Tag: news

Libertarian Republican Sen.
Rand Paul
reiterated his strong opposition to President Obama’s lawless
war against ISIS on Monday. He penned an op-ed for The Daily
Beast accusing Obama of subverting the Constitution, the War
Powers Act, and the Federalist Papers by bombing ISIS
absent Congressional authorization.

Paul saved his harshest criticisms for lawmakers of both parties
who only show an interest in holding the White House accountable
when it is occupied by a political enemy:

Where have those Democratic protectors of the constitutional
authority of Congress gone? Was it always just a partisan attack on
Republican presidents?

If not, when will Democrats—who so vociferously opposed a
Republican president’s extraconstitutional war-making powers—stand
up and oppose President Obama’s unconstitutional usurpation of
war-making powers?

Now that the Republicans have full power in Congress, they are
responsible for upholding the Constitution and pressing Obama for
proper war authorization, wrote Paul:

Conservatives have rightly decried President Obama’s
unconstitutional executive action on Obamacare—and his promises to
do the same with immigration. With both branches of Congress now
under Republican control, we should act to halt those power grabs,
too.

But conservatives can’t simply be angry at the president’s
lawlessness when they disagree with his policies. They should end
their conspicuous silence about the president’s usurpation of
Congress’ sole authority to declare war—even if (especially if)
they support going after ISIS, as I do.

It should be noted that Paul does ultimately support bombing
ISIS, just not without a legal justification. Is that position good
enough for war-weary libertarians and other skeptics?
It depends on whom you ask. Still, Paul unarguably
deserves credit for using his post-election perch to insult
interventionists on both sides of the aisle. As Paul writes, “If
ever there was too much bipartisanship, it would be the bipartisan
acceptance of unlimited presidential war-making power.”

I wonder if
Democrat Hillary Clinton—Paul’s likely rival in a presidential
showdown—would agree.

Read the op-ed
here.

On Wednesday, at the “Making Nature
Useless,” seminar sponsored by the D.C.-based think tank Resources
for the Future, Iddo Wernick, a researcher at Rockefeller
University’s Program for the Human Environment, asked, “Can
improving efficiency and changing consumer preferences overwhelm
rising population and affluence to reduce the tons of material that
Americans use? The world?” To answer this question, Wernick and his
colleagues collected data about the consumption trends on 100
materials that have long been used in the U.S. economy.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey considers the
idea that “the way we will save nature is by rendering it
economically worthless.”

View this article.

So President Obama has announced that the Internet should be
regulated as a public utility. He’s asking the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) to reclassify internet service
providers (ISPs) from “information services” under Title I as
telecommunications providers under Title II regulatory guidelines.
(See
here for background on the distinction.)

This is all being done in the name of “Net Neutrality,” keeping
the Internet free and open, prohibiting “fast lanes” for certain
services and sites, making sure no legal content is blocked, and
all other horribles that…have failed to materialize in the
absence of increased federal regulation.

Reason contributor and Clemson University economic historian
Thomas W. Hazlett defines Net Neutrality as “a
set of rules…regulating the business model of your local ISP.”
The definition gets to the heart of the matter. There are specific
interests who are doing well by the current system—Netflix, for
instance—and they want to maintain the status quo. That’s
understandable but the idea that the government will do a good job
of regulating the Internet (whether by blanket decrees or on a
case-by-case basis) is unconvincing, to say the least. The most
likely outcome is that regulators will freeze in place today’s
business models, thereby slowing innovation and change. 

Obama is old enough to remember Ma Bell,
which was even worse to customers than today’s cable and Internet
providers. And he is smart enough to recognize the Orwellian
contradiction in introducing onerous new regulatory regimes in the
name of keeping anything “free.” The FCC has never been
particularly adept at acting in the “public interest.” The less
control it has over the Internet (and TV and anything else), the
better off we will all be. 

The New York Times reports
that the NYPD plans to stop arresting people for possessing small
amounts of marijuana “in public view.” Cops will instead issue
summonses requiring pot possessors to appear in court on the
misdemeanor charge. That means cannabis consumers, provided they
have ID, will no longer be handcuffed and taken to a police station
for processing.

In 2012, the Times notes, “more than half of those
arrested for marijuana were released a couple of hours after being
brought to a station house,” where they were “fingerprinted,
checked for warrants and issued a ticket demanding their appearance
in court six to eight weeks later.” The rest “were ‘put through the
system,’ meaning they were held for up to 24 hours before being
arraigned.”

Eliminating arrests for this petty offense would be a big
improvement, since cannabis consumers in New York City would no
longer have to endure the humiliation, inconvenience, and
deprivation of liberty that has been routinely inflicted on them
until now. But they would still be charged with a misdemeanor, even
though merely possessing up to 25 grams of marijuana (about
nine-tenths of an ounce) has not been a crime in New York state
since 1977, and they would still be subject to arrest if they did
not have ID or failed to appear in court. It does not sound like
the NYPD plans to change its practice of transforming a violation
into a misdemeanor by claiming that marijuana was possessed in
public view (often as a result of police instructions or
pat-downs).

