Tag: hit&run

Republican Chris Christie was re-elected
governor in New Jersey by a landslide over Barbara Buono, winning
with the largest margin in a gubernatorial race since Tom Kean
defeated a 33-year-old in 1985. Exit polling
shows Christie won 57 percent of women, a 12 point increase
over 2009, as well as 51 percent of Latino voters, a 19 point
increase, and 21 percent of Black voters, a 12 point increase. He
won every age group except 18-29, which just barely broke for
Buono, and even 32 percent of Democrat voters after spending the
summer collecting Democrat endorsements. When Frank Lautenberg
died, vacating one of New Jersey’s senate seats, Christie
scheduled a special election for three weeks before the
November election date, on a Wednesday, to avoid risking his
landslide margin by sharing the top of the Republican ticket with
another candidate.

Some Republicans, nevertheless, are hoping Christie can help
lead them to national victory in 2016. This weekend, Mitt Romney
told Meet the Press he thought Christie could “save”
the Republican party.  Joe Scarborough
thinks Christie could unite the party, like Reagan. Rich Lowry,
meanwhile,
compares Christie to Bill Clinton:

Christie’s implicit pitch to the national GOP will
probably be that he’s to Republicans in the 2010s what Bill Clinton
was to the Democrats in the 1990s. In other words, he offers a
different kind of politics that can potentially unlock the
presidency after a period of national futility for his party.

Like Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas in the 1980s,
Christie is operating on hostile partisan and cultural territory,
and managing to thrive by co-opting or neutralizing natural
enemies.

Like the “explainer-in-chief,” Christie has a knack for public
persuasion. The New Jersey governor’s relentless town halls during
the fight for his public-sector reforms were model examples of
making an argument fearlessly and effectively.

Christie’s already been maneuvering for a 2016 election run,
becoming
one of the most
vocal opponents of the perceived libertarian faction of the
Republican party so far. Rand Paul’s
said it was a mistake for Christie to say there wasn’t room for
libertarians in the party.David Harsanyi (columns at Reason
here),
thinks this stance is Christie rejecting ideology in favor of
practicality, and not a sign of “cynical moderation.” Harsanyi
writes:

He might not be what conservatives want, but he may be
what they need. Sure, there’s a lot we don’t know about Christie’s
politics. Though he’s probably a conservative in the true sense of
the word, he almost certainly isn’t an ideologue. So you can
imagine that the rank and file will continue to be displeased with
the intensity of his political convictions. The “strain” of
libertarianism that was at the center of Rand Paul’s fight against
the NSA, and the nasty back-and-forth with House Republicans who
were aiming for a porkless Hurricane Sandy relief bill, were two
examples of Christie rejecting (what he sees as) ideology for
practicality. This is often confused with cynical
moderation.

Over the summer, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe

called Christie a “very strong general election candidate” who
was nevertheless too centrist to win in “the current Republican
party.”

More Reason on Chris Christie here.

Although voters in Portland, Maine, supposedly

legalized marijuana on Tuesday, that is not really what
happened. As I
noted last month, Question 1, which received support from more
than two-thirds of voters, merely eliminated
local penalties for possession of up to two and and
half ounces. Under state law, possessing pot in amounts below that
cutoff remains a civil violation punishable by fines
ranging from $350 to $1,000. Hence it is not surprising that
Portland Police Chief Michael Sauschuck
says the initiative won’t stop his officers from citing people
for marijuana possession when they think it’s appropriate. But he
also says that won’t be very often. “This doesn’t change anything
for us in terms of enforcement,” Sauschuck
told the Bangor Daily News. “But the actual statistics
show this is a low priority for us.”

Between June 2011 and June 2012, Sauschuck says, the
Portland Police Department issued just 68 marijuana summonses in a
city of 66,000. By comparison, the New York Police Department in
2011 made more than 50,000
arrests and issued more than 8,000 summonses
for marijuana possession in a city of 8.2 million. New York City
has a population that’s 124 times as big, but it nabbed 868 times
as many pot smokers. By that measure, New York is seven times as
intolerant of marijuana as Portland.

The Portland Police Department’s attitude toward marijuana
consumers seems similar to the
Seattle Police Department’s. Asked if he plans to cite people
who publicly celebrated the passage of Question 1 by lighting up a
joint and memorialized the moment in photographs, Sauschuck
replied, “Let’s think about resource allocation. We’re not going to
go after these guys for smoking a joint.”

