Tag Archives: case

The Fourth Amendment Takes Yet Another Body Blow

Mother Jones

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This week the Supreme Court has handed down decisions on affirmative action and child porn that have gotten a lot of press. But the affirmative action decision was probably inevitable, and the child porn case is an oddball example of statutory interpretation that probably has no greater significance.

More important is Navarette vs. California, which has real potential to do some long-term damage. In this case, a 911 caller reported an erratic driver, who was then pulled over and eventually convicted of transporting four bags of marijuana. The police had no probable cause to stop the driver except for that one anonymous phone call, but the Court upheld the conviction anyway. Justice Scalia is typically apoplectic in his dissent, but nonetheless makes some good points:

It gets worse. Not only, it turns out, did the police have no good reason at first to believe that Lorenzo was driving drunk, they had very good reason at last to know that he was not. The Court concludes that the tip, plus confirmation of the truck’s location, produced reasonable suspicion that the truck not only had been but still was barreling dangerously and drunkenly down Highway 1. In fact, alas, it was not, and the officers knew it. They followed the truck for five minutes, presumably to see if it was being operated recklessly. And that was good police work. While the anonymous tip was not enough to support a stop for drunken driving under Terry v. Ohio, it was surely enough to counsel observation of the truck to see if it was driven by a drunken driver.

But the pesky little detail left out of the Court’s reasonable-suspicion equation is that, for the five minutes that the truck was being followed (five minutes is a long time), Lorenzo’s driving was irreproachable. Had the officers witnessed the petitioners violate a single traffic law, they would have had cause to stop the truck, and this case would not be before us. And not only was the driving irreproachable, but the State offers no evidence to suggest that the petitioners even did anything suspicious, such as suddenly slowing down, pulling off to the side of the road, or turning somewhere to see whether they were being followed. Consequently, the tip’s suggestion of ongoing drunken driving (if it could be deemed to suggest that) not only went uncorroborated; it was affirmatively undermined.

The problem here is obvious: the Court has basically said that an anonymous 911 call is sufficient all by itself to justify a police stop and subsequent search of a vehicle.

In this particular case, it’s likely that the 911 caller was entirely sincere. But that’s surely not always the case, and this decision gives police far greater discretion to stop pretty much anyone they like for any reason. You don’t even need to roll your front bumper a foot over the limit line in an intersection to give them a pretext.

If we’re lucky, this case will become a footnote, with the precise nature of its facts giving it little value as precedent. But if we’re not so lucky, it’s yet another step in the Supreme Court’s decades-long project to chip away at the Fourth Amendment. When an unknown caller is all it takes to trigger a search, the entire notion of “probable cause” is pretty much consigned to the ash heap of history.

UPDATE: A regular reader points out that my summary isn’t entirely accurate. Under Navarette, an anonymous tip is enough for police to stop a vehicle, but to search it they still need some suspicion of illegal activity. In this case they “smelled marijuana.”

That’s true, and I should have said so. The reason I didn’t is that I figure this was basically pretextual. There’s always a post hoc reason if the police decide they want to search your car. And even if you think the cops really did smell something, they never would have gotten there without the stop, and there was no reason for the stop in the first place. This strikes me as pretty direct line from anonymous tip to search, with only the thinnest pretense of probable cause.

I admit that my cynicism here isn’t legally relevant. But honestly, once you allow the stop, cops will find a reason the search the car. There’s simply nothing in their way any longer.

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The Fourth Amendment Takes Yet Another Body Blow

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In America, Spending Cuts Are Driven by the Rich

Mother Jones

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Over at the Monkey Cage, Larry Bartels presents the remarkable chart on the right. Its message is simple: In most affluent countries, there’s net support for government spending cuts, but it doesn’t depend much on income. Not only is the level of support modest, but it’s the same among rich and poor.

But not in America. Here, demand for spending cuts is driven almost entirely by the well-off:

What accounts for the remarkable enthusiasm for government budget-cutting among affluent Americans? Presumably not the sheer magnitude of redistribution in the United States, which is modest by world standards. And presumably not a traditional aversion to government in American political culture, since less affluent Americans are exposed to the same political culture as those who are more prosperous. A more likely suspect is the entanglement of class and race in America, which magnifies aversion to redistribution among many affluent white Americans.

….The U.S. tax system is also quite different from most affluent countries’ in its heavy reliance on progressive income taxes. The political implications of this difference are magnified by the remarkable salience of income taxes in Americans’ thinking about taxes and government….Income taxes seem to dominate public discussion of taxes and tax policy. For example, years of dramatic political confrontation culminated in a grudging agreement to shave a few percentage points off the Bush tax cuts for incomes over $400,000 per year; meanwhile, a major reduction in the payroll taxes paid by millions of ordinary working Americans expired with barely a whimper.

