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Tag: Reason Roundup

  • Playing chicken

    Playing chicken

    Gifts for Putin? “Republicans in Congress are willing to give Putin the greatest gift he could hope for,” said President Joe Biden this week, in response to fiscal conservatives holding up a spending package that would dole out $110 billion in funding for Ukraine.

    Republicans are saying that addressing the situation at the southern border is a necessary prerequisite, something that Biden must prioritize if he wants Ukraine aid approved. Biden said his political opponents, in opposing that massive chunk of government spending, “are playing chicken with our national security” but that he is also interested in “mak[ing] significant compromises on the border,” if that’s what is deemed necessary to get Ukraine money approved.

    “Biden now faces a difficult choice about how much to throw himself into talks on an issue that for decades has defied efforts to reach bipartisan compromise,” reports The New York Times. “And he will have to decide how far to go in giving in to conservative demands that he substantially choke off the number of migrants admitted to the United States while their asylum claims are considered.”

    It’s a shame there are so few legitimately principled fiscal conservatives in Congress; holding up one form of spending to get another type greenlit is a time-honored tradition, but not one that truly dials back government spending.

    Congressional testimony fallout: After the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all testified in front of Congress earlier this week on the issue of antisemitism on campus, the board of Penn’s business school, Wharton, is calling on President Liz Magill to resign.

    It’s crazy that the free speech hypocrisy on elite campuses has gone on for this long and gotten this bad. High-up university donors and governing bodies should have probably pushed for cleaning house long ago, and more forcefully communicated opposition to the imposition of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies, campus speaker shout downs, and the like.

    Meanwhile, the mainstream media treatment of the issue has changed quite a bit over the last few days.

    The distinction made between conduct and speech by all three presidents remains largely correct. University administrators should push for and enforce policies that are broadly speech-permissive. It’s just that there’s a hollowness to this being their stance now after years of skirting this commitment.

    “What does it mean to make Jewish students feel safe on campus? One way would be to crack down on anti-Israel rhetoric that might make many Jews feel threatened. That would be consistent with the methods universities have sometimes employed to protect other minority groups,” writes Intelligencer‘s Jonathan Chait. “But it would also be deeply illiberal.”

    “When elite university presidents claim that even hateful speech should enjoy ironclad protection on college campuses, they are absolutely correct,” writes Reason‘s Robby Soave. “But if they are asserting that speech characterized as hateful currently enjoys ironclad protection on their campuses, they are blind.”

    Scenes from New York: Enjoyed chatting with Matt Taibbi on camera last night (possible Reason video forthcoming) at his provocatively-titled event “Hey, Haters: Come to Argue about Free Speech and Censorship in Park Slope.” People were mostly sensible Taibbi superfans concerned by the government jawboning of social media companies.

    Matt Taibbi
    (Liz Wolfe)

    QUICK HITS

    • Reason‘s Matt Welch and I will be on The Megyn Kelly Show today at noon. Tune in!
    • You seriously cannot make this up:
    • “Special counsel David Weiss leveled a nine-count indictment against Hunter Biden late Thursday, accusing President Joe Biden’s son of failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes from 2016 to 2020,” per ABC News.
    • The unemployment rate has reportedly gone up, from 3.9 percent to 4. Bloomberg has more on the early signs of a recession.
    • South Africa is experimenting with universal healthcare, which is proving controversial.
    • “Should Biden really run again?” asks The New York Times, citing dropping approval ratings and gesturing toward his senility (while characteristically spending much more time explicitly dinging Trump for his age). I think I can help the Times with this stumper: No, he should not. Down with the gerontocracy!
    • New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ poll numbers are dropping.
    • Good news:
    • The state of California—which is hemorrhaging its population—is staring down a $68 billion budget deficit next year.
    • Is Chinese garlic…a national security threat?

    Liz Wolfe

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  • Tunnel found

    Tunnel found

    Under the hospital: Select journalists were allowed into the Al Shifa Hospital complex yesterday by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), where they were shown what is purportedly evidence of Hamas operations at and underneath the hospital.

    On hospital grounds, there was a concrete and stone shaft that reportedly goes deep underground, with stairs and electrical wires. The IDF believes this is evidence of what they’ve long known—that Hamas operates out of this hospital, using civilians as human shields, and that tunnels beneath it are critical to the terrorist group’s plots. IDF troops have not descended into the tunnel, yet, because of fear of booby traps, but have investigated via drones to try to suss out what lies deep beneath the surface.

