Tag: hit&run

William Sager Jr. was being harassed at a
Buffalo, New York, college bar by the manager and two off-duty cops
who had worked security for the bar earlier that Saturday night.
 A friend called 911 to report it and shortly after,
the Buffalo News reports:

Sager was thrown down a set of stairs and placed in
handcuffs while out cold.

Then, still in handcuffs and bleeding from the ears and
mouth, he was dragged out on the sidewalk, a short distance from
the bar. When a friend tried to intervene, he was placed under
arrest.

Later, when on-duty police responded, they found an
internal surveillance tape from Molly’s in the trash
nearby.

Sager is in an intensive care unit (ICU) and may never recover
from his brain injuries. The Buffalo News pieced together
what happened that night in part with the help of reports by cops
who say they were troubled by the incident. Via the News
again:

These reports suggest that at least one of the off-duty
officers inside Molly’s Pub early Sunday was more than a passive
observer to the beating.

The off-duty officer retrieved his handcuffs so they
could be clicked around Sager’s wrists. He then complained to
responding officers about Sager’s friend, who was
arrested.

Said one cop: “Why would an off-duty officer put
handcuffs on an unconscious man?”

The concern cops say they have about the incident (crime) that
happened last week isn’t shared by police brass. The two off-duty
cops implicated in the assault have not been arrested. They’re on
paid leave while the police department investigates. The FBI is
reportedly also examining the incident.

Sager’s friends say it’s unlikely the victim “sparked the
incident,” as the News put it, because he was in the
process of applying to be a state trooper.

How
do you make a conservative sound like a liberal? Easy, writes A.
Barton Hinkle: Just bring up wind power. For years, progressives
have been pressing the country to use more renewable energy,
including wind energy. Since liberal support for anything
automatically renders it suspect in conservative eyes (and vice
versa), conservatives have made a series of claims as to why that
support is misguided. Unfortunately, Hinke observes, in their zeal
to slaughter a liberal sacred cow, conservatives rely on an
argument that only hurts their greater cause.

View this article.

“Click It or Ticket: Get Ready for Seat Belt Checkpoints! (Don’t
cops have better things to do?!)” is the latest video from
ReasonTV. Watch above or click on the link below for video, full
text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more ReasonTV
clips. 

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On May 16 and 17, a “Coalition to End Sexual
Exploitation” gathered just outside of Washington, D.C., to
discuss the serious “public health concerns” posed
by…pornography.  

Is it 1978?

Seems like it might as well be with this crowd. The
conference—touted as the first national anti-pornography conference
in 27 years—drew a mix of “family values” conservative types and
anti-choice feminists, for a resulting flurry of fear-mongering and
hyperbole.

Dawn Hawkins, executive director of Morality in Media—a group
that’s been quixotically crusading against pornography since
1962—told
reporters:

“There’s an untreated pandemic of harm from pornography. We know
now that almost every family in America has been touched by the
harm of pornography.”

University of Pennsylvania professor Mary Anne Layden said
pornography has played a role in every single
case of sexual violence she has treated as a
psychotherapist. Via
Agence France-Presse:  

“The earlier males are exposed to pornography, the more likely
they are to engage in non-consensual sex—and for females, the more
pornography they use, the more likely they are to be victims of
non-consensual sex.” 

Gail Dines, a sociology and women’s studies professor at
Wheelock College, author of Pornland: How Porn Has
Hijacked Our Sexuality, and president of the group Stop Porn
Culture, said: 

“These degrading misogynist images… are robbing young people
of an authentic healthy sexuality that is a basic right of ever
human being.”

According to Dines, taking down the pornography industry will
require taking a page from anti-tobacco playbooks. “Tie them down,
piece by piece, with legislation,” she
said.

Dines also referred to pornography as a form of “terrorism
against women” and stressed menacingly that “the idea of it
being a public health issue is that you have to come together
collectively as a group.” 

“Youth are developing sexual problems because of their exposure
to adult pornography,” pediatrician and conference speaker Sharon
Cooper told The
Christian Post. “It’s a very severe issue in our
country.”

Other conference presenters included a pastor leading a
“million men” against pornography crusade; the Dublin Rape Crisis
Centre’s Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop, who
believes “increasingly extreme” porn sites are driving surges
in sexual violence; a
neuroscientist who says he has “proof” of porn addiction; and
anti-porn group “Fight the New Drug.”  

