Month: August 2022

Rep. Peter Meijer’s Trump-Backed Primary Challenger Got a $435,000 Gift From Democrats


Rep. Peter Meijer faces a Trump-backed challenger.

Rep. Peter Meijer is a Republican congressman from Michigan. His district was previously represented by Justin Amash, the first Libertarian member of Congress. Meijer is a Republican rather than a Libertarian, but many aspects of his record are friendly to the principles of limited government. He has often channeled Amash’s independent streak, most notably by voting to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meijer’s defiance of the Trump wing has earned him a primary challenger: John Gibbs, an ardent Trump loyalist who has backed the former president’s stolen-election claims (while also spreading conspiracy theories about John Podesta and Democrats in general). Some Republican primary voters cannot forgive any perceived betrayal of Trump, no matter how well deserved, and thus, it’s a close race. The primary election is Tuesday, August 2.

If Gibbs defeats Meijer, the challenger will have benefited from the financial support of a very curious source: the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), an arm of the party that works to elect Democrats. The DCCC spent $435,000 on an ad campaign aimed at boosting Gibbs in the final days before the primary. That’s no trivial sum of money: As Meijer pointed out in a recent article for Bari Weiss, it was far more money than Gibbs had raised on his own and 100 times as much money as Trump himself had donated to Gibbs. The DCCC is trying harder to elect Meijer’s election-denying far-right challenger than Trump is.

The ad itself is quite insidious: It’s aimed at conservative Republicans and takes the approach of lamenting that Gibbs is “too conservative” and “handpicked by Trump.” The DCCC is clearly highlighting Gibbs’ proximity to Trump in hopes that enough of them will be tricked into spurning Meijer. Democrats’ reason for doing this is obvious: They think Gibbs will be easier to defeat in a general election.

Politics is a dirty game, and both parties routinely engage in this sort of brinkmanship, doing whatever it takes to win more seats. But Democrats boosting Gibbs are squandering considerable moral high ground they might have otherwise possessed on the issue of the so-called existential threat to democracy.

Democrats have claimed that Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is a special threat to the entire U.S. political system, given that Trump has denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Trump also pressured his allies in government to prevent the transfer of power to President Joe Biden. The January 6 Committee hearings are intended to conclusively show that Trump and his ilk are morally unfit for office—and that this reality transcends mere partisan disagreement over public policy.

But how on earth can Democrats continue to make that argument with a straight face, if they are willing to risk helping to elect a MAGA Republican over a more conventional Republican in order to gain a slight political advantage?

It should be noted that Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, did the same exact thing: He ran ads aimed at ensuring that Doug Mastriano, an election-denying state senator who participated in the protests surrounding the U.S. Capitol on January 6, would win the Republican primary and become his opponent. After this came to pass, Shapiro unsurprisingly performed a heel turn, denouncing Mastriano as “a dangerous extremist” who spreads conspiracy theories and wants to restrict the right to vote.

“If Democrats like Shapiro are going to position themselves as defenders of democracy standing against Republican attempts to undermine elections, they really ought to not help those same Republicans get elected,” wrote Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

In his article for Weiss’ Substack, Meijer pointed to several other examples:

It’s not just my race in Michigan. While claiming the moral high ground, Democrats have been busy rewarding candidates like my opponent across the country:

  • Colorado: Democrats have spent $4 million on TV and digital ads to elevate January 6th attendee Ron Hanks over moderate businessman Joe O’Dea in the GOP Senate primary.
  • Pennsylvania: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Josh Shapiro boosted the election-denying, January 6-attending GOP candidate Doug Mastriano in television ads, spending in one ad double what Mastriano had spent on his own campaign. Mastriano is now the gubernatorial nominee in a swing state.
  • Maryland: The Democratic Governors Association spent hundreds of thousands of dollars boosting Dan Cox, who not only attended the rally on January 6 but called Mike Pence a traitor as the violence unfolded.
  • Illinois: The Democratic Governors Association dropped $35 million on Super PAC ads targeting moderate Republican mayor of Aurora Richard Irvin and elevating his election-denying, Trump-endorsed opponent, Darren Bailey, who ultimately won the nomination.

This strategy has backfired spectacularly on Democrats in the past. It was an open secret that the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign was actively rooting for Trump to win the Republican presidential primary campaign; Clinton staffers reasoned that Trump would be easier for her to beat than the other candidates. We all know how that turned out.

Expecting political figures to be more forthright is obviously a hopeless endeavor. But there’s something particularly craven about a political party cynically donating nearly half a million dollars to a stop-the-steal extremist in hopes that he takes out a more reasonable, formidable obstacle to securing that party’s control over the House—all while that party’s members are collectively weeping at democracy’s supposed grave. Those are some crocodile tears.

The post Rep. Peter Meijer's Trump-Backed Primary Challenger Got a $435,000 Gift From Democrats appeared first on Reason.com.

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Which Is More Scandalous: The Training for Armed Teachers or the Training for Police Officers?


Is 650 hours of training enough to prepare police officers for their job?

A recent New York Times story about armed teachers casts doubt on the adequacy of the training they receive with a misleading comparison to the hours required to become a police officer. The real scandal here is not how little training is mandated for teachers who want to carry handguns in school but how little training police officers receive for a job that extends far beyond handling firearms.

Under a new Ohio program, teachers who volunteer to carry guns as a safeguard against mass shooters have to complete 24 hours of firearms training. “The law in Ohio has been especially contentious because it requires no more than 24 hours of training, along with eight hours of recertification annually,” the Times says.

