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In a
sweeping opinion handed down today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement officials to
obtain a warrant before searching the cellphones of individuals
they have placed under arrest.

“Modern cell phones are not just another technological
convenience,” declared the majority opinion of Chief Justice John
Roberts in Riley v. California. “With all they contain and
all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of
life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry
such information in his hand does not make the information any less
worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

In his 28-page opinion, Roberts demolished the pro-law
enforcement arguments put forward by the Obama administration and
the state of California, both of which advocated in favor of
allowing the police to conduct warrantless cellphone searches
incident to arrest. Not only are such warrantless searches
unnecessary to officer safety, Roberts observed, they are
unnecessary to help secure the preservation of evidence. The
government’s position, he declared, is “flawed and contravenes our
general preference to provide clear guidance to law enforcement
through categorical rules.”

In closing, the chief justice of the United States offered a
striking affirmation of the Fourth Amendment’s role in American
life: “Our answer to the question of what police must do before
searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly
simple—get a warrant.”

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Riley v. California is
available here.

The Los
Angeles Police Department (LAPD) recently bought a couple of
military-grade motorcycles. The bikes are electric, silent, a sleek
shade of all-black, and the LAPD can’t wait to use them to harass
homeless people.

“There are major benefits to incorporating these environmentally
friendly motorcycles. It costs less than 50 cents to charge
compared to using gallons of gas, maintenance is simple, and the
community appreciates how quiet they are,”
said LAPD Off-Road Unit Officer Steve Carbajal in a press
statement about the new Zero MMX motorcycles. “Most importantly,
our officers have an added tactical advantage while on patrol.”

Where exactly do LAPD officers find themselves employing this
new tactical advantage? “They’re able to sneak up on some of the
homeless encampments and some of the illegal activities in the
hillsides,” Lt. Andy Neiman
explained on Monday. He assures that “the community loves” the
bikes, because they don’t make “that whiny noise that is commonly
associated with the off-road bikes.”

On the bright side, at least the Zero bikes being used in this
pilot program “cost roughly $17,945 without additional department
modifications, compared with the approximately $35,000 for a
fully-equipped LAPD Harley or BMW,”
according to CBS. Though, the bikes need to be plugged in for
seven hours to fully charge and then they only last two hours on
the road.

This is another eyebrow-raising case of continued militarization
of domestic law enforcement, particularly within the already-armed-to-the-teeth
LAPD. Wired
describes the Zero MMX as a “special forces-specific bike,” and
that’s no exaggeration.  “We developed it for the U.S.
military. I’m not allowed to comment on the specifics, but we have
a contract with the military, and they are testing it,” a
representative of Zero Motorcycles told Wired. Indeed, the
Zero MMX isn’t even for sale to civilians. 

At the end of April, when the monthly
GDP report
found a sluggish, barely growing economy that had expanded by
just 0.1 percent in the first quarter of the year, former White
House Press Secretary Jay Carney found the good news.

Health care spending was up, way up, thanks to Obamacare. The
Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) had found that health spending
had grown by 9.9 percent, the fastest growth of any quarter since
1980. The health law was working—and had saved the economy!

“The fact of the matter,” Carney said
at a press briefing, “is—and the GDP report makes it clear—it
was consumer spending on health care that helped drive economic
growth in the first quarter, and that is directly related to the
increase in people who have insurance because of the Affordable
Care Act.”

This was a bit rich coming from the same White House that had
argued for years that the health law would hold health spending in
check. But now there’s another problem: Health spending appears not
to have grown at a record rate during the first quarter of the
year. It didn’t grow at all. In fact, it shrank by 1.4
percent, according to a revision released today by the BEA.

This is…very strange. As Phil Klein points out in
The Washington Examiner, the original estimate showed
health spending rising faster than any time since 1980. Now it
shows it shrinking more than any time since 1982. The BEA says the
revision is the result of new data from the Census, but even still,
it’s a bit a head scratcher.

And overall, today’s report is not great news for the economy:
The BEA also revised first quarter GDP numbers down, finding that
it shrank by 2.9
percent, the largest contraction since 2009. The health
spending revision was probably the
biggest factor in bringing it down.

Perhaps, however, the White House, in its boundless optimism,
will find the upside: The administration can now go back to arguing
that Obamacare is working because it’s causing health care spending
to shrink. 

The Clintons have done quite well for themselves
in recent years. They are worth at least $100 million, and
Hillary—who travels by private jet and says she hasn’t driven a car
since 1996—rakes in $200,000 per speech. Yet on a recent
promotional tour for her new memoir, Hillary still tried to portray
herself as an average American working to make ends meet. A. Barton
Hinkle says it’s time for the former secretary of state to learn
Economics 101.

View this article.

The feds could actually
soften their stance a little when it comes to weed.

