Category: reason

No candidate ever lost an election by promising voters too much free stuff, something Seattle mayoral candidate Jenny Durkan is banking on with her proposal for tuition-free community college.

Durkan—a former U.S. Attorney and one of two candidates competing for Seattle’s November mayoral elections—unveiled her “Promise Seattle” program Monday. The proposal actually included two remarkble promises: two years of free community college for any Seattle high school graduate at no additional cost to taxpayers.

Durkan says her goal is to get more low-income and minority students into post-secondary education. “We need to ensure students from all economic backgrounds, and from every neighborhood in Seattle, have the chance to earn a credential, certificate or degree.”

Free community college is becoming a popular promise among members of a certain political class. Four states having passed such schemes: Tennessee was the first in 2014; Oregon followed the next year. Rhode Island and New York passed community college giveaways in 2017, but have yet to implement them.

If these examples hold true, the benefits of Promise Seattle will accrue mostly to the city’s wealthiest students, while proving to be anything but “free.”

That’s because promise programs offer tuition on a “last dollar” basis, meaning their subsidies don’t begin to flow until after students have collected the federal and state aid for which they’re eligible. State and federal aid programs already cover most of the cost of attending a community college for low-income students. Their wealthier counterparts are the real beneficiaries.

Promise Oregon is a case-in-point.

According to a 2016 review by the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission, students whose family income qualifies them for full federal and state grants would get $284 in Promise tuition assistance per term. Students whose family incomes disqualify them from state and federal aid get $1,084 per term.

The same report found that the Promise Oregon spent only 7.9 percent ($860,000) of its funding on students expecting no assistance from their families. Meanwhile, 60 percent of Promise Oregon funds ($6.6 million) went to those students who’re expected to receive over $8,673 in yearly family support—much more than the average tuition cost for an Oregon community college.

Fifty three percent of Promise Oregon recipients were wealthy enough to be disqualified for federal Pell grants. The number is 47 percent for Tennessee’s Promise Scholarships. Expect Durkan’s proposal to follow the same pattern.

Durkan’s suggestion that the program could be run without tax increases is also questionable. Her outline suggests the program could be funded by revenue from a couple of Seattle’s other recent bad ideas, including its soda tax and fees from the $54 billion ST3 light rail expansion.

That could be enough, but only if the free tuition project stays within the suggested budget caps, something other Promise programs have failed to do.

Spending on Promise Oregon has escalated, from $10 million for the 2016-2017 academic year to $40 million for 2017-2018. Even with that four-fold boost in funding, the program is still $8 million short of covering all applicants, requiring the Oregon legislature to at last means-test the program.

While the evidence suggests nothing Durkan is promising is really free, it also suggests that hasn’t stopped taxpayers from believing in and voting for it.

At the beginning of the summer, as congressional Republicans were pushing to pass health care legislation, it looked as if, in some places, a major component of Obamacare might simply cease to exist, all on its own.

More than 40 counties across the country appeared likely to have no insurer available in the health law’s exchanges. Major news organizations published reports warning that, after insurers made their final decisions, hundreds of counties could ultimately be left bare under the law.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

All of the counties that were expected to be bare now have at least one participating insurer. The Republican effort to rewrite the health care law has stalled indefinitely, and may never be revived. A new government report published today finds that health insurance coverage has increased nationally this year by about 500,000 people. Obamacare, which languished in the polls throughout President Obama’s time in office, is now more popular than ever.

Yet all is not entirely well with the law. Although there are no bare counties, major health insurance companies like Aetna and UnitedHealth have pulled out of the program, and 47 percent of counties, covering about 23 percent of health law enrollees, will have just one option in the exchange.

This is hardly the boon for consumer choice that President Obama promised back in 2009, when he declared, in a speech making the case for health care reform, “My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition. That’s how the market works. Unfortunately, in 34 states, 75 percent of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies. In Alabama, almost 90 percent is controlled by just one company. And without competition, the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down.”

Under Obamacare, dramatic price increases are exactly what’s happening. In Maryland, for example, a state that has generally favored the law, exchange premiums will jump an average of 33 percent. And that hike is lower than what insurers requested: State insurance regulators negotiated carriers down from initial requests for rate increases averaging 43 percent.