Although the training for teachers is more extensive than Ohio’s requirements for armed security guards, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio thinks it is plainly inadequate. “That, to us, is just outrageous,” Michael Weinman, the union’s director of government affairs, tells the Times, which adds: “By comparison, police officers in the state undergo more than 700 hours of training.”

That is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison, as the Times more or less concedes in the next paragraph. Supporters of the new law, it notes, “say 24 hours is enough because while police training includes everything from traffic tickets to legal matters, school employees tightly focus on firearm proficiency and active shooter response.” If anything is “outrageous” here, it’s how easily someone can qualify as an armed agent of the state empowered to detain, search, and arrest people as well as use deadly force against them.

As the Cincinnati Enquirer noted in 2020, Ohio requires much less training for police officers than it does for “the person who cuts your hair.” Basic training for cops involves 737 hours of training, compared to “1,500 for licensed cosmetologists and 1,800 for barbers.”

Some cities in Ohio go beyond the state’s minimum requirements. “Cincinnati police run a 28-week training program,” the Enquirer noted, while “Columbus and Cleveland police both offer 1,100 hours of training to recruits”—still less than you need to accept money for a haircut. The paper added that “the level of training often depends on a department’s finances, which vary dramatically across the state.”

Police training is actually more rigorous in Ohio than it is in most states. According to the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform (ICJTR), the national average for basic training is 652 hours. State minimums range from zero hours in Hawaii to 1,321 in Connecticut. In Hawaii, the ICJTR notes, “agencies such as the Honolulu Police Department may provide training to some [officers], but not all attend.” And while Ohio does not allow cops to start working before completing basic training, 37 states do.

Insider notes that “the average US police department requires fewer hours of training than what it takes to become a barber or a plumber.” According to a 2017 Institute for Justice report, the average training requirement for barbers was about 1,300 hours. To qualify as a master plumber, you have to complete trade school and up to five years of apprenticeship.

The Institute for Justice reported that three states and the District of Columbia required licenses for interior designers. In those jurisdictions, it noted, “aspiring designers must pass a national exam, pay an average of $364 in fees and devote an average of almost 2,200 days—six years—to a combination of education and apprenticeship before they can begin work.” In Louisiana, which requires that interior designers have 2,190 days of education and experience, someone with a high school diploma can work as a police officer for up to 12 months even before completing basic training, which entails a minimum of 450 hours.

In Texas, the report noted, “eyebrow threaders with 20 years of experience are being told they must stop working and spend between $7,000 and $22,000 and 750 hours in a government-approved beauty school that does not even teach threading.” But if you want to wear a badge and carry a gun as a law enforcement officer in Texas, you need just 696 hours of training and can work up to a year before completing it.

In addition to firearms training, would-be police officers are supposed to learn “everything from traffic tickets to legal matters,” as the Times puts it. Those “legal matters” include complying with constitutional constraints on the use of force. But as UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz points out, that aspect of police training typically provides nothing more than a brief overview of major Supreme Court cases.

While “police departments regularly inform their officers about watershed decisions,” Schwartz notes in a 2021 University of Chicago Law Review article, “officers are not regularly or reliably informed about court decisions interpreting those decisions in different factual scenarios—the very types of decisions that are necessary to clearly establish the law about the constitutionality of uses of force.” Yet the doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields officers from civil liability for alleged misconduct that did not violate “clearly established” law, is based on the premise that officers can reasonably be expected to know the relevant cases, giving them fair warning about when they are overstepping constitutional limits. Schwartz calls that assumption “qualified immunity’s boldest lie.”

Even when officers should understand that a particular use of force is unlawful, they do not necessarily act accordingly, as dramatically illustrated by the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In federal court last week, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, two of three officers who failed to stop their colleague, Derek Chauvin, from killing Floyd, were sentenced to three years and three and a half years, respectively, for violating Floyd’s constitutional rights. The week before, the third officer, Thomas Lane, received a federal sentence of two and a half years. Lane had previously pleaded guilty to a state charge of aiding and abetting manslaughter, for which he has not yet been sentenced. Kueng and Thao are scheduled to be tried on similar charges in January.

Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE), a training program that was established in 2021, aims to avoid situations like this by encouraging officers to intervene when a colleague violates someone’s rights or seems about to do so. ABLE, which was developed by Georgetown University’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, grew out of a New Orleans program known as EPIC (Ethical Policing Is Courageous) that was launched in 2014 under the guidance of Ervin Staub, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. It is based on insights gained from research into why people either intervene or fail to intervene in emergency situations.

ABLE entails eight hours of training conducted by officers who have completed a week-long certification program. But this is a supplement to standard training that so far has been adopted by just 265 or so of the country’s 18,000 police agencies. Is it too much to expect that police departments add another eight hours to basic training, which would increase the average from 652 hours to 660, so that officers are less likely to look the other way when a colleague needlessly escalates an encounter or uses unlawful force?

Additional training is by no means a silver bullet for police abuse. It seems doubtful that any amount of instruction would have changed Chauvin’s behavior. And when cops lie to convict people or willfully misuse their authority to punish people who irk them, the problem is not that they were never taught they should not do that.

Still, “active bystandership” training might have affected how Kueng, Thao, and Lane responded when Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes. It was clear that Lane, a rookie who twice suggested that Floyd be moved from his stomach to a position in which it would have been easier for him to breathe, remembered what he had been taught about the dangers of “positional asphyxia.” If his training had included more emphasis on the duty to intervene and had better equipped him to do so, he might have been more insistent, and Floyd might still be alive.

