Beulah Toombs, an 89-year-old resident of Ohio,
is being forced out of her home for refusing to quit smoking.
Toombs lives in Cincinnati’s AHEPA 127 Apartments, a building for
low-income seniors whose rent is subsidized by the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 

According
to the Cincinnati Enquirer, building residents were
given one year to quit smoking when the building went totally
smoke-free in 2013. Toombs refused. “I don’t think so,” she told
the Enquirer. “This is my home, and I think you can do
whatever you want to in your home.”

Clearly, Beulah is a badass (and a healthy one at that—the
Enquirer reports that despite her lifelong cigarette
habit, Toombs is in remarkably good health). But badassery is
frowned on by building management, who deemed Toombs
“non-compliant” after maintenance workers spotted ashtrays and
cigarette butts in her apartment and another resident reported
seeing a lighter and cigarette inside. Toombs is now being forced
to evacuate by the end of April. 

“My mom is getting older, and this is causing her so much
stress,” her daughter, Mary Ann Burgoyne, told the
Enquirer. “She kept telling me that she was paying her
rent. She was a little confused. She thought they might put her in
a debtors prison.”

Burgoyne approached a senior-advocacy group for help, but said
they declined, saying her mom should quit
smoking. 

The group probably couldn’t have done much anyway—and that’s
somewhat as it should be. Toombs’ apartment building is private
property, and owners are free to impose whatever rules they like on
tenants who choose to live there. If tenants don’t like the rules,
they’re free to move somewhere else, as Toombs is doing. “This is
the free market at its best,” one commenter on the
Enquirer article wrote. 

I wouldn’t go that far. Private properties subsidized by the
government aren’t exactly “free market.” Toombs’ building is part
of a national network of HUD-subsidized AHEPA apartment buildings
for low-income seniors. 

HUD doesn’t have the authority to force subsidized but
privately-owned apartments buildings to go smoke-free. But it has
been encouraging them to do so. Since 2010, HUD has been
sending notices to property owners pressuring them to implement
smoke-free housing policies.

When the folks in charge of your financing strongly suggest
something, that’s a strong incentive to do it. I’d wager many
low-income buildings wouldn’t be instituting no-smoking policies if
it weren’t for HUD butting in. 

At Toombs’ building, it doesn’t seem like residents were calling
for the change. “I have been in this apartment bulding many times
as my Mother lived there before she passed away a year ago this
March,” Trisha Dufresne commented on the Enquirer article.
“It is very clean and you can’t smell the smoke from inside the
tenants apartments, so no one is really getting second hand
smoke.” 

Good thing HUD was around to stop the menace of an old lady
unobtrusively smoking within the confines of her apartment!

More proof that government will use any particular power you
grant it (in Toombs’ case, by living in subsidized housing) as an
excuse to reach into totally unrelated areas of your life. But hey,
I mean, people should quit smoking anyway, right? I’m sure Toombs
will be comforted through her stressful move knowing HUD was
just trying to help her.

Last year, in
response to a lawsuit over death-by-drone assassinations of
American citizens overseas, including Anwar Al-Awlaki, his teenaged
son Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, and Samir Khan, the Obama administration
admitted it had done the deed, and claimed that it did so
completely legally.

Howzzat? asked the plaintiffs and a curious judge.

We can’t tell you, it’s a secret, the administration replied.
And—nyah nyah—the
courts have no say in this anyway.

The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagrees, and says the
Obama administration must turn over its legal rationale for
snuffing Americans with flying killer robots.
Writes Judge Jon O. Newman for the court:

We emphasize at the outset that the Plaintiffs’ lawsuits do not
challenge the lawfulness of drone attacks or targeted killings.
Instead, they seek information concerning those attacks, notably,
documents prepared by DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) setting
forth the Government’s reaso ning as to the lawfulness of the
attacks.

Note that the the plaintiffs, including
The New York Times and the American Civil
Liberties Union, don’t challenge the legality of the assassinations
because they have no idea what the government’s argument for their
legality might be. It’s a secret, remember, unknown, and therefore
unimpeachable.

But the Obama administration has pushed the limits of the legal
protections it claims for its arguments in Lois Lerner style, by
publicly discussing the drone killings, boasting legal
authorization for its actions, and then coyly refusing to say
anything more. The
leak of a Justice Department white paper revealing part of the
legal argument and hinting at more also undermined the
administration’s insistence on secrecy.

Too cute by half, says the court. “Voluntary disclosures of all
or part of a document may waive an otherwise valid FOIA
exemption.”

As a result:

With the redactions and public disclosures discussed above, it
is no longer either “logical” or “plausible” to maintain that
disclosure of the legal analysis in the OLC-D OD Memorandum risks
disclosing any aspect of “military plans, intelligence activities,
sources and methods, and foreign relations.”

So cough it up, says the court. Tell us why you think it’s legal
to send drones to kill Americans.

To
find oneself an unmarked automatic weapon required either knowing
exact addresses on the deep web or
a prominent California Democrat. One of those options recently
got a lot harder (sorry,
Leland Yee) but the other may be on the verge of getting
easier. For black market goods most people turn to hard-to-access
places on the Internet, which haven’t been conducive to browsing.
Last week, an anonymous individual launched a search engine called
Grams that caters to all kinds of contraband needs.

Known only as “Gramsadmin,” the engine’s creator explained
to Wired, “I noticed on the forums and reddit people were
constantly asking ‘where to get product X?’ and ‘which market had
product X?’ or ‘who had the best product X and was reliable and not
a scam?’ I wanted to make it easy for people to find things they
wanted on the darknet and figure out who was a trustworthy
vendor.”

