Jeffchisholm

Writing at Salon, "New York based journalist and consultant to progressive causes" Tom Watson objects to the anti-surveillance Stop Watching Us rally, scheduled for October 26 in Washington, D.C., because it commits the unforgivable sin of reaching across partisan lines. The fatal flaw of this gathering, says this breathless correspondent, is that it includes (gasp) libertarians! Much better to keep objections to the NSA and intrusive snoopiness as a private club for those who, he insists, really care about privacy. "The path to NSA reform so clearly lies inside the Democrats’ big tent," he writes, "and runs through its liberal wing."

Stop giggling. That's so not polite.

Writes Watson:

This is a vital cause, and I agree with it.

Yet I cannot support this coalition or the rally. It is fatally compromised by the prominent leadership and participation of the Libertarian Party and other libertarian student groups; their hard-core ideology stands in direct opposition to almost everything I believe in as a social democrat.

The Libertarian Party itself – inaccurately described by Stop Watching Us as a “public advocacy organization” – is a right-wing political party that opposes all gun control laws and public healthcare, supported the government shutdown, dismisses public education, opposes organized labor, favors the end of Social Security as we know it, and argues in its formal political manifesto that “we should eliminate the entire social welfare system” while supporting “unrestricted competition among banks and depository institutions of all types.”

Yet my progressive friends would take the stage with the representatives of this political movement? Why? The loss is much greater than the gain. Organizers trade their own good names and reputations to stand alongside – and convey legitimacy to – a party that opposes communitarian participation in liberal society, and rejects the very role of government itself. And their own argument for privacy is weakened by the pollution of an ideology that uses its few positive civil liberties positions as a predator uses candy with a child.

Later, Watson goes on to describe libertarians as really authoritarian because "it’s always about the man on the balcony" whatever the fuck that means. Cuz progressives don't really mean it when they go all control-y, but libertarians secretly do because Hayek hearted Pinochet. But we already got that Watson doesn't like us from the whole child-predator thing.

The true larf riot comes with this tidbit, apparently written after Watson awoke from a stroke that erased the last decade. Or three.

Going “all in” with the libertarian purists is a fatal and unnecessary compromise; reform is clearly needed, but the presence of anti-government laissez-faire wingers at the beating heart of the privacy movement will surely sour the very political actors that movement desperately needs to make actual – and not symbolic, link bait – progress in its fight.

I speak of the progressive movement and the Democratic Party, of course.

For those whose feet still touch the ground, the path to NSA reform so clearly lies inside the Democrats’ big tent – and runs through its liberal wing. And because we are a liberal republic, whose central government is not leaving the landscape anytime soon (the libertarians’ fondest goal), change must also run through an elected Congress.

Democrats? Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Your Cell Phone) took to the pages of USA Today to defend NSA surveillance as recently as yesterday. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Your Email In Box) called Edward Snowden a "traitor" for revealing the NSA's excesses. And President Obama, who is, in fact, a Democrat, loves him some NSA surveillance.

So, of course do Republicans. Rep. John Boehner (R-Orange) shares Reid's sentiments about Snowden. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-The Inquisition) digs the NSA, and so does Sen. John McCain (R-Get Off My Lawn).

The whole establishment, Democrat and Republican, favors an intrusive surveillance states. It's left to mavericks like Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Rand Paul to provide opposition to the NSA that's affiliated with either major party. That's why a coalition reaching across partisan lines, and certainly not restricting itself to one or the other compromised and deeply authoritarian major party, is necessary to press for change. And libertarians, with our inherent suspicion of the state, are a natural part of such a coalition.

That inherent suspicion may explain why Edward Snowden, before revealing the NSA's shenanigans, contributed money to libertarian-Republican Ron Paul's political efforts. He was also called "a libertarian hero"—at Salon.

Yesterday, I noted ways that some employers are already limiting health benefits for workers because of Obamacare. Today, we have another example: Delta airlines says that the health law will cost the company $38 million directly, and nearly $100 million when all the additional costs are factored in.

In a letter signed by Robert Knight, Delta’s Senior Vice President for Government Affairs, the company says that the company will absorb some of those costs, but will also end up sharing some of them with employees. Ultimately, Knight writes, Obamacare “will result in increasing costs, for both companies and our employees, and will also reduce the benefits provided.”

