Author: admin

A mother in Bristol,
Connecticut, was charged
with leaving a child unsupervised in a car Wednesday.
How old was the helpless tyke?

Eleven.

Why was she in the car? She asked her mom if she
could stay there.

Was she in danger of boiling to death? According to
WFSB:

When officers opened the car doors, they said the child
was responsive and not in distress, and that the car was not
“excessively hot.”

In other words, the 11-year-old girl was indisputably fine. Not
overheated, not abandoned, not upset—nothing. 

So don’t just ask why the mom was charged with a crime, ask why
is this a crime? Why does the law get to decide how a
mom should raise her kids? Why does the law treat a self-sufficient
11 year old as a helpless forsaken baby? Why does the law allow
cops to harass tweens and moms just going about their
day? 

The answer: Our laws
leap to the very worst case scenario first—a child could die!—and
refuse to make any distinction between an infinitesimal risk and a
huge one. Everything is dangerous when it comes to kids. Even a
normal wait in a car.

The mom is scheduled to appear in court on July 21.

Meanwhile, another mom was just charged with a similar
crime. Read
about it here. Among the interesting details in this
case: The mother had her sister-in-law watching the car and
the kids the entire (short!) time she ran the errand, and now
she’s terrified the state will take her children away.

Put down that burger you
irresponsible carnivores! Why? Because munching steaks, burgers,
and chops significantly increases the carbon footprint of
meat-eaters and thus their contribution to man-made global warming.
So says a new study, “Dietary
greenhouse gas emissions of meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians
and vegans in the UK,” in the journal Climatic Change.
By how much? The researchers conclude:

We have shown that dietary GHG emissions associated with
self-selected diets in the UK are strongly associated with the
amount of animal-based products in the diet. After adjustment for
sex and age, an average 2,000 kcal high meat diet had 2.5 times as
many GHG emissions than an average 2,000 kcal vegan diet…

Assuming that the average daily energy intake in the UK is 2,000
kcal, then moving from a high meat diet to a low meat diet would
reduce an individual’s carbon footprint by 920kgCO2e every year,
moving from a high meat diet to a vegetarian diet would reduce the
carbon footprint by 1,230kgCO2e/year, and moving from a high meat
diet to a vegan diet would reduce the carbon footprint by
1,560kgCO2e/year…

A family running a 10 year old small family car for 6,000 miles
has a carbon footprint of 2,440kgCO2e, roughly equivalent to the
annual carbon saving of two high meat eating adults moving to a
vegetarian diet…

Analysis of observed diets shows a positive relationship between
dietary GHG emissions and the amount of animal-based products in a
standard 2,000 kcal diet. This work demonstrates that reducing the
intake of meat and other animal based products can make a valuable
contribution to climate change mitigation. Other work has
demonstrated other environmental and health benefits of a reduced
meat diet. National governments that are considering an update of
dietary recommendations in order to define a ‘healthy, sustainable
diet’ must incorporate the recommendation to lower the consumption
of animal-based products.

Look for the EPA to launch its War on Meat shortly!

While state-licensed pot stores began selling
marijuana only this week in Washington, they have been open for
business in Colorado for six months. Possession and consumption of
marijuana have been legal in both states for 18 months. In my
latest Forbes column, I consider the consequences so
far. Here is how it starts:

In 2012 John Larson, a retired high school math and science
teacher, voted against I-502, the initiative that legalized
marijuana in Washington. Yet this week Larson was one of the
first government-licensed marijuana merchants to open a
store in that state: Main Street Marijuana in Vancouver. “If people
were dumb enough to vote it in, I’m all for it,”
he told The New York Times. “There’s a demand,
and I have a product.”

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper also seems to have had a change
of heart about marijuana. The former brewer, who opposed Amendment
64, his state’s legalization initiative, is not about to become a
budtender. But in a recent interview with Reuters,
Hickenlooper conceded that the consequences of letting people grow,
sell, and consume pot without fear of arrest have not been as bad
as he feared.

“It seems like the people that were smoking before are mainly
the people that are smoking now,” Hickenlooper said as Colorado
marked six months of legal recreational sales last week. “If that’s
the case, what that means is that we’re not going to have more
drugged driving, or driving while high. We’re not going to have
some of those problems. But we are going to have a system where
we’re actually regulating and taxing something, and keeping that
money in the state of Colorado…and we’re not supporting a corrupt
system of gangsters.” Hickenlooper sounds cautiously optimistic,
and there are good reasons for that. 