Although the majority of the people covered under Obamacare will be relatively insulated from those hikes thanks to the law’s insurance subsidies, that just means that taxpayers will shoulder the additional cost. And those who earn too much income to qualify for subsidies will be stuck with substantially higher bills, yet again. So it’s no surprise that they are fleeing: The market for unsubsidized coverage shrank 29 percent in the last year, according to insurance industry consultant Bob Laszewski.

Among the insurers that has stepped in to fill many of the counties that were expected to be bare is Centene, which built its business on Medicaid managed care, in which insurers take over caseloads from states. Centene has been more successful than other companies in Obamacare’s exchanges, in part by relying on narrow provider networks. Under these sorts of plans, coverage through Obamacare looks more like coverage through Medicaid than what most people expect from private insurance.

Even the bare county problem, meanwhile, may be merely delayed rather than solved. In Ohio, which earlier this year expected to have 20 counties with no insurer, the state’s Department of Insurance Director, Jillian Froment said, “This is a temporary solution and one that only applies to 2018. Beyond that, insurers are still looking for predictability in the health insurance market.”

Predictability, in this case, may turn out to mean “stabilization funds“—or, less generously, publicly funded bailouts. The future of the health care law looks less like total collapse and more like consistent unsteadiness and worries about decline, while lawmakers attempt to prop it up on a nominally temporary basis.

The health care law may have avoided repeal, or any of the not-quite-repeal options that congressional Republicans considered. And it may have plugged the holes in the insurance market, at least for now. But it has hardly settled into a stable equilibrium, and the ways in which it is unstable and inadequate are unlikely to improve rapidly on their own. Obamacare may not be failing. But in many ways, it is flailing.

Trump’s Pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio Is a Reminder that Executive Clemency Should Be Used Far More Often

I believe in the goodness and necessity of executive clemency so strongly that I took a two-year break from journalism to work at an organization that advocates explicitly for commuting overly long sentences. There’s no universal agreement on what constitutes an “overly long” sentence, but I used to tell friends and peers that—in a very, very, very small way—I helped get drug dealers out of prison early.

It’s not just drug sentences that are too long. There is a saying among conservative prison reformers that “prison should be for people we’re afraid of, not people we’re mad at.” The precise boundaries of those categories may be debatable. (Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for example, insists drug offenders are inherently violent, a view I strongly disagree with.) Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was pardoned by President Trump last week in a controversial move that circumvented the conventional pardoning process, is in the latter category. Many people fear what Joe Arpaio did as sheriff, what he stands for, and the voters who empowered him to do those things for so long. But Joe Arpaio, private citizen, is not a threat to public safety.

So I am not too upset that he will not be caged, just as I am not upset when drug offenders are not caged, because I think our collective eagerness to rescind life and liberty is illiberal and dehumanizing, not to mention hideously expensive and a massive obstacle to personal reform.

The problem with executive pardon power as it has been used in the last few decades is not the benefits occasionally derived by the Joe Arpaios of the world, but that it so seldom benefits anyone else. Executive clemency is a thinly disguised lottery that mostly disappoints the vast majority of people who play it. Presidential pardons should be handed out far more often and far more consistently to a far wider group of people. (I would say the same of commutations, but legislative reforms would help far more people.)

To be clear, I believe President Trump’s decision to pardon Arpaio was a disgrace due to Arpaio’s lack of contrition and Trump’s blatant disregard for precedent. But if the price of radically expanding clemency were that sometimes someone like Joe Arpaio got pardoned too, it would be worth it.

Trump’s pardon of Arpaio did not follow the contours of what we typically think of as a “good” pardon.

Those usually start with the Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA), which acts as a conduit between clemency applicants and the upper echelons of the Department of Justice. The OPA encourages men and women convicted in the federal court system, or under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to apply for the president’s forgiveness starting five years after they have finished the entirety of their sentence; or, in the event they served no time, five years after the date of conviction.

That is not what happened with Sheriff Arpaio. He was convicted in July. He would not have been sentenced until October. Prior to his pardon, he seemed most likely to receive some form of supervised release, such as probation, rather than prison time. “Generally,” says the OPA website, “no petition should be submitted by a person who is on probation, parole, or supervised release.”

Arpaio, as it happens, was pardoned without ever submitting a petition. This is extremely unusual.