Even basic information about techniques commonly used by police might help prevent Fourth Amendment violations. A couple of years ago, the Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff’s Office reached a $150,000 settlement with a couple whose home was searched in 2012 based on a drug field test that misidentified tea in their trash as marijuana. Neither the deputies nor their boss, then-Sheriff Frank Denning, seemed to be aware that such tests are notoriously unreliable, notwithstanding a warning label that said their results “are only presumptive in nature” and should be confirmed by laboratory analysis. A little instruction on how often field tests finger innocent people could help reduce false arrests, not to mention thousands of guilty pleas based on a technology that is not accurate enough to be used in court.

You probably can think of additional examples. The notion that a few months of training (if that) is enough to prepare people for a job that presents myriad opportunities to wrongfully detain, interrogate, search, arrest, assault, and kill people is risible. Americans would be safer if states took those risks more seriously than the danger of a bad haircut.

The post Which Is More Scandalous: The Training for Armed Teachers or the Training for Police Officers? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Justice Thomas’ Withdrawal From GWU Exposes The Growing “Unavailability” Of Diverse Opinions In Higher Education

Justice Thomas’ Withdrawal From GWU Exposes The Growing “Unavailability” Of Diverse Opinions In Higher Education

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in USA Today on the withdrawal of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas from the faculty at George Washington University. The announcement merely said that Justice Thomas was now “unavailable” to teach. While the decision is being celebrated by both GWU and across the Internet, it is only the latest blow to free speech and the struggle to preserve a diversity of viewpoints in higher education. When the university announced earlier that it would not fire Thomas, I wrote a piece expressing doubt about how that victory would play out in the future to protect free speech on campuses. The cessation of teaching the course only magnifies those concerns. Such withdrawals raise the concern over the “unavailability” of a diversity of thought in higher education.

Here is the column:

After 11 years, students at George Washington University Law School will register for courses this fall with one notable difference. They will no longer be able to take a seminar with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The removal of Justice Thomas from the list of lecturers followed a cancel campaign that demanded that the university ban him from any classrooms. At 74, and looking at an upcoming term of major decisions, Thomas hardly needs the aggravation of such protests. However, his departure (even if temporary) is a great loss to students, the law school and free speech.

In a petition, Justice Thomas (and his wife) were denounced as “actively making life unsafe for thousands of students on our campus.” The impetus for the campaign was clearly the recent decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which critics charged “stripped the right to bodily autonomy of people with wombs” and called on faculty and students to “kick Clarence Thomas out of Foggy Bottom.”

While the university refused to terminate Thomas, the campaign continued and protests were expected in the fall. Now many are celebrating the departure as a triumph, but it is only the latest example of how dissenting viewpoints are being systematically eliminated in higher education.

Indeed, the contrast could not be greater this week as recently retired Justice Stephen Breyer was welcomed on the Harvard Law faculty. No protests. No cancel campaign over his liberal decisions.

Breyer’s return to Harvard, where he graduated and once taught, will be interesting. This liberal icon might now be considered a virtual moderate on a faculty that largely runs from the left to the far left.

A new survey report, conducted by The Harvard Crimson, revealed that 82.46% of faculty surveyed identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 16.08% identified as “moderate” and a mere 1.46% identified as “conservative.” Not a single faculty member identified as “very conservative,” but the number of faculty identified as “very liberal” increased by another 8% in just one year.

Thomas’ withdrawal fits with a long pattern of cancel campaigns, which often take two tracks.

First, they seek the termination of faculty with dissenting views. However, tenured or high-profile figures may be more difficult for a university to fire. Few of us believed that a sitting Supreme Court justice would be banned from teaching at the law school.

However, if termination is not possible, these campaigns try to push targets to resign by making their continuation on campus increasingly intolerable.

Recently, a campaign at Georgetown University successfully prompted a law professor to resign. Center for the Constitution Director Ilya Shapiro was suspended because of a single controversial tweet. And while Shapiro was cleared after a long investigation, the law school’s tepid support showed he couldn’t expect much of a future at Georgetown.

Even tenured professors can have enough. Recently, UCLA anthropology professor Joseph Manson resigned after declaring higher education a lost cause due to the now stifling level of orthodoxy on faculties. Manson described how his colleagues remained silent as dissenting faculty members were continually shunned and attacked.

After decades of teaching, he declared “U.S. higher education is morally and intellectually corrupt, beyond the possibility of self-repair, and therefore no longer a worthwhile setting in which to spend my time and effort.”

It is not clear that the cancel campaign prompted the decision of Justice Thomas, but the prospect of protests planned for the Fall could not have helped in his decision making.  What is clear is that his departure is likely to fuel additional efforts to isolate and stigmatize those with opposing views.

Recently, for example, Rep. Susan Wild, D-Penn., used her address as George Washington’s commencement speaker to accuse me of using law for “wrongful ends” for questioning the constitutional basis for former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment. The basis of her allegation was a demonstrably false accusation that even her Democratic colleagues refuted in the hearing. It simply did not matter that what Rep. Wild told our graduates was factually untrue. The point is to relentlessly attack and ultimately exhaust those with opposing views.

Such attacks are now a common factor of life for many faculty members offering dissenting views on issues ranging from impeachment to diversity programs to police abuse to transgender identification to vaccines to native-land acknowledgment.

Indeed, this week, University of Michigan medical professor Dr. Kristin Collier faced the same type of attack at an introduction ceremony. Almost half of the University of Michigan’s incoming medical school class walked out of a “white coat ceremony” to protest that fact that she opposes legalized abortion. She was not planning to discuss abortion, but the mere fact that she doesn’t support it made her speaking at the event unacceptable.

