Month: April 2014

Yesterday, I
highlighted the case of
Clarisa Christiansen, who was rousted by roving Border Patrol
agents on a road well within the United States and left stranded
after they slashed her tire.

But good, old-fashioned border crossings are a great place to
get roughed up by federal employees, too. Larry Kirschenman, a
75-year-old Vietnam Veteran and retiree living in a border
community, who was in the habit of heading to Mexico “to get
haircuts or dental work, or sometimes just for lunch” (Mexico is a

popular destination for affordably dentistry), was pulled over
at the Nogales port of entry. He ended up in the hospital.

That’s him pictured above right, holding photos from the
hospital of his injuries.

At the American Civil Liberties Union blog, he
tells his story:

When I got to the border crossing where customs officers checked
my passport, I was told to pull over into what’s called secondary –
a parking area where they search vehicles for contraband. The agent
there took my keys and in a gruff voice ordered me to get out of my
truck, put my hands on the vehicle, and said he was going to search
me. I did exactly as he said, then turned and asked him, in a calm
and polite voice, whether he needed some kind of probable cause to
search me. He answered “No I don’t!” Then he grabbed me in an arm
lock, slammed a pair of handcuffs down on my wrists hard enough to
split the skin, and pushed my wrists up behind my neck so far that
my shoulders started to go out of joint. It hurt so badly I started
screaming “Please stop, please stop, you’re hurting me.” I wasn’t
resisting at all, but he just kept on while I cried out in
pain.

Next the
officer marched me to a holding cell. There he picked me up by the
seat of my pants and slammed my head onto the tile floor. I blacked
out for a moment, then I woke up with a head wound that had peeled
a chunk of skin off the top of my head. I was still bleeding when
an officer handcuffed me to the side of a bench so tightly that I
couldn’t even stand up. And they kept on questioning me, “Why do
you come here so often? What are you doing over there?

Unshockingly, Kirschenman started having chest pains. The agents
agreed to call on ambulance, “but only if I agreed to pay the
hospital bill, which I did.”

According to him, the ER doc called the police, in fury over the
injuries inflicted by the Border Patrol agents.

In a release at the time of the incident, Customs and Border
Protection insisted that Kirschenman’s lacerations were “self-inflicted
injuries” which he sustained after becoming combative. He must
have thrown himself against the agents’ batons, over and over
again. 

The stop, claim the feds, was actually because of an outstanding
California warrant which turned out to be “non-extraditable and no
further charges are pending.” Well, that’s nice.

Kirschenman is still trying to get the Border Patrol to
surrender survellance footage of the incident. Below is a video
presentation of his story.

The ACLU filed a
lawsuit Monday to force the federal government to be more
forthcoming about its agents’ conduct along border.

Last Friday,
April 25, I was one of 20 or so townhall-audience panelists on
a special episode of Hannity titled “Stoned in America.” As
mentioned in this space
last week,

I am a vocal part of the
outnumbered legalize-it caucus. I don’t know how
the thing will play on television, but it was a pretty amazing
exchange in the room, and I suspect that Hit & Run readers
might find it of interest….

Well, Andrew Kirell of Mediaite found it of interest,
and wrote a clip-heavy post titled “Here
Are the Best Moments from Hannity’s Clownshow Weed Panel.”
Here’s one section and clip that involves me:

Unlike the majority of videos here, which fall under “so bad
it’s good” categorization, this clip
is actually good. Vice co-founder Gavin
McInnes started off by talking about his own
recreational drug use and how he doesn’t want the government
telling anyone what they can and cannot put in their body.

The panel’s designated “Hollywood reporter,” however, claimed
it’s government’s job to foster a “role model”-based society that
shuns drug use (she also had a bizarre aside about Obama’s
affiliation with former coke dealer Jay Z);
and a former Miss America concurred on that point.

Enter a visibly
frustrated Reason editor-in-chief Matt
Welch who derailed the segment (in a good way) by
triumphantly scolding the panel: “But by locking them up in human
cages for what they choose to put in their bodies, what kind of
culture is that? Did you listen to the cop about what he did on the
streets when he tried to enforce this? That
is not moral, that
is not conservative.”

That last bit is contained in this YouTube excerpt:

More clips and commentary at
Mediaite.

In the United States, it’s OK to fail
and fail and try again. Some of America’s biggest successes came
from people who failed often. Henry Ford’s first company failed
completely. Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected by 27 publishers.
Oprah was fired from her first job as a reporter. 