Read the whole thing.

Wherever there’s a budget cut being
proposed or implemented somewhere in this country, there’s someone
who benefits personally from that spending ready to make any kind
of claim and engage in any kind of fearmongering that could
possibly keep his gravy train from getting derailed.

In Miami-Dade, Florida, the mayor has proposed cutting $64
million in police funding
in his latest budget (PDF). The cut is projected to cost 250
police jobs, provided the union isn’t willing to compromise with
the government. It would involve disbanding units including
tactical narcotics, special response, and something called a “Sport
Unit.”

The union boss, naturally, is not interested in compromising
with the county government. Instead he’s warning residents of
lawlessness (and not from his cops).

Via WSVN in Miami:

John Rivera, president of the Miami-Dade Police Benevolent
Association, said, “If the mayor’s not going to provide security,
then my recommendation, as an experienced law enforcement officer
for nearly 40 years, is either buy yourself an attack dog, put bars
on your windows and doors and get yourself some firearms because
you’re going to have to protect yourselves. We won’t be able
to.”

Rivera inadvertently gave good advice whether or not the mayor
goes through with the cuts. The Supreme Court has ruled
previously that police officers don’t have any specific
obligation or duty to protect any specific person. As seen by the
variety of specialized units under threat from the cuts, the police
in Miami-Dade appear to spend a lot of time doing the kind of
police work that doesn’t specifically relate to maintaining
anyone’s personal safety—things like narcotics unit actually have
the opposite effect.

A few years ago Michael Bloomberg suggested cops go on strike
until the gun control laws in this country become stricter, as if
police violence wasn’t a problem. Mike Riggs’ response
works here too.

This much we know: There is no way of figuring out whether (or
by how much) the Affordable Care Act is going to cost compared to
the estimates used to push the program through Congress.
Back in 2009, it was really important to President Obama that
people understand he “not sign a plan that adds one dime to our
deficits—either now or in the future. Period.” He sold the plan as
costing about $938 billion in its first decade of operation.

Nowadays, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the agency
originally charged with tallying up Obamacare’s costs and revenues,
says there’s no way it can figure out how much the law will cost
compared to earlier estimates. There have been too many delays,
postponements, modifications, you name it, to the original bill.
“Isolating the incremental effects of those provisions on
previously existing programs and revenues four years after
enactment of the Affordable Care Act is not possible,”
the CBO concludes. 

Yet if past experience with massive government-run health care
programs is any indicator, the odds are high that Obamacare will
end up costing way more than it was supposed to. Here are
three examples to think about as the health care reform law gears
up for its second year of sign-ups (for more information,
go here).

1. Massachusetts Commonwealth Care. This is the
plan supported by Gov. Mitt Romney that provided the very model for
Obamacare. It guaranteed universal coverage and subsidized
insurance premiums for low-income residents. Initial cost estimates
came in at $472 million while actual costs were closer to $628
million for an error ratio of 1.2:1.

2. Medicare. In 1967, Congress estimated that
the nation’s single-payer system for the elderly, Medicare, would
cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual price tag was $110 billion,
for an error ratio on 9.17:1.

3. Medicaid DSH program. Medicaid pays for
health insurance for the poor (its expansion represents the main
way Obamacare in enrolling new beneficiaries). The
“disproportionate share hospital program” (DSH) gives money to
facilities that serve a large number of poor patients. In 1987,
Congress figured DSH payments would be less than $1 billion in
1991. Instead, they totaled $17 billion, creating an error ratio of
17:1.

Read more about phony-baloney health care accounting
here and
here. And check out Reason‘s special collection of new
stories about “The Sad Story
of Obamacare.”

Meet the new Generation
Gap, same as the old Generation Gap. Except this time, the baby
boomers are playing the role of angry, non-comprehending
parents:

Millennials use language differently than Boomers and Gen Xers
(born between 1965 and 1980). In the Reason-Rupe poll, about 62% of
Millennials call themselves liberal. By that, they
mean the favor gay marriage and pot legalization, but those views
hold little or no implication for their views on government
spending. To Millennials, being socially liberal is being liberal,
period. For most older Americans, calling yourself
a liberal means you want to increase the size,
scope, and spending of the government (it may not even mean you
support legal pot and marriage equality). Despite the strong
liberal tilt among Millennials, 53% say they would support a
candidate who was socially liberal and fiscally conservative (are
you listening, major parties?).

