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As
Virginia prepares to elect its next U.S. senator, how will the
state’s millennials cast their ballots? A statewide poll released
today finds young people prefer “anyone but Republican Ed
Gillespie.” Bloomberg Politics
reports:

Democratic Senator Mark Warner captured 47 percent in a survey
of voters between the ages of 18 and 35, which was released
Thursday by the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher
Newport University in Newport News, Va. The first runner-up
was Libertarian Robert Sarvis with 24 percent. Eighteen
percent said they were undecided, and 11 percent said they will
choose Gillespie. [emphasis added]

In other words, the libertarian candidate appears to
enjoy six times as much support from the millennial
generation as from the electorate at large. (Real Clear Politics’

polling average currently puts Sarvis at just 4 percent.)
However, there are some very good reasons to think that level of
support for Sarvis from young voters might not actually
materialize.

In a
previous post here at Hit & Run, I discussed the phenomenon
of polls tending to overstate third party candidates’ preformance
on election day. But there’s another problem with taking this
finding at face value, which the Bloomberg article itself
points out: It assumes young voters will show up at the polls.

It’s unclear how many millennials will actually go to the
polls. 

“A majority say they are certain to vote, but only 44% say they
are paying close or somewhat close attention, so it’s easy to
imagine many who might intend to vote not actually making it to the
polls on Election Day,” said Wason Center Director Quentin Kidd in
a news release.

Historically, young people cast ballots at far lower rates than
older voters. According to a study from
the U.S. Census Bureau, released in April:

In every presidential election since 1964, young voters between
the ages of 18 through 24 have consistently voted at lower rates
than all other age groups…Overall, America’s youngest voters have
moved towards less engagement over time, as 18- through
24-year-olds’ voting rates dropped from 50.9 percent in 1964 to
38.0 percent in 2012.

But that’s not all—even older voters have a track record of
being, shall we say, overly ambitious when reporting their
likelihood of voting. Consider the Scottish independence referendum
as one high-profile example from this year. An Ipsos MORI poll
taken just before the election found some
95 percent saying they were certain to turn out—a 10
on a 10-point scale. In fact, just under 85 percent of registered
voters actually cast ballots—a “record number,” and no wonder
considering the historic nature of the election. But it still
wasn’t 95 percent.

And the number of people who misrepresent their vote likelihood
is often much larger than that. A 2013
Harvard Kennedy School study looked at a series of races
and found that in all of them, “a sizable fraction of those who
self-predicted that they would vote mispredicted and did not
actually vote.” In one case, more than half of
self-predicted voters failed to turn out.

So while a majority of Virginia millennials might believe
themselves to be certain to vote—and nearly a quarter say they’d
vote for Sarvis—chances are, quite a few of them are mistaken.

An Oklahoma judge said Wednesday that
he won’t block a state law concerning the use of
abortion-inducing drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. Several news
outlets, including Reuters, reported
that abortion pills would now be banned in the state,
but this is not correct. Under the
new law, mifepristone and misoprostol—together known as the
“Mifeprex regimen”—are still permitted as long as doctors prescribe
them according to Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
protocol. 

This is, in itself, no win from a reproductive
freedom standpoint: the FDA-approved
regimen includes more restrictions on who can take the drugs
and how they do so than is currently accepted medical practice. The
Guttmacher Institute calls it
“an outdated regimen” that “prohibits alternative,
evidence-based protocols in wide use for at least the past
decade.” 

Under FDA protocol, which hasn’t been updated since its approval
in 2000, these medications can only be taken within seven weeks of
the start of a woman’s last period. Doctors and medical groups now
say the drugs are safe and effective through the ninth week of
pregnancy. 

The FDA-approved Mifeprex regimen also stipulates that all drugs
be taken in the presence of a physician. Since the regimen requires
taking the pills three days apart, that means a woman will have to
make a repeat (and unnecessary) visit back to a clinic merely to
swallow a pill. In most places it’s permissible to take the first
pill at the clinic and the follow-up pill at home.

The third major difference between now-typical protocol and the
FDA regimen is dosage: the FDA requires a 600 milligram dose of
mifepristone, while 200 milligrams is sufficient and standard. So
under Oklahoma’s new law, women seeking non-surgical abortions will
be required to take more of a drug than is necessary for its
effectiveness. 

Republicans in the Oklahoma legislature say all of this is to
ensure women’s safety. 

