Month: September 2018

Floridians heading to the polls in November can expect to see a voting rights amendment on their ballots.

Amendment Four, called the Voting Restoration Amendment, seeks to restore voting rights to those in the state who have been convicted of a felony and served the full length of their sentence, including probation, parole, and the payment of restitution.

There are exceptions, however. Those convicted of murder or sex crimes would still require permission via executive clemency. If the amendment receives 60% of the vote, it will be added to the Florida Constitution.

As it currently stands, ex-felons in Florida are ineligible to vote unless they receive executive clemency.

The restoration of voting rights has been a particularly difficult sell due to the political subtext. Last year, Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Ed Gillespie, released an ad criticizing his opponent’s support for the restoration of voting rights after an ex-felon was found with child pornography. Roy Moore, the controversial Republican challenger in Alabama’s 2017 senate race, made the accusation that Democrats were supporting the restoration of voting rights simply to help increase the votes against him.

The Sentencing Project has reported that the suppression of voting rights has effectively removed six million voters from the voting pool, and the black Americans are disproportionately affected. While black Americans hold diverse political opinions, Republican politicians who oppose reenfranchisement tend to assume they will vote exclusively for Democrats.

Support and disapproval transcend party lines, however. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and fellow Republican Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin have both worked in various capacities to secure the votings rights of ex-felons. (However, prior to Bevin’s work, he reversed a last minute executive order made by Democratic predecessor Steve Beshear, which had restored voting rights en masse.)

As the National Constitution Center notes, the suspension of voting rights has faced several challenges in the Supreme Court, including Richardson v. Ramirez and Hunter v. Underwood. Opponents of disenfranchisment have been unsuccessful in their attempts at court, which is why they’re banking on Florida’s ballot initiative process.

Now that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is accused of not just attempted sexual assault and harassment but also of helping to organize a gang rape during his high school years, some people have asked whether the allegations called to mind the infamous University of Virginia gang rape hoax.

But the Kavanaugh accusations, while not totally solid in every way, are significantly more plausible than the story an anonymous victim, “Jackie,” told to Rolling Stone in 2014.

Because I was an early skeptic of the UVA gang rape, a few people have asked me whether I am similarly skeptical of the Kavanaugh accusations. The journalist Richard Bradley—who expressed doubts about Jackie even before I did—has received the same queries. Like Bradley, I think there are important differences between what the Kavanaugh accusers—Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and now Julie Swetnick—have claimed and what Jackie claimed.

First, a refresher: Jackie’s story, told only to Rolling Stone‘s Sabrina Rubin Erdeley, on condition of anonymity, was that her date, an older male student at the University of Virginia, brought her to a fraternity party during the fall of her freshman year. This unidentified male—”Drew” in the story—lured her to a dark second-floor bedroom, where a group of men ambushed her. They knocked her through a glass table and viciously gang-raped her as the glass shards cut up her back. She passed out from the pain and blood loss, recovered consciousness hours later, and fled the room. Her friends told her not to go to the police, out of fear that this could impact their reputations.

Eventually, it turned out the whole story was a lie. “Drew” did not exist at all: Jackie had cat-fished her friends, and messages sent from Drew to other people were almost certainly sent by Jackie herself. The fraternity hosted no party on the night in question. And Jackie’s friends contradicted her account when journalists reached out to them for comment (Erdeley had neglected to speak with them, instead trusting Jackie’s memory of their comments).

Two details of the Rolling Stone story had struck me as false after I read it for a second time. For one thing, even a tiny cut from a shard of glass causes a person to bleed profusely: that people could roll around in glass for hours and survive the encounter beggared belief. For another—and this is relevant to the Kavanaugh accusation—Jackie claimed to be sober. The vast majority of campus sexual misconduct disputes involve alleged victims who were incapacitated by alcohol to some degree. Perpetrators rely on victims having a diminished ability to resist or be aware of what is happening. It was very hard for me to imagine a pre-planned fraternity gang rape that did not involve getting the victim drunk enough to make her next-day memory unreliable.

The Kavanaugh accusation is not as outlandish as this. (I’ll just discuss Swetnick’s claims in this article, since I’ve already written plenty about Ford’s, and Ramirez’s is less serious.) For one thing, Swetnick has chosen to out herself, in a sworn statement, which means her claims are more credible. (Jackie hid behind anonymity—and to this day, has suffered little consequence for lying: No mainstream news outlet has chosen to name her, even though every journalist who has written about her case knows exactly who she is.) For another, Swetnick has accused a specific person: Kavanaugh. (Jackie refused to tell Erdeley her attacker’s real name until after it was too late.)

