Tag: hit&run

As
noted earlier, today is the first day of Reason’s annual webathon.
Over the next week, we’re looking to raise $100,000 in
tax-deductible contributions so Reason magazine, Reason.com, and
Reason TV can keep bringing you award-winning, cutting-edge
libertarian journalism and commentary.

For a $100 donation, you’ll get a free print or digital
subscription to Reason, the nation’s (and planet’s!) only magazine
of “Free Minds and Free Markets.” You’ll also get your choice
of a classic black Reason T-shirt or this nifty “Be Paranoid”
number to the right.

For a full list of swag associated with various giving levels,
go here
how.

Reason is published by a nonprofit and your tax-deductible
donations help us keep the lights on, pay the bills, and, most
important, acting as your voice in public debates over politics,
culture, and ideas.

As Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) put it in a
Twitter chat with Reason earlier this year

I’d say the prospects for a more libertarian future are better
than they’ve ever been and @reason can take some of the
credit. What’s worse, is that government had to get so large
and out of control for people to begin to react.

So give what you can and we’ll keep pushing forward into the
future while taking swings at everything that is rotten in the
world.

• After losing a fight with the
  media, officials have
  released the 911 tapes from the Sandy Hook Elementary School
  shootings. Dispatchers can be heard taking information from adults
  on scene at the school and urging them to take cover.
• Now that health care is fixed forever, President Barack Obama
  is pivoting to
  lecturing America about the “income gap,” thinking the
  government is the solution and not often the cause.
• Forget NORAD and their fighter jets. Google is releasing its
  own app to
  track Santa. And it has games!
• The National Transportation Safety Board has
  booted the rail union from involvement in the investigation of
  the deadly weekend train derailment in New York for violating
  confidentiality. One passenger on the train has already announced
  plans to sue.
• If
  bankrupt Detroit sold all its art, it could raise between $452
  and $866 million, according to experts. Too bad its debt is about
  20 times that amount.
• There’s a big bureaucratic backlog in Colorado to actually
  
  license legal medical marijuana dispensaries that stretches
  back three years.

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Since the 2010 Supreme Court case,
McDonald v. Chicago, which applied the ruling in
the 2008 Heller case to states and
localities, the Court has so far evaded any new case
about the limits and meaning of the Second Amendment.

Those two cases, though, did not resolve all the important
questions about how and when and why the government can restrict
Second Amendment
rights. Heller and McDonald said
that the right to possess commonly used weapons for self-defense in
the home cannot be infringed, but
Justice Antonin Scalia in his majority
opinion in Heller explicitly said this didn’t
mean anything goes when it comes to Americans and their guns.

Many other cases that try to define the whos, whens, and hows of
our Second Amendment rights are percolating through the lower
courts, and some are trying to wend their way to the Supreme Court.
Brian Doherty takes a look at three of the most relevant active
cases involving the Second Amendment, ones that promise to expand
Second Amendment liberty, and resolve some of the core issues left
unresolved
by Heller and McDonald.

View this article.

The Department of Health and Human Services has given a grand
price in a contest to help promote Obamacare to the young to a very
interesting little video,
as Daily Caller reports.

A young lady singing wan but not charmless acoustic pop advises
the “young and wild and free” to remember to “take advantage of
this opportunity” to “make it more fair for affordable health
care.”

The choral punchline, summoning up generations of why the health
care market in America, rooted in third party payments and with
costs always opaque, is such a cost-exploding mess: “Affordable
care act/Don’t worry ’bout the price tag.”

“You are not immune to all disease,”  she sings.

But you are apparently immune to laws of supply and demand
governing a universe with scare resources.

The video:

The Department of Health and Human Services has given a grand
price in a contest to help promote Obamacare to the young to a very
interesting little video,
as Daily Caller reports.

A young lady singing wan but not charmless acoustic pop advises
the “young and wild and free” to remember to “take advantage of
this opportunity” to “make it more fair for affordable health
care.”

The choral punchline, summoning up generations of why the health
care market in America, rooted in third party payments and with
costs always opaque, is such a cost-exploding mess: “Affordable
care act/Don’t worry ’bout the price tag.”

“You are not immune to all disease,”  she sings.

But you are apparently immune to laws of supply and demand
governing a universe with scare resources.

The video:

Watch this special webathon video here or click below for more
links and resources.

Warning: This video includes six unauthorized
cameos. See if you can name them all (answers at link below).

View this article.

The Washington
Post published a report this afternoon based on
information leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealing
that the NSA tracks the locations of “at least hundreds of millions
of devices” around the world, enabling the agency “to track the
movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways
that would have been previously unimaginable.”

From
The Washington Post:

The records feed a vast database that stores information about
the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices,
according to the officials and the documents, which were provided
by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to
analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with
what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but
the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the
whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term
that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of
anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting
vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping
into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that
serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data
is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who
travel abroad with their cellphones every year.

The news coming only a day after the editor of The
Guardian
said that the London-based newspaper has only published 1
percent of the files leaked by Snowden.

More from Reason.com on the NSA here. 

Perpetual Libertarian Party candidate and former chair of the
Michigan L.P. Scott Boman says he was roughed up by campus cops–on
a campus where he teaches!–just for photographing what he thinks
were election law violations.