    Col. Elad Tsury, the commander of Israel’s Seventh Brigade, “acknowledged the pressure on Israel to show evidence of Hamas activity at the hospital,” according to the New York Times, “but said it might be days before troops descended the shaft.”

    Tsury also said that “soldiers were methodically searching the complex and had discovered weapons, explosives and computers, as well as the body of an Israeli hostage in a nearby building.” The body of another hostage was found earlier today on the hospital grounds.

    Elsewhere in Gaza: Palestinian outlets report that an Israeli strike hit the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, killing Gazans trying to get to safety. “U.N. aid deliveries to Gaza were suspended again on Friday due to shortages of fuel and a communications shutdown,” reports Reuters.

    Israel and Hamas appear to be getting close to a hostage deal, brokered by Egypt, the U.S., and Qatar, in which the terrorist group would release 50 hostages—all women and children—and Israel would release the same number of Palestinians—all women and children—who are currently being held in prisons.

    McCarthy’s clone? New House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) worked with Democrats to pass a spending bill to avoid shutting down the federal government as yet another deadline approached. In order to do so, he refused to champion the massive spending cuts that the fiscally-conservative flank of the House has long been advocating—a move that makes him quite similar to his predecessor, possibly earning similar ire from colleagues within his party.

    Scenes from New York: “If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.” But I am not sure many people, even New York Times readers and subscribers, were aware before today that there even was a poetry editor.

    As an aside: It is not that hard to devote the tiniest bit of word count to the fact that Israeli civilians were brutally slaughtered on October 7. That seems worth mourning, too, and it would be humane to mention the terrible brutality that set off this most recent round of fighting.

    QUICK HITS

    • “One-third of U.S. newspapers as of 2005 will be gone by 2024,” reports Axios. No need to mourn the death of local news (or worse: support government funding in an attempt to reinvigorate it). Competition sometimes kills, but cool new things always rise from the ashes.
    • I’m sure this will work:
    • Must we really give standing ovations to Xi?
    • The Backpage trial has concluded; a jury has found Michael Lacey guilty of money laundering charges but not facilitating prostitution. Reason will have more on this, but there’s some background on the case here, here, and here (as well as the obituary Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote for Backpage founder James Larkin, who took his own life earlier this year).
    • A look inside the “town created by Airbnb.”
    • On TikTok, some youths are making videos talking about how misunderstood Osama bin Laden was, and how actually he made some great points. Now, of course, there’s lots of freaked-out backlash to these videos. Ben Dreyfuss gets the level of concern about right:
    • Mary Katharine Ham eviscerates teachers union head honcho Randi Weingarten.
    • Nobody will ever be as cool as the Terminator: “Speaking over FaceTime, a cigar hung from his mouth as his pet pig, Schnelly, wandered by his feet,” writes Politico‘s Christopher Cadelago.
    • A rare bit of good housing-policy news:

     

    Liz Wolfe

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  • Xi Jinping’s in the house

    Xi Jinping’s in the house

    Xi comes to America: This week, at an estate outside of San Francisco, President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. They talked about stemming fentanyl production, keeping lines of communication open between the two countries’ militaries, and Taiwan’s future, among other things. But little was agreed to.

    “There was a time when summits with Chinese leaders resulted in agreements on containing North Korea and keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, on climate goals and economic coordination to avoid financial crises and joint efforts in counterterrorism. Those days are over,” wrote Katie Rogers and David E. Sanger for The New York Times. Now, “there is little to no prospect of changed behavior.”

    Afterward, Biden called Xi a dictator again, a move that has earned the Chinese Communist Party leader’s chagrin in the past. “He’s a dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country that is a communist country,” said Biden.

    The whole thing seemed pretty photo-oppy and of limited use, though the two leaders “agreed to steps that could help curb the flow of Chinese chemicals used in the U.S. production of fentanyl,” per Politico.

    China-watchers criticized the talks for ignoring the giant nuclear elephant in the room. “When it comes to the U.S. nuclear posture in East Asia—deploying and expanding America’s nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to Chinese hostilities—Biden is not only following Trump’s lead but in some ways taking an even more aggressive stance than his predecessor did,” wrote Michael Hirsh for Politico. “Many experts fear Washington and Beijing are headed into a tit-for-tat spiral of nuclear confrontation that could come to resemble the brinkmanship of the Cold War.”

