Tag: posts

Watch a special bonus Independents show with Matt Welch,
Kennedy, Kmele Foster and Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward NOW.

The National Cannabis Industry
Association is hosting its first annual Cannabis Business
Summit at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver this week.

See product photos here.

As I reported at
length last October, California was the first state to create a
statewide regulatory structure to allow the use of smartphone apps
that summon rides-for-hire; the most prominent such companies are
Uber and Lyft. 

Despite the fact that the ride services, at least, are in fact
fully legal and regulated in California, and amazingly convenient
for users, the University of California system has announced that
its employees cannot use them for any professionally required
rides, at least not on their employers’ dime. (The UC system has
similarly disallowed reimbursement for using Airbnb for
lodging.)

From
Inside Higher Ed:

University of California employees will from now on have to hail
regular cabs and book standard hotel rooms when traveling on
official business, as the system’s Office of Risk Services has
decided to ban the use of peer-to-peer services such as Airbnb,
Lyft and Uber.

Those and other service startups “should not be used because of
concerns that these services are not fully regulated and do not
protect users to the same extent as a commercially regulated
business,” according to an email sent out to the University of
California at Los Angeles campus. “As the market matures and these
businesses evolve, the University may reconsider whether
reimbursement of travel costs provided by peer-to-peer or sharing
businesses will be allowed.”

The decision was made due to “insurance concerns,” a spokeswoman
for the university system said in an email.

Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor,
reproduced the letter announcing the policy at his blog at the
Washington Post.

It is an incalculable—but large, I assure you—number of employee
man-hours that will be wasted waiting for cabs in California by
this policy. Taxpayers should be ocncerned.

When Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) announced
last week that he would pull his state out of Common Core, he
may have been sounding the death knell of the national education
standards. Though a confluence of pushy and powerful interest
groups have promised that they invented the solution to the
American education crisis, people just aren’t buying that more
top-down standardization is the answer, writes Robby Soave.

Fierce opposition to the standards is remarkably nonpartisan.
Both conservative grassroots organizations and teachers unions are
urging state legislatures to resist Core implementation. Thousands
of parents and teachers have shown up to townhall meetings to
demand that their school boards don’t hand over curriculum
sovereignty to regional or federal education authorities.

The opponents are winning, and if Jindal’s flip flop is any
indication, the momentum seems to be shifting against Common Core.
Libertarians should see this as a triumph, according to Soave.

View this article.

• The Syrian government conducted airstrikes
  in Iraq today, killing 57
  civilians. Instead of backing away slowly and mumbling about
  leaving the stove on, the U.S. sent in
  special forces.
• “The Constitution makes it clear that a president’s job is to
  faithfully execute the laws. In my view, the president has not
  faithfully executed the laws,” said House Speaker John Boehner,
  confirming today that he
  intends to sue President Obama for overstepping his
  executive authority.
• It’s been a busy day in a couple of courts. The Supreme Court
  ruled that police
  need a warrant to search a cell phone and that tech
  company Aereo’s television streaming business is illegal.
  A federal appeals court upheld gay marriage in
  Utah, while another federal court struck down Indiana’s ban
  on gay marriage.
• A Commerce Department report released today says that the U.S.
  economy
  shrank 2.9 percent in the first quarter of 2014. It’s just
  shrinkage from the cold weather, I swear.
• The Chicago City Council voted to severely
  restrict potential locations for gun stores and will require
  every firearm transaction to be recorded on video.
• The Cleveland Indians could get hit with $9
  billion lawsuit over their name and mascot if Robert Roche
  of the American Indian Education Center follows through with a
  threat he made today.

A Washington school district is
going the extra mile to ensure that fun dies a wretched death:
Students will now be prohibited from bringing cupcakes to school to
celebrate their birthdays. 

The sweet snacks were deemed inappropriate, given the Obama
administration’s federal health mandates for public schools,

according to KIRO 7:

The move is part of an 18-month wellness and nutrition study
that started after a new federal wellness policy took effect
requiring superintendents nationwide to monitor nutritional
standards for students.

The district has gotten three written complaints so far.