In 2011, the legislature passed a somewhat similar law, only
this one banned all off-label use of abortion-inducing
drugs. Because misoprostol was initially approved and introduced as
an ulcer medication, this would have prohibited its use in inducing
abortion. Aside from mifepristone, there are no other
abortion-inducing drugs currently approved in America, and
mifepristone only works properly in conjunction with misoprostol.
So the 2011 law would have essentially banned non-surgical
abortion. It was found
unconstituional by a district court and
eventually the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The new law—passed in April and scheduled to take effect
November 1—”fixed the issues that the court had,” said its author,
Rep. Randy Graud (R-Oklahoma City).

District Court Judge Robert Stuart hasn’t yet ruled on the
merits of the law, but he indicated in court on Wednesday that he
would deny a motion for temporary injunction brought by the
Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice and Reproductive
Services of Tulsa. However, he said he will temporarily suspend
portions of the law that subject physicians to legal liability. As
written, the law allows not only women but also maternal
grandparents and “the father of the unborn child who was the
subject of the abortion” (if they’re married) to bring an action
against physicians who perform an abortion “in knowing or reckless
violation” of the law.

Three social scientists at Chapman
University have just released a revealing
report on American fears. Among other interesting bits of data,
it informs us that the item in its survey that Americans fear most
is walking alone at night, that people who watch true-crime TV are
more likely to be afraid of the future, and that 15.9 percent of
the country is at least somewhat scared of clowns.

Also, Americans are prone to thinking crime rates are getting
worse even when they’re actually improving. If you’re a regular
Reason reader, there’s a good chance you suspected that
already, but now you have some fresh numbers to back up those
suspicions:

“What we found when we asked a series of questions
pertaining to fears of various crimes is that a majority of
Americans not only fear crimes such as, child abduction, gang
violence, sexual assaults and others; but they also believe these
crimes (and others) have increased over the past 20 years,” said
Dr. Edward Day who led this portion of the survey. “When we looked
at statistical data from police and FBI records, it showed crime
has actually decreased in America in the past 20 years.
Criminologists often get angry responses when we try to tell people
the crime rate has gone down.”

Despite evidence to the contrary, Americans do not feel like the
United States is becoming a safer place. The Chapman Survey on
American Fears asked how they think prevalence of several crimes
today compare with 20 years ago. In all cases, the clear majority
of respondents were pessimistic; and in all cases Americans believe
crime has at least remained steady. Specific crimes queried in the
survey were: child abduction, gang violence, human trafficking,
mass riots, pedophilia, school shootings, serial killing and sexual
assault.

Here’s a handy chart:

While the numbers for riots and serial killings are not
majorities, both go over 50 percent if you add the people who say
the threats occur about the same amount now as 20 years ago. So you
never have a majority saying a crime has declined.

Yes, yes, you say, but what was that thing you said
about clowns? Glad you asked:

N.B.: They didn’t survey anyone under the age of 18, so these
numbers don’t capture those of us who aren’t afraid of Bozo now but
used to run screaming from the room whenever Sesame Street
showed this little John-Wayne-Gacy-makes-time-run-backwards
film:

Anyway. I’ve only scratched the surface of the study. To explore
it for yourself, go
here.

In 2002, the Bush
administration issued a formal proposal outlining the reasoning for
the creation a new, cabinet-level bureaucracy, the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS).

“The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a
new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that
can strike with a wide variety of weapons,” the proposal explained.
“America needs a single, unified homeland security structure that
will improve protection against today’s threats and be flexible
enough to help meet the unknown threats of the future.” Without
DHS, America would never be safe.

Flash forward to 2014. The Department of Homeland Security has a

$39 billion annual budget. It is fighting the fight
against our invisible enemies, and taking on the unknown threats of
the future.

By confiscating baseball-themed women’s underwear from
enthusiastic local retailers.

The Kansas City Star reports
on Peregrine Honig, who created the design for “Lucky Royals”
women’s boyshorts, featuring the words “take the crown” and a “KC”
logo emblazoned on the rear, in honor of the Kansas City Royals
baseball team making it to the World Series.

Honig was going to sell the boyshorts in her store, Honig’s
Birdies Panties. Then a pair of DHS agents stopped by:

Homeland Security agents visited the Crossroads store and
confiscated the few dozen pairs of underwear, printed in Kansas
City by Lindquist
Press.

