Month: April 2014

Tonight’s episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT)
will continue the recent trend toward WTF (Winning the Future!)
juxtapositions on
Wednesdays, as an interview with
Obama-impeacher Ralph Nader transitions into a discussion on
Benghazi, asteroid scare-mongering (I hope!) with Bill Nye the
Science Guy presages a
National Honesty Day round of mutual criticism among the
co-hosts, and so on.

Party Panelists are
Fox Business anchor Melissa Francis and Wall
Street lawyer-turned comedian Paul Mecurio, who will
discuss Oklahoma’s
cinematically awful execution, the U.S. economy’s
spectacularly sluggish growth, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s
pot-sweetening in the Toyota relocation deal, and the
high cost of regulation.

Speaking of Melissa Francis, she participated in an
Independents real-or-fake contest about horrifying
government laws and regulations last Friday:

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

Here’s an annoying new twist on “if you see
something, say something”: Some influential San
Franciscans are proposing that the city start paying snitches
to report neighbors who may be renting out spaces via Airbnb.

Airbnb, which
launched in San Francisco, matches up travelers with local
residents who have space—be it a couch, a spare bedroom, or a whole
place—to rent out for a few nights or a few weeks. 

A ballot measure backed by former city Planning Commissioner
Doug Engmann would ban these temporary rentals in any San Francisco
neighborhood not marked for commercial zoning. It would also
require hosts to get permission from landlords or homeowners
associations, enact insurance requirements for hosts, and—most
controversially—set up a financial reward system for residents who
rat out neighbors violating the law.

The language of the proposal isn’t available yet, but
Engmann said  it will likely match existing city laws that
financially reward citizens for reporting various crimes. “Right
now, it’s totally unregulated, and the law is being violated,”
Engmann
told Venture Beat. “I have a real problem with
businesses that basically build a revenue model on encouraging
their hosts to do illegal activities—that’s basically what Airbnb’s
business model is.”

You could put it like that. Or you could say Airbnb
built a revenue model on encouraging their hosts to do legal
activities that freaked out politicians (and well-connected
competitors) enough to ban them.

Airbnb rentals are often much cheaper than hotels and nicer than
hostels, which makes it and similar sites (like VRBO) quite
attractive to travelers. These sites are also good for homeowners
and renters, who can make extra cash off temporarily unused space.
But politicians aren’t huge fans, because they facilitate
transactions between individuals without government regulators
getting a say or a cut. For more on New York’s Airbnb battle, check
out this 2013 video from Reason TV. 

Last night, a horrific scene played out at the
Oklahoma State Penitentiary as prison officials attempted to carry
out the first of what was supposed to have been a double
execution. 

At 6:23 p.m., the execution began for Clayton Lockett,
convicted in 1999 of killing 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman.

Five minutes after a cocktail of lethal drugs was injected,
Lockett began shivering, breathing deep, blinking, and gritting his
teeth. Seven minutes into the execution, Lockett alerted prison
officials that he was still conscious. Ten minutes into the
execution, prison officials announced that he was finally
unconscious. Thirteen minutes in, Lockett moved his head from side
to side and then lifted it off of the bed. Fifteen minutes in,
Lockett was mumbling, breathing heavily, and appeared to be
struggling. Sixteen minutes in, Lockett said “man” out loud, and
tried to get up. Following this, a female prison official told
horrified eyewitnesses, “We are going to lower the blinds
temporarily.” The blinds were never lifted.

Minutes after the blinds went down, the director of prisons told
eyewitnesses there had been a “vein failure” and that he was using
his authority to issue a stay of execution. Less than a half hour
later, after the director of prisons admitted the execution had
been botched, Lockett was pronounced dead from what officials said
was a heart attack.

Shortly after Lockett’s grisly death, Oklahoma Governor Mary
Fallin (R) issued an executive order granting a 14-day stay for
stay of execution for Charles Warner, the inmate who was scheduled
to be executed two hours after Lockett. Warner’s execution is now
scheduled for May 13.

In her
press release, Governor Fallin said that she had asked the
Oklahoma Department of Corrections “to conduct a full review of
Oklahoma’s execution procedures to determine what happened and why”
during Lockett’s botched execution.

Executions in other states have been botched before, but what
makes what happened in Oklahoma last night so particularly
grotesque is that it could have, and should have, been
prevented.

Over the past several months, questions had been raised over the
constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection secrecy law,
which allowed state officials to prevent the disclosure of any
information about the drugs used in lethal injections. Lawyers for
condemned inmates argued that without being able to know even the
most basic information about these drugs, it would be impossible to
verify whether or not the executions carried out would comport with
the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and
unusual punishment.

