Tag: posts

If you are like most people, you
probably wonder, “What is the absolutely worst environmental policy
on the planet?” A. Barton Hinkle nominates a strong contender for
the dubious honors. It’s a policy that benefits special interests,
raises prices on consumers, and harms the planet. What could be
worse?

View this article.

The
New York Daily News reports an exclusive on a curious memo
from the Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) chief at the New York Police
Department (NYPD).
Via the Daily News:

When Internal Affairs gets a tip about police
corruption it will often make arrests or execute warrants — then
question prisoners about the officer in question.

Reznick believes that too many recent arrests were examples [of]
“collars for dollars,” as the practice is known within the
department.

“The reasons for enforcement were nonsense,” the tough-talking
Reznick says in a April 8 memo, which was sent out to the
commanding officers of six groups within IAB in response to an
explanation of recent overtime.

“Don’t test me. Most arrests lacked quality and the end result was
the same (no intelligence),” according to a copy of the memo that
was obtained by the News.

The distinction between prisoners and officers in question
indicates it’s generally not the cops who are accused of wrongdoing
that are arrested but other people involved in the allegations. The
New York Post, meanwhile, gets a quote from a “police
source” that suggests the memo isn’t meant for the IAB officers who
received it but for cops who may
find themselves in the IAB’s crosshairs:

“It really has nothing to do with abusing overtime,”
said the source. “Bratton is trying to show that he’s not in line
with the old regime.”

Bratton, who served as NYPD commissioner under Rudolph Giuliani
(R) before leaving for the Los Angeles Police Department, was
appointed police commissioner in New York City once again by Bill
De Blasio (D) after he took office as mayor.

Among Bratton’s first moves was to
sack Charles Campisi, the IAB chief for the last 20 years. The
complaints against Campisi included that his bureau focused too
much on “petty enforcement,” like towing illegally parked police
vehicles and trying to prevent NYPD parking placard fraud. A pair
of lawsuits were filed against IAB last year by cops who accused
the bureau’s officers of
arbitrary spying, racial discrimination, and sexual
impropriety. The bureau’s investigation into an off-duty cop
beaten into a coma, meanwhile, earned the
wrath of the police union.

Reznick, it should be noted,
cost the NYPD $280,000 when the city settled a lawsuit with a
detective Reznick labeled a “rat.” 

So Tax Day has come and gone, except for all
of us who have filed extensions or are figuring out how to amend
dashed-off returns.

It’s useful to document how much we pay in taxes but it’s always
worth remembering that government spending is only loosely related
to how much money a government takes in. For example, in 2009, the
United States’s tax burden at all levels of government came to just
23.3
percent of GDP. The average for all OECD (or “developed”)
countries was 33.6 percent.

But as Milton Friedman liked to remind people, the cost of
government is best measured not simply by tax levels but by
spending levels. And here the data tells a damning story of
profligacy. In 2009,
OECD data show that the United States came in slightly below
average for “general government expenditures as a percentage of
GDP.” However, when you break that down on a per-capita basis (as
is done on the right), a different picture emerges. The U.S. is
suddenly among the biggest spenders, shelling out almost $20,000
per person (in 2009 dollars).

Here is something upon which
stimulatarians and fiscal hawks might agree: We cannot
accurately price the cost of government if we are buying today’s
services on a super discount. That tank—or mortgage
deduction—you’re happy to pick up at a 40 percent discount may not
seem so necessary if it was actually selling at retail.

Read more here.

• Three people are dead and almost 300 are unaccounted for after
  a ferry
  capsized off the coast of South Korea. Most of the passengers
  onboard were school students.
• Bill O’Reilly thinks that
  Stephen Colbert will struggle to get conservatives to
  watch The Late Show on CBS after he takes over
  from David Letterman.
• A column of six armored
  combat vehicles carrying Russian flags entered a city in
  eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian activists. A man in one
  of the vehicles said that he and others in the column were
  Ukrainian soldiers who had defected.
• Researchers say that the Census Bureau changing the way it
  calculates how many people have health insurance may obscure the
  
  impact of Obamacare. According to a
  Reuters/Ipsos poll, Americans increasingly prefer Democrats
  over Republicans when it comes to health policy.
• Video has emerged of what appears to be the
  largest gathering of Al Qaeda in years.
• Two bags were detonated near the finish line of the Boston
  Marathon yesterday, the anniversary of last year’s Boston Marathon
  bombing that left
  three dead and 264 injured. A 25-year-old man has been charged
  with disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and possession of a
  hoax device.

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Whatever the intentions behind the Department of
Commerce and its disparate programs, the results are unimpressive
at best and wasteful at worst. Veronique de Rugy writes that worse
still are the systematic distortions they introduce into the
market. Commerce grants and subsidies are nothing more than
privileges bestowed to well-connected special interests. In this
age of trillion-dollar deficits and public revulsion at crony
capitalism, there has never been a better time to shut down the
department. And if we have to destroy it piece by piece, the
Economic Development Administration is a good place to start.

View this article.

