Month: October 2016

Meet Brian Sims, member of Pennsylvania’s state House of Representatives and a Democrat. He gets a lot of attention nationally because he’s also openly gay and an activist in the gay community. He’s been serving in office since 2012.

Now meet Dick Yuengling Jr., the elderly proprietor of Yuengling brewery in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump’s son, Eric, visited the brewery on Monday and promoted it as a great business success, promising there would be more companies like it if his dad were president. Yuengling (the man, not the brewery) is a Trump supporter and told Eric, “Our guys are behind your father. We need him in there.”

Apparently that some people at a brewery support Trump as president has resulted in some outrage within the gay community, and this has led to a call for gay bars to dump Yuengling’s beers as a protest. Sims is a loud proponent of such a boycott. He posted on Facebook:

GOOD BYE, Yuengling Brewery: I’m not normally one to call for boycotts but I absolutely believe that how we spend our dollars is a reflection of our votes and our values! Supporting Yuengling Brewery, that uses my dollars to bolster a man, and an agenda, that wants to punish me for being a member of the LGBT community and punish the black and brown members of my community for not being white, is something I’m too smart and too grown up to do.

D.G. Yuengling & Son, Inc. believes that an agenda that is anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-racial minority and anti-equality is best for them and that tells me all I need to know about what they think is best for their own customers.

I won’t reminisce about your product or lament any losses. Goodbye Yuengling and shame on you.

Sincerely,
A former customer of 17 years!

Now, this initial post is simply Sims saying he’s not buying Yuengling anymore because of the owner’s politics, and, you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. Many people have made choices like this. But a subsequent post took it to the next level and called on gay bars in the Philadelphia area to dump the beer. And because of Sims’ position as an elected official, this call is getting media attention.

Claire Sasko over at Philadelphia magazine notes that Dick Yuengling is a well-known conservative who holds conservative views and has been such for years, so Sims acting like he’s just discovering the man’s politics is a bit rich. If true, it kind of shows how unaware Sims is of his state’s own political landscape.

I’ve been critical of previous LGBT-centered boycott calls as misguided and ineffective (consider the absurd and pointless of boycott of Stolichnaya vodka in order to attempt to punish the Russian government for treating gay people there badly). We should be even more critical of this call from Sims.

Sims is not just a gay activist. He is an elected official of the Democratic Party. He is calling for citizens to punish a business for supporting the presidential candidate of the political party that opposes him. He is not Dan Savage. He’s an elected office-holder attempting to punish a supporter of another political party. He can couch it in terms of gay issues all he wants, but he is still calling for the economic harm of a man and a company over support of a Republican.

This is grotesque and needs to be pushed back. This is an unhealthy attitude for a politician in a country that values free and open elections. The response from a Democratic politician to Trump’s campaign should be to make a better case for Hillary Clinton, not to try to hurt citizens within his own state who support the Republican.

Furthermore, this is an effort that can so clearly and obviously backfire terribly. A good, huge (yuuuuge!) chunk of Trump voters are motivated by the belief that they are victims and that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., are “out to get them,” to hurt them by handing their tax dollars to illegal immigrants, to steal their money with Obamacare, to ship their jobs to China, and to line the pockets of their friends and donors. Where on earth do they get these paranoid ideas? Well, I’m sure a Democratic lawmaker literally calling for economic retribution against a conservative business owner probably plays a role there.

And the final killer here is that if Sims supports using ones political influence to punish adversaries, well Trump is willing to do that in spades. He’s threatening lawsuits left and right and his campaign rally rhetoric is ominous for its “strongman” undertones. Sims’ behavior serves to enforce Trump’s crass “I’ll show them” mentality. The way Sims has approached political disagreement in policy makes it clear that he supports punishing one’s foes. He just has a different vision of who those foes are than Trump’s.

This is an election whose narratives revolve around punishing our political, cultural, and (because so many people are ignorant about how markets and trade work) economic enemies. Sims is more than willing to play his role in that story and get right down into the gutter with Trump. Whenever anybody complains about a third-party voter like me believing that the Democrats are just as awful and bad as the Republicans, these are the kinds of stories I’ll be pointing to.

Eleven days out from what had long looked to be a breakthrough moment for the Libertarian Party, the Gary Johnson campaign this morning received a dagger in the ribs from FiveThirtyEight number-cruncher Harry Enten:

1st time all year Gary Johnson has dropped below 5.0% in polls-only projection. No federal funding for Libertarians https://t.co/En5ydrdIyH http://pic.twitter.com/wJ5Q9eYcTR

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) October 28, 2016

It’s not just about projections, either: The site’s running snapshot of the election as it stands has the Libertarian nominee right at 5.0 percent, down a full percentage point from as recently as Monday. Johnson was last at 7 percent on Oct. 8, 8 percent on Sept. 22 (back when I wrote a post titled “Gary Johnson Continues to Avoid the Third-Party Fade“), and 9 percent on Aug. 25. His high point in FiveThirtyEight‘s reckoning was 9.9 percent on July 17.