So if Question 1 (which officially takes effect in a month)
won’t have much of a practical effect, what was the point? As I
suggested last month, the Question 1 campaign was a dry run for
statewide legalization efforts in Maine and elsewhere. Its
messaging focused on the relative hazards of marijuana and alcohol,
with ads featuring respectable-looking pot smokers asking,
“Why should I be punished for making the safer choice?” Judging
from the large majority the initiative attracted, that message,
which also was prominent in Colorado’s successful legalization
campaign, resonates with voters.

Another plus: The marijuana-is-safer message really upsets pot
prohibitionists, who hate it so much that they tried to
censor it. “Maine is on the brink of creating a massive
marijuana industry that will inevitably target teens and other
vulnerable populations,” warns former congressman Patrick Kennedy,
chairman of the anti-pot group Project SAM, which has created a
Maine chapter to fight legalization there. “Misconceptions about
marijuana are becoming more and more prevalent. It’s time to clear
the smoke and get the facts out about this drug.”

Guess who else is upset. “We’re not against legalization of
marijuana,” an unnamed alcohol industry lobbyist
tells National Journal. “We just don’t want to be
vilified in the process. We don’t want alcohol to be thrown under
the bus, and we’re going to fight to defend our industry when we
are demonized.” That’s fair enough. I myself sometimes worry
that marijuana activists may alienate potential allies if they
seem to be condemning alcohol or bashing drinkers. But it is
perfectly legitimate to point out that the legal distinction
between alcohol and marijuana makes no sense from a scientific or
medical standpoint, and some potential benefits from legalization
(such as
fewer traffic fatalities) hinge on alcohol’s greater
hazards.

As a malt beverage enthusiast, I sympathize with the concern
that beer may be unfairly tarnished by the message that pot is a
safer choice. But if brewers want to defend their products, they
will have to do better than this:

“We believe it’s misleading to compare marijuana to beer,” said
Chris Thorne of the Beer Institute. “Beer is distinctly different
both as a product and an industry.”

Thorne notes that the alcohol industry is regulated, studied
extensively, and perhaps more importantly already an accepted part
of the culture.

“Factually speaking beer has been a welcome part of American
life for a long time,” he said. “The vast majority drink
responsibly, so having caricatures won’t really influence
people.”

Don’t compare beer and pot, Thorne says, because they’re
different! Well, they’re different in some ways and similar in
others, which is what makes the comparison instructive. Thorne adds
that marijuana should not be tolerated because it is not accepted,
which seems pretty circular to me. He also says the responsible
majority of drinkers should not be caricatured, and I agree, but
the responsible majority of marijuana consumers surely have more to
complain about on that score.

We knew it
had the votes earlier in the week, but the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act picked up even a few more Republicans as it

passed the Senate today, 64-32. Via MSNBC:

Senate lawmakers on Thursday passed a bill banning workplace
discrimination against LGBT individuals in a historic, albeit
nominal, victory four decades in the making.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed its final
vote in the full Senate 64-32, just three days after its first
since 1996, when a similar measure failed but just one vote. The
full Senate would not vote again on a workplace protection bill for
gays and lesbians until this past Monday, when lawmakers voted to
begin debate. It was 1974 when Congress first saw a bill of this
kind.

Signs of the measure becoming law were stunted earlier in the
week, however, when Speaker John Boehner voiced his opposition on
the grounds that it would cost small business and create “frivolous
litigation.”

Ten Republicans voted for its passage, including John McCain,
Jeff Flake and Rob Portman (who famously flipped positions on
same-sex marriage after his son came out of the closet).

Read the full story here.

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Today the heads of British security agencies MI5,
MI6, and GCHQ were questioned by the Intelligence and
Security Committee, something that usually occurs in
private.

During the hearing MI5 Director General Andrew Parker claimed
that 34 terrorist plots have been disrupted since the 2005
bombings in London, MI6 chief Sir John Sawers said that “our
adversaries were rubbing their hands with glee,” and GCHQ Director
Sir Iain Lobban told the committee that “We don’t want to delve
into innocent emails and phone calls,” and that some people being
monitored have discussed different ways to communicate since
Snowden’s leaks.

Of course, similar sorts of justifications and complaints
relating to surveillance have been heard before on this side of the
Atlantic. NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander claimed that surveillance
programs have prevented
“dozens” of terrorist attacks. President Obama said that “at
least fifty” plots had been averted thanks to surveillance, a claim
that is backed up
with little evidence.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R.Ga.)

have claimed that terrorists have been changing their
behavior since the leaks, a claim not unlike the one made by
Lobban.

The hearing in the U.K. comes in the wake of a number of
controversies surrounding the British intelligence community that
have emerged since the publication of Edward Snowden’s
revelations.