The rules have been bent in other ways, of course. Marc Rich, an oil trader indicted for doing business with Iran during the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, fled the U.S. in 1984 to avoid arrest and a trial. President Bill Clinton pardoned him in 2001 without Rich ever returning to stand justice.

Understandably, plenty of people were upset about this. Democrats. Republicans. Justice Department staffers. It was a disgrace, and the actors who made the Rich pardon happen—a list that includes then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder and Pres. Clinton himself—admitted later it was a bad idea.

Trump pardoning Arpaio when, how, and why he did is more akin to Clinton’s pardon of Rich than any relief granted by Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama or even George H.W. Bush. Arpaio may not have given Trump as much money as the Rich family gave Clintonland and the Democratic National Committee, but he gave him electoral support.

I want to thank @RealSheriffJoe for all of his help in our historic Arizona win. Could not have done it without you Joe!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2016

And like Rich, Arpaio thumbed his nose at the justice system, which Nick Gillespie documents in detail here. Any attorney or advocate whose worked on pardon applications will tell you that contrition is an essential ingredient to having a snowball’s chance in hell. (If you want more examples of Arpaio’s bumptiously disrespectful behavior toward the judge presiding over his case, read this thread by the judge’s former clerk.)

And yet, most pardon applicants, even those who go through the normal process and show contrition, do not have even a snowball’s chance. Between the beginning of Dubya’s presidency and the end of Obama’s, the DOJ received 5,893 pardon applications. Those two presidents granted 401 combined, or just shy of seven percent. The rest were either denied or ignored—”closed without presidential action.”

While we’re talking about Bush and Obama, let’s zoom right quick down memory lane and look at how long their pardon recipients had to wait. You can see all the presidential pardon and commutation recipients here, dating back to Pres. Richard Nixon, who exercised his clemency powers like someone who never donned the veil of ignorance.

Bush’s two most generous pardons came seven years after the applicants were convicted. Most of the people he pardoned waited much longer. One man received a pardon in 2005 for a bootlegging conviction dating back to 1959. There’s no obvious rhyme or reason to Bush’s list, though little people getting lucky and big people nudging things along probably explains most of it. (The actual reasoning that an administration uses for each case is pre-deliberative information and thus exempt from public records requests.)

Even when Bush did meddle in the Justice System, he didn’t go nearly as far as Trump. After White House staffer Scooter Libby was convicted for his role leaking Valerie Plame’s identity and lost on appeal, Bush commuted his 30 month prison sentence, but didn’t pardon him for his crimes or rescind the court-ordered fines and period of supervised release. Libby forfeited his law license in 2008 and didn’t get it restored until 2016, and remains unpardoned. I’m not suggesting you weep for the man, but it does show that even for the wealthy, criminal penalties aren’t always limited to what’s handed down at sentencing.

Those unintended penalties are supposedly why pardons exist: so that every few years the president can pluck a handful of random people out of a living hell and give them his (and one day her) blessing to hold occupational licenses, vote, and own firearms without being labeled a felon in possession.

Let’s return to Arpaio getting a pardon despite showing zero remorse while most people feel obligated to grovel and many don’t get so much as a formal brush-off: Arpaio didn’t deserve it by the historical standard. He didn’t wait long enough, didn’t say sorry, didn’t cop to being bad nor promise to be good. (“You should bear in mind,” the OPA tells potential applicants, “that a presidential pardon is ordinarily a sign of forgiveness and is granted in recognition of the applicant’s acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct for a significant period of time after conviction or release from confinement.”)

Also: Trump’s reasoning—that Arpaio was treated unfairly—was absolute bullshit. As Gillespie noted, Arpaio was treated as fairly as one could hope to be by the federal criminal justice system. He had private attorneys and remained free during his trial. He remains free right now.

Lastly, let’s look at what makes the pardon process so awful even when it’s not being used to benefit political allies.

The Office of the Pardon Attorney is very small. It receives a large volume of applications, each of which requires a ream of supporting paperwork, ranging from documents related to all of the applicant’s convictions and arrests, to contrite personal statements and documented claims of conviction-related hardships, to letters of support. “You must list all delinquent credit obligations,” says the OPA, as well as any bankruptcies and unpaid tax obligations.