The bulk of the letter, first posted by Erick Erickson at Redstate, details the specific provisions that Delta expects to add to the company’s costs. Those include:

• A reinsurance fee of $63 per covered individual, which makes family coverage more expensive and which the company estimates will cost about $10 million next year.
• Coverage for dependents up to age 26, which results in a “permanent increase in costs of about $14 million a year.”
• The individual mandate, which Delta expects will result in some employees who currently turn down employer coverage deciding to take it rather than pay a penalty—which will cost the airline an additional $14 million.

But Delta can afford it, can’t they? The company’s profits were up 18 percent in 2012, when it netted about $1 billion on $36.7 billion in revenue. Compared to that, $100 million is just a drop in the bucket, right?

That’s one way to look at it. Here’s another: Delta is, at least for the moment, better positioned to handle these sorts of costs than many, perhaps even most companies. It’s a huge corporation with billions in revenue, and the $100 million cost represents a relatively small part of its net revenue.

And it’s still planning to reduce benefits for workers.

So consider how all the smaller companies that don’t have Delta’s cash cushion or reasonably strong annual margins are likely to react. And think about what might happen a few years down the road if Delta’s profits—which were losses just a few years ago—don’t hold up. The costs imposed by Obamacare won’t just be shrugged off, or eaten as part of the normal cost of doing business. They won't go unnoticed by execs, or unfelt by workers. They will have an impact, somehow, on employers and their employees, on the benefits they provide, and the coverage they receive.

The Obama Administration has been publicly pushing the idea that questions about the administration’s actions and truthfulness in regards to last year’s attack on the Benghazi consulate was a “phony scandal.”

In private, though, it appears the Administration is working very hard not to have any information contradicting their claims to truthfulness from coming out. CNN is now reporting that “dozens” of CIA employees were on the ground in Benghazi at the time of the attack. Here’s what the Administration is doing to try to keep that fact under wraps:

Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency's missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency's workings.

The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress.

It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career.

In exclusive communications obtained by CNN, one insider writes, "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well."

Let that last statement sink in. It ought to be a familiar tactic.

CNN's exclusive, of course, is not the first mention of CIA involvement in Benghazi. The second part of the Benghazi attack was on the CIA annex in the Libyan city. The CIA apparently was not sure how the attackers knew about the facility in the first place.

Paula Broadwell, the intelligence officer-cum-palace journalist whose affair with David Petraeus ended the general’s career as CIA director, believed the CIA annex in Benghazi was a secret prison and that the attack was a jihadi jailbreak (something we’ve seen from Iraq to Pakistan in recent months).

President Obama and administration officials, of course, chose to blame a video, something that was known to be patently false very early on in the aftermath, both to US officials on the ground and anyone who was paying attention and had half a clue. The latest revelations about the extent of the CIA presence in Benghazi on September 11, and the extent to which the administration is trying to prevent it, at least provide some minor insight as to why the Obama Administration was so committed to the lie of the video.

I argued a few months ago that the answer to Hillary Clinton’s question of “what difference does it make?” what the facts on Benghazi are is that it betrays a complete disregard for truthfulness from this administration to the public. That continues.

On Friday a New Orleans homeowner was arrested for attempted second-degree murder after shooting a teenager who had climbed over his fence in the middle of the night. Merritt Landry, who works as a building inspector for the city's Historic District Landmarks Commission, said he believed Marshall Coulter, a 14-year-old with a history of burglary arrests, was about to break into his home. Awakened by his dog's barking, Landry went outside to see what was going on and saw Coulter in his driveway a few feet from his back door. Landry said that as he approached Coulter the teenager made a "move, as if to reach for something." Landry said he fired at that point, fearing that Coulter had a weapon. But police said Coulter, who was struck in the head and critically wounded, was unarmed and did not pose the sort of "imminent threat" that would justify the use of deadly force. Based on where they found blood and a shell casing, they estimated that Landry shot Coulter from a distance of about 30 feet.

Neighbors told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that Landry, who has a pregnant wife and a baby daughter, was merely trying to protect his family. Coulter's 23-year-old brother, David Coulter, admitted that Marshall had a history of "stealing stuff," calling him a "professional thief." But he said Marshall "would never pick up a gun, not in a million years." He added:

He's still a little boy. Who pulls a trigger on a 14-year-old? What if it was your little brother or your sister? How would you feel?