So, he spent two weeks building Grams, which looks a lot like
Google, primary color scheme and “feeling lucky” button included.
He built it to function like Google, too. Gramsadmin has
discussed his project on Reddit:

I am working on the algorithm so it is a lot like Google’s it
will have a scoring system based how long the listing has been up,
how many transactions, how many good reviews. That way you will see
the best listing first….

Within the next two weeks Grams will have a system similar to
Google AdWords where vendors can buy keywords and their listings
will go to the top of the search results when those keywords are
searched for…. They will be bordered with an advertisement
disclaimer so users know those are paid results.

Although it’s only a beta version and only accessible through
the Tor Browser, which facilitates anonymous Internet activity at a
tedious pace, Grams has an average time of one second for a
search to load, which is “super fast, especially for Tor,”
Vice‘s Meghan Neal
reports.

Also, Grams currently only shows results from eight different
marketplaces, such as SilkRoad2, Agora, and BlackBank.

For those who want to give it a whirl, “grams7enufi7jmdl.onion”
is the address. 

Reason.com food columnist Baylen Linnekin

sounds off over at Fox New about the unsavory treatment in the
United States of our right to eat and drink the goodies of our
choice.

In fact, 2014 may go down as the worst year for food freedom
since the New Deal era, when Congress, President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and the Supreme Court conspired to strip Americans of
many basic food rights. Just how ludicrous was that period? In
1942, the Supreme Court actually upheld a New Deal law that
prohibited farmers from using wheat they grew on their own farms to
bake bread to feed their own families.

While we haven’t matched that historic low yet, there are still
nine months left in the year.

Linnekin points to rules requiring chefs and bartenders to wear
gloves, bans on trans fats, nagging nannies adopting tech tools so
that it’s increasingly difficult to escape their concerns, and more
issues you may have already found cringe-worthy through his pieces
and those of other great Reason writers.

It just may inspire you to stock the pantry with
soon-to-be-forbidden treats.

Read the
whole thing here.

More zero tolerance run
amok, via KEYC, a
CBS-affiliated station in Minnesota:

On Tuesday Wells Police reportedly found a small pocket
knife in [high school junior] Alyssa Dresher’s purse during a
routine locker search.

Which led school officials to suspend her for three days. The
school has a very strict weapons policy and according to that, the
punishment could lead to a 12 month suspension after further
advisement from the school board. The superintendent was not able
to speak specifically to the case concerning Drescher but did tell
KEYC that in any situation the safety and welfare for all students
is their primary concern. 

The school board will decide on Thursday whether to kick her out
of school for mistakenly (according to her) bringing a pocket knife
used to complete farm chores to school. Her father says the schools
superintendent, Jerry Jensen, wants to push for a 12-month
suspension or expulsion at Thursday’s meeting and that his daughter
had never had any disciplinary problems before.

The knife was found while the school was put on “lockdown” so a
drug dog could sniff students lockers for drugs,
according to The Albert Lea Tribune, which also
reported that police said they found no drugs in the school during
the search. Drescher’s locker was nevertheless singled out.

Her family and friends set up a
Facebook page in support of Drescher on Thursday. It’s garnered
about 1,100 fans.

Thanks to Anthony Sanders for the tip

Obamacare is often described as an attempt to
make sure that most everyone has, or at least has access to, health
insurance. But it’s more than that: It’s an attempt to make sure
that everyone has a specific kind of health insurance. It’s not
enough for the law’s authors and administrators to tell you that
you need to be covered. They also want to tell you how.

Case in point, a regulation proposed last month by the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which would prohibit
people in most states from purchasing standalone fixed indemnity
insurance. Fixed indemnity coverage is a form of limited, low-cost
insurance that pays out a flat rate in response to certain
prescribed events—say $75 for a doctor’s visit or $15 for a
prescription—regardless of the cost. Because the coverage payouts
aren’t variable, and because some major medical costs aren’t
covered at all, monthly premiums are often quite low, meaning that
it offers a way for people to have some coverage at relatively
affordable rates.

It may not be an option for much longer. The proposed
regulation would essentially outlaw standalone indemnity
policies,
making it illegal to sell them except as an addendum to the
more robust, more expensive plans that meet the law’s minimum
essential benefits requirements.  Under the proposed rules,
indemnity insurance sold by itself would be classified in such a
way that it has to meet all the requirements for “major medical
coverage.”

It’s as if regulators suddenly decided that anyone selling
scooters had to make sure those scooters were as powerful (and thus
expensive) as motorcycles. Otherwise, scooters could only be sold
as sidecars to people who already owned motorcycles.

The result is that scooters probably won’t be available at all.
Basically, the indemnity policies would have to meet a slew of
Affordable Care Act requirements that would increase their cost
and, in the process, make them too expensive and troublesome to
sell.

In some ways it’s really sort of bizarre. Prior to this
proposal, the expectation was that individuals would be able to pay
the mandate penalty and then purchase fixed indemnity insurance on
the side. If this proposal goes through, that won’t happen. Which
would likely mean fewer people with some kind of coverage.

In other ways, of course, it makes a certain sort of sense. If
you understand that the goal of the law is not merely to drive
people into some form of health coverage, but also to specify what
type of coverage they have, then this certainly fits the bill.

It’s another example of the many ways the law attempts to
control and limit the flexibility of insurance carriers to offer a
variety of plans and coverage types. The health law’s supporters
have regularly sold it as a market-based system that promotes
private insurer competition. But as we see with these sorts of
rules, it in fact ends up heavily restricting the kinds of
insurance market competition that is acceptable, and transforming
the individual insurance market into what is effectively a
quasi-public regulated utility.