michigan
In the wake of the largest municipal bankruptcy in history,
Detroit launched a variety of revenue-generating schemes, such as
raising the prices of parking meters in a downtown with a rapidly
dwindling population and workforce. Unfortunately for the city,
about half their meters are broken, making it one of the only
cities to actually
lose money on parking enforcement. But what really grants
Detroit this honor is “Operation Compliance,” an initiative pushed
by former mayor David Bing aimed at bringing all of Detroit’s small
businesses up to code through costly permitting. The initiative
launched with the stated goal of
shutting down 20 businesses a week.
2. Ferguson, Missouri
Ferguson has stayed in the news for the massive protests over
the police shooting of Michael Brown and for the militarized
response of law enforcement to those protests. But tension between
the citizens and the government run deep in Ferguson and the other
nearby St. Louis suburbs. Citizens report of being constantly
harassed by law enforcment over minor violations and then being
forced to navigate through an overrun court system. The Washington Post reported that one courthouse in St. Louis
County had issued five arrest warrants per citizen.
1. Bell, California
Residents of this tiny California town just south of Los Angeles
rose up against the local government after learning that their city
officials were robbing them with high property taxes and ridiculous
parking fines and city fees in order to pay themselves exorbitant
salaries. The ringleader was City Manager Robert Rizzo, who paid
himself
$1.5 million in annual salary and benefits in a town with a per
capita household income of $24,800. Rizzo is now rotting in federal
prison alongside his accomplice, former Assistant City Manager
Angela Spaccia, but the town is still on the hook for the $137
million in debt left behind. Locals call it the
“Rizzo Tax.”
“Ideally, the local population would rise up and say, ‘It’s time
to take back our town. Government is not just a revenue source. It
should be an engine of justice.’ Until that happens, we’ve got a
much wider problem,” says Olson.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick, Tracy
Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller. Approximately 4 minutes.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claims it
is helping America stay healthy with the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act’s mandate to display calories on restaurant
menus and vending machines. Recent studies have shown that this
mandate actually has little or no impact on the ordering behaviors
of the general population. What has yet to be addressed, however,
is the deleterious effect of this mandate on the estimated twenty
million women and ten million men who struggle with eating
disorders during their lifetimes. For those working toward
recovery, writes clinical psychologist Pam Singer, this policy
impedes a foundational part of their efforts.
The
release earlier this week of the Senate’s “torture report” has been
discussed mostly in terms of what went on under George W. Bush’s
presidency and at “his” CIA. That lets other lawmakers—including
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat in charge of the committee that
released the report, and Barack Obama, among others—off way too
easy. And it leads to a serious misapprehension of the true
significance of the mess in Washington, D.C. From my Daily Beast column on the topic:
We need to be clear about the ultimate import of the torture
report, which covers a period from late 2001 through 2009 and whose
release was unconscionably delayed for years. It won’t be the cause
of lowered international esteem for America or even attacks on
overseas personnel. No, that’s all due to the same old failed
interventionist foreign policy, massive and ongoing drone attacks,
and the proliferation of “dumb wars” over the past dozen years
under both Republican and Democratic presidents and Congresses.
The torture report is simply the latest and most graphic
incarnation of an existential leadership crisis that has eaten
through Washington’s moral authority and ability to govern, in the
way road salt and rust eat through car mufflers in a Buffalo
winter. “America is great because she is good,” wrote Tocqueville back in the day. “If America
ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” We’ve got a lot
of explaining to do, not just to the rest of the world but to
ourselves. How much longer will we countenance the post-9/11
national security state, which Edward Snowden’s ongoing revelations
remind us are constantly mutating into new forms and
outrages?…
Nobody here has
credibility. Claims that they never knew about waterboarding and
other enhanced interrogation techniques by leaders such as Nancy
Pelosi have never been particularly credible. Sen.
Dianne Feinstein notes at the very start of the report, the
original investigations started in 2007 when it came to light that
the CIA had destroyed (accidentally!) video of its interrogations.
What took so long for this all to see the light of day? And for all
President Obama’s cloying campaign patter about transparency, he
still chose to keep 9,400 CIA documentsfrom the Senate
Committee, citing “executive privilege.” Some secrets, it seems,
must be kept even from elected representatives who could still be
sworn to secrecy….
The leadership in both parties is laughable and ineffective,
incapable even of pushing a budget through in the official manner
while missing no opportunity to sermonize on the real and imagined
evils of their legislative adversaries. The torture report taunts
both sides equally because in the final analysis, the difference
between “How could you support this?” and “How could you let this
happen?” is morally null and void.
Recently, the FDA, courts, and voters in
several states have had their say on a variety of food-labeling
issues.
The FDA’s menu-labeling rules dropped last month.
Lawsuits on a variety of food-labeling issues continue to bubble.
Examples include lawsuits over labels appearing on foods
from mayonnaise to booty to skim
milk.