For more than a decade, George Washington University Law School benefited greatly from the teaching of Justice Thomas, who combines a legendary career with one of the most inspiring life stories in the history of the court. Whatever the reason for his cessation in teaching, he deserves our thanks.

He also deserved better. He deserved greater public support from individual faculty members. He deserved greater understanding from students. He deserved an equally vocal counter-campaign in support of free speech and a diversity of viewpoints at the university.

Yet, there is now an overwhelming fear among faculty and students that they could be next to be targeted in a cancel campaign or to be shunned by colleagues. These campaigns threaten everything that brings meaning to an intellectual from access to classes to conferences to publications.

This is why many choose to remain silent as the mob pursues their colleagues. For those tagged as dissenters, the atmosphere is perfectly Robespierrean. French revolutionary leader Abbe Sieyes captured this atmosphere as a liberal thinker who was later suspected of being an independent thinker.

When asked what he had done during the Reign of Terror, he replied: “I stayed alive.”

Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/01/2022 – 16:20

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Markets Turmoil As Bad News Is Not Great News Anymore

Markets Turmoil As Bad News Is Not Great News Anymore

Shitty data has been very supportive for the last few days in markets as the world and their pet rabbit anticipates a Fed pivot being forced on Powell by recessionary forces.

Three things changed today

1) Jawboning – A smorgasbord of Fed (former and current) Speakers jawboned down the idea that a Fed Pivot is imminent.

2) Really Ugly Global Data – ISM Manufacturing data shit the bed and GDPNOW followed suit with a sizable downgrade of its Q3 growth forecast, (which followed terrible data out of China and EU)

3) WW3 Worries – Perhaps only of side notice but Pelsoi’s plan to visit Taiwan raises the risk of WW3 and that is just too bad of news to be buying.

And that prompted the ‘bad news is good news’ narrative to implode, leaving stocks lower, oil down hard, bond yields tumbling (and curve inverting), crypto dumped, and the Dollar and Yuan sold… with Gold bid.

The ugly China and EU data (accelerated by the Pelosi headlines) sent futures lower into the cash equity open, the algos kneejerk bought the dip on the ugly ISM data (prices paid were down), but those gains never held as confidence waned. By the close, the S&P was the ugliest horse in the glue factory…

The opening weakness was short-squeezed back up but could not hold…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasuries were mixed with the short-end underperforming (2Y +1.5bps, 30Y -10bps)…

Source: Bloomberg

Which inverted the curve even more dramatically, erasing all the steepening since The Fed…

Source: Bloomberg

The 10Y Yield closed at its lowest in 4 months…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar lost ground today, back at one month lows…

Source: Bloomberg

As did the Chinese yuan on Pelosi headlines (and an ugly PMI print overnight)…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos slipped lower after strong gains on Saturday…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold rallied today, extending its bounce off $1700 and nearing $1800…

Oil prices tumbled amid ugly data from China, EU, and US (and news that EU/UK will delay their insurance sanctions against Russia)…

Finally, we note that the drop in gas prices may be coming to an end very soon as wholesale gasoline and crude prices have decoupled from retail pump prices…

Source: Bloomberg

Not good news for President Biden’s ratings. Nor is this…

Finally, in case you needed any convincing, this morning’s ISM data had some interesting subcomponent action under the surface.

As @charliebilello notes, the last 4 times the spread between New Orders and Inventories in the ISM Manufacturing Index was this negative, the US was already in a recession. The 2001, 1990-91, and 1981-82 recessions never had readings this low…

But of course, it’s different this time right… because President Biden is in office?

Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/01/2022 – 16:01

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Here Are The Best And Worst Performing Assets In July And YTD

Here Are The Best And Worst Performing Assets In July And YTD

After a historically poor first half of the year, July saw asset price performance turn on its head as a majority of the non-currency assets in the main Deutsche Bank asset sample were in positive territory. As DB strategist Karthik Nagalingam writes, 29 of the 38 major assets tracked by the bank started the second half of the year with a monthly gain in July – the highest percentage since November 2020 when Covid vaccines were first approved.

July’s gains were led by a combination of factors, including the prospect of the Federal Reserve pivoting due to softening economic conditions and potential peaking in inflationary factors. Still, despite the July rush, only 5 assets of the 38 in the sample are currently enjoying a YTD gain, which if trends continued will make this year even worse than we saw in 2008.

Concerns about growth slowing and some signs that inflation might be peaking meant that investors began to price in a less aggressive pace of monetary tightening from the Fed over the coming months. In fact, markets are pricing rate cuts now within the next six months.

The Federal Reserve Chair this past week acknowledged softening economic changes, but also reiterated that getting prices under control was the priority. Chair Powell left open the possibility of another 75bp or more hike in September, but avoided providing forward guidance, saying that the Committee would be making policy decisions on a meeting-per-meeting basis. Up into the FOMC and then thereafter the prospect of a less aggressive Fed proved supportive for US fixed income.

At the ECB meeting in mid-July, the central bank began their hiking cycle with a 50bp hike for all three of their main interest rates, which leaves the deposit facility rate at 0%, and the main refinancing rate at 0.5%. Just a week before the Fed meeting, the ECB also discontinued forward guidance, saying that the Governing Council would “make a transition to a meeting-by-meeting approach to interest rate decisions.” The 50bp hike from the ECB came alongside their new mythical antifragmentation tool, the Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), which helped some peripherals. And while Europe is crashing into a recession, most economists paradoxically still see another 100bps of hikes in the near term amid calls for a 2% terminal rate (even if it is delayed until 2024 over a two-stage hiking cycle that pauses because of a recession, which is hilarious since rates will be cut far deeper than before in the “middle” of the recession).