“They came in and there were two guys” Honig said. “I asked one
of them what size he needed and he showed me a badge and took me
outside. They told me they were from Homeland Security and we were
violating copyright laws.”

She thought that since the underwear featured her hand-drawn
design that she was safe. But the officers explained that by
connecting the “K” and the “C,” she infringed on major league
baseball copyright. (The officials involved could not be
immediately reached for comment.)

They placed the underwear in an official Homeland Security bag
and had Honig sign a statement saying she wouldn’t use the
logo.

Don’t you feel safer now?

The Royals won their first World Series game in
decades last night. We all lose when overfunded, unnecessary
bureaucracies expand their poorly defined missions into doing dumb
stuff like this.

(Link via
Radley Balko’s Twitter feed.)

Here’s ReasonTV with three reasons to scrap DHS now:

As reported by John
Surico at Vice, the
NYPD has been quietly deploying a tactic called “Omnipresence,”
which involves floodlights pointed at housing projects all night
long, parked police cars on sidewalks with their menacing blue and
white lights flashing, and beat cops indefinitely stationed on
street corners as a new means of policing
pre-crime. Surico calls it “stop and frisk
2.0.”

Stop and frisk as commonly understood is
barely practiced anymore, having died an
ignominious death in 2013 when
Judge Shira Schiendlin ruled that searches of black
and Latino youths based on generalized suspicion was
unconstitutional.

Former mayor and ardent stop-and-frisk
enthusiast Michael Bloomberg defended the practice on his WOR
radio show, “the kids think they’re going to get stopped, so they
don’t carry the gun. And if you can’t do that, you turn the city
over to the criminals, literally overnight.”

The post-Bloomberg NYPD is not about to let the city revert to a
scene from “The Warriors”
without a fight, so instead of instilling citizens with the fear
that they can be stopped and searched for no reason at any time,
they want the public to know that they are there, all the time, and
always watching. If that sounds Orwellian to you, you’re not alone.
Surico writes of “Omnipresence”:

“That’s the comically Orwellian (and completely fucking
terrifying) name for the freshest tactic in the NYPD playbook. To
her, the bright beams mean one thing: The cops are here until
dawn.”

Unlike stop and frisk, very little public information exists on
Omnipresence. It’s barely google-able. Surico cites a single
article in the
The New York Times as the only other major outfit to
report on it at all. The NYPD has made no public statements
explaining the tactic. It’s just there. 

Perhaps Mayor Bill de Blasio and his NYPD Commissioner William
Bratton learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, who clung
to stop and frisk even as it became a public relations disaster for
them. During the trial of stop and frisk, Eric Adams, a former NYPD
captain and New York State Senator testified that then-NYPD
Commissioner
Ray Kelly hoped that stop and frisk would “instill fear” in the
young men of Gotham’s high crime areas, and that would in turn keep
guns off the street. 

The experience of all-night flood lights on courtyards and the
always unnerving sight of flashing police cruiser lights might just
be instilling the fear Kelly envisioned. And by avoiding
belligerent public pronouncements of impending anarchy, the new
bosses can claim to be post-stop-and-frisk reformers. 

Still, with a name like “Omnipresence,” it’s going to be hard
for the NYPD to keep this a secret for too long. 

Reason TV reported on the stop and frisk trial in 2013:

Katy Hall of The Huffington Post interviewed me earlier
this week for a story about Ebola conspiracy theories. Her article
is
up now; here’s an excerpt:

Medical conspiracy theories pop up around any
widespread health scare, sometimes bolstered by the inadequate or
opaque government responses that can follow. Such theories captured
the public imagination during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s,
surfaced around the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, and they remain a
staple of the anti-vaccination movement. Conspiracy theories
represent a way for people to try to make sense of a chaotic health
threat—especially one like Ebola that’s horrific and far from being
contained overseas.

“You’re going to have gaps in the signals that are coming in about
what’s happening in the world, and you’re going to want to fill in
those gaps somehow,” said Jesse Walker, books editor of Reason
magazine and author of The United States of Paranoia: A
Conspiracy Theory. “If you’re afraid of something, you’re
going to find a fearful pattern. Obviously infectious disease is
something people are very afraid of.”

In addition to talking with me, Hall interviewed
Conspiracy Theories author Mark Fenster, who had some
sensible things to say about the fears fueling some of the Ebola
theories that have been floating around. Check the rest of the
piece out
here.