Now Congress is having its say. And the early results of this
bipartisan effort, it may surprise you to learn, aren’t half bad,
according to Baylen Linnekin.
It was only a few months ago that everybody
was livid when A-list celebs were hacked and naked selfies flooded
the internet like Nigerian get-rich-quick emails used to. With the
hack of Sony and the exposure of terabytes of confidential data,
emails, and more, all we’re interested in is just how awful
Hollywood really is:
There is unapologetic prurience at the chance to get a real
behind-the-scenes look at an industry long notorious for its
wicked, backbiting, and hypocritical ways. Big-shot producer Scott
Rudin tells Sony co-chair Amy Pascal he thinks Angelina Jolie is
“a minimally talented spoiled brat”? A-List
director David Fincher is as difficult as Hitler was anti-Semitic? Tell us
more!
In
a new column for Time, I argue that as hacks become more common
and more public, expect people to become in general to become more
forgiving:
Even a few decades ago, the release of nude photos was enough to
cost Miss America her crown. However mortified they might be
personally, none of the celebrities outed in the nude picture hack
can claim much if any damage to their professional life. So it is
with Hollywood hypocrisy and scandalous personal behavior, which
has never been in short supply.
Short of revelations of serious crime—such as the
rape allegations Bill Cosby is facing—the public will simply
consume any behind-the-scenes drama as something akin to a bonus
track on a DVD. If anything, expect seemingly unauthorized “hacks”
to become strategically deployed to pique curiosity about projects.
Certainly,The Interview is a more interesting movie
when we know that studio executives wanted to tone it down.
And expect Hollywood players—phonies that they are—to be the
most forgiving of all. Rudin and Pascal have already apologized for their “racially insensitive remarks” and Pascal has
begun a ritualized apology tour by phoning the
Rev. Al Sharpton and promising to go on the tax-avoiding MSNBC
host’s show. Pascal has even managed to air kiss Angelina Jolie, the object of
withering scorn in one of the most widely discussed email exchanges
with Rudin. Most important, though, Rudin and Pascal have
reportedly also forgiven each other for their harsh comments.
Because in Hollywood, after all, it’s who you know that counts most
of all.
In a Google Hangout-ed interview to a D.C. Cato Institute
conference on surveillance that is going on right this second as I
type, former NSA and CIA guy Edward Snowden suggests something few
people with government agencies have the nerve to suggest: maybe
those agencies don’t need to exist at all.
Snowden suggested that our major modern spy agencies arose
during the rush of World War and perhaps didn’t need to survive
them at all, and now “can be replaced by methods of law
enforcement,” even when aimed at foreigners like Vladimir Putin:
“Do we really need an NSA and secret courts to wiretap Putin?” when
he thinks any judge through any normal specific targeted law
enforcement procedure would give permission to do so.
He seems to think the extension of normal law enforcement
procedures to even the countries’ overseas desires to investigate
would work OK, and maybe we don’t need “secret organizations that
inevitably push beyond” any limits we might imagine we want to hold
them to, once they are able to disappear behind a screen of
“national security secrecy.”
Snowden also says he still hopes one day to be able to return to
the United States.
Lima, Peru – The 20th Conference of the
Parties (COP-20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) is supposed to wrap up today. The headline
is taken from a press release from the activist group, the Third
World Network. They, along with other activists and envoys from
developing countries, are not happy about the direction in which
the negotiations are going here at the COP. Why? In a word,
money.
The COP was chiefly convened to set up a formal system under
which countries make pledges before March 2015 about how they plan
to handle climate change, most especially their greenhouse gas
emissions cuts. Secondly it supposed is to approve a draft
negotiating text for the global climate change agreement that is to
be adopted next year at the COP in Paris. It looks like a Paris
text will be accepted since it is mostly an un-curated wish list of
possible policies. Nothing is excluded, so every country can hope
for a nice policy gift just before Christmas next year in Paris.
This afternoon featured a succession of press conferences at
which various activist groups and self-styled representatives of
civil society got to throw the moral equivalent of temper tantrums.
I have now covered nearly ten of these meeting and the endgame
always, always, always comes down to a fight over money. The rich
countries refuse to pony up as much as the poor countries think
they deserve. So perennially disappointed activists are again
furious that the rich countries are not making explicit promises to
supply billions in funds to help poor countries. Here are some
representative comments:
Lidy Nacpil from Jubilee South Asia Pacific: “We demand a
finance roadmap—when and how much they [rich countries] will
deliver on their financial obligations before 2020.”
Jagoda Munic, Chairperson Friends of the Earth
International: “The inaction of wealthy nations at
the UN climate negotiations is outrageous. It flies in the face of
the most vulnerable countries and communities suffering from the
climate crisis. This is climate injustice.”
Samantha Smith from the WWF’s Global Climate and Energy
Initiative: “We are not seeing the political will, the money, and
the urgency that the climate crisis all around us demands.”