Swetnick has alleged that Kavanaugh’s circle of friends at Georgetown Prep hosted parties in which women were given copious amounts of alcohol, and possibly drinks spiked with sedatives. Sweentick has claimed, “I was drugged with Quaaludes or something similar [was] placed in what I was drinking.”

Quaaludes, of course, are the sedatives Bill Cosby—who was sentenced just this week—used to incapacitate his victims so he could rape them. It’s possible Seetnick is trying to link Kavanaugh with Cosby here, because even though the use of these drugs to incapacitate people are a real problem, some evidence suggests they aren’t used nearly as often as people seem to think. Alcohol, voluntarily consumed, is by far the substance most commonly used to facilitate rape. Swetnick might sincerely think she was drugged, but lots of sexual assault victims have thought the same, when really alcohol was the culprit.

Swetnick has also claimed that the boys at the Georgetown Prep parties—including Kavanaugh—would line-up outside a room containing an incapacitated woman, “waiting for their turn” to rape her. This is a somewhat more difficult circumstance to accept on face value—would the men really just wait outside the door, in a manner that made it obvious they were patiently waiting for their opportunity to commit rape, in full view of other party attendees? Note that the most plausible of the allegations against Kavanaugh, the one made by Ford, involves no such thing: She claimed that Kavanaugh dragged her into a bedroom when she was away from the rest of the group, and attempted to rape her with just his close confidant, Mark Judge, watching. For Ford to be telling the truth, it only requires that Kavanaugh and Judge consumed tons of alcohol and made a spur-of-the-moment, terrible mistake. If Swetnick is telling the truth, a lot of people plotted to do something terrible, were content to make everyone else aware of what they were doing, and waited patiently to do it.

It’s the premeditation aspect of Swetnick’s story that most strongly resembles the UVA hoax. Fortunately—for the truth’s sake, if not any one party’s—Swetnick named names, and there should be other witnesses who can shed light on the truth of the matter.

In the meantime, it would be wrong to dismiss the allegation as beyond the realm of possibility. Given the number of people who have accused Kavanaugh and Judge of teen sexual misbehavior and serial alcoholism—misbehavior that Kavanaugh has denied completely, rather than claimed to not remember or at least acknowledged was not unheard of in his private school set—one would have to think that this is essentially a conspiracy to derail his nomination. At this point, I’m not sure conspiracy is the most plausible explanation. We shouldn’t accept these accusations on blind faith, but it’s starting to seem like blind faith is what Kavanaugh’s defenders are requiring of us.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.) is earning the ire of partisans on both the right and the left for remarks he made on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon. Flake blasted his fellow senators and President Donald Trump for the handling of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, but also declined to take a firm position on any of the increasingly fraught questions swirling around the Supreme Court nominee.

Some of that criticism is warranted. After all, Flake is one of only 100 people in America with the power to approve or block Kavanaugh’s nomination. Even that calculation understates Flake’s potential influence over the outcome of this process: given the current hyper-partisan environment and the narrow 51-49 Republican majority in the Senate, Flake is a swing vote in both the crucial Senate Judiciary Committee and the chamber as a whole.

But it’s also difficult not to sympathize with Flake’s assessment of the situation. He is retiring at the end of the current term, and therefore has little to gain from playing politics or trying to appear above the partisan fray. He’s free to be the voice of the people—or perhaps the Senate’s conscious, if you prefer—and the vox populi is frustrated, confused, and a little angry.

Flake said he’s unwilling to believe that Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of attempted to rape her at a high school party in 1983, is “is part of some kind of vast conspiracy from start to finish to smear Judge Kavanaugh,” but that she should be heard (and she will be, Thursday, by the Senate Judiciary Committee). Flake also said that he refuses to believe that her claims of sexual assault are invalid because she did not report the assault immediately after it happened—something Trump tweeted earlier this week.

“How uninformed and uncaring do you have to be to say things like that, much less believe them?” asked Flake. “Do we have any idea what kind of message that sends, especially to young women? How many times do we have to marginalize and ignore women before we learn that important lesson?”

On the other hand, Flake said he does not believe that Kavanaugh “is some kind of serial sexual predator, as has been alleged by some on the left.” (Flake did not comment on the most recent allegations against Kavanaugh, and told a reporter that he did not have time to review those new allegations before his floor speech Wednesday)

Flake lamented that tather than trying to get to the truth, both sides have rushed to strip both Kavanaugh and Ford of their humanity, turning both into “grotesque caricatures” of who they really are.

“We think that our ideological struggle is more important than their humanity,” he said, “because we are so practiced at dehumanizing people that we have also dehumanized ourselves.”

Flake’s assessment of the circus that surrounds Kavanaugh’s confirmation process seems pretty reasonable. Even by modern political standards, and even with the ideological composition of the Supreme Court hanging in the balance, the vitriol shown by both right and left in the past two weeks has been stunning.