Landry, of course, was in no position to know Marshall Coulter's age, criminal history, or attitude toward firearms. And under Louisiana law, it seems he was within his rights to shoot the intruder. The Louisiana statute governing the "use of force or violence in defense" says "there shall be a presumption that a person lawfully inside a dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle held a reasonable belief that the use of force or violence was necessary to prevent unlawful entry thereto, or to compel an unlawful intruder to leave the premises or motor vehicle" if "the person against whom the force or violence was used was in the process of unlawfully and forcibly entering or had unlawfully and forcibly entered the dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle" and "the person who used force or violence knew or had reason to believe that an unlawful and forcible entry was occurring or had occurred." A homicide likewise is considered justified "when committed by a person lawfully inside a dwelling, a place of business, or a motor vehicle...against a person who is attempting to make an unlawful entry into the dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle, or who has made an unlawful entry into the dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle, and the person committing the homicide reasonably believes that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent the entry or to compel the intruder to leave the premises or motor vehicle."

So why was Landry arrested? Det. Nicholas Williams asserted in the arrest warrant that Coulter was not trying to enter Landry's house when he was shot. But this "professional thief" had hopped Landry's fence at 2 a.m. and was a few feet from the back door. If he had closed that distance and put his hand on the door knob before being shot, would that have made Landry's use of force justified?

Louisiana, by the way, has a "stand your ground" law, adopted in 2006, and at least one change made that year is relevant in this case. The main change, as in Florida, was a provision stating that "a person who is not engaged in unlawful activity and who is in a place where he or she has a right to be shall have no duty to retreat before using deadly force [when justified by a reasonable fear of death or serious injury] and may stand his or her ground and meet force with force." But even prior to 2006, the Times-Picayune notes, people facing intruders at home had no duty to retreat and were authorized to use force, including deadly force, if they reasonably believed it was necessary to "prevent the entry or to compel the intruder to leave the premises." The 2006 law, also as in Florida, strengthened the right to self-defense in the home by creating a presumption that the use of force is reasonable in that setting.

[Thanks to David Kervin for the tip.]

While the Department of Justice is mulling whether to file federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, an act for which Zimmerman’s been acquitted, families of victims of police shootings often have to try to seek justice on their own.

This week, the family of Noel Polanco, an unarmed 22-year-old shot during a traffic stop in New York City last October, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Hassan Hamdy, the detective who fatally shot him, as well as the NYPD and the City of New York. The family is seeking $75,000 as judgment for the assault and battery involved in the shooting .

In February, a grand jury decided not to file charges against the officer who shot Polanco. The cop’s excuse? He thought Polanco, a member of the National Guard Reserves, was reaching for a gun in his waistband. No gun was found anywhere in the car. He had been pulled over after police say they observed him driving erratically. One of the passengers in the car says Polanco kept his hands on the wheel through the entire encounter, while the other passenger, an off-duty cop, was asleep at the time.

Will the Department of Justice be investigating Hamdy or the NYPD? Don’t hold your breath. But President Obama is considering police commissioner Ray Kelly, who did call for a grand jury probe of the shooting, for the top job at the Department of Homeland Security.

There's now a trailer for The Fifth Estate, director Bill Condon's forthcoming movie about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Watch below:

The movie hits theaters on October 11. Read Reason's voluminous coverage of Wikileaks here. 

Justin Carter, 19, has been in jail since March 27, when the Comal County (Texas) teen was arrested for making an off-color joke to a friend about a MOBA* computer game they were playing. "You're crazy," the friend told Carter. "I think I’ma shoot up a kindergarten. And watch the blood of the innocent rain down. And eat the beating heart of one of them," Carter replied, adding "lol j/k."

For this transgression, Carter was not just investigated, but arrested. He's been in jail for months now, held on $500,000 bail. His attorney says he's been beaten several times and placed on suicide watch; suicide watch, in case you didn't know, translates to "placed naked in solitary confinement."

Across the country, in Washington, D.C., a very similar situation has had a very different outcome. D.C. Police Officer Christopher Picciano, "a 17-year veteran who was a member of the elite presidential motorcade detail," will be suspended without pay for a little over a month after joking about killing the first lady, threatening to go on a shooting spree, and calling Pres. Obama a communist: 

A District police officer accused of threatening Michelle Obama has been cleared of administrative charges related to the first lady but was found guilty of posting a derogatory job description on social media and depicting the president as a communist, his attorney said Monday.