Does having filed for bankruptcy hurt your chances? Improve them? OPA won’t tell you, and I doubt the agency has a hard and fast rule. What if your hardships are not exceptional? How does one go about making him or herself out to be exceptionally screwed by the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction? What an awful contest.

Every aspect of the application must be verified, and the burden of accuracy is on the applicant. “The failure to fully and accurately complete the application form may be construed as a falsification of the petition,” says OPA, which adds that “the knowing and willful falsification of a document submitted to the government may subject you to criminal punishment.” I don’t think anyone has ever been tried for leaving something out of a pardon application, but isn’t nice to know the government reserves that right?

The applications are first read by bureaucrats, then by other bureaucrats, who might pass them along to political appointees, who may put them in front of White House staff, who perhaps will put a bug in the president’s ear. At each step, an anonymous person with a lot of power has to ask him or herself, “Will kicking this up the chain of command expose me or my boss to criticism or blowback?” If the answer remotely resembles a yes, then the applicant’s answer is generally “no.” There are exceptions, of course, but you can name then on your fingers: Rich, Chelsea Manning, Arpaio, Libby. But we should probably dispense with the idea that a presidential pardon is anything more than a carefully orchestrated attempt on the government’s behalf to appear inoffensively human. (The exceptions being Obama’s clemency initiative and Jimmy Carter’s pardoning of men who refused to fight in Vietnam.)

There is even a small cottage industry of legal workers who will “help” federally convicted individuals put together a petition. Attorneys will generally do so for somewhere around $10,000, even though the instructions for applying are posted on the DOJ website and say nothing about the necessity of hiring a lawyer. These attorneys will cite their experience in government or their pardon success rate, but they can’t say for sure they’ll get you out, only that they’ll take your money and use their letterhead. Further down the legal food chain, paralegals will tell you they also know how to put together a perfect pardon application, and will do it for slightly less than the attorneys. Then there are current and former prisoners who got lucky or know someone who did. They will transfer that luck to you, for money.

The people who receive pardons—like the people who receive commutations—are generally no more exceptional or deserving of them than many of the people who get rejected. They are simply the ones who, for whatever reason, didn’t get rejected. The result is a system that is fundamentally unfair.

The pardon process should be more than a crapshoot that benefits the lucky and the well-connected.

One way to do that is to pardon lots of people regularly, something former Pardon Attorney Margaret Love advised in a brief for the American Constitution Society. “When pardons are issued generously and at regular intervals, as they were prior to 1980, the power appears more a function of government than a perk of office, and thus more legitimate in the public eye.”

Love also suggests we should think more broadly about who deserves pardoning, when, and why:

An individual who has fully satisfied the court-imposed penalty, accepted responsibility for the offense and made a reasonable effort to reconcile with those injured by it, and lived productively for a period of time in the community, should ordinarily be considered favorably for pardon. Humble status and modest means should not be disqualifying. Indeed, reserving post-sentence pardons for those who have performed heroic acts or rendered extraordinary service to their communities may send a message that forgiveness is not a final closure to which ordinary people may aspire. At the same time, the gravity of the offense or notoriety of the offender may suggest the desirability of imposing a longer waiting period before favorable action, in consideration of the symbolic effect of a pardon. A specific need for a pardon (e.g., to qualify for a particular job or license, obtain a security clearance, or avoid deportation) may be a relevant factor in considering whether to grant clemency, but a simple desire for forgiveness should be sufficient.

P.S. Ruckman, Jr., with whom long-time Reason readers are likely familiar, has also published suggestions for transforming pardon power from a crapshoot into a mundane rehabilitative tool.

A sound first step would be moving the Office of the Pardon Attorney out of the fundamentally punitive confines of the Justice Department. He also suggests that pardon attorney terms should begin and end with those of the president, which would allow for the OPA to reflect the views of a new president and force new presidents to select someone whose philosophy on mercy mirrors their own. Ruckman’s list goes on, and includes thoughtful ideas such as creating a clemency commission, tracking data on clemency recipients post-receipt of either pardon or commutation, and requiring the attorney general to publish why pardons and commutations were granted, as was done in the early 20th century.

But any initiative to reform the process would need to come from the White House. With Trump flouting the conventions that already exist to pardon people like Arpaio, I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Disclosure: I served as director of communications at Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a sentencing reform organization that advocates for legislative reforms and increased use of executive clemency, from 2013 to 2015.