    And yet, the San Francisco talks had pretty much nothing on that, as far as we know. There was some talk of reining in the use of artificial intelligence in nuke deployment, but little beyond that; it was essentially one big “we’ll circle back on that later” meeting.

    Potemkin San Francisco: Meanwhile, the long-failing city of San Francisco was seemingly cleaned up overnight—or at least parts of it were—seemingly to prepare for Xi’s arrival.

    This became heavily memed:

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom claimed that, well actually, this cleanup process had long been underway, but also that of course the city would clean up in advance of world leaders coming over for dinner. “Obviously, any time you put on an event, by definition…you know, you have people over to your house, you’re going to clean up the house,” said Newsom. “You’re going to make sure the kids make their beds, you know. Take the socks, you know, put them in the drawer, in the hamper.”

    What Newsom misses is that taxpayers deserve for their dollars to be put to good use all the time, not just when foreign leaders visit.

    Besides, it’s also worth noting that “the city hardly ‘fixed’ its second homelessness problem. It just shifted encampments and vagrant behavior away from the downtown,” wrote Reason‘s Christian Britschgi. There’s a difference between legitimately solving a problem and simply hiding it out of sight; Newsom seems to have mostly chosen the latter.

    Don’t all MRI rooms house AK-47s? Few details have been released about the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raid of Al Shifa hospital in Gaza, which is believed to be above a Hamas command center. “In a video taken at the hospital, a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, displayed caches of guns, ammunition, protective vests and Hamas military uniforms, some of which, he said, had been hidden behind M.R.I. machines and others in nearby storage units,” reported The New York Times.

    Indeed, IDF video provided to the press shows grab bags with AK-47s, ammo, and grenades hidden behind an MRI machine at Al Shifa, per Conricus. But many observers have said that Israeli claims that Al Shifa was housing large Hamas operations have not materialized. “Really what we haven’t seen at this point is anything like the claims from the Israeli military that this is used as a sort of sophisticated command and control center by Hamas,” reported BBC correspondent Yolande Knell.

    It’s a little too early to tell. More will likely emerge in the coming days.

    Scenes from New York: Earlier this week, hundreds of kids and their parents marched to Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer’s house demanding that he take action to prevent Israel from continuing to attack Gaza. I am not a huge fan of kid political activism, generally speaking, especially varieties that seem to emanate from parental preference and not the interest of the child, though this is perhaps something even worse: Ever-younger kids becoming obnoxious, shouty activists. (They are all well within their rights to do so, of course.)

    QUICK HITS

    • The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is allowing SpaceX to proceed with its second test launch for the Starship rocket after the first exploded. (More on the FAA’s role in space exploration here.)
    • Come for the Mike Johnson/monkeypox headline, stay for the absolutely bonkers nugget that the World Health Organization changed the virus’s name to “mpox” since “the term monkeypox could be seen as stigmatizing and racist,” reported Politico.
    • I too want to blame my pesky marijuana habit on long COVID.
    • Not sure Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore knows very much about Argentine politics:
    • Please someone help Jacobin recognize basic facts:
    • Watch this cool new documentary from Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller on how bitcoin mining powers a bathhouse in Brooklyn.
    • This thread, from Russ Roberts, makes a lot of sense:

    Liz Wolfe

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  • Abortion’s big night

    Abortion’s big night

    Voters show up for abortion rights: Yesterday, voters across the country made clear that they oppose Republican-backed abortion restrictions. Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s Democratic incumbent, won his reelection bid for governor after repeatedly hammering his opponent’s opposition to abortion. In Ohio, both weed and abortion won when put to the people via ballot measures—the latter by 12 points. In Virginia, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won a state Supreme Court seat. (Both states saw a lot of abortion-related campaigning.)

    “Abortion is the No. 1 issue in the 2024 campaign,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, who publicly supported the abortion efforts in Ohio and Virginia, said Tuesday. In Ohio, Issue 1—which amends the state constitution to protect abortion up until the point of fetal viability, or around weeks 22-24—won, which means that Republicans will be thwarted in their attempts to ban abortion at six weeks of pregnancy. (Former Roundup writer/Ohioan Elizabeth Nolan Brown covered some of the Issue 1 controversy here.)

    Many libertarians will find these abortion wins encouraging. I do not. 