Account from the Examiner:

A popular Michigan math and physics professor will soon stand
trial in Detroit’s 36th District Court for trespassing in a public
space at his own place of employment…[Wayne County Community
College District]

Boman, Vice-Chairman of the Libertarian Party
of Michigan, recently rejected the prosecutor’s offer to drop the
trespassing charge if he would concede that his arrest was
justified….

The professor’s pre-trial hearing will be held on January 15,
and he will have a jury trial on January 29….

What Boman says happened:

….after teaching class on July 30, Boman stopped by an
absentee voting event being held at the WCCCD Northwest Campus.

…..Boman began taking pictures of signs that were posted by
the incumbent City Clerk Janet Winfrey. These signs were in
violation of election laws. For example, one sign was hanging over
the entrance of the voting location’s building entrance.

….WCCCD Security Officer Olivia Moss-Fort stormed out of the
polling place and shouted, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Boman responded that he was taking pictures, and continued to do
so since the officer would not tell him which law he was
violating…..

Boman then attempted to join other candidates and volunteers who
were handing out campaign literature in the area. While Boman was
passing out his cards, he says that Moss-Fort swatted his hand, and
two or three additional officers threw him to the ground, breaking
the skin on his right shoulder. He was then cuffed and led
away.

“I lost control of my right arm,” he said. “They kept me bound,
isolated and without water for 3.25 hours, to intimidate me from
attending a candidate forum.” He also said that the officers
laughed at him while he was stuck in handcuffs.

By the time his camera was returned, incriminating video he took
of the police was deleted.

The campus cops deny Boman’s account, and although there is
generally a 24 hour security camera covering the area, they claim
there is no video record of what really happened. They claim his
real crime was taking pictures with students in them when students
allegedly asked him not to take their picture.

Boman’s own full
account of the incident, which has nothing about being told to
not photograph students, but has many details of being detained
initially without charges in a closet, cuffed painfully, and denied
water.

Boman has run
for some statewide office every election year since 1994 in
Michigan.

My latest piece at The Daily
Beast takes aim at tomorrow’s union-backed labor action at
fast-food joints around the country.

Here’s the start of it:

In what is probably the least inspired labor action since the
great Detroit Symphony Orchestra Picket Line of 2011, groups
such as the Service Employees International Union, Fast Food
Forward, and Fight for 15 are calling for nation-wide wage
strikestargeting McDonald’s, Burger King, Arby’s, and other
latter-day Dickensian workhouses. On Thursday, protesters in over
100 cities will stand outside of fast-food joints and call for
doubling the wages of burger flippers and fry-vat operators from
$7.25 an hour (the current federal minimum) to at least $15.

Regardless of how much solidarity or sympathy you might feel
about the people who assemble your Triple Steak Stack or
your Cheesy Gordita Crunch, this sort of demand is economic
fantasy at its most delusional and counterproductive. Doubling the
wages of low-skilled workers during a period of prolonged
joblessness is a surefire way not just to swell the ranks of the
reserve army of the unemployed but to increase automation at your
local Taco Bell….

Think
about this way: Are you worth double your paycheck? And
while I’m sure you are, what about the other slobs you work with?
The wage strike – which follows up on earlier iterations held in
August and last November – showcases just how devoid of vision
organized labor is when it comes to the private sector. There’s
almost 4 million jobs open in trades such as construction, welding,
carprentry, and the like – and there are employers ready and
willing to train new workers for these positions. Groups such as
the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of tomorrow’s
organizers, would do better by workers if they figured out a way to
match unemployed and underemployed folks with jobs that pay well
and offer chance for long-term growth.

Read the whole article.

Near the end of the piece, I cite Mike Rowe, the host of the
cable show Dirty Jobs, whom we interviewed recently for Reason TV.
Look for that Q&A to go live sometime next week at this here
website.

My latest piece at The Daily
Beast takes aim at tomorrow’s union-backed labor action at
fast-food joints around the country.

Here’s the start of it:

In what is probably the least inspired labor action since the
great Detroit Symphony Orchestra Picket Line of 2011, groups
such as the Service Employees International Union, Fast Food
Forward, and Fight for 15 are calling for nation-wide wage
strikestargeting McDonald’s, Burger King, Arby’s, and other
latter-day Dickensian workhouses. On Thursday, protesters in over
100 cities will stand outside of fast-food joints and call for
doubling the wages of burger flippers and fry-vat operators from
$7.25 an hour (the current federal minimum) to at least $15.

Regardless of how much solidarity or sympathy you might feel
about the people who assemble your Triple Steak Stack or
your Cheesy Gordita Crunch, this sort of demand is economic
fantasy at its most delusional and counterproductive. Doubling the
wages of low-skilled workers during a period of prolonged
joblessness is a surefire way not just to swell the ranks of the
reserve army of the unemployed but to increase automation at your
local Taco Bell….

Think
about this way: Are you worth double your paycheck? And
while I’m sure you are, what about the other slobs you work with?
The wage strike – which follows up on earlier iterations held in
August and last November – showcases just how devoid of vision
organized labor is when it comes to the private sector. There’s
almost 4 million jobs open in trades such as construction, welding,
carprentry, and the like – and there are employers ready and
willing to train new workers for these positions. Groups such as
the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of tomorrow’s
organizers, would do better by workers if they figured out a way to
match unemployed and underemployed folks with jobs that pay well
and offer chance for long-term growth.

Read the whole article.

Near the end of the piece, I cite Mike Rowe, the host of the
cable show Dirty Jobs, whom we interviewed recently for Reason TV.
Look for that Q&A to go live sometime next week at this here
website.