One reason that markets have started to reprice inflation expectations is the pullback in commodity prices. The prospect of slower global growth and an impending recession in both Europe and the US impacted oil prices with Brent crude futures dropping -4.2% and WTI futures trading off -6.8%. The pullback in commodities such as copper (-3.8%), wheat (-7.0%), and iron (-5.8%) also are projected to reduce pricing pressures.

Not every commodity was lower, however: European natural gas soared, and was a major theme last month due to the economic ramifications of the geopolitical maneuverings surrounding the maintenance of Nord Stream 1. Gas flow did turn back on after a roughly 2 week break mid-month, however gas flow has been slowed to 20% of capacity after initially returning to the 40% of capacity seen prior to maintenance. EU countries reached a deal on emergency gas cuts for this winter, with member states due to prepare emergency plans by the end of September to show how they will curb demand. European natural gas futures climbed +28.5% this month after spiking 50.6% in June.

Adding to the case for a Fed pivot, the last week of July saw US GDP come in at -0.9% in 2Q, which is the second consecutive print in contractionary territory and thus a technical recession. As such, markets are currently pricing a Fed response to the slowing activity and that the economic slowdown will help reduce pricing pressures.

Finally, Q2 earnings season kicked off, with many major US financials disappointing as major money center banks signaled that they would likely need to optimize their balance sheets to increase capital ratios over the near-term. And while many large technology firms announced plans to cut or slow hiring, though shares advanced as earnings outperformed lesser expectations. Analysts have lowered earnings estimates for Q3 by 2.5% already, which is more than average, though the forward P/E ratios for the S&P 500 rose over the course of the month.

With all that in mind…

Here are the assets which saw the biggest gains in July:

Equities: Risk assets rallied in response to expectations that slowing economic conditions would mean a dovish pivot by the Federal Reserve in the medium term. DM equities were the best performing asset this month with the Nasdaq (+12.4%) topping our monthly leaderboard for the first time since April 2020. The S&P 500 (+9.2%) and Stoxx 600 (+7.8%) were second and third respectively.

Fixed Income: The prospect of a slowing hiking cycle by the Fed and less dire European economic forecasts proved supportive for DM fixed income with the turn in risk sentiment leading Credit to gain in July. US HY (+6.8%) saw its biggest monthly gain since July 2009, while EUR IG (+5.0%), EUR HY (+5.1%) and US IG non-fin (+3.5%) all produced strong months in an otherwise historically bad year. European government bonds rallied as concerns over an economic slowdown mounted as the energy crisis fears deepen. The announcement of the ECB‘s new anti-fragmentation tool, the Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), seems to have helped Spanish (+4.6%) bonds keep up with bunds (+4.6%), though BTPs underperformed as they were not able to overcome Prime Minister Draghi’s resignation (+1.6%).

Which assets saw the biggest losses in July?

Chinese Equities: The Hang Seng (-7.3%) and the Shanghai Composite (-3.1%) were among the worst equity indices this past month as fresh covid flare-ups in Shanghai and the surrounding areas meant that risk sentiment remains weak. Furthermore there was renewed scrutiny on tech shares as China imposed fines on several companies including Tencent and Alibaba for not adhering to anti-monopoly rules on disclosures of transactions.

Oil: WTI (-6.8%) and Brent (-4.2%) were at the second and third from the bottom of our monthly rankings. The prospect of slower global growth and an impending recession in Europe and the US impacted oil prices.

Metals (both precious and industrial): Commodities across the board struggled, as both precious and industrial metals followed oil prices lower on the backdrop of slower global growth. Copper (-3.8%) was just behind oil for worst performing commodity, with gold (-2.3%) somewhat better but still down on the month.

 

Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/01/2022 – 15:45

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Jon Stewart Melts Down At Jack Posobiec Outside Capitol

Jon Stewart Melts Down At Jack Posobiec Outside Capitol

Comedian Jon Stewart had an absolute meltdown after journalist Jack Posobiec approached him to discuss a bill in Congress that would have helped veterans affected by burn pits, until Democrats pulled a last minute ‘blank check’ financial trick to the tune of $400 billion, which GOP lawmakers refused to sign off on.

To recap; Stewart has gone on a disingenuous campaign against Republicans for shooting down the PACT Act – which they previously supported – before House Democrats tried to slip in a change that shifted $400 billion from “discretionary” to “mandatory” – essentially handing them a giant slush fund. The legislation, if passed, will allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to expand health care services for service members exposed to dangerous chemicals from so-called burn pits, where the military dumped and incinerated toxic waste, including jet fuel.

The controversy spilled over to the airwaves this weekend, with Republican lawmakers such as Ted Cruz (R-TX) calling for Democrats to remove the unrelated spending so the bill could get passed, and Stewart completely ignoring the difference.

Stewart doesn’t care…

“The difference between mandatory and discretionary…that’s just a word salad that he’s spewing into his coffee cup on his way to god-knows-where,” the comedian then told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, adding “At some point we all have to live in reality. And what he’s saying is just factually incorrect.”

Fast forward to Monday outside the Capitol, where Posobiec and the National Pulse’s Raheem Kassam approached Stewart and a group of other protesters.

“Shut the fuck up and listen” Stewart can be heard saying to Posobiec.

“Over the line…” Stewart later shouts. “People have suffered for 15 years because you’re a fucking troll. You’re a troll. Not in good faith … you’re not in good faith,” the TV host shouted.

“I’m not even against you guys,” Posobiec replied.