An international nutrition study spanning more than a decade has turned up unexpected findings that researchers say should cause health experts to reconsider global dietary guidelines.

The ongoing Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) project has found both saturated and unsaturated fat intake linked to better heart health, that a high-carb diet is a better predictor of health risks than fat consumption, and that the health benefits of fruit, vegetables, and legumes like beans and chickpeas may plateau at three to four servings per day.

The new analysis, presented at the European Society of Cardiology meeting this week in Barcelona, included 135,000 adult participants between ages 35-70 living in Africa, Europe, North America, South America, south Asia, southeast Asia, China, and the Middle East.

These participants responded to food-intake and lifestyle surveys between between January 2003 and March 2013, with an average follow-through of 7.4 years. Researchers considered health outcomes for participants through March 31, 2017, recording 5,796 deaths in total and 4,784 “major cardiovascular events” such as strokes, heart attacks, and heart failure.

Overall, carbohydrate intake in the highest versus lowest consumption groups was associated with 28 percent higher risk of death.

“Our findings do not support the current recommendation to limit total fat intake to less than 30 percent of energy and saturated fat intake to less than 10 percent of energy,” said Mahshid Dehghan, a nutritionist from Canada’s Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University. Dehghan is the author of one of several papers on the latest PURE-study findings.

Dehghan recommends “a total fat intake of about 35 percent of energy” in conjunction with lowering carbohydrate intake.

Looking Again at Legumes, Fruits, and Vegetables

Perhaps most notably, while higher fruit, vegetable, and legume consumption was associated with lower total mortality risk and less risk of death from non-cardiovascular causes, this benefit appears to max out at three to four servings, or around 375-500 grams, per day.

“Previous research, and many dietary guidelines in North America and Europe recommended daily intake of these foods ranging from 400 to 800 grams per day,” said Andrew Mente, lead researcher on the fruits and veggies study published this week in The Lancet. “Our findings indicate that optimal health benefits can be achieved with a more modest level of consumption.”

Fruit intake was linked to lower risk of death from heart disease and from other causes; frequent consumers of legumes had lower rates of death from all causes and from non-cardiovascular causes; and raw vegetable intake “was strongly associated with a lower risk of total mortality,” while “cooked vegetable intake showed a modest benefit against mortality,” Mente and his team found. (See more data from the study here and Mente’s presentation to the European Society of Cardiology here.)

Cut Some Carbs, Keep the Fat

Looking at the link between macronutrients and heart disease, researchers found high carbohydrate consumption—defined as diets where more than 60 percent of calories come from carbs—increased the risk of overall death (though not the risk of heart disease or death from heart-related causes specifically).

Meanwhile, eating saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fatty-acids was associated with lower death risk.

“Each type of fat was associated with significantly reduced mortality risk: 14 percent lower for saturated fat, 19 percent for mono-unsaturated fat, and 20 percent for polyunsaturated fat,” according to the study. Higher saturated fat intake was also linked to a 21 percent decrease in stroke risk. (See more data from the study here, and Dehghan’s conference presentation here.)

The same group of researchers also looked at the effect of fats and carbohydrates on blood lipids like cholesterol, triglycerides, and apolipoprotein. They found that LDL cholesterol, a measure that informs many government dietary guidelines, “is not reliable in predicting effects of saturated fat on future cardiovascular events.” A better predictor, they found, is apolipoproteins A and B levels—something no one is talking about.

“For decades, dietary guidelines have focused on reducing total fat and saturated fatty acid intake based on the presumption that replacing [saturated fats] with carbohydrate and unsaturated fats will lower LDL [cholesterol] and should therefore reduce” heart and metabolic problems, noted Dehghan. But these recommendations rely largely on North American and European populations. “PURE provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of diet on total mortality and [heart disease] in diverse settings, some settings where over-nutrition is common and others where under nutrition is of greater concern,” she said.

Not surprising, then, that their conclusions challenge common assumptions about nutrition.

But don’t ditch grains entirely just yet. As Mente reminds us, the research supports the idea that high-carb diets are bad, but not necessarily that low- or no-carb diets are optimal. “It’s [the high-carb eating] population that needs to reduce carb intake to more moderate levels,” he said. “Our data doesn’t support low carb but certainly it supports a moderate carb intake of 55 percent.”