There are other areas where language doesn’t track neatly with
Boomer and Gen X definitions. Millennials have no first-hand
memories of the Soviet Union or the Cold War. Forty-two percent say
they prefer socialism as a means of organizing society but only 16%
can define the term properly as government ownership of the means
of production. In fact, when asked whether they want an economy
managed by the free market or by the government, 64% want the
former and just 32% want the latter. Scratch a Millennial
“socialist” and you are likely to find a budding entrepreneur (55%
saying they want to start their own business someday). Although
they support a government-provided social safety net, two-thirds of
Millennials agree that “government is usually inefficient and
wasteful” and they are highly skeptical toward government with
regards to privacy and nanny-state regulations about e-cigarettes,
soda sizes, and the like.

That’s from latest column in Time, which draws off the
great Reason-Rupe Poll of Millennials that was released
yesterday.

Read the whole column
here.

Read the Reason-Rupe Poll and polling director Emily Ekins’
analysis here.

So let’s get this straight: Like a marauding elephant, America
sticks its trunk in Latin America, snorts out one-trillion in
military and other aid to stop the flow of drugs that Americans
want, gives a huge push to drug cartels in these countries who
unleash all kinds of unspeakable atrocities on innocent civilians,
and now, when these civilians desperately try and get their
children out of harm’s way by grasping at a Bush-era law that is
required to give them a hearing, nativists march on the street
blathering about America’s national sovereignty?

Where were they when their guvmint (which is about to authorize
nearly
$4 billion in emergency funding to deport these kids
immediately) was violating the sovereignty of Honduras, El Salvador
and Guatemala — the three countries from where most of
the  unaccompanied minors are coming from?  These
countries enjoy the highest murder rate in the world, thanks, in
part, to our drug war.

 Yet nativists shamelessly march on the streets demanding
that these kids be “Returned to Sender.”

America is arguably experiencing its worst spasm of nativism
since the early 20^th Century, I note in my Washington
Examiner column:

 Then, magazines such as Judge ran cartoons depicting a
Statue of Liberty with a Chinese face welcoming crime-prone and
diseased immigrants. Now, protesters in towns like Murrieta,
Calif., are turning away buses carrying these kids to shelters,
accusing them of being scabies-infected lawbreakers.

But just as the argument that blacks be kept in chains because
slavery was the law of the land lost, so will nativism. That’s
because it’ll run into the Huckleberry Finn Problem.

What is that? Go
here to find out.

The Justice Department will not
be getting involved in the feud between the CIA and the Senate
Intelligence Committee over accusations that the CIA illegally
snooped on Senate staffers preparing a report on torture and
counter-accusations that the staffers illegally got their hands on
unreleased classified CIA documents during the process. The feud
was so bad that it actually caused security state worshipper Sen.
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to publicly declare that government
surveillance is a terrible thing and the Fourth Amendment
matters—when applied to the Senate, of course. From
McClatchy’s Washington bureau:

“The department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us
and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal
investigation,” said Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr.

The news marks an apparent end to an extraordinary feud that
spilled into the public forum in early March over the committee’s
report on the agency’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program.
The dispute included competing Justice Department referrals, with
both the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee accusing the
other side of criminal conduct throughout the course of the
interrogation study.

I explained the
details of the fight back in March. This Senate report
analyzing CIA interrogation methods during the Iraq war is known to
be very critical of the methods used by the CIA during the Bush
administration. Senate staffers were given access to CIA documents
through a special computer network at the CIA’s offices. CIA
employees, other than IT workers, were not supposed to have access
to the machines. During the preparation of the report, staffers
discovered documents disappearing out of the system, deleted by the
CIA. Later they discovered an internal CIA report (called the
Panetta Review) analyzing their interrogation methods. Feinstein
said the report validated her committee’s concerns about
interrogation methods.

Later the report disappeared from the computer system. The CIA
claims that Senate staff illegally gained access to the report
somehow, and it should not have been accessible to them. Feinstein
responded that it was the CIA that provided access to this report
in the first place and that it was a violation of the Fourth
Amendment for CIA to search Senate staff computers without a
warrant. The CIA, in turn, went to the Justice Department, accusing
Senate staffers of illegally removing classified information. But
the Justice Department apparently wants nothing to do with it.

The Senate’s
report on torture still has not been released. The Senate
Intelligence Committee has voted to declassify parts of it, but the
CIA gets to review it first to determine whether any of the
information would threaten national security if made public.