There has been almost no consideration of whether Kavanaugh would make a good justice; no consideration of his judicial record or his legal views. His confirmation now seems to hinge on whether you believe Ford’s accusations (and now the accusations brought by two other women) or Kavanaugh’s denials—and “believe” is indeed the right word here, because the frustrating lack of concrete evidence has turned that question into an article of partisan faith.

It’s also right, I think, to feel disappointed that Flake did not take the opportunity to change the process he’s decrying, or even attempt to do so.

He need not take a position on Kavanaugh’s nomination—indeed, he’s right to say he wants to hear the testimony of both Ford and Kavanaugh with an open mind on Thursday—but he could have said that he would not support the decision to vote on Kavanaugh as soon as Friday. He could have said he wanted additional time to allow Kavanaugh’s other accusers to come forward and have their claims properly vetted.

It is unlikely that Thursday’s hearing will definitively prove Ford or Kavanagh to be a liar. And the Supreme Court confirmation process is a political process, not a court of law where due process matters and accusations must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Together, those two facts leave all of us with another frustrating reality: there’s likely no outcome of the Kavanaugh confirmation process that will be accepted as the “right” one.

“However this vote goes, I’m confident in saying that it will forever be steeped in doubt,” Flake said. “This doubt is the only thing of which I am confident.”

The burden of sorting all this out falls to Flake and his fellow senators. It is important to call out the “toxic political culture” that’s only been worsened by the past two weeks of Kavanaugh drama, as Flake did Wednesday. What he does on Thursday and Friday will matter even more.

The Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco cost more than $2.2 billion and took about eight years to construct. Yesterday the city had to shut it down because of a cracked steel support beam.

The center will stay closed through the end of next week.

The four-story transit center, which opened to the public on August 12, serves as hub for many of the city’s bus lines. Hailed the “Grand Central of the West,” it’s supposed to serve as many as 45 million people each year, the Associated Press reports. In addition to its bus services, the transit center features restaurants, shops, and even a rooftop public park.

But Tuesday morning, workers installing ceiling panels discovered a crack in a 6 ½-foot steel beam on the third floor. Officials had no choice but to close down the center. “The beam is cracked, so the behavior of the beam is unpredictable,” Transbay Joint Powers Authority Executive Director Mark Zabaneh said at a news conference. Zabaneh called it a “safety issue,” adding that “we can’t take any chances.”

It wasn’t clear what caused the crack, but it meant chaos for commuters. Buses were redirected, and several of the streets surrounding the structure were closed to traffic. In a press release, officials asked motorists to “avoid driving downtown,” while warning transit riders “to allow extra time for their commute.” This afternoon, Zabaneh said a second cracked beam had been discovered as well.

So what caused the issue? Joe Maffei of the San Francisco–based firm Maffei Structural Engineering tells the San Francisco Chronicle that he sees two potential culprits for the first crack: It could be “a fabrication problem—something went wrong when the beam was manufactured—or the beam is supporting more weight than it’s designed to bear.”

The cracked beams aren’t the only problem to plagued the new transit center. When construction finally ended, the structure was more than $500 million over budget. And earlier this month, the rooftop park’s walkway started crumbling.

As San Francisco spends resources on public transportation, it has made life harder for companies trying to give commuters more choices. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance in April requiring dockless electric scooter services to be licensed and instructing the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Agency to draft regulations for these scooters. The city eventually granted permits to just two companies, and each was only allowed to deploy 625 vehicles.

It’s not just scooters. For months, San Francisco City Supervisor Aaron Peskin has pushed a plan that would tax Uber and Lyft’s net rider fares. Last week Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill allowing San Francisco voters to have the final say on that proposal. Peskin hopes to have the measure on the ballot in 2019.

The San Francisco government clearly values public transportation over private alternatives. In a better world, the city would take its ability to spend billions on transit without getting it right as a sign it should rethink those priorities.

People of many political persuasions have identified postmodernism as a major threat to civilization. The most notable recent attacks have come from Jordan Peterson and other members of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web.”

Reason Editor-at-Large Nick Gillespie has a problem with that. He sat down with Zach Weissmueller, video journalist for Reason TV, to discuss and defend postmodernism—a term he says has been widely mischaracterized by its most vociferous critics—from a libertarian perspective.

Watch the full interview above.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Lorenz Lo.

“Say It Again, I’m Listening,” by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Daniel_Birch/Synth_Movements_Vol1/Say_It_Again_Im_Listening Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Daniel_Birch

“Fluid Dreams,” by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Daniel_Birch/Synth_Movements_Vol1/Fluid_Dreams Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Daniel_Birch

“Telling Me Yes,” by Ryan Andersen is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ryan_Andersen/MORE/Telling_Me_Yes Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ryan_Andersen

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