Mente also cautions against confusing population-level effects with individual risk reduction. “The effects are modest effects, in the neighborhood of a 20 percent reduction in relative risk,” he said. “So if the annual [absolute] risk of mortality is 1 percent, it would be reduced to 0.8 percent. At the individual level, it is tiny…. Having said all that, at a population level, if these small effects are true and not due to confounding, they would translate into thousands or even millions of fewer deaths annually, depending on the size of the population, if the exposure is common which is certainly true for diet.”

At any public health level—with the aim of better government dietary advice—”the findings are important,” he said.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin has had enough of violence bursting from protests of right-wing speakers in his city and at University of California Berkeley. So in order to end it, he wants the speakers to shut up, go away, and go bother somebody else.

Weekend violence from black-clad antifascist provocateurs disrupted a “Rally Against Hate” in Berkeley, and 13 people have been arrested. After the protest, Arreguin decided to buckle under the threat of the “thug’s veto” and asked U.C. Berkeley to cancel an upcoming Free Speech Week at the college in September, where people like Milo Yiannopoulos are scheduled to speak.

“I’m very concerned about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and some of these other right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus, because it’s just a target for black bloc to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street,” Arreguin said.

Yes, there is clearly some sort of trap being set here. There are an unknown number of people on each side in this ongoing public political battle especially invested in turning speech into violence. In this particular case, it seems most likely that violence is going to originate from the self-described “antifascist” side, as it has previously.

But let’s be clear here. It is the job of Arreguin, the city government of Berkeley, and its police to protect the right of people within its borders to speak without facing violent responses. This is not some sort of additional source of frustration and labor for the city. One of the primary expectations of a city government is to protect the civil liberties of the people within its borders, and the right to speak freely and demonstrate peacefully are among those liberties.

Arreguin is hardly the only mayor to attempt to use violence as an excuse to abandon the responsibility to protect freedom. The mayor of Portland did the exact same thing in May when an apparently unstable man turned violent on a train and stabbed and killed two people. It was clearly a bizarre, isolated incident, yet Mayor Ted Wheeler made a huge performance out of trying to ban right wing protests in the city as a result.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe also just banned demonstrations temporarily at a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond while the state comes up with more regulations over the correct way they’ll allow citizens to protest.

U.C. Berkeley should resist Arreguin’s request, and Americans should reject the idea that violent reactions can be used as a justification for giving up on free speech. Instead, citizens need to be demanding that cities do a better job of both protecting protesters and holding individuals who engage in acts of violence criminally responsible.

It may be messy and it may not be easy (people intent on violence are masking their faces for a reason), but it’s nevertheless the only real way of working through this current phase of public political resistance and coming out the other side with our rights intact. If Arreguin is not up for the job of protecting the people in his city from violence, he should consider whether he should be mayor.

He did propose another solution, one that is also terrible. He wants to possibly classify “Antifa” violent activists as a “gang.” Such a proposition shows either an unwillingness or inability to hold individuals responsible for their own behavior and attempts to establish collective guilt. It would use California law as a tool to suppress the freedom of association rights of people who are classified as being in a gang rather than to punish actual criminal conduct.

And California’s gang law enforcement is a mess as it is. A state audit in 2016 found very poor oversight and accountability within the system, resulting in people being added to the gang member database without supporting evidence that they should be there. You better believe that if California classified “Antifa” as a gang, there’d be some police officers looking to declare any mouthy protester who engaged in even nonviolent civil disobedience to be a member.

Free trade deals like NAFTA are beneficial for everyone, even as President Trump continues to signal his hostility toward them.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Among the endless injuries Donald Trump has inflicted upon the country, few might do more lasting damage than leading so many Republicans to abandon their commitment to free trade. Millions of people could end up poorer because of it.

“We are in the NAFTA (worst trade deal ever made) renegotiation process with Mexico & Canada,” the president tweeted while Houston was drowning. “Both being very difficult, may have to terminate?”

The awfulness of NAFTA is a refrain for the administration; not long ago the U.S. trade representative, Robert E. Lighthizer, claimed “at least 700,000 Americans have lost their jobs due to changing trade flows resulting from NAFTA. Many people believe that the number is much, much bigger than that.”

Many people do indeed. Many people also believe the moon landing was fake, George W. Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened, and Barack Obama is really Muslim. Many people are often full of it, as is Lighthizer.b

View this article.