On April 21, the Oklahoma Supreme Court stayed the executions of
Lockett and Warner, which were scheduled to take place on April 22
and April 29, so that the justices could evaluate the legality of
Oklahoma’s secrecy law.

In an unprecedented move, Governor Mary Fallin proclaimed on
April 22 that Oklahoma’s executive branch would not honor the state
Supreme Court’s stays of execution, and issued an executive
order that granted a seven-day stay of execution for Clayton
Lockett. 

Even more shocking, a Republican state representative, Mike
Christian, introduced
impeachment proceedings on April 23 against the five state
Oklahoma Supreme Court justices who had voted for the stays of
execution, stating that the justices had used “unsupportable
arguments regarding constitutional rights.”

On April 24, the Oklahoma Supreme Court caved to political
pressure, and declared that the state’s injection secrecy law was
constitutional, allowing the botched execution to proceed on April
29 as Governor Fallin ordered.

Besides the questions over the constitutionality of the state’s
secrecy law, concerns had also been raised over the state’s
essentially experimental three-drug execution cocktail, which
included the drugs midazolam, vecuronium bromide, and potassium
chloride.

This drug combination has only been used once before – in
Florida. However, Florida’s protocol called for five times more
midazolam than Oklahoma’s, which led some to predict the execution
might not be effective. Because these drugs were obtained through
secret means and information about them was protected under the
state’s secrecy law, there was no oversight from experts on the
quality of the drugs.

Medical experts warned Oklahoma officials of the possibility of
a botched execution, and defense attorneys asked them to open up
the lethal injection process to review by the courts, doctors, and
the public because of the dangers of this untested drug
combination. It really should come as no surprise that this
execution played out as it did.

If the state wasn’t obsessed with killing these inmates so
quickly and recklessly, and instead allowed the process to be
transparent and open for review, Clayton Lockett’s botched
execution could have been prevented.

Instead, the state elevated an unsympathetic killer to a symbol
of what the death penalty has become in states that are adopting
secretive and experimental execution methods: a reckless
abandonment of the rule of law.

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News
poll shows 47 percent of respondents saying the United States
should be “less
active” in global affairs. The Wall Street Journal

describes the results as a “marked change from past decades,”
but the poll provides some data from previous decades, which may
partially belie that notion.

The polls in 1995 and 1997 found 34 percent of Americans wanting
the U.S. to be “less active” and, crucially, just 17 percent
supporting the U.S. being “more active.” This time, 19 percent of
respondents wanted the U.S. more active. A plurality in the 1995
and 1997 polls (47 percent and 46 percent) thought the U.S. should
continue its current level of activity.

The numbers did change rather drastically in the (presumably
post-9/11) 2001 poll, which found 37 percent in support of the U.S.
being more active and just 14 percent to be less active. Even then
a plurality, 44 percent, believed the level of U.S. activity in
global affairs was just right. After 13 years of escalating
interventionism by the U.S. around the world (Iraq,
and
Afghanistan, and
Pakistan, and
Somalia, and
Libya, and the
rest of Africa, and the “Asia
pivot“), it shouldn’t be a surprise that supporting U.S.
activity in global affairs at current levels finds the support of
only 30 percent of respondents in the latest poll.

As I pointed out in my column
yesterday, President Obama has been able to maneuver his
foreign policy politically in such a way as to maintain the pillars
of interventionism while reshaping the domestic perception of
American activity abroad just enough to run as a kind of “anti-war”
candidate not only in 2008 but in 2012. It appeared last summer he
was ready to plunge into a
military intervention in Syria, pulled back at the last minute
by a John Kerry gaffe exploited for diplomatic purposes by
Russia.

Other recent polls show the American non-interventionist mood
extending to specific situations, which is not always so. A

recent Reason poll found 58 percent of respondents wanting the
U.S. to stay out of Ukraine altogether. The prospect of war in
Syria wasn’t popular last summer either; a
Reason poll last year found 64 percent of respondents believing
airstrikes in Syria were not necessary to protect U.S. interests.
Nearly half believed the Washington political establishment wanted
war more than they did. An ABC News/Washington Post poll
last year found a record 67 percent of Americans believing the war
in Afghanistan was not worth fighting. That war continues.

The Wall Street Journal also noted that its results
crossed party lines: self-identified Democrats and Republicans want
the U.S. less involved in global affairs. The last two times
around, Democrats chose a candidate who talked peace but whose
policies never matched and Republicans chose candidates who played
into that narrative while trying to out-warmonger Obama.
Non-interventionism ought to be popular on the campaign trail,
although as the American electorate should know by now, given
recent history, not every candidate vehicle will be
authentic.