The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the medical
evidence surrounding the safety and effectiveness of marijuana, a
process that could lead to the agency downgrading the drug’s
current status as a Schedule I drug, the most dangerous
classification.

Read more.

The Internal Revenue Service
(IRS) “did not follow the law” when it failed to report the loss of
emails belonging to Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS
Exempt Organizations Unit, and the recycling of her hard drive,
rendering recovery impossible. That’s according to
David Ferriero (pictured), the Archivist of the United States,
during questioning by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) of the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The loss of Lerner’s
potentially sensitive emails is just the latest development in the
evolving story that has grown from revelations of almost certainly
politically motivated scrutiny of small-government and Tea Party
groups by the tax agency.

The
entire exchange is below:

Walberg: Thank you Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ferriero,
just to review a bit in your testimony, you state that when
agencies become aware of unauthorized destruction of federal
records that they are required to report the incidents to the
Archives. At any time in 2011, through last Monday, did the IRS
report any loss of records related to Lois Lerner?

Ferriero:  No.

Walberg: Is it fair to say that the IRS broke
the Federal Records Act?

Ferriero: They are required, any agency is
required to notify us when they realize they have a problem that
could be destruction or disposal, unauthorized disposal.

Walberg: But they didn’t do that?

Ferriero: That’s right.

Walberg: Did they break the law?

Ferrerio: I’m not a lawyer.

Walberg: But you administer the Federal Records
Act.

Ferriero: I do.

Walberg: If they didn’t follow it, can we
safely assume they broke the law?

Ferriero: They did not follow the law.

According to Fox News polling,
76 percent of Americans think the destruction of the emails was
deliberate, while just 12 percent are conviced by the
dog-ate-my-homework claim that it was an acccident.

Deliberate or not, the IRS, which is so zealous in enforcing the
tax code, apparently managed to break the law
regarding retention of federal records.

As
I noted yesterday, the great actor Gary Oldman recently outed
himself as a libertarian in a
Playboy interview.

That Oldman chose to do so immediately after ruminating on how
unfair it is that he isn’t allowed to call Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.) “a cunt…a fucking useless cunt” is, well, what’s the
Italian phrase for comme ci comme ça again?

Oldman, who defended offensive outbursts by fellow rage-aholic
thespians Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin, also riffed on how
that tribe that runs Hollywood, well,
runs Hollywood:

Alec calling someone an F-A-G in the street while he’s pissed
off coming out of his building because they won’t leave him alone.
I don’t blame him. So they persecute. Mel Gibson is in a town
that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s
actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him—and doesn’t need
to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an
outcast, a leper, you know? But some Jewish guy in his office
somewhere hasn’t turned and said, “That fucking kraut” or “Fuck
those Germans,” whatever it is? We all hide and try to be so
politically correct. That’s what gets me. It’s just the sheer
hypocrisy of everyone, that we all stand on this thing going,
“Isn’t that shocking?” [smiles wryly] All right. Shall I stop
talking now? What else can we discuss?

After
public denunciations from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and
Simon Wiesenthal Center, Oldman has apologized thus:

I am deeply remorseful that comments I recently made in the
Playboy Interview were offensive to many Jewish people. Upon
reading my comments in print—I see how insensitive they may be, and
how they may indeed contribute to the furtherance of a false
stereotype. Anything that contributes to this stereotype is
unacceptable, including my own words on the matter. If, during the
interview, I had been asked to elaborate on this point I would have
pointed out that I had just finished reading Neal Gabler’s superb
book about the Jews and Hollywood, An Empire of Their Own:
How the Jews invented Hollywood. The fact is that our
business, and my own career specifically, owes an enormous debt to
that contribution.

I hope you will know that this apology is heartfelt, genuine,
and that I have an enormous personal affinity for the Jewish people
in general, and those specifically in my life. The Jewish People,
persecuted thorough the ages, are the first to hear God’s voice,
and surely are the chosen people.

I would like to sign off with “Shalom Aleichem”—but under the
circumstances, perhaps today I lose the right to use that phrase,
so I will wish you all peace–Gary Oldman.

More
here (and all thanks to Alan Vanneman,
whose latest books, Author! Author! and Vorak of
Kolnap, are damn good reads).

The special-pleading half of me that is half-dago (in
a Joe DiMaggio sort of way) feels a need to say: Wait, but
Nancy Pelosi is still a cunt? 

I get it, the Last Acceptable Prejudice™ is slagging prominent
Italian Americans (whether they are objectively awful politicians
is a separate matter). You never have to apologize for making fun
of the spicy-meatball crowd. Where’s Joe Columbo, the mafiaoso who
started the Italian-American Civil Rights League in 1970, when you
need him? Oh, that’s right:
He was fatally shot at close range by another goombah at the
group’s second annual rally protesting negative media portrayals of
Italian Americans.