A video posted to YouTube shows a plainclothes detective in King’s County, Washington, approach a motorcyclist with his gun already drawn and accuse him of reckless driving and speeding before identifying himself as a cop.

“Give me your driver’s license or I’ll knock you off this bike,” the detective tells the motorcyclist, Alex Randall, later threatening to “dunk him” if he moves his bike.

The detective ignores multiple requests by Randall for permission to take off his helmet and turn off his bike to hear him better.

The detective identifies himself as police only when Randall tells him he’s sorry that he gets panicked when there’s a gun drawn on him. At that point the cop had already pulled the man’s wallet out of his pocket.

Eventually, the detective gets around to asking Randall why he was driving 100 miles an hour. Randall doesn’t give an answer—and why would he given the road rage the detective had just displayed?

The detective does not write Randall any citations, even though he tells Randall what he allegedly did was an “arrestable offense” and that he could impound his bike if he wanted to.

Randall says he’s filed a complaint with the sheriff’s department and the county’s Office of Law Enforcement Oversight. “I am still conducting an independent investigation and will make a follow up video once it concludes,” Randall writes in the description of the YouTube video he posted.

King County Sheriff John Urquhart insists it is never appropriate for his officers to wield a service weapon in that way. Urquhart, however, decided to place the detective, who has not been identified, on administrative leave rather than fire him.

“There’s nothing standard about approaching a driver with a pistol out. That should not have happened,” Urquhart told the local Fox affiliate. He also stressed he hadn’t yet gotten the detective’s side of the story.

Randall says Urquhart called him personally to apologize. But how sorry can the sheriff be? If he’s truly interested in reducing this kind of behavior, monitoring YouTube for viral videos and then handing out administrative leaves isn’t sufficient. The process for disciplining and dismissing cops who show a reckless abandon for the rules they are supposed to follow, ought to be taken seriously.

You can watch Randall’s YouTube video here:

Recently pardoned by President Donald Trump, Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio is almost certainly “America’s Worst Lawman.” The lawman was found guilty of contempt of court for flouting a federal order to stop “the unconstitutional racial profiling and detainment of Latino residents.” He was sued in 2007 for running “saturation patrols” that stopped people for immigrant-status offenses that are the exclusive province of federal authorities. Famous for making male prisoners wear pink underwear and running a sweltering “boot camp” prison in the Arizona desert, Arpaio had been getting into trouble with the law since the mid-1990s, when investigators raised questions about excessive violence against inmates and suspects. His out-of-control methods ended up costing Arizona taxpayers money. As Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella explains:

In 2007, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors settled a lawsuit filed by the founders of the Phoenix New Timesnewspaper against Arpaio and the board for $3.5 million. The newspaper founders sued after they were arrested by MCSO deputies for publishing details of a grand jury subpoena for the paper’s notes and sources for its coverage of Arpaio. The charges against the newspaper were quickly dropped. The Maricopa County attorney and deputy attorney, on the other hand, were both later disbarred for ethical violations involving campaign finance corruption. Arpaio’s chief of staff, who once deployed deputies to spy on Arpaio’s political opponents, was fired for his role in the same scandal.

In 2008, Arpaio’s jail lost its accreditation after investigators found jail officials provided false information about conditions inside the facility. The Phoenix New Times reported that, at the time, there had been 2,200 lawsuits filed against Arpaio for the conditions inside his jail.

Still, Donald Trump pardoned Arpaio even before the sentencing phase of his contempt conviction was underway:

“He’s done a great job for the people of Arizona, he’s very strong on borders, very strong on illegal immigration, he is loved in Arizona,” Trump said. “I thought he was treated unbelievably unfairly when they came down with their big decision to go get him, right before the election voting started.”

For such a tough guy, Arpaio himself is no slouch when it comes to whining about his treatment under the rule of law. In an understated yet blistering tweetstorm and a Washington Post piece, Andrew Case, who clerked for the judge who issued the court order that Arpaio flouted, undercuts the sheriff’s outrage at the same justice system he supposedly upheld. Arpaio repeatedly attacked Judge G. Murray Snow as a liberal who went after Arpaio out of political bias. The reality is anything but, says Case:

It has been widely reported that Snow was appointed by George W. Bush; that is not the full extent of his conservatism. He had a desk blotter from the Romney Institute. He spoke favorably of Justice Antonin Scalia’s jurisprudence. While we had little opportunity to talk electoral politics, I would guess he was no fan of President Barack Obama.