In its 2013 decision in
Thomas v. Nugent, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
5th Circuit granted qualified immunity to a Louisiana police
officer who repeatedly used his taser on a handcuffed suspect. That
suspect subsequently died of his injuries on the way to the police
station. According to the 5th Circuit, “this case does not provide
an ‘obvious’ example of excess force” because the suspect “was
arrested pursuant to an active felony warrant, attempted to evade
arrest, was subdued only through the threat of deadly force, and
did not comply with the officers’ repeated requests to cooperate in
effectuating the arrest.”

In response to an appeal filed by the suspect’s surviving
daughter, the U.S. Supreme Court today remanded the case back to
the 5th Circuit “for further consideration in light of Tolan v.
Cotton.” Tolan v. Cotton, as Will Baude
explained at the Volokh Conspiracy, “said that the Fifth
Circuit had wrongly granted summary judgment to a police officer in
a civil rights case…. [B]y my count it’s the first time in 10
years that the court has ruled against a police officer in a
qualified immunity case.”

Depending on how the 5th Circuit deals with this matter on
remand, the officer may still receive qualified immunity. Either
way, the dispute may well end up before the Supreme Court once
more.

Cisco Systems, probably the best-known provider of network and
router technology, saw its
sales plunge in 2013 in the wake of Edward Snowden’s release of
documents detailing the National Security Agency’s (NSA)
surveillance techniques, which indicated that our online encryption
methods were not secure from the feds. Furthermore, the documents
indicated the NSA was physically tampering with computer equipment
sent through the mail to install methods of intercepting data.

Glenn Greenwald’s
new book, No Place to Hide, takes the accusations a
step further, including photos from a 2010 NSA document that
appears to show the agency resealing an intercepted package that is
clearly labeled with Cisco’s logo.

Cisco leaders claim they didn’t know the NSA was engaging in
this behavior and did not cooperate. Now the chief executive
officer of Cisco, John Chambers, has sent a letter directly to
President Barack Obama, asking for him to get the NSA to knock it
off already.

Tech site Re/Code got a copy of the letter and
took note:

Addressing the allegations of NSA interference with the delivery
of his company’s products, Chambers wrote: “We ship our products
globally from inside as well as outside the United States, and if
these allegations are true, these actions will undermine confidence
in our industry and in the ability of technology companies to
deliver products globally.”

“We simply cannot operate this way; our customers trust us to be
able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest
standards of integrity and security,” Chambers wrote. “We
understand the real and significant threats that exist in this
world, but we must also respect the industry’s relationship of
trust with our customers.”

Failure to restore and repair that trust, Chambers said, could
threaten the evolution of the Internet itself and lead to its
fragmentation.

Something to keep in mind today as the Department of Justice
announces  it is filing charges against
five hackers in the Chinese military for stealing trade secrets
from American industries.

Over at Vice, Michael Tracy
describes a conversation with Ras Baraka, the mayor-elect of
Newark (and Amiri Baraka‘s
son):

Mayor-Elect Ras Baraka claims to have looked out upon
the beleaguered city and, after careful consideration, devised an
ingenious remedy for its many ills.

“I think drugs should be decriminalized, period,” he told me.

Yes, that would include crack, methamphetamine, and heroin. Perhaps
not a policy position one would expect to hear promulgated in the
context of a ferociously contested election marked by persistent
fear of drug-related violence, but maybe there is something brewing
in Newark.

Bold stuff. But…

Puzzlingly, despite endorsing the concept of drug
decriminalization, the victorious Baraka also hedged on the
question of marijuana legalization per se. When asked for
his view on the senate bill [to legalize possession of pot for
adults], he equivocated, remarking obtusely, “If the people decide
they want to go further, that’s when they go further.” It is a
telling sign of the times in Newark that the winning
candidate…would apparently be unwilling to voice a clear position
on marijuana legalization while he claims to support systemic
change to the entire drug-prohibition regime.

Make of that what you will, and keep your eye on New Jersey for
further developments.

There are still huge technical
problems yet to be resolved with Obamacare.

For example, the vast majority of people who gained private
coverage through Obamacare are being subsidized through the law’s
system of health insurance tax credits. But about a million of
those subsidies are wrong, either too high or too low—it’s unclear
how many fall on which side—according
to The Washington Post. 