As Kasaam later notes; “After all the screaming was over, Jon pulled me aside and explained to me that he doesn’t want discretionary spending amendments because it would lead to underfunding. I listened. Before I could reply he walked away. We then spoke with Vets for 45 mins.

After Stewart’s meltdown, he calmed down and admitted “I lost my temper a little bit, I felt like I was being trolled. And, uh, I realized that the important thing is… just gotta get this done for these guys and get them over the finish line to get the healthcare they need.

More from Kassam (via the National Pulse)

Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/01/2022 – 15:27

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Russia Is Vital For OPEC+, Says New OPEC Secretary-General

Russia Is Vital For OPEC+, Says New OPEC Secretary-General

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

Russia is “a big, main and highly influential player in the world energy map,” according to the new secretary-general of OPEC, Kuwaiti former oil executive, and OPEC governor Haitham al-Ghais.

Speaking to Kuwait newspaper Alrai in an interview quoted by Reuters, Al-Ghais also said that OPEC was not competing with Russia on the oil market and that Russia was vital for the success of the OPEC+ agreement.

The Kuwaiti official will attend his first OPEC+ meeting as OPEC secretary-general this week. According to early reports, the group will likely discuss keeping oil production unchanged in September from August, although some sources told Reuters it might also talk about a modest increase.

According to Al-Ghais, the oil market is currently “very volatile and turbulent.” The OPEC official also noted in his interview that “OPEC doesn’t control oil prices, but it practices what is called tuning the markets in terms of supply and demand.”

Al-Ghais also echoed the opinions of fellow OPEC members, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that the oil price rise was not only the result of the Ukraine war but the consequences of processes that began much earlier.

“All the data confirm that prices began to rise gradually and cumulatively, and before the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian developments, due to the prevailing perception in the markets that there is a shortage of spare production capacity, which has become confined to a few and limited countries,” OPEC’s new secretary-general told Alrai.

He added that prices could rise further because of insufficient investment in new production. Just how high oil could go, however, Al-Ghais declined to predict.

The Kuwaiti oil official assumed the office of OPEC secretary-general today and will serve for a term of three years. He can be reelected but only once. He replaces Nigeria’s Mohamed Barkindo, who passed away earlier this year.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/01/2022 – 15:21

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Rep. Peter Meijer’s Trump-Backed Primary Challenger Got a $435,000 Gift From Democrats


Rep. Peter Meijer faces a Trump-backed challenger.

Rep. Peter Meijer is a Republican congressman from Michigan. His district was previously represented by Justin Amash, the first Libertarian member of Congress. Meijer is a Republican rather than a Libertarian, but many aspects of his record are friendly to the principles of limited government. He has often channeled Amash’s independent streak, most notably by voting to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meijer’s defiance of the Trump wing has earned him a primary challenger: John Gibbs, an ardent Trump loyalist who has backed the former president’s stolen-election claims (while also spreading conspiracy theories about John Podesta and Democrats in general). Some Republican primary voters cannot forgive any perceived betrayal of Trump, no matter how well deserved, and thus, it’s a close race. The primary election is Tuesday, August 2.

If Gibbs defeats Meijer, the challenger will have benefited from the financial support of a very curious source: the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), an arm of the party that works to elect Democrats. The DCCC spent $435,000 on an ad campaign aimed at boosting Gibbs in the final days before the primary. That’s no trivial sum of money: As Meijer pointed out in a recent article for Bari Weiss, it was far more money than Gibbs had raised on his own and 100 times as much money as Trump himself had donated to Gibbs. The DCCC is trying harder to elect Meijer’s election-denying far-right challenger than Trump is.

The ad itself is quite insidious: It’s aimed at conservative Republicans and takes the approach of lamenting that Gibbs is “too conservative” and “handpicked by Trump.” The DCCC is clearly highlighting Gibbs’ proximity to Trump in hopes that enough of them will be tricked into spurning Meijer. Democrats’ reason for doing this is obvious: They think Gibbs will be easier to defeat in a general election.

Politics is a dirty game, and both parties routinely engage in this sort of brinkmanship, doing whatever it takes to win more seats. But Democrats boosting Gibbs are squandering considerable moral high ground they might have otherwise possessed on the issue of the so-called existential threat to democracy.

Democrats have claimed that Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is a special threat to the entire U.S. political system, given that Trump has denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Trump also pressured his allies in government to prevent the transfer of power to President Joe Biden. The January 6 Committee hearings are intended to conclusively show that Trump and his ilk are morally unfit for office—and that this reality transcends mere partisan disagreement over public policy.

But how on earth can Democrats continue to make that argument with a straight face, if they are willing to risk helping to elect a MAGA Republican over a more conventional Republican in order to gain a slight political advantage?

It should be noted that Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, did the same exact thing: He ran ads aimed at ensuring that Doug Mastriano, an election-denying state senator who participated in the protests surrounding the U.S. Capitol on January 6, would win the Republican primary and become his opponent. After this came to pass, Shapiro unsurprisingly performed a heel turn, denouncing Mastriano as “a dangerous extremist” who spreads conspiracy theories and wants to restrict the right to vote.

