Tag: posts

America has a lot of economic, social, and political
obstacles to overcome, according to economist and author Doug
Casey. Casey recently sat down with Reason TV’s
Nick Gillespie to discuss these challenges and how we can learn
from failed states. 

View this article.

For about two years, a New
York–based business called Aereo has offered a useful service: It
receives local TV broadcasts on thousands of tiny antennas, stores
the programs on DVRs, and transmits them on demand to
subscribers’ laptops, tablets, and phones. Today the Supreme Court
told the company to cut it out: Reversing a lower court’s decision,
it ruled
6–3 that Aereo’s activities violate copyright law.

The big broadcasters don’t like Aereo because it doesn’t pay the
fees that cable and satellite companies pony up for the right to
retransmit programs. So they sued, claiming that Aero’s efforts
amount to a public performance of their copyrighted material.
During oral
arguments, Aereo attorney David Frederick argued that this
characterization of the company’s activities was wrong, and that it
was merely “providing antennas and DVRs” that let consumers do
things that are already legal.

The Court sided with the broadcasters. Writing for the majority,
Justice Stephen Breyer points out that Congress amended the
Copyright Act for the specific purpose of treating cable broadcasts
of local TV channels as performances. What Aereo has been doing,
Breyer concludes, is similar enough to qualify as a performance
too. Frederick had argued that even if this were so, that would not
make its service a public performance, since each
transmission is received only by the user who requests it—a
private transaction. The Court was unpersuaded, arguing
that in practical terms this was still fundamentally the same as
cable.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent—which was joined by justices
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—calls this an “improvised
standard” that amounts to “looks-like-cable-TV.” The dissenters
deny that the company engages in a performance at all, let alone a
public one. An Aereo transmission “undoubtedly results in a
performance,” Scalia writes, but “the question is who does
the performing.” If the answer to that question is unpalatable to
the TV industry, the “proper course is not to bend and twist the
[Copyright] Act’s terms in an effort to produce a just outcome, but
to apply the law as it stands and leave to Congress the task of
deciding whether the Copyright Act needs an upgrade.”

For more on the issue—and on what’s coming next—here is a Reason
TV video from earlier this month:

Tonight’s episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT,
with re-airs three hours later) gets straight into some Supreme
Court news from today: The robust victory for cellphone privacy in

Riley v. California, and the big victory for
Big Media in
American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo.
Navigating both decisions is Cato Supreme Court Review
Editor in Chief Ilya Shaprio.

Beloved former Reason staffer
Radley Balko will

break down the ACLU’s big new report, “War
Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American
Policing.” Daily Beast national security reporter
Eli Lake will talk about
the latest horrors from ISIS. Fox Business analyst
Elizabeth MacDonald will dive into those
ghastly new GDP numbers. Party Panelists Jill Filipovic and Sonnie Johnson will argue
about the Clinton family’s finances (and depictions thereof), and
the co-hosts will bat around the
latest IRS illegality.

Follow The Independents on Facebook at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and
click on this page
for video of past segments.

“Armed forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq,”

explained President Barack Obama while announcing that he was
sending up to 300 military “advisers” back to the country from
which the United States officially withdrew its armed forces in
December 2011. (The New York Times reports
that the U.S. embassy and consulates in Iraq employ about 5,500
Americans, a mix of military personnel, contractors, and
diplomats).

If it seems difficult for American soldiers to leave Iraq once
and for all, it may be because the United States has always liked
to keep military personnel stationed in vanquished countries long
after the battles ended.

Indeed, the U.S. armed forces currently station tens of
thousands of soldiers in countries such as Italy (which surrendered
to the Allies in World War II in September 1943), Germany (May
1945), Japan (August 1945), and South Korea (where fighting ended
in July 1953).

In the latest accounting from the Defense Manpower Data
Center, the United States has about 1.35 million total active
military, including about 160,000 troops stationed
overseas. 

In a 2-1 decision today, a
federal appeals court in Denver upheld a ruling from 2013 that

Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage recognition is
unconstitutional.

If Utah chooses to appeal this latest ruling (which the judge
has put on hold for the state to consider its options), it will be
up to the Supreme Court to decide if it wants to hear it.

In the majority decision, Judge Carlos Lucero writes, “We hold
that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right to
marry, establish a family, raise children, and enjoy the full
protection of a state’s marital laws. A state may not deny the
issuance of a marriage license to two persons, or refuse to
recognize their marriage, based solely upon the sex of the persons
in the marriage union.” Read the decision here.

In the dissent, Judge Paul J. Kelly
said the court was overstepping its authority: We should resist
the temptation to become philosopher-kings, imposing our views
under the guise of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Assuming Utah continues its appeal, the Supreme Court would have
to decide to take the case up and consider whether setting a legal
precedent that gay marriage recognition is or is not a right. If
they decline to take up the case, technically they are avoiding the
precedent, but given that federal judges have been striking down
gay marriage bans wherever they’ve been challenged (less than an
hour before this announcement,
a judge struck down Indiana’s ban, and the state has already
begun handing out marriage licenses), gay marriage recognition is
likely to become the law of the land anyway.