The same trajectory can be found in RealClearPolitics‘ polling averages (which, unlike those from Nate Silver’s outfit, do not take into account state polls or differing quality in the data, though they do measure Green Party nominee Jill Stein). There, Johnson sits currently at 5.2 percent, down from 6.0 percent on Tuesday, 7.1 percent on Oct. 6, 8.1 percent on Sept. 25, and a high of 9.2 percent on Sept. 14 (a day after I wrote a post titled “New Poll: Gary Johnson Support ‘Essentially Unmoved Even After’ Aleppo“).

In an interview with me on Tuesday, Johnson posited that “the factor involved in the drop in polls” was “the poll shift from registered voters a couple of months out to likely voters,” the latter of which “underweigh young people and independents.” But even among registered voters, his numbers have been in free-fall: The latest CNN/ORC poll, which came out Monday, saw a registered-voter drop in just 18 days from 9 percent to 5 percent (likely voters decreased from 7 percent to 3).

Are there any other reasons to hope that Johnson can punch above his polling weight? I can think of just one: His terrific showing among active-duty military, who I presume are disproportionately underweighted in most public-opinion surveys, due to many being overseas. And though the momentum is hurtling in the wrong direction, it is theoretically possible that Hillary Clinton will reassert a larger lead over Donald Trump and more voters will belatedly realize that the race is not close in the state they actually live in.

For the Libertarian Party, the difference between 4.9 percent and 5.0 percent is huge: The higher number would mean achieving official “minor party” status from the Federal Elections Commission, making it eligible for a taxpayer gift of around $10 million, in addition to having a much smoother time with the onerous ballot-access requirements that otherwise soak up a large percentage of the party’s time and energy. When I asked the candidate this week whether he thought he’d cross that threshold, he said “I don’t know, we’ll see.” The answer to that question will go a long way toward assessing the heavily disputed question of whether his campaign has been a historic success, a bungled opportunity, something in between, or even all of the above.

A Washington couple who filed a civil rights lawsuit challenging Arizona’s asset forfeiture laws will get their car back five months after it was seized by police, but they’re not dropping their suit.

Last week, the Navajo County Attorney’s Office filed a notice that it was dropping its effort to forfeit Terry and Maria Platts’ 2012 Volkswagen, which was seized this spring while their son was driving it through Arizona, even though the Platts owned the car and were never charged with a crime.

Earlier this month, the Platts, represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging that Arizona’s asset forfeiture scheme is unconstitutional and that the seizure of their car was illegal.

Although the Platts’ car is being returned, the Institute for Justice says their lawsuit will continue. “We’re glad the Platts are getting their car back,” Institute for Justice attorney Paul Avelar says. “But it does not change the fact that the Platts’ rights have been violated or that their rights are still threatened in the future. The state can still pursue forfeiture against the car for up to seven years. We are still pressing this case forward to ensure the Platts get recognition and their rights are protected in the future, as well as the rights of all Arizonans.”

As Reason reported, the Platts’ son had borrowed the car and was driving back from Florida when he was pulled over by police for a window-tint violation. A subsequent search of the car found a small amount of marijuana and roughly $31,000 in cash. The son was arrested on money laundering charges, and the car and cash were seized under asset forfeiture laws, which allow police to seize property if there’s probable cause that it is connected to illegal activity. However, no charges were ever filed against the Platts or their son.

Unable to afford a lawyer, the Platts filed a handwritten petition to the Navajo County Attorney’s Office to get their car back, but the county attorney rejected their petition because the Platts had neglected to include four words, “under penalty of perjury,” after their signatures. The county attorney filed a motion for an uncontested forfeiture of the car and never submitted the Platts’ petition to the court.

In its latest filing, Navajo County Attorney’s Office admits that it may have come to an “honest, mistaken conclusion” about the ownership of the car, mixing up the names of William Terance “Terry” Platt, the father, and Terance Shea Platt, his son. However, it still maintains that the seizure of the Platts’ car was legal and justified under the circumstances, and that the Platts’ petition was properly rejected. “A subsequent review of this matter and new information received since the time of the Platts’ original, defective claim has caused the state to withdraw any claim in forfeiture to the 2012 VW Jetta,” the county attorney wrote. The county attorney will still be pursuing forfeiture against the $31,000 in cash.

Avelar, however, finds the sudden discovery of “new information” less than convincing.

“They’re sticking to their original position, insisting they did nothing wrong and they were perfectly justified to do this to the Platts and to anyone else in the future,” Avelar says. “It’s wrong, and we’re going to put a stop to it. They were supposed to be investigating this for the last five months, but now, only a month after they get sued, they find new information?”