• Longtime Mississippi Sen. Thad
  Cochran
  prevailed over his more conservative Tea Party
  challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, in a closely watched
  Republican primary contest on Tuesday. Assuming that he wins the
  general election in November, Cochran will return to Congress to
  serve a seventh term that he
  barely wanted. Thanks, democracy.
• Remember that story about the heartless KFC employees who
  kicked a little girl out of the restaurant because her ugly face
  was allegedly disturbing customers? Well,
  it’s not true. The family of three-year-old Victoria
  Wilcher initially maintained that a Jackson, Mississippi, branch of
  the popular food chain had treated the girl—who was recovering from
  a pitbull attack in which she had lost an eye—cruelly. But
  investigators found no evidence that the incident ever occurred.
  KFC has decided to contribute $30,000 to the girl’s medical bills,
  anyway. Those evil corporations, at it again.
• In the wake of recent developments in the IRS scandal,
  Jon Stewart
  assailed the agency as “totally incompetent” and
  bordering on “criminal idiocy” on his latest show.
• Queen Elizabeth visited the set of HBO’s “Game of
  Thrones” and
  somehow resisted the malevolent call of the Iron Throne.
  She shook hands with cast members and producers but declined to sit
  in the ultimate seat of royal power. Long may she reign, in any
  case.
• Robert Morris University-Illinois has
  added League of Legends as a varsity sport.

Absolutely great USA Today column
by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds about the VA scandal and the larger
lesson about perverse public-sector incentives at the root of it
all:

Even though veterans were dying, and
books were being cooked, every single VA senior executive
received an evaluation of “fully
successful” or better over a 4-year period. That’s
right. Every single one. Over four years. At
least 65% of them received bonuses (“performance
awards“). All while veterans around the country were suffering
and dying because of delayed care.
The executives got these bonuses, in part, because
they cooked
the books, because the bonuses were more important to them than
the veterans’ care.

It would be nice to believe that this sort of problem is limited
to the VA, but there’s no particular reason to think that it is.
The problem with the VA is that, like every other government
agency—and every other human institution —it’s not a machine that
runs itself. It’s a collection of people. And people tend to act in
their own self interest.

He continues:

the strongest priority of most bureaucracies is the welfare of
the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats it employs, not whatever the
bureaucracy is actually supposed to be doing. 

Read the whole thing.

Reynolds is not a nihilist who believes that nothing can improve
the situation. But it’s not an easy nut to crack. The starting
point is to recognize that the worst attributes of self-interested
behavior are, ironically, mitigated more effectively in market
situations. Yes markets are made up of individuals and groups
(companies, firms, nonprofits, etc.) all pursuing their advantages.
Unlike in the public sector, where actors typically have guaranteed
revenue or a state-enforced monopoly over a certain set of goods
and services, private-sector actors have to woo and keep customers.
Observers such as Bernard Mandeville
understood that “private vices” yield “publick benefits” and
Adam
Smith noted that “it is not from the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but
from their regard to their own interest.” More recently,
Milton Friedman was fond
of saying:

The case for free enterprise, for competition, is that it’s the
only system that will keep the capitalists from having too much
power. There’s the old saying, “If you want to catch a thief, set a
thief to catch him.” The virtue of free enterprise capitalism is
that it sets one businessman against another and it’s a most
effective device for control.

The same dynamic doesn’t apply in
many government situations and certainly doesn’t in a place such as
the Veterans Administration, which not only delivers benefits but
determines whether you get them in the first place. The first step
toward reform is to recognize the root problem of the dysfunction:
There’s a total disconnect between customer satisfaction and
rewards for those within the system. Seriously, every
senior exec at the VA was great at his or her job? What is this,
Lake Wobegon for bureaucrats? The second step is to introduce
competition among providers, especially by giving beneficiaries the
all-important power to go elsewhere, whether through
vouchers or other means. All businessess, whether private-sector or
public-sector, shape up the minute their gravy train is
imperiled.

Read Peter Suderman on
the pressing lessons we should all be learning from the VA and
Obamacare.

Take it way, Remy, with “God Bless the USA” (VA Scandal
Remix):

Not long ago, Sen. Marco Rubio
(R-Fla.) said that there is no “responsible way to
recreationally use marijuana.”

Rubio’s statement isn’t wrong because it’s unpopular. Plenty of
people on every part of the political spectrum believe what he
believes. It’s wrong because it is flatly contradicted by millions
of people who use pot both recreationally and responsibly. In this
sense, marijuana is absolutely no different than intoxicants such
as beer, wine, and alcohol, writes Nick Gillespie.

Now that pot is fully legal in Colorado and Washington
and a growing majorityof Americans agree that marijuana should
be treated similar to alcohol, it’s more important than ever to
drive home the fact that responsible drug use is not a myth but a
lived reality for many successful people, according to
Gillespie.

Here’s a list of 10 really successful people who have admitted
to using pot.

View this article.