The newly released teaser trailer for The
Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 will remind everyone why no
other recent pop culture phenomenon is as strikingly
libertarian.

The teaser depicts President Snow, ruthless dictator of the
fictional North American country of Panem, rallying viewers of a
government-run propaganda TV station to pledge total support to his
rule as creepy buzzwords like “UNITY” appear on screen.

His speech is accompanied by cheesy background music straight
out of a modern political ad, though it finds a menacing note as
Snow’s threats grow more explicit:

“Ours is an elegant system conceived to nourish and protect.
Your districts are the body, the Capitol is the heart. Your hard
work feeds us, and in return, we feed and protect you. But if you
resist the system, you starve yourself. If you fight against it, it
is you who will bleed. I know you will stand with me, with us, with
all of us, together as one. Panem today. Panem tomorrow. Panem
forever.”

Viewers are encouraged to use the hastag #OnePanem
and visit thecapitol.pn to
learn more about how their government is keeping them safe from
pesky freedom fighters like Katniss Everdeen.

The film will be released on November 21. Watch the teaser
below.

An update on the
Philly police officer who had a habit of jumping into her
teenage daughter’s fights. Tamika Gross was suspended without pay
for 30 days and
will be fired after that, according to the police department
(as a public employee, Gross will likely be able to appeal that
decision). This week, Gross was charged with a felony count of
endangering the welfare of a child and a number of misdemeanor
counts related to corrupting minors, assault, and reckless
endangerment. 

The latest incident for which Gross is being charged, which

we covered last year, happened in October. In that incident,
Gross jumped in to join a fight over a boy between her daughter and
another teenage girl The first one happened in January 2012, when
Gross demanded her 18-year-old son fight another teenage boy, which
led to a wider fight between multiple boys.

It took the Philadelphia Police Department’s Internal Affairs
division and the District Attorney two and a half years to
investigate, and these charges and the suspension/firing come more
than six months after the mother of the teenage girl in the latest
incident complained about the cop assaulting her child.

Nevertheless, a police spokesperson wanted resident to know
Gross’ behavior was “what we are combating every day out on the
streets” and that they “don’t want any of our officers encouraging
this type of behavior.”  The lag time between the incidents
and the charges, and the length of the investigation, isn’t very
encouraging.

Business-oriented service club
Rotary International raises money to fund projects to help build
clean water wells for third-world citizens in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America (example of their efforts here; full disclosure:
I’m an extremely lapsed Rotary member from back during my
newspaperman days).  Maybe we should consider sending them up
to Detroit.

The latest news in the decades-long collapse of Motor City is
that the Detroit Water and Sewage Department began cracking down on
businesses and residents who had fallen behind on their bills,
sending out tens of thousands of turn-off warnings. In May, the
city cut off the water to about 4,500 residents. A spokesman for
the department said that most of the affected people made
arrangements to turn the water back on within 48 hours. But since
then several local groups have essentially embraced Detroit’s
status as a third-world municipality and has called on United
Nations for aid. From the
Detroit Free Press:

The coalition stated in
an 8-page report issued June 18 that it heard directly from
people impacted by the shutoffs, who claimed they were given no
warning.

“Sick people have been left without running water and working
toilets,” the report states. “People recovering from surgery cannot
wash and change bandages. Children cannot bathe and parents cannot
cook.”

The coalition is calling for services to be restored and for
state and federal agencies to help prevent a transfer of the
utility’s financial burden onto residents who are currently paying
“exorbitant rates.”

The news report unfortunately lacks any context about the claim
of “exorbitant rates.” Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in the same
story claims that water rates in Detroit have increased by 119
percent over the past decade, which, while it seems like a big
number, I don’t believe is actually out of line with what other
municipalities have experienced. The Detroit water department
offers
this chart (pdf) showing their rates from 2010 being on the low
end compared to other large municipalities.

Nevertheless, after the outrage and press coverage bubbled up,
Detroit announced an
$800,000 program to help low-income residents pay water bills.
Part of the money will be paid for by a 50-cent charge on all water
bills, though there have apparently also been private donations.
They need to call Rotary in there to build some wells, guys!

As a CBS correspondent, Sharyl Attkisson reported
on the shifting explanation for the Benghazi, Libya, attacks,
and the bungled rollout of the Obamacare website. But according to
Attkisson, the network got tired of her reports criticizing
government. She no longer works there.

This sounds all to familiar to John Stossel. Unfortunately, the
media powers that be love stories about weird external threats from
which government can swoop in to rescue you, writes Stossel. They
are much less fond, however, of complex stories in which problems
are solved subtly by the dynamism of the free market. The invisible
hand, after all, is invisible. It works its magic in a million
places and makes adjustments every minute. That’s hard for
reporters to see—especially when they’re not looking for it.

View this article.