[....]

Picciano got into trouble in July 2012 while eating breakfast with a group of officers in a downtown restaurant. They were talking about the first lady’s threat level, and one officer explained that it was high because “a lot of people want to kill her.” Another officer then testified that Picciano said, “Yeah, because I want to kill her” and then showed that officer a picture of a handgun on his phone.

But Pressler said that two separate conversations were crossing the table at the same time. Picciano’s version is that the officer asked who would kill Obama — to which he answered, “I guess I would.” Pressler said his client was also talking about a birthday gift of a .40-caliber handgun and at the moment he made the joke, the picture of the gun downloaded on the phone he was holding up.

According to the Washington Post, the U.S. attorney's office declined to press charges against Picciano because it "agree[d] with the Secret Service that Picciano was not serious with his comment about Michelle Obama." Picciano also "wrote on Facebook about taking a rifle to a tall building," after the D.C. Council voted to trim pension benefits for the MPD. That wasn't serious either, apparently. 

Comal County, Texas, is a world away from Washington, D.C., so the two cases aren't exactly apples-to-apples. Then again, Texas is also a world away from Massachusetts, where another teenager was nearly rail-roaded for posting violent raps on Facebook. Could the differences between how Carter and Picciano were treated be largely geographical? It's possible. 

But there's also something to be said about the benefit of a doubt afforded police officers (even bad ones) versus regular people. Picciano joked about killing the first lady and going on a Charles Whitman-esque shooting spree, yet remains free and employed in a job that allows him to carry a gun; Carter, a 19-year-old who doesn't own a gun, joked about shooting up a school, and is being kept naked in solitary confinement as a result.

It's possible that Carter made that joke in the wrong state, but I think in this case, and others like it, power matters far more than geography. 

Related: Why Firing a Bad Cop is Damn Near Impossible. 

*League of Legends is a MOBA, not a MMOG.

Here's the way it is, America: annoy a cop, even doing something perfectly legal, and he might cuff you. And if your dog sees it and gets upset, he might kill your dog.

Latest example in this video uploaded to YouTube yesterday from Hawthorne, California  of a man filming police on the street, when they then approach and cuff him.

Warning: if watching a dog die would upset you, don't watch. It looks to me like the cop was approaching the dog before the fatal moment more than the dog was attacking the cop:

This week the Ohio House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill ostensibly aimed at fighting "human trafficking" that makes it a crime to "solicit" a legal act: sex with someone who is 16 or 17 years old. The age of consent in Ohio is 16. Yet under H.B. 130, a 20-year-old who asks a 16-year-old to have sex with him, or a 21-year-old who does the same with a 17-year-old, thereby commits a fifth-degree felony, punishable by six to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine. He also has to register as a sex offender. But if the teenager broaches the subject, or if the sex proceeds without any explicit verbal reference to it, no crime has been committed. Here is the relevant provision:

No person shall solicit another, not the spouse of the offender, to engage in sexual conduct with the offender, when the offender is eighteen years of age or older and four or more years older than the other person, and the other person is sixteen or seventeen years of age, whether or not the offender knows the age of the other person.

Since there is no requirement that money change hands, this provision criminalizes ordinary sexual propositions if one person is 16 or 17 and the other is at least four years older when it is the older person who makes the suggestion, even though the sex itself remains legal. Having sex is fine, as long as you don't talk about it beforehand.

The elimination of any knowledge requirement, which is problematic even when the "solicitation" involves someone below the age of consent, is especially so when the person approached is 16 or 17. Since the difference between a 16- or 17-year-old and an 18-year-old may be difficult to discern, someone keen to avoid a felony charge would be wise to demand proof of age before saying anything about sex. And if the object of his attention happens to have a fake ID—as teenagers pretending to be older than they are sometimes do, especially when they go to bars or clubs—that is no defense. As Granville, Ohio, attorney Drew Mc Farland notes, the bill imposes  a "strict liability" sta ndard, meaning that "even an honest mistake is unforgiven." Mc Farland, who drew my attention to this bill, suggests one such scenario:

A mature 17-year-old is lawfully in a liquor-serving establishment and meets a 22-year-old who suggests they go back to his or her place for some sexual fun. Under this change in the law, the 22-year-old is guilty of a felony.