Earlier this week the British ambassador in Berlin was summoned
by the
German foreign ministry after reporting, based in part on
Snowden’s revelations, emerged alleging that the British had been
using its embassy to spy on the German government.

Snowden’s leaked information also revealed information on the

Tempora program run by GCHQ, which allows the agency to access
personal data online, as explained by Philip Bump at
The Atlantic:

Working closely with America’s National Security Agency, the
GCHQ is about halfway done implementing “Project Tempora.”
Comprised of two parts, suggestively dubbed “Mastering the
Internet” and “Global Telecoms Exploitation,” the project aims to
eventually allow the agency (and its partner) to survey over 90
percent of the cables that route through the United Kingdom,
pulling data from 400 at once. “As of last year,” the Guardian
reports, “the agency had gone half way, attaching probes to 200
fibre-optic cables each with a capacity of 10 gigabits per second.
In theory, that gave GCHQ access to a flow of 21.6 petabytes in a
day, equivalent to 192 times the British Library’s entire book
collection.” Full content of transmissions is preserved for three
days andmetadata for 30. Between them, the GCHQ and NSA have 550
analysts poring over the data — and 850,000 people with top secret
clearance can access it. We’ve known for weeks that the NSA shares
its PRISM data with the UK; now we know it also goes in
reverse.

Read more from Reason.com on the NSA and Edward Snowden here and here. 

There wasn’t much genuinely new information to be
found at yesterday’s congressional hearing on Obamacare. Health and
Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius offered little more than
canned defenses of the administration and more
promises to fix what has so evidently gone wrong with the
rollout of the law’s technical infrastructure.

But here’s something we did see highlighted in a revealing
way:  The administration’s credibility on health care issues
has been badly damaged. And Sebelius, in particular, appears not to
be trusted, even by some in her own party.

Republican questioning focused heavily on the millions of
insurance plan cancellations that are happening all over the
country right now—and the contrast with President Obama’s repeated
promise that anyone who liked his or her health plan could keep
that plan.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tx.)
asked Sebelius whether she thought President Obama’s statement
was true.  “Well, we know that lying to Congress is a crime,
but unfortunately lying to the American people is not. I’d just
like to ask you a simple true-or-false question. Is that statement
on the White House website true or is it false?”

Her response was to try to challenge the framing of the
question: “Sir, I think the statement is that…” Cornyn didn’t
wait to find out what she thought the statement in question was. He
cut her off, asking again: “Is it true or is it false, Madame
Secretary?”

She never directly answered the question, according to the AP
account. Instead she said that “a vast majority” of people who
currently have job-based insurance would be allowed to keep their
plans, as would a majority of people who get individual coverage.
Cornyn finished the exchange by asking the record to “note that you
have refused to answer my question whether it’s true or false.”

It was clearly a question that Sebelius didn’t want to answer,
at least not directly. Other Republican legislators pressed her on
the point, but the closest she came to an actual response regarding
how Obama’s multiple promises that individuals could keep health
plans they liked was when she
said “The president’s promise was written into the law from Day
One, and that was the grandfather clause.”

At best that’s a non-answer. The president’s promise wasn’t just
written into law. It was also delivered verbally in unmistakably
clear language on
at least three dozen occasions. And what he said was: If you
like your health plan, you can keep it, period. The law’s
grandfathering provisions, meanwhile, were written narrowly and
strictly—ensuring that few plans would actually be able to retain
their protected status. Democrats were warned that the narrowness
of the rules would result in people losing existing plans. They
went ahead anyway. That’s part of the reason why people are
upset.

That’s not the only administration deception that came up during
yesterday’s hearing. And Republicans were the only ones to
criticize the administration’s botched rollout of the
exchanges.

Regarding the failure of the exchange portals, Sen. Debbie
Stabenow (D-Mich.) told Sebelius that there are “no words to even
describe the frustration that all of us have.”

Sen. Max Baucus, one of the law’s Democratic authors,
referencing his pre-launch warning that the exchanges could turn
into a “train wreck” if the administration didn’t get a better
handle on the particulars of the implementation process, chastised
Sebelius for failing to acknowledge the project’s problems
earlier—and for insisting that implementation was on
track.

“Make no mistake, I believe in this law. I spent two years of my
life working on the Affordable Care Act. There is nothing I want
more to succeed,” he said,
according to The Washington Post. “But months ago I
warned that if implementation did not improve, the marketplace
might struggle…We heard multiple times that everything was on
track. We now know that was not the case.”