    Although some of the language gestures toward freedom, much of it misrepresents the objections of pro-lifers. “Ohioans know that no matter how you feel about abortion personally, government should not have the power to make these personal medical decisions for the people you love,” said one Issue 1 organizer. But how you feel about abortion frequently dictates whether you believe government intervention to be warranted, since one of the few defensible functions of government is protecting innocent beings from being aggressed against. The language of bodily autonomy—which we saw plenty of in the lead-up to these elections—focuses only on the rights of the mother, but never on the rights of the baby. Surely people on both sides can admit that the issue is so fraught because these rights come into conflict, with no easy resolution.

    Still, it’s undeniable that this is a galvanizing political issue and that Republicans haven’t known how to message their beliefs—and allay people’s fears about the consequences that stem from abortion bans—post-Dobbs. Generally speaking, the country is profoundly divided on abortion, with 61 percent believing it ought to be legal in all or most cases, and 37 percent believing it ought to be illegal in all or most cases. People tend to be broadly supportive of allowing abortion in the first trimester, but broadly opposed to permitting it in the second and third trimesters.

    But “in states where abortion is prohibited, the share of people who say access to abortion should be easier has increased since August 2019,” reported Pew in April. “About a third of adults (34%) say it should be easier for someone in the area where they live to obtain an abortion, an 8-point increase since 2019.” Almost 20 percent of those surveyed, per Pew, say their views on abortion have changed in the last year or so since the Dobbs decision was handed down by the Supreme Court.

    Interestingly, in Ohio, “the victory for Yes on Issue 1 was not driven by remarkable Democratic turnout—but by a significant share of voters in Republican-leaning counties casting their ballots for abortion rights,” per a Politico analysis of the results.

    Beyond abortion: Ohio just became the 24th U.S. state to legalize recreational weed (more from Reason‘s Jacob Sullum). Colorado’s TABOR—which requires excess property tax revenue to be returned to the people—changes were defeated (more from Reason‘s Eric Boehm). And in Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin—who had tried to get a really solid legislative majority for his party—did not succeed. More here.

    RFK Jr.’s second wind: The, uh, antiestablishment candidate made waves earlier in the presidential campaign season, then faded for a while, but he’s back again—this time, pissing his former pals off with his recent comments on free speech while also polling surprisingly well. A New York Times/Siena College poll found significant support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when up against Donald Trump and Joe Biden in battleground states and with younger voters:

    “When asked about the likeliest 2024 matchup, Mr. Biden versus Mr. Trump, only 2 percent of those polled said they would support another candidate,” reports The New York Times. “But when Mr. Kennedy’s name was included as an option, nearly a quarter said they would choose him.”

    “The findings suggest that Mr. Kennedy is less a fixed political figure in the minds of voters than he is a vessel to register unhappiness about the choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.”

    Though I am not very fond of RFK Jr. (as previously established, to many people’s chagrin), I am intrigued by people’s possibly growing comfort with rejecting the awful front-runners put forth by the two major parties. I’m not optimistic that such polling data will convert to Election Day results, though.

    Scenes from New York:

    The fact that it mentions Brooklyn is bizarre (unless the sentiment is just plain old antisemitism). Lefty gentrification discourse—the idea that any neighborhood could be “owned” by any particular ethnic group, or that one has a claim to a place simply by nature of having lived there the longest—has never made sense because it feels reminiscent of far-right nativism. It also ignores that little thing we call property rights, in which you can buy a home or a tract of land and then decide what you do with it and who you allow to live on it, random people’s feelings aside.

    QUICK HITS

    • Local reporter and solid tax-hater Lily Wu, who seems libertarian-ish, was just elected mayor of Wichita, Kansas.
    • No! You can’t access LaGuardia by subway, minus 10 points for city planners.
    • More on whether the Hamas-controlled health ministry is reliable at reporting death tolls: “There is even close consistency for MoH and UN totals for the 2008, 2014 and 2021 Gaza Wars,” reports Action on Armed Violence. “In short, the MoH figures for the total numbers of Gazan fatalities in previous Israel-Hamas confrontations have proven reliable.”
    • A third of the buildings in the northern part of Gaza, where Israeli troops now have a stronghold, have reportedly been either destroyed or significantly damaged.
    • The better thing would be for her to get perma-booted by voters, but this will have to do for now:
    • Don’t forget to stock up on booze—there’s a GOP debate tonight, at 8 p.m. Eastern.
    • It’s the Erewhon cult content you’ve been waiting for.
    • The only thing more hilarious than the fact that USA Today hired a full-time Taylor Swift reporter is that it’s a dude, so now people are big mad.
    • Yep:

    Liz Wolfe

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  • Trump’s stooges flip

    Trump’s stooges flip

    Cooperation time: In August, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought racketeering charges against former President Donald Trump and 18 of his associates under Georgia’s statute, on charges relating to their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Over the last few days, three guilty pleas have followed: Sidney Powell to misdemeanor charges and Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis to felony charges. Now, Ellis, Chesebro, and Powell will cooperate with prosecutors.

