Month: September 2014

This week a

series of stories in The Washington
Post described the threat that civil forfeiture and the
war on drugs pose to innocent drivers carrying large amounts of
cash. In my latest Forbes column, I highlight three
features of forfeiture law and five Supreme Court decisions that
have made it easy for cops to take money from motorists. Here is
how the piece starts:

One afternoon in August 2012, Mandrel Stuart was driving with
his girlfriend into Washington, D.C., when a Fairfax County cop
pulled him over on Interstate 66, ostensibly because the windows of
his SUV were too dark. Lacking the device necessary to check
whether the tinting of the windows exceeded the legal limit,
Officer Kevin Palizzi instead cited Stuart for having a video
running within his line of sight. While Palizzi was filling out the
summons, another officer arrived with a drug-detecting dog.
Claiming the dog alerted to the left front bumper and wheel of
Stuart’s GMC Yukon, the cops searched the car and found $17,550 in
cash, which they kept, assuming that it must be related to the
illegal drug trade.

Stuart, who had planned to use that money to buy equipment and
supplies for his barbecue restaurant in Staunton, Virginia, was
astonished that a routine traffic stop could so easily turn into
grand theft. But as Washington Post reporters
Michael Sallah, Robert O’Harrow Jr., and Steven Rich
explain in a revealing and troubling series of
stories that ran this week, taking Stuart’s hard-earned money
was perfectly legal, thanks to civil forfeiture laws that turn cops
into highway robbers.

Read the whole thing.

Republican Arizona Sen. Jeff
Flake simply
cannot get enough of desert islands. He keeps popping off to
them to get away from it all and work on his survival skills. You
never know when the ability to start a fire might be useful to end
a boring subcommittee hearing.

But his latest stunt is dragging a senator from across the aisle
with him and filming what happens for reality television. A new
show for the Discovery Channel, called Rival Survival, is
sending Flake and Democratic New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich to a
remote location in the Marshall Islands. The Hollywood
Reporter
notes:

The duo will be given a modest choice of items from which they
can select only three. They’re forced to use the limited resources
and work together as they attempt to spear fish, build shelter and
find enough water to survive for a week on Eru in the Marshall
Islands, where the reefs alone are littered with venomous
stonefish, lionfish and scorpion fish.

Flake is a conservative republican who served in the U.S. House
of Representatives for six consecutive terms, from 2001-13, before
he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He’s a reformer who has backed
immigration reform. Heinrich, meanwhile, is a conservationist and
strong progressive and a member of the Senate’s Energy and Natural
Resources Committee who backs education, health care and Social
Security. The duo is described as being polar opposites and were
often at odds in the Senate.

Eru, meanwhile, is home to the wreckage of downed WWII aircraft
and the largest shark sanctuary in the world with more than 2
million square miles of protected waters.

So far they only appear to have done this one episode (which
will air Oct. 29), but they’re hoping for a series. Sadly, the way
the Reporter describes it, they won’t continue on sending
legislators off into the wilderness and out of our hair. They’ll be
looking for other volunteers and they aren’t even all that
committed to the concept of sticking only to “rivals.”

Back in 2012, we classified Flake as one of the more libertarian-leaning
candidates for office, and ReasonTV interviewed him in 2011.
Watch below:

One of the things that has contributed to the freak out against
ISIS is that it is attracting recruits from the West. Many
commentators worry that these Westerners are a product of
liberalism’s spiritual weakness – its inability to provide a
“transcendental” purpose, a cause to die for. And if ISIS is not
defeated decisively, they fear, liberalism will only look weaker,
producing a loss of confidence and an existential crisis in the
liberal West.

ISIS does indeed deserve to die. But I note in my column at
The Week, if anything bespeaks a loss of confidence, it is
what counts as an “existential crisis” now.

There is nothing new about a small number of Americans bolting
to join foreign armies fighting for anti-liberal causes. Over
2,800
Americans enlisted on the communist side in the Spanish Civil
War, despite America’s official policy of neutrality (because, as
in many current conflicts, there were no clear good guys). What’s
more, in the first eight months of 1931, when Stalin’s atrocities
were approaching their zenith, more than
100,000 Americans applied to emigrate to the Soviet Union,
several thousand of them successfully.

Go
here to read the whole thing.

In
his new film, which premiers this Sunday night on PBS,
documentarian Ken Burns examines the tangled lives of Theodore,
Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. “It was not our intention to make
a puff piece,” Ken Burns told Senior Editor Damon Root in an
interview this week, “but a complicated, intertwined, integrated
narrative about one hell of an American family.” Root reports that
Burns was just partially successful. At its best, Root writes,
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History offers a warts and all
portrait of the family. But at its worst, the film ignores
historical details and underplays the family’s abuse of political
power.

View this article.

Forget The Day After. The great nuclear-war movie of
the early ’80s is this 10-minute take on Ray Bradbury’s “There
Will Come Soft Rains“:

The film was made by Nazim Tulyakhodzayev—a Soviet director—in
1984, giving the picture a foothold on both sides of the Cold
War.

Bonus link: That time the FBI
thought Bradbury might be a Communist.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

• Republican Sen. Ted Cruz
  offended the crowd at an event he attended, “In Defense of
  Christans.” Cruz told attendees that persecuted Christians had no
  greater friend than Israel,
  which prompted boos.
• Ohio authorities apprehended escaped
  convict T.J. Lane. Lane, 19, had been serving three life
  sentences for murdering three classmates at his high school. At his
  trial, he showed no remorse, taunted his victims’ families, and
  laughed when the verdict was read. He escaped with two other
  inmates but was caught early Friday morning.
• Apparently the Palin family got into
  some sort of fight with the locals at an Alaskan snowmobile
  race. Someone told Bristol Palin that she couldn’t just do whatever
  she wanted because,”This isn’t some Hillbilly reality show.”
• A sixth grade teacher in the Washington, D.C., area
  apologized for giving her students a homework assignment that
  required them to make a Venn diagram comparing President George W.
  Bush to Adolph Hitler.
• New York public school student Draven Rodriguez has a dream: He
  wants a weird picture of hin and his cat to make it into the
  yearbook.
  Fight the good fight, kid. (The picture is the greatest thing
  ever.)

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In The Skeleton
Twins, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader draw on their many years of
professional togetherness – seven seasons ofSaturday Night Live,
five previous films – to set up the familial rhythms of a pair of
troubled siblings. The movie isn’t a straight comedy – the title
characters are sunk in despair, and only steps away from suicide.
But Wiig and Hader use their comic timing to create an easy
intimacy, even in scenes in which nothing funny is going on. Kurt
Loder writes that it’s unusual to check in with actors we’ve
watched for so long and find them doing something fresh – in fact,
giving breakthrough performances. But that’s what’s happening
here.

View this article.