Baucus
walked back his original train wreck remarks after they were
widely quoted by critics of the law. But here he’s making a charge
that’s arguably even more severe: He’s not just accusing the
administration of botching the rollout of the exchanges—he’s
accusing them of deceiving, or at least failing to inform, senior
elected officials in their own party regarding the status of the
implementation process, including one of the law’s own chief
legislative authors.

All Baucus wanted was reliable information. But that’s something
he feels as if he hasn’t gotten. “You’ve got to tell us what the
problems are,” he
said. “The more you don’t tell us, the greater the problem is
going to be.” In imploring Sebelius to start being straight with
Democrats on the Hill, he was implicitly making the point that up
until now that’s not what she and the rest of the administration
had been doing.

That’s important—and revealing. Republicans and critics of the
law have never trusted the administration on Obamacare. But they
weren’t the only ones the White House misled, misinformed, or
simply kept in the dark throughout the implementation
process. Even senior Democratic legislators, for
example, were given no early hint that the law’s employer mandate
would be delayed; party leadership was reportedly given

just 30 minutes notice before the announcement went
public.

And now some Democratic legislators are openly frustrated, and
skeptical, as well. They haven’t quite turned on the law yet. But
they’re wary of the people in charge of implementing it.

To put it another way: They still like Obamacare, but they don’t
quite trust the Obama administration. The problem, as the law’s
supporters are rapidly discovering, is that even with the best of
reforms, bad implementation tends to make for bad law. Which means
that if the administration doesn’t start displaying some very basic
technical and managerial competence, Democrats may increasingly
find that they like the law in theory, but aren’t so thrilled with
it in practice. 

• Twitter’s
  initial public offering today is a far cry from Facebook’s
  first-day disaster. It initially offered stocks at $26 a share, but
  its first trade came in at more than $45 a share.
• Wondering why telecom companies aren’t objecting to handing
  over data to the feds? Money, of course. The CIA is paying AT&T
  more than
  $10 million a year for their assistance.
• 250,000 Colorado residents will
  lose their current insurance coverage thanks to Obamacare.
• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford continues his public transformation
  character into a Saturday Night Live character with a
  
  hilarious but also angry and violent rant that was secretly
  recorded and recently distributed.
• Fearing (probably correctly) that New York City’s new mayor
  will drop the appeals against the implementation of stop-and-frisk
  reforms,
  police unions are asking permission to intervene and keep the
  challenge going.
• Iranian officials say they’re being offered some relief from
  their
  crippling sanctions from Europe and America for their
  cooperation with efforts to scale back the country’s nuclear
  ambitions.

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Balaji Srinivasan, a Stanford Universty
instructor and genomics entrepreneur, recently offered some
radically individualistic advice to aspiring tech innovators. He
warned that, despite (or maybe, because of) the liberating and
enriching qualities of technology in people’s lives, the tech
industry faces a backlash from old-line power centers. In response,
he said, technological innovators should publicly argue their case,
but also be prepared to exploit a market opportunity to help people
escape government control, no matter the law. In other words, to
hell with arguing for more freedom, let’s take it. That’s good
advice for all of us, writes J.D. Tuccille, if we can break with
old attitudes and embrace a willingness to defy authority.

View this article.

As we approach the 50th
anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death, Karlyn Bowman and Andrew
Rugg of the American Enterprise Institute have pulled together a

very useful paper on the popularity of various conspiracy
theories over the last five decades. The authors assembled every
poll they could find since 1963 on the JFK, RFK, and MLK
assassinations, the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks, Roswell,
Oklahoma City, and more — all sorts of conspiracy stories, from
the plausible (a Waco cover-up, Iraq war lies) to the loopy
(Holocaust denial, moon landing denial). For many of the topics,
several polls have been conducted over the years, allowing the
reader to track a theory’s popularity over time.

It’s a great resource, and it includes several surveys I’ve
never seen before. (I wish I’d had it at hand when I was writing my

book about America’s conspiracy folklore.) It is also
refreshingly reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions about
conspiracy believers. “We don’t find compelling evidence from the
data in this document that particular demographic groups are
susceptible to a belief in conspiracy theories,” Bowman and Rugg
write. “It depends on the theory. Middle-aged Americans are more
likely to believe in the JFK assassination conspiracy than older or
younger ones. Young people and Democrats are most likely to
subscribe to conspiracy theories about 9/11. Women are more likely
to believe foul play was involved in Princess Diana’s death. While
the demographic data presented here are by no means exhaustive,
we’re hesitant to endorse what much of the literature concludes —
that the young and less educated are more prone to conspiratorial
instincts.”