Mayor Bill de Blasio
condemned  such arrests during his campaign last year,
calling them “unjust and wrong.” He noted that pot busts
disproportionately affect minorities and can have
“disastrous consequences for individuals and their
families,” since they “limit one’s ability to qualify for student
financial aid and undermine one’s ability to find stable housing
and good jobs.” But so far petty marijuana
arrests have been
just as frequent under De Blasio as they were in 2013.
Now he apparently has decided that the arrests should
be replaced by misdemeanor summonses, which are not as bad but can
have the same “disastrous consequences” that he decried last
year.

This latest shift in policy is reminiscent of a change

announced by De Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, in
February 2013:

Right now, those arrested for possessing small amounts of
marijuana are often held in custody overnight. We’re changing
that. Effective next month, anyone presenting an ID and
clearing a warrant check will be released directly from the
precinct with a desk appearance ticket to return to
court. It’s consistent with the law, it’s the right thing to
do, and it will allow us to target police resources where they’re
needed most. 

That change was welcome, but it raised the question of why
cops were bothering to arrest people for this trivial offense at
all, especially since Bloomberg said “Commissioner [Ray] Kelly and
I support Governor [Andrew] Cuomo’s proposal to make possession of
small amounts of marijuana a violation, rather than a misdemeanor,
and we’ll work to help him pass it this year.” Like De Blasio,
Cuomo
highlighted “gaping racial disparities” in marijuana arrests,
saying he wanted to “save thousands of New
Yorkers, particularly minority youth, from the unnecessary and
life-altering trauma of a criminal arrest.” He regretted
the “countless man-hours wasted” on “what is
clearly only a minor offense.” But after De Blasio, a fellow
Democrat, was elected, Cuomo dropped the proposed legislative fix,

saying “it’s not timely in the way it was last
year.” 

Either possessing small amounts of marijuana for personal
use should be a crime, or it shouldn’t. If it shouldn’t, the
legislature should eliminate the “public display” loophole. But
even if it doesn’t, De Blasio, like Bloomberg before him, has the
discretion to stop charging cannabis consumers with a crime that is
not supposed to exist anymore. 

Although a
two-month ceasefire is still technically in place, Russia’s
invasive ground war in Ukraine is escalating. The United States has
some stern words for Vladimir Putin over this incursion.

Yesterday U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette
Meeha issued
this statement on behalf of the White House:

We are very concerned by intensified fighting in eastern
Ukraine, as well as numerous reports, including from the Special
Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE), that Russian backed and supplied separatists are
moving large convoys of heavy weapons and tanks to the front lines
of the conflict. We continue to call on all sides to strictly
adhere to the cease-fire. Any attempt by separatist forces to seize
additional territory in eastern Ukraine would be a blatant
violation of the Minsk agreements. We reiterate our call on the
Russian Federation to honor all of the commitments it made in
Minsk, including ending its military supply to the separatists and
the withdrawal of all of its troops and weapons from Ukraine.
Furthermore, Russia must enable the restoration of Ukrainian
sovereignty along the Ukrainian side of the international border,
to be monitored by the OSCE, and facilitate the release of all
hostages. We continue to stress that adherence to the framework
agreed upon in Minsk is the best chance of achieving a peaceful
resolution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Secretary of State John
Kerry had an unofficial meeting with Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov this weekend at the Asia-Pacific Cooperation summit
in Beijing. It appears Russia, which continues to deny any
involvement in the war despite enormous evidence to the contrary,
has the upper-hand and is framing the debate. “If Washington is
interested in contributing to the reconciliation of the situation
and creating dialogue between Kiev and the rebel leadership… I
think that would be a step in the right direction,” said
Lavrov.

Kerry stated, “We
do have some disagreements about some of the facts on the ground
with respect to Ukraine. We have agreed to exchange some
information between us regarding that. We have also agreed this is
a dialogue between us that will continue.”

President Barack Obama and Putin are supposed to have an
unofficial meeting at the summit, too.

Radio Free Europe
reports that this weekend eastern Ukraine faced “some of the
most intense shelling since the cease-fire” began.

Whether Putin can sustain this war is yet to be seen. Russia’s
central bank is predicting three
years of economic stagnation. The nation’s currency continues
to drop to record lows, and this weekend The Moscow Times

reported “rising demand for foreign currency mean[ing] that
U.S. dollars and euros were unavailable at some Russian banks and
exchange points Friday as the ruble went into free fall during
morning trading.” Earlier in the year, Russia invaded and annexed
Crimea, which “is now Russia’s poorest region,” and will
cost tens
of billions of dollars on development.