“If Democrats like Shapiro are going to position themselves as defenders of democracy standing against Republican attempts to undermine elections, they really ought to not help those same Republicans get elected,” wrote Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

In his article for Weiss’ Substack, Meijer pointed to several other examples:

It’s not just my race in Michigan. While claiming the moral high ground, Democrats have been busy rewarding candidates like my opponent across the country:

  • Colorado: Democrats have spent $4 million on TV and digital ads to elevate January 6th attendee Ron Hanks over moderate businessman Joe O’Dea in the GOP Senate primary.
  • Pennsylvania: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Josh Shapiro boosted the election-denying, January 6-attending GOP candidate Doug Mastriano in television ads, spending in one ad double what Mastriano had spent on his own campaign. Mastriano is now the gubernatorial nominee in a swing state.
  • Maryland: The Democratic Governors Association spent hundreds of thousands of dollars boosting Dan Cox, who not only attended the rally on January 6 but called Mike Pence a traitor as the violence unfolded.
  • Illinois: The Democratic Governors Association dropped $35 million on Super PAC ads targeting moderate Republican mayor of Aurora Richard Irvin and elevating his election-denying, Trump-endorsed opponent, Darren Bailey, who ultimately won the nomination.

This strategy has backfired spectacularly on Democrats in the past. It was an open secret that the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign was actively rooting for Trump to win the Republican presidential primary campaign; Clinton staffers reasoned that Trump would be easier for her to beat than the other candidates. We all know how that turned out.

Expecting political figures to be more forthright is obviously a hopeless endeavor. But there’s something particularly craven about a political party cynically donating nearly half a million dollars to a stop-the-steal extremist in hopes that he takes out a more reasonable, formidable obstacle to securing that party’s control over the House—all while that party’s members are collectively weeping at democracy’s supposed grave. Those are some crocodile tears.

The post Rep. Peter Meijer's Trump-Backed Primary Challenger Got a $435,000 Gift From Democrats appeared first on Reason.com.

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Which Is More Scandalous: The Training for Armed Teachers or the Training for Police Officers?


Is 650 hours of training enough to prepare police officers for their job?

A recent New York Times story about armed teachers casts doubt on the adequacy of the training they receive with a misleading comparison to the hours required to become a police officer. The real scandal here is not how little training is mandated for teachers who want to carry handguns in school but how little training police officers receive for a job that extends far beyond handling firearms.

Under a new Ohio program, teachers who volunteer to carry guns as a safeguard against mass shooters have to complete 24 hours of firearms training. “The law in Ohio has been especially contentious because it requires no more than 24 hours of training, along with eight hours of recertification annually,” the Times says.

Although the training for teachers is more extensive than Ohio’s requirements for armed security guards, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio thinks it is plainly inadequate. “That, to us, is just outrageous,” Michael Weinman, the union’s director of government affairs, tells the Times, which adds: “By comparison, police officers in the state undergo more than 700 hours of training.”

That is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison, as the Times more or less concedes in the next paragraph. Supporters of the new law, it notes, “say 24 hours is enough because while police training includes everything from traffic tickets to legal matters, school employees tightly focus on firearm proficiency and active shooter response.” If anything is “outrageous” here, it’s how easily someone can qualify as an armed agent of the state empowered to detain, search, and arrest people as well as use deadly force against them.

As the Cincinnati Enquirer noted in 2020, Ohio requires much less training for police officers than it does for “the person who cuts your hair.” Basic training for cops involves 737 hours of training, compared to “1,500 for licensed cosmetologists and 1,800 for barbers.”

Some cities in Ohio go beyond the state’s minimum requirements. “Cincinnati police run a 28-week training program,” the Enquirer noted, while “Columbus and Cleveland police both offer 1,100 hours of training to recruits”—still less than you need to accept money for a haircut. The paper added that “the level of training often depends on a department’s finances, which vary dramatically across the state.”

Police training is actually more rigorous in Ohio than it is in most states. According to the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform (ICJTR), the national average for basic training is 652 hours. State minimums range from zero hours in Hawaii to 1,321 in Connecticut. In Hawaii, the ICJTR notes, “agencies such as the Honolulu Police Department may provide training to some [officers], but not all attend.” And while Ohio does not allow cops to start working before completing basic training, 37 states do.

Insider notes that “the average US police department requires fewer hours of training than what it takes to become a barber or a plumber.” According to a 2017 Institute for Justice report, the average training requirement for barbers was about 1,300 hours. To qualify as a master plumber, you have to complete trade school and up to five years of apprenticeship.

The Institute for Justice reported that three states and the District of Columbia required licenses for interior designers. In those jurisdictions, it noted, “aspiring designers must pass a national exam, pay an average of $364 in fees and devote an average of almost 2,200 days—six years—to a combination of education and apprenticeship before they can begin work.” In Louisiana, which requires that interior designers have 2,190 days of education and experience, someone with a high school diploma can work as a police officer for up to 12 months even before completing basic training, which entails a minimum of 450 hours.

In Texas, the report noted, “eyebrow threaders with 20 years of experience are being told they must stop working and spend between $7,000 and $22,000 and 750 hours in a government-approved beauty school that does not even teach threading.” But if you want to wear a badge and carry a gun as a law enforcement officer in Texas, you need just 696 hours of training and can work up to a year before completing it.

In addition to firearms training, would-be police officers are supposed to learn “everything from traffic tickets to legal matters,” as the Times puts it. Those “legal matters” include complying with constitutional constraints on the use of force. But as UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz points out, that aspect of police training typically provides nothing more than a brief overview of major Supreme Court cases.

While “police departments regularly inform their officers about watershed decisions,” Schwartz notes in a 2021 University of Chicago Law Review article, “officers are not regularly or reliably informed about court decisions interpreting those decisions in different factual scenarios—the very types of decisions that are necessary to clearly establish the law about the constitutionality of uses of force.” Yet the doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields officers from civil liability for alleged misconduct that did not violate “clearly established” law, is based on the premise that officers can reasonably be expected to know the relevant cases, giving them fair warning about when they are overstepping constitutional limits. Schwartz calls that assumption “qualified immunity’s boldest lie.”