Mike Lee calls for “a new
conservative reform agenda” based on “three basic principles,” one
of which is federalism.” The biggest reason the federal government
makes too many mistakes is that it makes too many decisions,” the
Republican senator from Utah explained in a speech at the
Heritage Foundation last year. “Most of these are decisions the
federal government doesn’t have to make—and therefore
shouldn’t.”

So why is Lee co-sponsoring a bill introduced last
month that would ban online gambling throughout the country,
instead of letting each state decide whether to allow
Internet-assisted poker? Jacob Sullum says the contradiction
illustrates one reason the GOP seems destined for permanent
minority status: Too many of its members are unprincipled killjoys
who do not understand that federalism requires tolerance of
diversity.

View this article.

The Los Angeles
Unified School District has suspended high school teacher Greg
Schiller because the science projects two of his students were
working on looked
dangerous. The two projects, which officials describe as
“imitation weapons,” are designed to shoot small projectiles.
Schiller teaches several classes, including two Advance Placement
courses. He’d been sending in lesson plans to a substitute, but
school officials ordered him to stop because it violated his
suspension. He was also coach of the fencing team, which can no
longer practice or compete because no one is there to supervise
them.

Tonight’s live episode of The
Independents (9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT, on Fox Business
Network, with repeats three hours later) will, like
last night’s, feature as fill-in host yours truly. As a result,
like last night’s, tonight’s associated blog post will be brief.
Oh–go to Facebook to
decide what we’re talking about in our second panel with Gavin
McInnes and Sherrod Small: That
new immigration study, or the
standoff in Nevada.

Basically, we’ll be kicking off the show with an extended slam
on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, which fills me with a
very special rage. Coming on will be Trisha Moon, a resident of
Canada who tore up her citizenship because of the damn-fool
law.

John Stossel will talk about Tax Day and Earth Day, Dr. Carl
Hart will talk about the alleged heroin epidemic, Philip Howard
will talk about deadbeat laws, and the aftershow is destined to be
a delightful trainwreck. Go to http://ift.tt/QYHXdy
at 10 p.m. sharp, find us on Facebook at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and
click on this page
for video of past segments.

Which crime is the fault of my
political enemies? Take your pick.

The most recent crime attributed to somebody’s political enemies
is the Kansas
City Jewish community center shooting. Glenn Miller/Frazier
Glenn Cross, the alleged murderer in that incident, has very
distinct views of the sort that you might expect of a man who yells
“heil
Hitler” when arrested and is a
former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. That is, he’s
completely fucking out there with nothing more than an
opportunistic link to mainstream politics in this country (he ran
for office as
both a Democrat and Republican).

But why the hell not
lay his crime at the feet of former Rep. Ron Paul (and use that
as an excuse to dredge up old
attacks against the guy) because Miller said unsolicited (by
Paul) nice things about him?

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok, who has already

attributed opposition to President Barack Obama to racism, went
on MSNBC to link Miller’s crime to a supposed surge in hate groups
fueld by white fears over the “browning
of the American population.”

Or maybe the nutty neo-Nazi’s crime was
really the work of the lefty Nation‘s Max Blumenthal,
who is critical of Israel.

This kind of crazy has to be a one-off, right?

Nope. Hanging nasty crimes on political opponents is a popular
pastime, with conservatives and the Tea Party as the main
recipients in recent years of the most bogus links to shootings,
bombings, and the like.

The Boston bombing may have been the work of the the Tsarnaev
brothers, two Muslim extremists from Chechnya, but that didn’t stop
Michael Moore from
turning it into right-wing terrorism. “Tax Day.
Patriots Day,” he Tweeted.

NBC’s Luke Russert also
thought that was a fair conclusion.

Well, OK;
Infowars said the U.S. government did it. But really, that was
Infowars.

And Jared Loughner’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords
(D-Ariz.) was somehow the fault of
Sarah Palin and the
Tea Party. Those connections came even as some of those making
the charges, like Slate‘s
Jacob Weisberg, admitted the shooter was “crazy” and probably
suffered from “schizophrenia”—characteristics that would seem to
take political intentions out of the equation.

Occasionally, righties get to return the favor and link
their opponents to crimes—like the shooting at the Family
Research Council, which
Michelle Malkin hung around the neck of left-wing criticism of
the organization. Political opportunism, like crime, has no
intrinsic ideology of its own. But, as of late, this has mostly
been an intellectually lazy sport for liberals and progressives,
who see an opportunity to slam opponents without having to expend
too much brain sweat on actually examining ideas and arguments.

You know who was really responsible for those crimes? The
individuals who committed them, not some thoughts they may or may
not have shared with people who didn’t hurt anybody.

Below, see an excerpt from The Independents in which
Reason‘s own Matt Welch takes on political smears and
intellectual laziness.

At 8:30p.m. ET I will be discussing Sen. Rand
Paul (R-Ky.) on The Jerry
Doyle Show.

Paul, who recently addressed Jeb Bush’s
comments on illegal immigration, may face a
well-funded neocon campaign in his
widely expected 2016 presidential bid.

Read more from Reason on Paul here.