In the Wall Street Journal today, I review Cody Wilson’s new book, Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free. Wilson became notorious when he launched the effort by his non-profit Defense Distributed to create and then supply online the digital files for using a 3-D printer to make guns at home. His new book almost diaristically details that saga and the opposition and relentless fearmongering that his project has faced from government agencies and progressive pundits and politicians.

Wilson takes his title from the Gonzales Flag used by American colonists when they fought the first battle for Texas independence from Mexico. Featuring an image of the cannon the colonists refused to hand over to Mexican troops the flag is emblazoned with the slogan “Come and Take It.” On his website, Wilson replaced the cannon with an image of a RepRap printer.

Excerpts from the WSJ review:

Do you have a right to download and use the digital instructions to print out a gun? In September, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled, 2 to 1, that you don’t. The author of “Come and Take It,” Cody Wilson, runs the nonprofit Defense Distributed, which was the losing plaintiff in that case. Mr. Wilson asserts that the printing instructions are protected by the First Amendment as free speech. In a sense, the court ruling is an answer to the author’s challenge to “come and take it.”

The Feds want to ban the guns and the digital instructions for making them.

Just how could the federal agencies actually enforce such a ban? Put firmware locks on the printers? Ban digital file sharing? Require that manufacturers of 3-D printers install some kind of feature that prevents gun-part printing? As digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow, who is no fan of Mr. Wilson’s, has observed: “Every one of those measures is a nonsense and worse: unworkable combinations of authoritarianism, censorship, and wishful thinking. Importantly, none of these would prevent people from manufacturing plastic guns. And all of these measures would grossly interfere with the lawful operation of 3D printers.”…

Judge Edith Jones, in her powerful [Fifth Circuit] dissent, observed that “the denial of a temporary injunction in this case will encourage the State Department to threaten and harass publishers of similar non-classified information.” She further declared that “interference with First Amendment rights for any period of time, even for short periods, constitutes irreparable injury.” During a talk in 2013, Mr. Wilson declared that his digital gun-design project “is working so well because it confuses the stakes for free-speech liberals and command-and-control liberals. The files themselves are a powerful species of political speech. And how do we know they are political speech? Because the’re being fought so strongly.” Sadly, free-speech liberals seem mostly absent in this fight.

Go here to read the whole WSJ review.

For more background see below my Reason TV colleague Todd Krainin’s documentary, “Cody Wilson: Happiness Is A 3-D Printed Gun.”

Hillary Clinton campaign staffers discussed shoehorning Eric Garner—killed by police who were trying to arrest him for allegedly selling loose, untaxed cigarettes—into a New York Daily News op-ed on gun control and separately that Garner deserved punishment but not death for his actions, the latest batch of John Podesta emails released by Wikileaks reveal.

In a series of tweets, Garner’s daughter Erica said she’d be interested in knowing what staffer Corey Ciorciari meant when he said the campaign had an “Erica Garner problem” and what the campaign had to say about Podesta and Clinton previously saying they believed Garner deserved punishment, and why the campaign would discuss “using” her father.

Elsewhere on her Twitter timeline, Garner seems to know the answer. She points out Democrats feel entitled to black votes just because they’re Democrats. She tweeted that people are told they “must vote” but can’t vote third party or abstain because that’s a trump vote. “so then u tell me then,” she concluded.

Discussions within the Clinton campaign about using Garner to promote gun control should not be surprising, and neither should the silence from the Clinton campaign. As Erica Garner noted, Democrats feel entitled to black votes. The strategy to tie police violence to gun violence is also an old Democratic strategy, formed relatively quickly after police brutality entered the national discourse in 2014. Few Democratic politicians have been able to grapple with the problem of police brutality without falling on standard talking points on gun violence (or more government spending). At the Democratic National Convention, the party brought together mothers of victims of police violence and gun violence. The tactic is not far off conceptually from Republicans who try to rope in black-on-black violence to discussions of police brutality.

The problem of police brutality is primarily a problem of state-sponsored violence. For that reason, more than any others, comparisons to private violence, be it white-on-black, black-on-black, black-on-white, whatever, are unhelpful and irrelevant. Police officers and other law enforcement officials and armed government agents operate on behalf of and with the authority of the state behind them, placing them in practice in a separate class from other citizens in the criminal justice system. As if this were not enough, pro-union liberals and nominally anti-union conservatives have spent the last half century plus building a robust set of privileges for law enforcement officials.