They all kept striving—and succeeded. But those happy
experiments are less likely to happen today, John Stossel writes.
Now there are many more rules, and regulators add hundreds of pages
of new ones every week. And the more the government “protects” us,
the more it puts obstacles in the way of us trying new things and
taking new chances. 

View this article.

If the money spent in America
on enforcing and complying with federal regulations was used
instead to start a whole new country, this new country would be a
major economic player on the world stage. So calculates Clyde Wayne
Crews at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in his annual
survey of the state of federal regulation, titled “Ten Thousand
Commandments.”

Though there’s no easy way to quantify private regulatory costs
because they’re not the kind of things that show up on budgets,
Crews calculates that Americans paid a grand total of $1.863
trillion in federal compliance costs for 2013.  That’s more
money than the entire Gross Domestic Products of countries like
Australia, Canada, and India.

Working through Bureau of Labor Statistics data calculating the
number of households in America and an average household income of
$65,000, Crews attempts to calculate how much of each family’s
budget is consumed by the cost of federal regulations, assuming
logically that businesses pass the costs along to consumers. Crews
acknowledge his attempted calculations aren’t fully scientific, but
he estimates that if the costs of regulation are completely passed
through to consumers, each household pays nearly $15,000 a year in
hidden regulatory costs. That’s nearly a quarter of the average
household income before taxes and higher than any other expense
outside of housing.

Crews is only focusing on the costs of federal regulations, by
the way. Imagine what additional burdens are faced by residents of
high-regulation states like California and New Jersey.

Crews’ report focuses a lot more on just these figures. There
are all sorts of terrifying numbers in his 89-page report. Some
highlights from his summary:

• This is the 21st edition of Ten Thousand Commandments. In that
  time, 87,282 final rules have been issued. That’s more than 3,500
  per year or about nine per day.

• The “Unconstitutionality Index” is the ratio of regulations
  issued by agencies compared to legislation passed by Congress and
  signed into law by the president. The ratio stood at 51 for 2013.
  That means there were 72 new laws and 3,659 new rules – 51 rules
  for every law, or a new rule every 2 ½ hours.
• The top six federal rulemaking agencies account for 49.3
  percent of all federal rules. In 2013, these were the Departments
  of the Treasury, Commerce, Interior, Health and Human Services, and
  Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
• Small businesses pay more in per-employee regulatory costs.
  Firms with fewer than 20 employees pay an average of $10,585 per
  employee, compared to $7,755 for those with 500 or more
  employees.

Read the full report
here (pdf). Despite the length and subject matter, I find the
report very accessible.

Democrat, Republican, or independent, millennials
aren’t likely to be flocking to the voting booth come November.
A new national poll from Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP)
finds less than a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds say they will be
“definitely” be voting this fall. Yet young conservatives are more
likely to be among midterm voters than young liberals.

Thirty-two percent of self-identified conservatives said they
would definitely vote in the November 2014 elections, compared
to only 22 percent of self-identified liberals. Of millennials who
voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, 44 percent say they’ll vote this
fall, compared to 35 percent of those who voted for President
Barack Obama in 2012. 

This isn’t too surprising. In general, midterm elections tend to
draw out more base voters for the party not in power, and many
millennials full of Hope® in 2008 or 2012 have spent the past
several years becoming disillusioned with Democrat power. 

In fact, Gen Y trust in politicians and government institutions
is at a five-year low, according to the IOP poll. Trust in Obama
has dropped to 32 percent, and trust in the Supreme Court is at 36
percent. Trust was highest for the U.S. military, at 47 percent.
Additionally, 62 percent of respondents agreed with the statement,
“elected officials seem to be motivated by selfish reasons,” and
nearly a third agreed that “political involvement rarely has any
tangible results.” 

“To inspire the next generation to public service—and to improve
our communities—our elected officials need to move past the bitter
partisanship and work together to ensure progress and restore trust
in government,” said IOP Director Trey Grayson. 

It’s a lovely sentiment, but he might as well have said our
elected officials need to start pooping unicorns in top hats.
“Moving past bitter partisanship” doesn’t seem like something
either Republicans or Democrats are terribly interested in. When
you’re out of touch, out of ideas, and have no consistent political
philosophy, bitter partisanship is really your best bet.