The law’s subsidies are doled out based annual income, and
people who apply for coverage are responsible for submitting income
data in order to prove eligibility for the subsidies. The problem
is that a million or so people have entered incomes that differ
substantially from what the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has on
file.

Normally this would be reconciled through a follow-up auditing
process; when the system identifies people whose submitted incomes
don’t match IRS records, those people are asked to send in further
paperwork as proof. But only “a fraction” of those people have
responded, according to the Post. And even when they have
provided additional documentation, it doesn’t matter.

The federal computer system at the heart of the insurance
marketplace cannot match this proof with the application because
that capability has yet to be built, according to the three
individuals,” the report says.

So piles of unprocessed “proof” documents are sitting in a
federal contractor’s Kentucky office, and the government continues
to pay insurance subsidies that may be too generous or too
meager. 

Fun fact: That contractor happens to be Serco, the data entry
company which has a $1.2 billion deal under the health law, and
which recently generated some negative attention when an anonymous
employee said that there was
almost no work to do at the company’s processing
centers. 

Another fun fact: The back end system that processes and
verifies the subsidies was originally supposed to be completed when
the exchanges opened last October. Then, when the exchanges
launched with so many problems, officials pushed back the opening
to early 2014 so they could concentrate on fixing the
consumer-facing end of the system.

It’s May, and the back end is still far from complete. Federal
health officials won’t provide reporters with timelines indicating
when they expect it to be complete. And insurers participating in
the law have been told to
be prepared to continue using the current, manual workaround system
until at least September. 

The Obama administration doesn’t really want to talk about any
of this, because they promised this wouldn’t be a problem. Or, as
the Post puts it, “members of the Obama administration are
sensitive because they promised congressional Republicans during
budget negotiations last year that a thorough income-verification
system would be in place.” So far, that obviously isn’t the
case. 

And it won’t be for at least several more months. Work will
proceed by hand, but income discrepancies won’t be up for review
until this summer. That’s because the administration has another
million applications with a different problem: questions
about the applicant’s citizenship. Those issues will be dealt with
first. Even that doesn’t fully capture the extent of the
application glitches. “Of the roughly 8 million Americans who
signed up for coverage this year under the health-care law,” the
Post says, “about 5.5 million are in the federal insurance
exchange. And according to the internal documents, more than half
of them — about 3 million people — have an application containing
at least one kind of inconsistency.” This isn’t a small problem,
and it likely won’t be going away soon. 

Just over a month ago, in a fit
of assertive smugness of the sort to which politicians fally prey
an awful lot,
President Obama insisted, “The point is the repeal debate is
and should be over. The Affordable Care Act is working.” Never mind
the horror stories about lost coverage, rising costs, glitchy
exchanges, and limited access to actual lealth care, “it’s well
past time to move on as a country and refocus our energy on the
issues that the American people are most concerned about.”

You can bet President Obama wants to put discussion of his
Frankenstein monster of a health law in the rear-view mirror;
opinions of Obamacare aren’t flattering, and they aren’t helping
his party’s political prospects. But the American people aren’t
going along with the program.

In fact 60 percent of Americans say the debate over Obamacare
should not be over, according to a new
Politico Poll. And which way do they lean on the law? Among
those polled, 48 percent want the law repealed outright, 35 percent
want it changed, and only 16 percent want the president’s signature
health plan maintained as is. Eighty-nine percent of
respondents said the health care law will be important in
determining their congressional votes in November.

Not surprisingly, the poll picked up a Republican advantage in
voter sentiment going into November’s congressional elections.

The Politico Poll also picked up slight opposition to same-sex
marriage and marijuana legalization, and support for immigration
reform and “stricter background checks for gun purchases,” if
you’re trying to read the ideological tea leaves.

Respondents also favored divided government, with one party
controlling the White House, and the
other Congress. Some economists

say this approach is the best bet for achieving less-expensive
government, as the parties squabble without running up the
bills.

Those bills can cen be incurred by controversial measures, such
as those jamming a poorly constructed health system down
everybody’s throats.

Last
year EVE Online, the massive multi-­player online
game set in the fictional universe of New Eden, welcomed its
500,000th subscriber. (For comparison, Iceland, the country
where EVE Online developer CCP Games is based,
has a population of about 320,000.) A video game with a
nation-sized economy throws off an awful lot of data, but can
economists draw real-world lessons from the buying, selling,
stealing, and destroying of virtual space gear? Matthew Feeney
points to a few ways they are.

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