Even when officers should understand that a particular use of force is unlawful, they do not necessarily act accordingly, as dramatically illustrated by the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In federal court last week, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, two of three officers who failed to stop their colleague, Derek Chauvin, from killing Floyd, were sentenced to three years and three and a half years, respectively, for violating Floyd’s constitutional rights. The week before, the third officer, Thomas Lane, received a federal sentence of two and a half years. Lane had previously pleaded guilty to a state charge of aiding and abetting manslaughter, for which he has not yet been sentenced. Kueng and Thao are scheduled to be tried on similar charges in January.

Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE), a training program that was established in 2021, aims to avoid situations like this by encouraging officers to intervene when a colleague violates someone’s rights or seems about to do so. ABLE, which was developed by Georgetown University’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, grew out of a New Orleans program known as EPIC (Ethical Policing Is Courageous) that was launched in 2014 under the guidance of Ervin Staub, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. It is based on insights gained from research into why people either intervene or fail to intervene in emergency situations.

ABLE entails eight hours of training conducted by officers who have completed a week-long certification program. But this is a supplement to standard training that so far has been adopted by just 265 or so of the country’s 18,000 police agencies. Is it too much to expect that police departments add another eight hours to basic training, which would increase the average from 652 hours to 660, so that officers are less likely to look the other way when a colleague needlessly escalates an encounter or uses unlawful force?

Additional training is by no means a silver bullet for police abuse. It seems doubtful that any amount of instruction would have changed Chauvin’s behavior. And when cops willfully misuse their authority to punish people who irk them, the problem is not that they were never taught they should not do that.

Still, “active bystandership” training might have affected how Kueng, Thao, and Lane responded when Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes. It was clear that Lane, a rookie who twice suggested that Floyd be moved from his stomach to a position in which it would have been easier for him to breathe, remembered what he had been taught about the dangers of “positional asphyxia.” If his training had included more emphasis on the duty to intervene and had better equipped him to do so, he might have been more insistent, and Floyd might still be alive.

Even basic information about techniques commonly used by police might help prevent Fourth Amendment violations. A couple of years ago, the Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff’s Office reached a $150,000 settlement with a couple whose home was searched in 2012 based on a drug field test that misidentified tea in their trash as marijuana. Neither the deputies nor their boss, then-Sheriff Frank Denning, seemed to be aware that such tests are notoriously unreliable, notwithstanding a warning label that said their results “are only presumptive in nature” and should be confirmed by laboratory analysis. A little instruction on how often field tests finger innocent people could help reduce false arrests, not to mention thousands of guilty pleas based on a technology that is not accurate enough to be used in court.

You probably can think of additional examples. The notion that a few months of training (if that) is enough to prepare people for a job that presents myriad opportunities to wrongfully detain, interrogate, search, arrest, assault, and kill people is risible. Americans would be safer if states took those risks more seriously than the danger of a bad haircut.

The post Which Is More Scandalous: The Training for Armed Teachers or the Training for Police Officers? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Proposed Bill Would Protect Journalists Like Julian Assange From Espionage Charges


Assange protest poster

Three members of Congress are attempting to avoid future Julian Assange–style prosecutions by amending the U.S. espionage law so that it doesn’t apply to journalists.

Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) and Reps. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) partnered up to reintroduce the Espionage Act Reform Act. The Espionage Act, passed in 1917, is ostensibly intended to punish and imprison government employees and contractors for providing or selling state secrets to enemy governments. In practice, the law has been brought to bear time and time again to attempt to punish journalists and whistleblowers for attempting to inform the public about serious issues the U.S. government would prefer to keep secret. While people like Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Iraq War leaker Chelsea Manning, domestic surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange aren’t spies of foreign governments, many have been threatened with or thrown into prison as if they were.

The Espionage Act Reform Act would change the law in a couple of ways. First of all, the reform would clarify that the espionage law specifically affects people authorized to receive confidential government information (federal employees or contractors), meaning that journalists who receive classified information and publish it are not engaging in espionage. It also establishes that whistleblowers within the government are able to turn to members of Congress, federal courts, an inspector general, and a couple of other key oversight agencies with important classified information without running afoul of the law.

In short, the goal is to align the law with what people think that the law is for—to punish spies, not people trying to warn lawmakers or the public about federal government misconduct.

“At a time when government officials claim the right to perform warrantless surveillance upon all American citizens, there is an urgent need to zealously guard freedom of the press and to demand government transparency and accountability,” Massie said in a prepared statement. “The ongoing attempts to prosecute journalists like Julian Assange under the Espionage Act threaten our First Amendment rights, and should be opposed by all who wish to safeguard our constitutional rights now and in the years to come.”

Assange still currently faces extradition from the U.K. to the United States, where he faces 18 separate espionage-related charges for publishing the documents provided by Manning. Media watchdogs and human rights groups have been warning that the prosecution of Assange serves as a threat to journalism and compromises free speech.

The Knight First Amendment Institute supports the bill and sent out a statement urging for better safeguards for those who report on important national security issues.

“We welcome this bill, which would provide important new protection for press freedom in the United States,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney for the Institute. “It would provide crucial safeguards for national-security journalists, enabling them to report on issues of indisputable interest to the public without fear of criminal liability. Congress should enact this bill and also provide additional protections to national-security whistleblowers.”

Khanna and Wyden first introduced the bill in 2020. Each of them was referred to their respective House and Senate Judiciary Committees, where they sat with no further action.

The post Proposed Bill Would Protect Journalists Like Julian Assange From Espionage Charges appeared first on Reason.com.

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