Instead of a cupcake, students will now get a pencil or handmade
card from classmates.

How fun.

Apparently, some teachers complained that there were simply too
many birthdays during certain weeks and the extra sweets made kids
rowdy. Okay, but can’t they just celebrate some joint birthdays
without cutting cake entirely?

Nope,
according to Edmonds School District spokeswoman DJ Jakala:

“If the child chooses, the class will sing to them. Like I said,
there are instances of personalized cards and they can be first in
line,” said Jakala.

Just let them eat cake.

Hat tip:
Eric Owens / The Daily Caller

An influx
of unaccompanied children crossing the Mexican boarder is
putting a strain on the resources of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), the department tasked with providing basic
necessities to detained illegal immigrants. 

In a bid
solicitation posted earlier this month, the agency said it
needs 3,500 pairs of 100 percent cotton men’s briefs from sizes
medium to extra large. But the agency has bigger problems than the
bare bottoms of border hoppers.

With more than 52,000 Central American minors arrested since
October, the patrol stations in South Texas have nowhere to put
them. According to permits obtained by the Associated
Press, the
U.S. government plans to turn an empty 22,000 square-foot warehouse
near the Rio Grande Valley’s busiest Border Patrol station into a
facility to house 1,000 children in “four fence-enclosed
pods inside a corrugated steel warehouse.” The new “processing
facility” will have rows of cells with unsecured doors and open
“interaction/play” areas.

Currently the U.S. detains minors who illegally enter the
country without an adult. A 2008 law requires them to be turned
over to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) within 72
hours. But because HHS is overwhelmed as well, this procedure is
rarely followed, said
Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Craig
Fugate during a recent congressional hearing.

When the children are finally turned over to HHS, they are
“processed” and then sent to shelters around the country. Only
later does the department make arrangements to send them back to
their home countries. This is not true for all children who are
caught crossing the border. Mexican
children can usually be sent back immediately.

The problem is that the majority of unaccompanied
children are coming from places like Honduras and
Guatemala. Tragically, many of these children are fleeing
to the U.S. to escape poverty and seek refuge from gangs and
violence.

Children and their families are reportedly being convinced by
people known as coyotes, who facilitate human
smuggling, that
they will receive permits to stay in the U.S. because of President
Obama’s 2011 Deferred Access for Childhood Arrivals program,
which allows young immigrants to apply for a two-year
authorization. The program would not apply to new immigrants,
however. Applicants must have been in the U.S. for at least five
years as of 2012.

And unfortunately things look like they’re only going to get
worse as the number of children immigrating illegally
is expected to keep rising. Border Patrol better order more
underwear.

On June 25-26, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and
Arapaho warriors demonstrated that even underdog natives have a
fighting chance against the forces of an advanced and aggressive
power—at least if the advanced troops are led by a vain and
arrogant commander and hobbled by idiotic bureaucracy. Once widely
venerated as an American hero, George Armstrong Custer is now
largely regarded as a brutal enforcer of inhumane policies against
Native Americans, and man who paved the way to his own demise—while
taking a lot of other people with him.

James “Public Policy
Hooligan” Bovard notes
the historical significance of the date, and the lessons to be
drawn from it.

On this day in 1876, George S. Custer led his 7th Cavalry
regiment to their demise in Montana. The Battle of Little Big Horn
was one of the biggest defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the war
against the Indians. It is only in recent years that proper
attention has been paid to the role of atrocities by Custer and
other military leaders in stirring up the wrath of oppressed
Indians.

Custer was something of a protégé of General
Philip Sheridan, he of “the only good Indians I ever saw were
dead” fame. That was a quote Sheridan denied uttering, though his
prosecution of the Indian Wars lived up to its tone, and Custer was
a tool in that prosecution. Not surprisingly, such ham-handed
attacks on Native Americans provoked anger and led to
retaliation.

The Battle of Little Big Horn was lost by Custer and his
soldiers not just because he stirred a hornet’s nest and then stuck
his head (and those of his men) in, but because his troops were
denied the products of the industrial civilization they
represented. As Bovard puts it, “Custer’s men were wiped out in
part because the Army Quartermaster refused to permit them to carry
repeating rifles—which supposedly wasted ammo. The Indians didn’t
have a quartermaster, so they had repeating rifles, and the rest is
history.”