    “Proof of criminal intent is indispensable to the criminal cases against Trump, both in Georgia and in the federal election case,” writes David French for The New York Times. “While the specific intent varies depending on the charge, each key claim requires proof of conscious wrongdoing—such as an intent to lie or the ‘intent to have false votes cast.’” 

    The lawyers flipping “may grant us greater visibility into Trump’s state of mind during the effort to overturn the election,” adds French. “The crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege prevents a criminal defendant from shielding his communications with his lawyers when those communications were in furtherance of a criminal scheme.” 

    Some, like Andrew McCarthy writing for National Review, argue that “Willis wildly overcharged the election-interference case and is now picking off some defendants on minor charges.”

    The upshot from French:

    “As a general rule, when evaluating complex litigation, it is best not to think in terms of legal breakthroughs (though breakthroughs can certainly occur) but rather in terms of legal trench warfare. Think of seizing ground from your opponent yard by yard rather than mile by mile, and the question at each stage isn’t so much who won and who lost but rather who advanced and who retreated. Willis has advanced, but it’s too soon to tell how far.”

    Speaker update: Rep. Mike Johnson (R–La.) was chosen last night to be the new nominee for speaker of the House. This is after Minnesota’s Tom Emmer dropped out, having spent much of yesterday securing votes.

    Johnson, who is serving his fourth term in the House, was named to Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team and “played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results,” reports The New York Times. He’s a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and is broadly well-liked by colleagues.

    The House will probably vote on Johnson today; 217 votes must be secured to become speaker.

    Make no mistake: “The United States does not seek conflict with Iran,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the United Nations Security Council yesterday. “But if Iran or its proxies attack US personnel anywhere, make no mistake: We will defend our people, we will defend our security, swiftly and decisively.”

    “To all the members of this council: If you, like the United States, want to prevent this conflict from spreading, tell Iran, tell its proxies—in public, in private, through every means—do not open another front against Israel in this conflict,” Blinken continued.

    Blinken is referring to the possibility of strikes escalating between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah on the much-watched northern front. Many observers fear that a ground invasion of Gaza with the intent of wiping out Hamas could trigger entry into the conflict from Hezbollah, seeing a weakened Israel and pushing them to fight on two fronts at once. 

    Officials also report that strikes from other Iran-backed groups on U.S. targets have ramped up in recent days; back-channel talks with Iran have been ongoing, but Blinken’s admonition yesterday was significant due to its public, urgent nature.

    Scenes from New York:

    Regulating skyline views would “guarantee a collective experience, a sense of shared identity and civic meaning, which can bind New Yorkers across generations and centuries,” Jorge Otero-Pailos, the director of Columbia’s historic preservation program, tells The New York Times. 

    The best part is that this is mentioned immediately after a few paragraphs on how unaffordable the city has become. If only we could grasp the connection between the two!

    QUICK HITS

    • Due to her posts on Hamas, the Israeli Ministry of Education will be removing any references to Greta Thunberg in school curricula. Forgive me, but I don’t think Greta Thunberg should ever have been taught in Israeli schools.
    • No truer words:
    • “Mr. Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, is the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president,” reads a New York Times subheading. “He has focused on providing comfort to people in pain after the Hamas attack.” Doesn’t this read like a press release?
    • Bad move by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis:
    • Comparing the tech industries in the U.S. and the E.U. (Good observations here, here, and here. Tough but fair, from Paul Graham. Is European (lack of) venture capital also part of the equation? Genuinely asking.)
    • Color me skeptical that Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, misheard that recent question on antisemitism.
    • In Spain, the workweek will drop from 40 hours to 37.5, at least if acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Labor Minister Yolanda Diaz (“a card-carrying Communist,” per Bloomberg) get their deal passed. “The minimum wage has risen by about 47% since Sanchez first formed a government in 2018.” Amusingly, a 2019 report from BBVA Research notes that “productivity growth has been one of the Spanish economy’s chronic weaknesses.” What a stumper!
    • “Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?” Check out economist Tyler Cowen’s generative book. “This book is not just the text, it’s the text plus what you use AI to do with it,” writes Cowen.

    Liz Wolfe

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