The institute also produced a short video to release alongside
the paper. I have a few cameos in it:

Wes Benedict, the longtime Texas Libertarian Party man and
current executive director of the Libertarian National Committee,
who founded the Libertarian Booster PAC, responds
in a statement today to accusations floating around the
right-wing world that his PAC only supported Robert Sarvis’s LP
campaign for governor of Virginia as a tool of moneyed Democratic
Party interests, specifically donor Joe Liemandt (who has
also given six figures to the Obama campaign in 2012)

Says Benedict:

I realize that, no matter what I say, paranoid right-wingers
will think I’m a sneaky operative trying to help Democrats beat
Republicans. This message is for the rational people out there.

I founded the Texas-based Libertarian Booster PAC in late 2011.
Its purpose was to recruit and assist Libertarian Party candidates
for public office. You can read more
about it here.

In 2012, the PAC focused solely on non-federal races in Texas.
With satisfactory accomplishments, and no partisan election
happening in Texas in 2013, I looked to expand to other states
where permitted by law. Virginia was one of two states with a
gubernatorial election in 2013 plus state legislative elections, so
it was an obvious choice.

Back at the end of 2008, a man contacted me expressing interest
in the Libertarian Party. It turned out he was a successful
high-tech entrepreneur. One of his comments was along the lines of,
“What could the Libertarian Party do if it had a million dollars?”
Naturally, I contact this man whenever I think I have a good idea
that needs funding.

I’ve raised $300,000 from this donor for the Libertarian Booster
PAC. He has provided very little in the way of instruction or
advice regarding use of the money….

It was my idea, and my decision, to have the Libertarian Booster
PAC help recruit Libertarian Party candidates in 2013 in
Virginia. I
even advertised about it in February.

According to The Blaze, “[Rush] Limbaugh said the
Democrats enlisted a ‘fake Libertarian candidate’ who was ‘bought
and paid for by an Obama bundler.'” That’s an outright lie, and
Limbaugh should retract his claim.

My strategies and tactics have never been secret. They are
common strategies in the Libertarian Party, and they are the same
strategies promoted at the founding of the Libertarian Party. I try
to publicize them any way I can. I’ve even written a book about
them and included a chapter about PACs.

I want Libertarians to win elections. But I also want them to
run for office even when they’re unlikely to win. Why? To get the
public to discuss and consider libertarian principles…

The total amount the Libertarian Booster PAC gave to Sarvis’
campaign was barely
over $11 thousand, by the way. Sarvis freely discussed the
PAC’s role in helping him get on the ballot in
my October interview with him, hardly a good idea if that was
the key to revealing he was some sort of Democratic plant all
along.

Benedict points out that:

If I wanted to hurt the Republican in Virginia, I would have
supported a right-wing candidate who sounded like a Tea Partier —
who only talked about cutting welfare, Obamacare, and how bad
Democrats are. I would never have helped someone like Robert
Sarvis, who talked a lot about social issues that appeal to liberal
voters. As it turned out, polls show that if Sarvis weren’t in the
race, McAuliffe would probably have won by a slightly bigger
margin.

I’ll be writing more extensively about the Sarvis campaign
and its meaning for libertarianism and Libertarianism in American
politics moving forward here next week.

The school board in East Hampton, New York
says it didn’t hear any complaints it took in the three weeks to
get from an idea by a parent concerned about drugs at the local
high school to the school board voting unanimously to bring drug
dogs into the building.
Via the East Hampton Star:

A packed house of parents sat close together, speaking
as one in favor of the proposal.

“I speak in support of this policy, as a taxpayer and parent of a
young child in the district,” said Jeff Erickson. “I applaud the
board. We all know that we have an epidemic on Long Island with
oxycodone and prescription-drug use. It starts with alcohol and
marijuana. If we have children using our facility to sell drugs or
use drugs, let’s get rid of them. Let’s get them out, because
they’re poisoning our children.”

Mr. Erickson continued: “I’m pretty conservative on this. I have no
problem with them sniffing our children.”

Thunderous applause followed his remarks.

“We have not heard one word against — not one,” said Patricia Hope,
the board president, yesterday morning.

One parent suggested the dogs do the cars in the parking lot,
too. No word on what the teachers union might say about that. The
principal of the high school says the building would go on
“modified lockdown” during surprise visits by the county sheriff’s
K-9 unit, and local police would be called if drugs were found.

Read Jacob Sullum’s March Reason piece on how police use drug
dogs to manufacuter probable cause
here. Schools need only “reasonable suspicion” to conduct
searches, the Supreme Court explained in a 2009 decision about a
middle school girl strip searched over an Advil, which you can read
Sullum on here.