So-called Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, pioneered in Maryland in the early 1970s, have now become universal, and are in addition to specific privileges police unions carve out for cops in collective bargaining agreements. Such agreements are not the product of any substantive bargaining—after all, the government and government workers are practically the same institution, democratic accoutrements notwithstanding. As Black Lives Matter’s Campaign Zero highlights in its police union contract tracking project, privileges that have the effect of normalizing police violence and thwarting efforts at accountability or transparency exist in contracts all over the country, largely irrespective of the make-up of the particular government negotiating with the government.

The almost total lack of substantive engagement of the problem of police brutality on the national stage outside of cheap attempts to co-opt the issue for a pre-existing partisan agenda is a feature of the system of identity politics as electoral strategy, leaving as it does large swaths of the country unnecessary for either party to engage meaningfully, while each side does its best to offer the other fodder for the kind of fearmongering that can suppress the urge to look elsewhere for political solutions.

Tonight the Chicago Cubs will play the first World Series game held in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field since 1945. The cheapest price for a standing-room-only ticket on Stubhub is currently $1,700, and some season ticket holders are reportedly seeking upwards of $1 million for a chance to see the lovable losers take on the less-lovable historically-losing franchise known as the Cleveland Indians.

The Cubs and Wrigley are both institutions of Chicago culture, and the team’s first National League pennant in several generations is something even non-sports fans in the Windy City are understandably excited about, which is why some Chicagoans of means are willing to shell out thousands of dollars to watch a baseball game.

But spare a moment of sympathy for Chicago’s aldermen, those public servants making six figure salaries, who until very recently enjoyed the perk of being able to buy Cubs’ postseason tickets at face value, rather than on the open market, like the rest of us commoners.

The Cubs have long made a practice of providing politicians at every level the chance to buy tickets at face value, but according to Illinois Policy, the Chicago Board of Ethics ruled last week that city aldermen may only accept this perk if they are “performing a public, ceremonial duty, such as throwing out the first pitch or delivering a speech.”

Announcing the ruling, Ethics Board Chairman William Conlon said, “It is inappropriate under the circumstances for a group that has governance over Wrigley Field — everything from vendors to hot dogs to improvements to the stadium and building adjacent to the stadium — to accept preferential treatment from the Cubs,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Alderman Roderick Sawyer reportedly responded as any precious snowflake would, arguing that he and his fellow politicians “should be able to take advantage of history.” But even this tone-deaf sentiment was topped by Alderman Milly Santiago, who according to the Chicago Tribune is “a former journalist who campaigned for office on a platform of reform and anti-corruption.”

Santiago first complained that the playoff tickets she was previously able to purchase for a fraction of the price the public had to pay “were all the way in the upper deck…that’s how bad those tickets were.” Santiago added, “It’s kind of embarrassing in my part…Those of us who would like to get a chance to go to one of those games and be part of history, we should have that choice.”

But Santiago has a choice, despite her statement that she is “a poor alderman” who “cannot even afford to buy a $1,000 ticket,” despite earning a $116,208 annual salary. She could easily watch the Cubs game across the street at a Wrigleyville bar with the rest of the little people. And for a self-described reformer like herself, avoiding potential ethical entanglements should be of greater concern than whether or not she is able to attend a wildly expensive private event for pennies on the dollar. Santiago has since walked her complaint back, saying she “never intended to offend anybody” but insisted she’s not rich “compared to so many people.”

Writing for Illinois Policy, Jon Kaiser says, “Chicago aldermen aren’t used to being told ‘no.'” Kaiser adds:

Despite the city being dubbed the corruption capital of the country, aldermen have worked hard to shield themselves from any sort of oversight. They let former Legislative Inspector General Faisal Khan’s contract expire without a replacement ready in 2015, thus making the office obsolete, and a group of aldermen changed a February ordinance to limit auditing powers of Inspector General Joe Ferguson.

Aldermen’s track record, though, would suggest oversight is needed. In the past 40 years, 33 of approximately 200 Chicago aldermen have been convicted of federal crimes, such as bribery, extortion, embezzlement, conspiracy, mail fraud and income-tax evasion. Telling these politicians they can’t receive a luxury not afforded to the public should not be an issue, but a level playing field with the public seems foreign to aldermen.

As if trying to make a point about how unnecessary their jobs are, two Chicago aldermen reportedly blew off budget hearings earlier this week to take a road trip to Cleveland “in an SUV with a lobbyist and fundraiser” to watch Game 1 of the World Series, according to the Tribune.

And because irony is apparently dead, 40 out of 50 Chicago city aldermen did not attend yesterday’s annual ethics board meeting, according to Chicago Now. The Board of Ethics, which reportedly receives $850,000 in annual taxpayer funding, received no questions from the few aldermen who bothered to attend, and the meeting lasted five minutes.

In a petulant display, Alderman Anthony Beale, reportedly played a “Go Cubs, Go” chime on his cellphone to protest he and his colleagues’ loss of an elite perk previously reserved only for stewards of good government like himself.