Legislators already define "human trafficking" broadly enough to include consensual sex (when it occurs in exchange for money). Now Ohio is poised to classify merely talking about consensual sex, even when no money is involved, as a species of sexual slavery.

The Ohio Senate is expected to take up the bill after returning from its summer break.

When George W. Bush and the GOP ran the government, Republicans were far more likely to support the kind of NSA surveillance that's just be exposed. Unsurprisingly, with Barack Obama in the White House, Democrats are now more fond of government snooping than they used to be.

"The virtually unyielding preference for partisanship over principle," writes Nick Gillespie, "explains why regardless of which party controls the government, the surveillance state continues to grow. It’s totally different, don’t you see, when my guy is running the show!"

Gillespie argues that if and when the surveillance state gets beaten back, it will be do not to partisan apparatchiks but to a small band of libertarians and leftists - the Rand Pauls and Bernie Sanders - in Congress who agree on little more beyond this issue.

View this article.

Spend enough time online, and you'll find someone who believes that because the National Security Agency exists solely to keep Americans safe, it would never do anything it absolutely didn't need to do in order to fulfill its mission. "Even if it did," argue defenders of government spying, "I have nothing to hide." 

If you believe that's really the case, recall that shortly before Sen. Obama was elected president, ABC News reported that military interceptors working for the NSA listened to troops' private conversations with loved ones back home, and would gather as a group to listen to especially salacious calls: 

[F]ormer Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

Read the whole thing here, via The Atlantic Wire. And remember, so long as there's a potential for abuse, abuse will happen. 

As Scott Shackford and Mike Riggs pointed out, President Obama returned, earlier today, to a favorite theme of his: insisting that Americans should trust the government. He did so even as that position becomes increasingly preposterous. While talking up his signature policy, the Affordable Care Act, which we'll just have to trust won't become the huge disaster it certainly looks to already be, the president was asked about revelations, this week, that the National Security Agency is scooping up information on Americans' telephoning habits and snooping on their Internet activity. But tradeoffs!, he said. You have to balance privacy and security. And we have top people on the job to make sure it's done right. You don't have to just trust us ... but trust us.

From President Obama's speech in San Jose:

That's not to suggest that you just say, trust me; we’re doing the right thing; we know who the bad guys are.  And the reason that's not how it works is because we’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight.  And if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

Just weeks ago, the president hit us with this same astonishment that anybody could doubt the government's essential goodness during a speech at Ohio State University:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works.  They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner.  You should reject these voices.  Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

We have never been a people who place all of our faith in government to solve our problems; we shouldn’t want to.  But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either.  Because we understand that this democracy is ours.  And as citizens, we understand that it’s not about what America can do for us; it’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government.  (Applause.)  And, Class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process.  (Applause.)  

The founders trusted us with this awesome authority.  We should trust ourselves with it, too. ...

This is a continuing theme with the nation's chief executive, even now that we've discovered that the U.S. Justice Department has been snooping on the Associated Press and spying on Fox News reporter, James Rosen, while implying that his uncovering of information was somehow criminal. He urges us to place our trust in government officials even though we've also recently learned that this administration, like several before it, has presided over an Internal Revenue Service that targets its political enemies for special treatment.

The cinematically creepy and intrusive NSA is just the cherry on top.

Somebody needs to tell the president that it's not that a lack of trust in government leads to "some problems," it's that a litany of problems involving the use and abuse of government's coercive power have eroded any basis for trust.

In response to a Guardian report about the National Security Agency's collection of data on millions of Verizon customers, Pres. Obama told reporters today, "Nobody is listening to your phone calls." In the same speech, Pres. Obama explained that "there are some trade-offs involved" in keeping America safe. "You can't have 100% security, and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience," Obama said.

How does that claim stack up against what Obama's said in the past--both as a president and a senator? We'll show you:

President Obama's inauguration speech in January 2009: 

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."  

Sen. Obama in August 2007: 

"[The Bush] administration puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our constitution and our freedom."

From Sen. Obama's office in Dec. 2007 regarding his support of a filibuster of FISA:

"Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill …"

Sen. Obama in Jan. 2008, after threatening to filibuster FISA, spoke out against "wiretaps without warrants." 

How things seem to have changed since Obama's time in the Senate. Check out Scott Shackford's analysis of the logical fallacies in Obama's recent speech here and Reason.com's coverage of the NSA scandal here.