There is no arrogant, oppressive power so overwhelming that it
can’t be crippled by red tape.

It’s not as if Custer hadn’t had ample warning that his good
looks on horseback were insufficient defense against the wrath of
guerrilla forces. While leading his troops at the
Washita Massacre, during which he attacked and killed Cheyenne
Indians living peacefully on reservation land, he was almost cut
off when he discovered that the settlement he attacked was only one
of many.

Custer also went up, at great cost, Bovard points out, against
the Confederacy’s Col. John S. Mosby. Mosby very effectively used
irregular tactics against Union forces in a lesson from which
Custer apparently learned nothing.

Failing to learn from experience, whether it’s a matter of
response to tactics, or to avoid policies that invite
blowback, is as
much a problem now as it was then.

Environmental bureaucrats: they are just like us! If we like to
leave feces around the hallways of our offices, that is.

Some
digging from
Government Executive uncovers some Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) actions that could be said to pollute the
human, if not the natural, environment:

Management for [Environmental Protection Agency] Region 8 in
Denver, Colo., wrote an email earlier this year to all staff in the
area pleading with them to stop inappropriate bathroom behavior,
including defecating in the hallway.  

In the email, obtained by Government Executive,
Deputy Regional Administrator Howard Cantor mentioned “several
incidents” in the building, including clogging the toilets with
paper towels and “an individual placing feces in the hallway”
outside the restroom.

Confounded by what to make of this occurrence, EPA management
“consulted” with workplace violence “national expert” John
Nicoletti, who said that hallway feces is in fact a health and
safety risk. He added the behavior was “very dangerous” and the
individuals responsible would “probably escalate” their
actions….

EPA spokesman Richard Mylott provided the following
statement:

“EPA cannot comment on ongoing personnel matters. EPA’s actions
in response to recent workplace issues have been deliberate and
have focused on ensuring a safe work environment for our employees.
Our brief consultation with Dr. Nicoletti on this matter, a
resource who regularly provides our office with training and
expertise on workplace issues, reflects our commitment to securing
a safe workplace.”

The
Fourth Amendment protects our “persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Today, in the
case of
Riley v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
unanimously that this constitutional protection extends to the
cellphones we carry around with us, even when the police have
placed us under arrest and would like to search those cellphones
without a warrant in the hopes of finding some incriminating
evidence. “Our answer to the question of what police must do before
searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly
simple,” declared Chief Justice John Roberts, “get a warrant.”

It’s a welcome decision and a well-deserved victory for digital
privacy. It’s also a stinging benchslap for the Obama
administration and the other parties who lined up in favor of
aggressive law enforcement tactics in this case. For example,
according to one legal filing
submitted by the Obama administration, “Although cell phones
can contain a great deal of personal information, so can many other
items that officers have long had authority to search, and the
search of a cell phone is no more intrusive than other actions that
the police may take once a person has been lawfully arrested.”
Translation: The Fourth Amendment should not apply.

But the problem with that boundless view of government power is
that it would give the police free rein to access the emails,
texts, photos, videos, and GPS tracking data of each and every
person that has been placed under arrest, including those persons
arrested for minor crimes such as jaywalking. What’s more, as the
chief justice observed in his opinion, “a cell phone search would
typically expose to the government far more than the most
exhaustive search of a house,” since unprecedented amounts of
private information is now available at the touch of a cellphone
screen or button.

As for the government’s claim that a warrantless cellphone
search is “materially indistinguishable” from the sort of
warrantless physical searches that the police are allowed to do in
order to locate hidden weapons, Roberts was equally dismissive.
“That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially
indistinguishable from a flight to the moon,” he quipped. “Both are
ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else justifies
lumping them together.”

The whole point of the Fourth Amendment is to safeguard the
citizenry against government snooping, meddling, and overreaching.
Today, the Supreme Court gave the Fourth Amendment its due and put
it to precisely that use in Riley v. California.