Snow believed in the rule of law and the fair application of law. During my clerkship year, from September 2011 through September 2012, he heard foreclosure cases, prisoner petitions and many prosecutions of immigrants. A liberal judge could have found loopholes to save a person’s house, spring a prisoner or give an immigrant a second chance, but Snow did not: He followed the law….

He treated Arpaio exceptionally fairly throughout the trial. When the plaintiffs presented strong evidence that Arpaio’s department mainly stopped Hispanics, Snow emphasized that the lawsuit could not prevail unless they also proved that that was Arpaio’s intent. When it was revealed that Arpaio’s office had improperly deleted thousands of emails responsive to document requests, Snow ruled only that he “may” take the fact under consideration at trial. And when Snow discovered a procedural issue that could have merited his recusal, he called a hearing, and both sides asked him to stay on the case.

Snow repeatedly focused on the facts of the case in front of him, even when incendiary material was presentd. For instance, it turned out that Arpaio had ordered the deletion of official emails requested by the prosecution. When some of those emails were found, they included racist jokes:

Many of the deleted emails were recovered; they contained racist jokes about “Mexifornia,” “Mexican Yoga” and “Mexican Engineering.” (9/15) http://pic.twitter.com/9Z4smJ3X5H

— Andrew Case (@AClaudeCase) August 29, 2017

Case writes that “Snow Snow ignored these incendiary emails and focused on the evidence relevant to the case — Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office equated being Hispanic with being unlawfully present in the country. Their written orders directed officers to stop cars when the drivers and passengers appeared Hispanic. Full stop.”

Read the full Washington Post piece here. On the specific case at hand, it’s a powerful deconstruction of Arpaio’s (and Trump’s) delusional belief that the self-styled “world’s toughest sheriff” was somehow treated poorly in the court of law. Even more important the entire episode is one more case study in the need to verify the claims of powerful authorities in an age of social media. If journalism has never been objective, political figures are even more self-interested in the stories they tell about themselves and others. In an age where more and more people can tell their stories directly, without intermediaries, it’s incumbent upon all of us to verify information more than ever. With such liberating technology comes responsibility. In the early days of the World Wide Web, when media gatekeepers were starting to break down in a big way, there was a saying that the internet would “fact-check your ass.” Back then, it was mostly meant as a threat to journalists, but it also is a useful reminder that politicians, especially those who control men and women with guns, deserve such treatment even more so.

• The Trump administration will reportedly drop an Obama-administration rule requiring businesses to report on employee pay by gender, race, and ethnicity. “It’s enormously burdensome,” Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination.”
• The Florida Senate spent $5 million on a website “that it later scrapped,” according to the Associated Press. It’s now “agreed to spend up to $200,000 more in a legal battle to avoid further payments” to the person who developed the doomed site.
• Houston cops are warning about burglars posing as Homeland Security agents.
• Hurricane Harvey touched down in Louisiana Wednesday morning.
• “Prenatal testing followed by selective abortion is not genetic engineering,” writes David M. Perry at The Nation. “It is, however, a space in which we have real-world data about how people make choices about procreation when granted additional information about the genetic makeup of their potential offspring,” and as such it could prove instructive for the “the Age of CRISPR.”
• A federal appeals court ruled that cops couldn’t charge someone with obstructing justice merely for being critical of them. “The officers [argued] that he had no constitutional right to observe a traffic stop or arresting officer in conversation,” reports the Washington Examiner., “but the court rejected that argument by pointing out that Hoyland was ‘standing in the doorway of his own home trying to tell the officers that his wife was handicapped.'”

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There is not a lot of understanding of how prices work, particularly during crises.

John Stossel writes:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is upset about “price gouging” during hurricane Harvey. Some stores raised prices to $99 for a case of bottled water—$5 for a gallon of gas. “These are things you can’t do in Texas,” he says. “There are significant penalties if you price gouge in a crisis like this.”

There sure are: $20,000 per “gouge”—$200,000 if the “victim” is a senior citizen.

Texas, a state that I thought understood capitalism, punishes people who practice it.

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