John Foran from the International Institute of Climate Action
and Theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara: “The
problem is that the neoliberal capitalist economy is at war with
the planet and its people.”
Michael Dorsey from the Joint Center for Political and Economic
Studies and Sierra Club board member: on the board of the Sierra
Club: “We are on a course for low ambition; we are on a course for
a Paris agreement with no binding commitments.”
Pascoe Sabado from Corporate Europe Observatory: “We have to
accept that climate change is not about the climate; it is about
the economy. Climate change is about system change.”
A
leaked memo from the so-called like-minded development group of
countries – basically some 40 of the world’s poorest countries –
suggests that they may not agree with the proposals being put forth
here and so COP-20 could end with no decisions on how to proceed to
the negotiations in Paris. This kind of threat surfaces at every
COP, so it’s doubtful that they will carry through with it, but
we’ll see.
I will analyze whatever is decided here at the COP next
week.
It started with a simple question. What if more of the web
worked the way BitTorrent does?
Project Maelstrom begins to answer that question with our first
public release of a web browser that can power a new way for web
content to be published, accessed and consumed. Truly an Internet
powered by people, one that lowers barriers and denies gatekeepers
their grip on our future.
The
announcement is more of a manifesto than an actual explanation,
but it’s easy to extrapolate the basic details.
BitTorrent is a protocol that uses a peer-to-peer network for
file sharing. It allows users to collect data in bits and pieces
off the hard drives of others users instead of downloading files
directly from a central server.
A Web browser built with BitTorrent could load pages by drawing
information from other people who’ve already visited the same
websites and automatically saved some of the information, instead
of going straight to the source. So when users log on to Reason.com
in the future, they’ll be pulling different little pieces of
data—text, pictures, ads—from millions (billions!) of other users
instead of straight off of our server.
An obvious benefit is speedy browsing. With Project Malestrom,
blockbuster stories at Reason.com wouldn’t affect download speeds
because users wouldn’t all at once be trying to access the same
server.
Project Malestrom could also help unclog the Internet’s
pipes—muting the debate over net neutrality and denying Washington
justification for “fucking
up the Internet“—because BitTorrent has an elegant system of
prioritizing data flows called “Micro Transport Protocol.”
“It’s the best example we have of technology being used to solve
what is perceived to be a policy problem,” BitTorrent CEO Eric
Klinker
toldFast Company when asked about its Micro Transport
Protocol. “It’s only through the technology that the Internet’s
rules are written.”
But here’s what I find most exciting about Project Maelstrom: If
the Web is distributed over a vast decentralized network,
governments have no way to control what people do and say online.
Sending in men with guns to pull a server offline is a waste of
time if the data on that server is duplicated on billions of
computers dispersed around the globe.
This technology could also supercharge projects like OpenBazaar, a decentralized
e-commerce platform in which home computers act as nodes in a vast
free trade network that nobody controls. And it seems like a first
step towards the dream of a “mesh network,”
in which the Internet has no trunk pipes and every computer is
simply linked to another computer, creating a network so dispersed
that no central authority could control or destroy it.
Last year the Texas legislature
deregulated craft beer in
several significant ways, allowing on-site sales at small
breweries, letting brewpubs sell their beer in bottles at stores,
and raising the production cap under which breweries are
allowed to distribute their own products. At the same time,
however, legislatiors decreed that brewers could no longer sell
distribution rights to wholesalers, even though they are legally
required to pick one distributor for a given territory. That change
was a windfall for distributors, who now get these valuable rights
for free yet can sell them to other distributors, and a signficant
revenue loss for craft brewers, who now find it more difficult to
expand beyond their local markets. This week the Institute for
Justice filed a
lawsuit on behalf of three craft brewers who argue that the
legislature’s arbitrary reassignment of distribution rights
violates the Texas Constitution.
In their
complaint, Live Oak Brewing, Peticolas Brewing, and Revolver
Brewing (located in Austin, in Dallas, and near Fort Worth,
respectively) argue that the new rules violate Article I, Section
17 of the Texas Constitution, which allows the government to take
people’s property only with “adequate compensation” and only for
public use or to eliminate urban blight. They also cite Article I,
Section 19, which says people may not be deprived of “life,
liberty, property, privileges or
immunities…except by the due course of the law of
the land.” The complaint says the rights
protected by this guarantee include “the right to earn
an honest living in the occupation of
one’s choice free from unreasonable governmental
interference.”
I.J. argues that there is no legitimate public policy
rationale for compelling brewers to give away their distribution
rights. “This law has nothing to do with protecting
consumers,” it says. “It is a blatant
transfer of wealth from brewers to distributors who got the law
changed using political connections.” It is easy to understand why
distributors, whose status as middlemen controlling access to beer,
wine, and liquor is protected by law, would rather not have to pay
for the privilege of selling newly popular craft beers. But it is
hard to see how catering to that preference serves anyone else’s
interests. To the contrary, it hurts consumers by making it harder
for them to try interesting new beers.