It’s no surprise that spending cuts are popular in other countries: most of them spend a lot of money, and they fund it with high tax rates on just about everyone. But that’s decidedly not the case in the United States. Our government spending is relatively low and so are our tax rates. But none of that matters. Rich Americans don’t like paying taxes, and as we know from multiple lines of research—in addition to plain old common sense—the opinions of the rich are what drive public policy in America. Add in longstanding grievances against providing benefits to people with darker skins, and you’ve got a big chunk of the middle class on your side too. This works great for the rich. For the rest of us, not so much.

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In America, Spending Cuts Are Driven by the Rich

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An Update From Our 1 Percent World: Southern California Housing Edition

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports that the Southern California housing market is once again getting frothy:

But a deeper look at the market reveals a recovery divided between the rich and everyone else.

The market for high-dollar homes is hopping, with sales on the rise and buyers launching bidding wars. But sales of low- to medium-priced homes have plummeted during the same period — with many potential buyers priced out….Those declines came even as sales of high-end homes increased. Sales of homes costing $800,000 or more grew 12%, while sales of homes costing less than $500,000 fell at twice that rate.

….”We’re getting multiple offers on just about everything,” said Barry Sulpor, an agent with Shorewood Realtors in Manhattan Beach, where he said there is a new wave of tear-downs and new construction in prime beachfront locations. “The market is really on fire.”

I think partly this is a bit of a statistical artifact: a lot of investors were buying cheap houses a year ago, figuring they could rent them out and make a killing. That didn’t work out so well, and now a lot of those houses are back on the market. Long story short, some of the increase in low-end housing prices over the past year or two has been a bit of an investor-fueled mirage, and now reality is catching up to that.

Still, the overall picture is clear: At the lower end of the market, ordinary people have been increasingly locked out for a while, and that’s still the case. Nor is it any surprise. After all, median wages have stagnated during the entire period that we so laughingly refer to as a “recovery.” As always in our brave new 1 percent era, things are going pretty well for the rich. For the not-so-rich, not so well.

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An Update From Our 1 Percent World: Southern California Housing Edition

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How to Lose Money and Come Out OK Anyway

Mother Jones

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TIAA-CREF is buying Nuveen Investments for $6.25 billion from Madison Dearborn, a private equity shop that bought Nuveen in 2007. Nuveen has performed poorly since then, but insiders say that the TIAA-CREF deal ensures that the Madison Dearborn will at least break even on its investment. Felix Salmon is gobsmacked after running through the numbers:

So here’s my back-of-the-envelope math: you buy a company for $2.7 billion in cash, plus debt which you refinance a few times. While you’re running the company, it loses a total of $2.4 billion. And then you sell the company for $1.75 billion in cash. Total going out the door: $5.1 billion. Total coming in, at exit: $1.75 billion. Net loss: some $3.35 billion, give or take.

All of which raises some big questions about the WSJ’s claim that Madison Dearborn “will have at least broken even on its Nuveen investment”. If that claim is even close to being true, then at the very least we can’t take Nuveen’s public filings at face value at all….This is worth remembering, when private-equity types (think Mitt Romney) claim that their interests are aligned with the interests of the companies they buy. That certainly doesn’t seem to have been the case here. Nuveen is being sold with about $1.5 billion more debt than it started with, and with cumulative losses under Madison Dearborn’s ownership of some $2.4 billion. That’s not a great legacy for TIAA-CREF to inherit. If Madison Dearborn really is breaking even on this deal, that only goes to show the enormous disconnect between the economics of private equity companies — the wealthy rentiers of society — versus the economics of the real-world companies they buy and sell.

Of course, one possibility is that Madison Dearborn is just putting a brave face on things and reporters are taking it at face value. More likely, though, there are tax games of some kind that allowed Madison Dearborn to strip a ton of value out of Nuveen over the past seven years. I suppose they’re also benefiting from low interest rates, which means that Nuveen’s refinanced debt is less onerous now than it was in 2007.

In any case Salmon’s point is well taken. If you can break even after running a company as disastrously as Madison Dearborn has, there’s something pretty badly rotten about the entire world of high finance. But then, you knew that already, didn’t you?

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How to Lose Money and Come Out OK Anyway

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Apple Has Patented Clicking on Phone Number to Dial a Phone? Seriously?

Mother Jones

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The New York Times tells us today that Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung is really just a proxy for its war against Google’s Android operating system. That’s not news. But this just makes me want to pound my head against a wall:

In the case set to open this week, Apple’s legal complaint aims at some of the features that Google, not Samsung, put in Android, like the ability to tap on a phone number inside a text message to dial the number. And although Google is not a defendant in this case, some of its executives are expected to testify as witnesses.

I know we all mock some of the things that seem to be patentable these days. I sure do. And who knows? Maybe those things really aren’t quite as obvious as we all think they are. But tapping a phone number on a phone in order to dial it? There is no plausible universe in which several thousand designers wouldn’t think of doing that. Somebody needs to put a leash on Apple before the venomous ghost of Steve Jobs drags them into a rabbit hole of techno-legal vengeance from which they never recover. Enough.

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Apple Has Patented Clicking on Phone Number to Dial a Phone? Seriously?

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The Tech Revolution Might Kill Economic Growth But Make Us All Happier Anyway

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias makes a point worth sharing about technology and economic growth:

It seems entirely conceivable to me that future technological progress simply won’t lead to that much economic growth. If we become much more efficient at building houses, that will increase GDP, because the output of the housing sector is selling housing. But the output of the health care sector is selling health care services, not curing illnesses, and sick people already buy a lot of health care services. People with cancer tend to buy cancer treatments. If those treatments become more effective at curing cancer, that’d be great for patients and their families but it’s not obvious that it would raise “productivity” in the economic sense.

Yglesias provides a couple of example of this ambiguity. The printing press didn’t do much for GDP growth, because books just aren’t a big segment of the economy and never have been. But that doesn’t mean the printing press wasn’t a revolutionary invention. Likewise, if someone invented a pill that cured cancer, that might actually reduce GDP by eliminating all the money we spend on cancer care. But it would still be a huge contribution to human welfare.

This is a point that plenty of economists have made, but it’s worth repeating. Facebook is a big deal, but it hasn’t added an awful lot to measured GDP. In terms of the market economy, it employs a few thousand people, owns some buildings, and operates some large server farms. That’s not a huge contribution. On the flip side, if 100 million people spend more time on Facebook and less time going to the movies or reading books, it could actually be a net GDP loser. Ditto for video games, which might reduce economic output if the time and energy spent buying games and game consoles is less than what people used to spend all those hours on.

This isn’t a bulletproof case. It’s just meant to illustrate a point. If, in the future, we spend a lot more time on activities that are relatively cheap to produce—social networking, video games, virtual reality, etc.—we could end up in a world where people are as happy as they are now (or happier) with far less in the way of the traditional production of market goods. I doubt that this dynamic has had much effect on growth yet, but it’s quite possible it will in the future. Living in the Matrix is pretty cheap, after all.

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The Tech Revolution Might Kill Economic Growth But Make Us All Happier Anyway

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Rick Santorum is Still the Same Creepy Guy He Was in 2012

Mother Jones

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A quick note on the Republican presidential field. In the course of making the case for Paul Ryan as the front runner a few days ago, I failed to mention Rick Santorum as a possible challenger. That was a mistake. He’s going to run, and he belongs on the list.

That said, come on. Is anyone taking him seriously? Yes, he won a few primaries in 2012, but only as the last man standing in the Anyone But Romney marathon. That doesn’t demonstrate an ability to win, it just demonstrates an unusual level of pigheadedness. Santorum was willing to stay in the race for months even though he never polled more than a few percent and was obviously widely disliked. Only when everyone else was gone did conservative voters reluctantly turn to him as their final, forlorn hope of stopping the Romney juggernaut.

So sure, Santorum is going to run. He might do better this time around because his name recognition is higher. But he’s still the same creepy dude he was last time and he still has the charisma of a sea slug. Even the Christian Right obviously finds him a little too self-righteous and a little too shudder inducing. I wouldn’t put him even in the top five of possible 2016 contenders.

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Rick Santorum is Still the Same Creepy Guy He Was in 2012

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Opposing View: Yes, We Should Keep Adding "Gate" to Every Flap

Mother Jones

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USA Today’s media columnist, Rem Rieder, is tired of the rest of us tacking gate onto the end of every conceivable scandal. Here’s his argument:

It’s not cute. It’s not cool. It’s not clever.

I will give it knee-jerk. And lazy. And oh, so predictable.

But it’s not supposed to be cute, cool, or clever. It’s supposed to be knee-jerk, lazy, and predictable—or, as the rest of us refer to this quality, instantly recognizable. Tomato, tomahto, my friend.

Perhaps recognizing the tenuousness of his case, Rieder adds this:

But there is a more serious reason to show gate to the gate. By awarding the suffix to everything from serious government misconduct to the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII (surely you remember Nipplegate), you create a false equivalency that ends up trivializing everything.

That certainly was the take of Sam Dash, who served as chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee all those years ago. “When people hear this proliferation of ‘gates,’ they feel the press is telling them this is the same as Watergate, and whatever Watergate has stood for has lost its meaning,” Dash told Suzan Revah of American Journalism Review.

I dunno. We’ve been slapping gate on the end of things for 40 years now, and Richard Nixon’s notoriety remains safe. So I don’t really think this argument holds water. Besides, gate actually has a very specific meaning. Watergate was the first big example of scandal as public spectacle during the media age, and because of this gate is generally reserved for spectacles large and small. But it’s not used for things that go beyond the realm of political spectacle. There’s no such thing as Benghazi-gate because that was a tragedy in which people died. Likewise, there’s no Surveillance-gate or Waco-gate. Its use is actually surprisingly specialized.

Still, what if we did all get tired of gate? What would we replace it with? It would be even more boring to just call all these things scandals, and that wouldn’t clearly identify them anyway. But maybe we could poach some other scandal-related suffix? What options do we have? Teapot Dome. Crédit Mobilier. The Plame Affair. Iran-Contra. The XYZ Affair. The Keating Five. Chappaquiddick. The vicuna coat. Let’s try these out to see how they sound as a replacement for Bridgegate:

Bridgedome
Bridgemobilier
Bridgeplame
Bridgecontra
Bridgexyz
Bridgekeating
Bridgechappaquiddick
Bridgevicuna.

It’s hopeless. Teapot Dome is the only one that works—though I’ll confess that Bridgexyz has certain possibilities depending on how you pronounce it. So that’s that. We either keep using gate or else switch to dome. I think we’re better off sticking with gate.

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Opposing View: Yes, We Should Keep Adding "Gate" to Every Flap

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QUIZ: Match the Political Scandal to the Apology

Mother Jones

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return;

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slide.addClass(‘revealed_answer’);
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return quiz.init(quiz_data, options);
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options = options ;
options.container = this.attr(‘id’);
this.quiz = $.quiz(quiz_data, options);
return this;
};
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On Wednesday, at the end of a day dominated by reports that his aides had gleefully shut down a bridge as payback to a political rival, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took a moment to apologize. Sort of. “What I’ve seen today for the first time is unacceptable,” Christie said in a statement. “I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was I misled by a member of my staff, but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge.” The political apology (or non-apology, as the case may be), is an art form. But as with other art forms, its intricacies are often lost on the general public.

Below are excerpts from some of the more infamous apologies made by American politicians and Rob Ford. Can you match the apology to the offender?

var quiz = jQuery(‘#quiz_container’).quiz(‘0AuHOPshyxQGGdG9DVDBwdERFLVVNYVpGX1RzQVNCWkE’); //your published spreadsheet key or URL goes here

This article is from:  

QUIZ: Match the Political Scandal to the Apology

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Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

Mother Jones

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David Brooks smoked marijuana in his youth, but then got bored with it and stopped. He says it never seemed like a very uplifting pastime, and this makes him nervous about about legalization:

I don’t have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.

We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.

….I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

Brooks’ column is getting a lot of mockery in my Twitter feed, but for once I guess I can’t really join in. It’s not that I agree with Brooks—and I’ll concede that his comparison of pot smoking with “higher pleasures” is kind of silly. But for the most part, all his column does is express a fairly modest sense of unease about the fact that legalization will almost certainly increase pot smoking a fair amount. There’s really nothing wrong with being a little nervous about that. These new laws will increase marijuana use.

But the big thing Brooks misses is the question of whether this will increase overall intoxication. It might. Alternatively, marijuana might largely displace alcohol use, producing little or no net increase in intoxication but producing a safer society overall since pot tends to be less damaging than alcohol. In the lingo, this is a question of whether marijuana and alcohol are economic substitutes or economic complements, and the research on this point is inconclusive. One of the great benefits of legalization in Washington and Colorado is that it will finally start to give us some decent data on this. For various reasons, it won’t settle the question definitively, but two or three years from now we’ll certainly have a much better idea than we do today about the net effect of marijuana legalization.

And if it turns out that legalizing pot reduces alcohol use? Then Brooks should be happy. There will still be plenty of idiots getting drunk and stoned, but there won’t be any more than there are now. We’ll have an increase in personal freedom; a reduction in drug war costs; and no significant change in the number of people pursuing higher pleasures. It’s well worth finding out if this will be the case.

See the article here – 

Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?