Bonus link: The inevitable plug for the new, expanded

paperback edition of my conspiracy book.

In the latest video from Reason, we profile a couple
millenial-aged entrepreneurs and find out what motivated them to
take the huge emotional and financial risks entailed with starting
a business. Watch above or click on the link below for video, full
text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV
clips.

View this article.

In August Officer Percy Dupra shot and killed  in Phoenix, Arizona, after the woman
allegedly wielded a hammer while police were executing an order to
bring her to a mental health facility. This week the city announced
reforms in response to the shooting.

The Phoenix New Times
reports:

“August 14, 2014, was a tragic day not only for the Cusseaux
family, but for our department as well,” [Police Chief Daniel]
Garcia said at a press conference yesterday, where Cusseaux’s
mother was in the audience.

The main change going forward is the creation of a mental health
advisory board that reports directly to the police department.

“This is not a task force, this is not a temporary board,” Mayor
Greg Stanton said. “This is a board that’s going to be made up the
top mental-health professionals in our community, providing
constant guidance to the police department.”

According to the police department, all cops received two hours
of mental health training after the Cusseaux shooting. Police will
also try to minimize their involvement in mental-health crises—cops
were there to take Cusseaux to a mental hospital on a court
order.

For those not convinced the advisory board, made up mostly of
local mental health providers, the city has apparently used them
for the police department before. From the Times:

Councilman Michael Nowakowski said he was placed on a police
advisory board 20 years ago, and it’s still active.

“I know that these advisory boards work,” he said. “These
advisory boards have direct communication to the chief and top
administrators of the Phoenix Police Department. This is where
change happens.”

Garcia says more reforms are on the way but wouldn’t say
specifically how the shooting of Cusseaux informed the reforms,
because that shooting is still being investigated.

In August, Victor Nava of the
Reason Foundation
highlighted what is ultimately the destruction of a significant
feature of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s modest public employee
pension reforms. He sought to stop one source of pension
spiking—the pursuit of temporary bonuses and extras in pay that
ultimately permanently boost an employee’s pension payout—by
requiring pensions to be calculated from base pay, not including
these bonuses.

No problem, said the California Public Employees’ Retirement
System (CalPERS). They’ll just declare all sorts of bonuses to be
part of their base pay and force them right back into the pension
calculations. CalPERS voted to have 99 bonuses sometimes given to
certain public employees for various tasks that most of us would
classify as expected job duties (like officers directing traffic)
as part of their base pay. And so California’s multi-billion-dollar
pension crisis gets worse.

Today the Los Angeles Times follows up on the fears
raised by Nava to explore the potential financial impact of this
vote. Note that CalPERS doesn’t know the potential cost to
taxpayers of the decision they made. They voted without any sort of
estimate. So the Times took the city of Fountain Valley,
an Orange County community with a population of around 55,000, and
had CalPERS
determine what the bonuses are going to cost:

CalPERS found the Fountain Valley perks could hike a worker’s
gross pay as much as 17%. About half the city’s workforce received
the extra pay that will also increase their pensions, most of them
police and fire employees.

Fountain Valley taxpayers are spending between $147,000 and
$179,000 in total compensation, pension and other benefits for each
full-time officer on its force, according to city documents.
Sergeants, lieutenants, two captains and the chief receive
more.

CalPERS executives told the Times they didn’t
understand why people are so upset with them:

The action simply clarifies the 2012 reform law, which was
designed to stem rising pension costs, said Brad Pacheco, a
spokesman for the agency.

CalPERS always assumed that new employees would continue to
benefit from bonuses just as those hired earlier did, Pacheco
said.

“We just changed the definition of ‘base pay’ to include things
that are obviously not base pay. Why is everybody so upset with
us?”

When it comes to salary negotiations though, you better believe
all those bonuses (and the fact that they permanently boost
pensions) will not be part of the numbers tossed out so that
employee representatives can make wages appear more modest.

The Times notes that pension contributions from the
state and municipal governments within California have jumped from
$1.9 billion to $8.1 billion in 10 years. That’s not even getting
into the massive problem of growing health care costs for
government employees.

Nava noted some of the justifications for bonus pay in his
August story, but the Times has a longer list
here.

Below, Reason Foundation Vice President of Policy Adrian Moore
discusses how to end the public sector pension crisis: