Year: 2013

by Brendan James

Harry Levine explains the incentives in law enforcement that produce so many marijuana arrests:

Police work can be dangerous. Ordinary patrol and narcotics police like the marijuana arrests because they are relatively safe and easy. If an officer stops and searches 10 or 15 young people, one or two of them will likely have a bit of marijuana. All police have arrest quotas and often they can earn much-desired overtime pay by making a marijuana arrest toward the end of a shift. In New York City, arresting people for petty offenses for overtime pay is called “collars for dollars.” Every cop in the city knows that expression. From the officers’ point of view, people possessing marijuana are highly desirable arrestees. As one veteran lieutenant said, people whose only crime is marijuana possession are “clean,” meaning physically clean. Unlike junkies or winos, people arrested for marijuana don’t have HIV, hepatitis, or even body lice. They are unlikely to throw up on the officer or in the police car or van. Frequently they are on the way to a party or a date, and if they have smoked a little, they may be relaxed and amiable. Marijuana arrests are a quality of life issue – for the police.

By the by, here in NYC under Mayor Bloomberg, the police round up more pot smokers every year than the total number of arrests under Koch and Dinkins combined.

by Chris Bodenner

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/63292312 w=580&h=326]

The article about missing WMDs that Andrew refers to, “So Where Are They?”, is here. A key passage:

The third explanation is that our intelligence was radically wrong – or politically manipulated for effect. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that U.S. and British intelligence got things wrong, although in many cases, such as North Korea or India, they have erred in the direction of complacency. Or it could be that the range of possibilities discovered by intelligence was presented by the politicians in the worst possible light so as to win public support. I’ve no doubt that was partly the case. That’s what politicians do. They make a case based on evidence. Others were free to make alternative cases, and they did. Currently, we simply don’t know what happened either in intelligence gathering or the political use of the data. But we should. After a decent period of time to gather all the possible evidence, there should indeed be a thorough inquiry into whether and how the case for Saddam’s imminent WMD threat was made.

But in some ways, these matters, while important, still don’t get to the heart of the matter. The fundamental case for getting rid of Saddam was not dependent on the existence of a certain amount of some chemical or other.

It was based on a political and military judgement. Once the threat from Islamist terror was self-evident, it would have been irresponsible for any political leader to ignore the possibility of a future attack with WMDs. It was and is the obvious next step for an operation like al Qaeda. Further, the war against terror, from the beginning, was always directed not simply at terrorist groups, but at the states that aided and abetted them. The key point is that Saddam’s Iraq was a clear and present danger in that context. What mattered was not whether at any particular moment Saddam had a certain specifiable quantity of botulinum toxin. What mattered was his capacity to produce such things, his ability to conceal them, and his links to terrorists who could deploy them. No one can doubt that he had had them at one point, was capable of producing them, and was linked to groups who would be only too happy to use them. That was and is the case for getting rid of him. It’s as powerful now as it was in January.

by Patrick Appel

Ellen announced Finding Nemo sequel Finding Dory on her show a couple days ago:

Christopher Orr is dispirited by the rash of Pixar sequels. He suspects Finding Dory was green-lighted because Nemo was “the third-highest grossing animated film—and the best-selling DVD overall—of all time.” A silver lining:

What I do know is this: If Pixar’s films seem to have been slipping back into the pack of excellent-but-not-transcendent animated features of late, it is in part because that pack has dramatically lifted its game. Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Despicable Me, Tangled, Rise of the Guardians, and a dozen other recent offerings—animated filmmaking has rarely, if ever, produced such quality in such quantity. And it is very, very hard to imagine that this would have happened if Pixar hadn’t been around to show Hollywood that animated films could be such good films (and, not incidentally, such profitable ones).

How Alyssa thinks about sequels:

I can easily see a sequel to The Incredibles that focuses not on the grown-up Parrs, whose arc is largely resolved, but on their children, who are growing up superpowered in a world where the use of their abilities is technically illegal. For all that I’m charmed by the idea of Monsters University, I don’t see the necessity of an origin story for Mike and Sulley, just as I don’t feel particularly drawn to spend more time with Dory, the cheerful, forgetful fish voiced by Ellen Degeneres in Finding Nemo. For sequels to be artistically necessary, there needs to be some sort of narrative or character-driven urgency to them.

by Brendan James

A couple Iraqi intelligence officers say their government asked the US for strikes against jihadis on the Syrian border. Obama declined. Micah Zenko, relieved, provides some background:

In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA had increased its covert training and support efforts to enhance Iraq’s Counterterrorism Service forces that are focused on AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] or [Syrian jihadist] al-Nusrah militants that threaten western Iraq. A senior Obama administration official stated: “This relationship is focused on supporting the Iraqis to deal with terrorist threats within their borders, and not about ramping up unilateral operations.” Training and advising another state’s security forces is a normal component of military to military cooperation, but conducting kinetic operations for them could quickly draw the United States into creating additional enemies out of what are domestic and regionally-focused terrorist groups.

The CIA already serves as the counterterrorism air force of Yemen, and, occasionally, Pakistan. It should not further expand this chore to Iraq.

Extending the drone campaign to Iraq to to combat Syrian insurgents sounds like a profoundly poor idea that, as Zenko points out, could very quickly spin out of control. Given Obama’s rejection of the Petraeus-Hillary plan to directly arm Syrian rebels and his interest in preserving his legacy on Iraq, it’s hard to imagine him touching that border as things stand.

But proof has been mounting for a while now that jihads in Iraq and Syria travel back and forth with ease, and have comingled to the point that State has labled them the same operation. The obvious snag is that we want Bashar’s regime to fold and Maliki’s to hold up. The jihadis, of course, don’t distinguish the two, and right now their success against Bashar contributes to instability in Iraq, and vice versa. It’s quite a nasty cycle, one we’ll have to break at some point soon.

by Doug Allen

Richard Nieva sees the insurance industry as the biggest threat to the increasingly popular “sharing economy”:

Airbnb ran into issues when some hosts reported guests ransacking and stealing of their property. And Uber, the black car taxi service — the most successful of auto-related sharing companies — made headlines recently when the company’s contracted drivers staged a protest in San Francisco, partly over outrage that Uber doesn’t own a commercial insurance policy, meaning the drivers themselves are liable for any accidents they might get into.

As the sharing economy burrows its way into people’s everyday lives – or at least out from the realm of absurdity – there’s been a familiar refrain echoing throughout the blogosphere and traditional press: City hall has been getting in the way. Indeed, in many cases, government regulators have taken a hard line against the sharing economy companies. … But even with the long laundry list of attacks by city hall, the trickiest obstacle for sharing economy companies – particularly in the car-sharing space – is the arms length relationship they have with the insurance industry. Early adopters — call them the Napster generation — are happy to break the law within reason. Putting their savings at risk by lending an asset that insurance won’t cover (up to a certain point) may be another matter.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

This Winkler person trying to gin up the idea that the NRA got its ideas about strutting their gun culture in public from the Black Panthers … please. I was politically awake in California at that time.  There was a HUGE cultural backlash, from racist gun-culture-loving whites, against the “nerve” of those Black Panthers appropriating white conservative ideas – which were already long-cooked in the 1960s – of patriotic militias defending their rights against oppressive big governments. The idea that today’s West Coast NRA types who delight in congregating at their local Starbucks, armed up, to rile the local liberals, took this idea in any way from a now-obscure Black Panther model, instead of from their own generations of intense culture-worship of founding fathers with guns, backwoods pioneers with guns, cowboys with guns, American soldiers with guns, and John Wayne (and many others) playing at cowboys-and-soldiers with guns on the silver screen, is truly nonsensical.

Another is on the same page:

The NRA was singing the 2nd amendment tune long before there were Black Panthers.  I went to summer camp in the late 1950s, where we did archery and riflery, each under the banner of a national association, from which we earned kiddy honors, complete with sew-on patches and medals. So I became a junior member of the NRA, and read The American Rifleman, the NRA magazine.  It was full of the same bullshit still put forth: the only thing standing between the upstanding US citizen and government tyranny was the fact that some of the citizens were packing heat.

I proudly repeated this stuff to my father.  I figured he’d appreciate my attention to the Constitution, since he taught Constitutional Law.  He slapped it all down pretty quicky. “Read the amendment, and tell me what a militia is.  If gun control is really unconstitutional, they could get a ruling on that.  But the courts have always read the ‘right’ as related to militias.  It doesn’t work for them, so they just lobby against any laws they don’t like.  That ‘bulwark against tyranny’ line is just John Birch stuff.”

Well, the NRA finally found a Court that was willing to ignore the word “militia” and the concept of “well-regulated” – overturning 230 years of jurisprudence.  It’s a Court that claims to be traditionalist and modest in its reach.  Oh, sure: The Court said, “Let any unstable jerk be a militia, and let him regulate himself.” And the Court saw that it was good.  And the Court said “Let the corporations be people”.  And the Court saw that it was good.  This Court is detached from reality, lost in the swamps of theory, and radical.

The following passage is from the same email by the reader who said he prevented his rape in a hotel room by pulling out a gun:

By the way, your coverage of the ongoing gun debate has been nothing short of terrible and incredibly one-sided.  But I understand different people have different opinions.  And nothing being proposed so far would have impacted my ability to defend myself in that situation, so it’s a bit irrelevant to the gay rape issue.

But it’s worth pointing out.  The Frum quote you posted about the Black Panthers was particularly distressing. Reading his larger piece, he calls hunting an “increasingly marginal” activity, since only 6% of Americans have purchased a license, seemingly indicative of Mr. Frum’s long-term feeling that guns aren’t worthy of constitutional protection.  What then does that mean for Jews like himself, who are a nearly statistically irrelevant 2% of the population.  Or gays, who are likely closer to to 6% than the previously claimed 10%.  Are gays a marginal population?  Six percent of Americans is 20 million people, which doesn’t include all those over 65 or with their own land who generally don’t need a license to hunt. By way of comparison, 7% of Americans (25 million) played golf last year. Does David Frum think golf is an increasingly marginal activity??

Nothing in Winkler’s book should be a surprise to anyone who spent time examining the issue beyond merely reciting the talking points of the Bloomberg activism machine.  In fact, the reaction to the Black Panthers by the establishment (with the NRA’s support) passing onerous gun control laws designed from the outset for enforcement in a discriminatory fashion against blacks is the very reason the NRA’s membership erupted and split. All the Democrats these days pining for the NRA to return to the NRA of old, or Republicans to emulate Ronald Reagan (who oversaw the passage of those and other laws), are really asking for a return to the terrible days when it was considered acceptable to pass laws as long as the intent was only to impact those “other” people.  It’s reprehensible, and indicative of the deep distrust Americans have, for any attack on our rights.

Previous Dish on Winkler’s wonderful 2011 Atlantic piece here. Money quote:

The day of [the Black Panthers’] statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

Yet another example of how Reagan is such a false idol for the contemporary GOP base.