HIT & RUN BLOG

Eric Salard/WikimediaConcessions workers at the Atlanta International Airport are being trained in how to spot sex traffickers and victims. One employee, Gary Norris, told wsbtv.com that before the training, he would just come in and do his job. "But now," Norris says, "you look at people, how they carry their bag or (are) walking, the expressions on their face—do they look fearful, do they look terrified?" 

Because it's not enough to have Transportation Security Administration officials watching your every move suspiciously: now the guy behind the Jamba Juice counter and the gal making your Auntie Em's pretzel will be side-eyeing you at the airport, too. Wonderful. 

The training was part of a larger statewide campaign "to raise awareness and curb child sex trafficking." As part of the effort, businesses including airports, buses, bars, truck stops, and strip clubs are now required by law to post signs asking "Are you or someone you know being sold for sex or made/forced to work for little or no pay and cannot leave?"

The signs also list a toll free number for victims to call. Failure to post the signs can lead to fines of up $5,000. 

Stephanie Davis of Georgia Women for a Change thinks the law is necessary to curb sex tourists from New York City. "Now they don’t need to go to Bangkok, they can get it right in Atlanta," she said, though why she thinks NYC predators need to leave NYC for evil-doing is beyond me. 

Meanwhile, a local CBS affiliate in St. Louis is warning that "drug dealers are switching to human trafficking." And on what basis do they know this information? One quote, from one local cop, who imagines that they must be doing so because it's only good business sense.

"Once you sell your product, if it’s drugs, it’s gone," pointed out Sgt. Adam Kavanaugh. "You have to re-up that all the time. If you have a girl, you can use her over and over, night after night." (Why do I picture Kavanaugh salivating a little bit as he says that?)

But, you know, what's the harm of misrepresenting drug dealers? Or hanging up anti-trafficking signs? These are small things. No big deal, right? 

Yet it all serves to fuel the sex trafficking moral panic that's currently raging (fanned by feminists and social conservatives and "helpful" progressives alike). That moral panic, in turn, helps grow the budgets and authority of law enforcement agencies (and social service groups) who claim to be combating the scourge. And they know this.

"Sex-work prohibitionists have long seen trafficking and sex slavery as a useful Trojan horse," wrote "retired call girl" Maggie McNeill at The Washington Post yesterday. 

"In its 2010 'national action plan,' for example, the activist group Demand Abolition writes, 'Framing the Campaign’s key target as sexual slavery might garner more support and less resistance, while framing the Campaign as combating prostitution may be less likely to mobilize similar levels of support and to stimulate stronger opposition.'"

The more folks succeed at a) framing all prostitution or sex work as sex trafficking and b) inciting fears about sex trafficking's rise, the more legislative and voter support will grow for anti-trafficking measures—measures that cost taxpayers money, ruin sex workers' lives, and drive more people into the criminal justice system. Measures that put more power in the hands of cops, lawmakers, and, now, airport concessions workers.

What these measures don't do, however, is actually stem sex trafficking. Groups from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International agree that this worthy goal would actually be much better accomplished through prostitution decriminalization or legalization. 

Didn't get enough of Reason Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on Wednesday's episode of The Independents? Well, she's back tonight at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT, with repeats three hours later) on Fox Business Network, talking about–what else?–the Singularity.

That is because the weekly theme episode this time around is all about robots—smart machines that will (depending on who you talk to) liberate us from work, diagnose our strokes, drive our cars, modernize our economies, blow up our enemies, end humanity as we know it, or merely vacuum our houses while consoling us about the dwindling human race.

Kicking things off on a fearful note is James Barrat, author of new book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, which Ron Bailey reviews here. Followed by George Mason University associate economics professor Robin Hanson, who is decidedly more upbeat. Brookings Institution scholar P.W. Singer, author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, will talk about robot sand-fleas; and Dr. Yulun Wang of InTouch Health will demonstrate his fancy diagnostic robot friend. Competitive Enterprise Institute Fellow Marc Scribner will talk about driverless cars, R Street Institute Senior Fellow Lori Sanders will talk about our jerbs, and the co-hosts will talk about their very favorite robots from audi-visual entertainment history.

Do you, for one, welcome your new robot overlords? I for one am not so sure, but the show will give you plenty of raw material to chew on either way. Remember: Follow the show on Facebook and Twitter, and go to this link for a playlist of previous segments. WEEKEND REPEATS: "Rise of the Machines" will re-air over the weekend at 7 p.m. ET (4 p.m. PT) both Saturday and Sunday. And at 2 a.m. this evening/morning, we will be repeating the Wednesday show featuring Rep. Justin Amash (D-Mich.), documentarian Errol Morris, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and TV's Andy Levy from Red Eye (which you can then watch at 3 a.m. on the big Fox).

Ivy Dawned/flickr/FILESome parents in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, are agitating for random drug testing of teachers after one middle school teacher was arrested for possession of heroin, prescription meds, needles, and other paraphernalia. He and another teacher were suspended with pay by the school district, and a third teacher reportedly requested a leave related to the investigation. Last week a child found a syringe in the boys bathroom. Although school bus drivers in New Jersey must undergo drug testing, thanks in part to union representation, there are no drug test mandates for public school teachers. The Bergen Record reports on parents’ reactions:

“I could care less for the unions” if they oppose this, said one school parent who would not give her name. “The security of my child is important.”

…Several parents — none of whom would give their name — said after the [Thursday school board] meeting they would like the school to install surveillance cameras, while another mom said she wanted employees to be drug tested monthly.

“I trusted the teacher so much,” she said, though she would not specify which educator taught her child. “I’m so disappointed.”

Parents also had spoken out the previous evening, telling officials at the school board meeting that they did not want the teachers returning to work. Others called for more drug searches on campuses.

All the teachers implicated are tenured, a job protection originally fashioned to protect teachers from reprisals for the content of their teaching. Even if heroin were legalized, leaving syringes in the student bathroom isn’t something teachers ought to be doing.

Via CNNFiguring out how to save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars on ink is so easy a sixth grader could do it. In fact, one did. 

Suvir Mirchandani, a student at a Pittsburgh middle school, decided he wanted to look for ways to reduce waste at his school. So for a science project, he measured how much ink was used in creating enlarged versions of commonly used letters in his teachers' handouts. And then he measured how ink usage would be reduced by using different fonts. 

Printer ink can be quite expensive—almost double the per ounce price of Chanel No. 5 perfume, as Mirchandani tells CNN, which first reported the story. 

It turned out his school district could reduce its annual ink usage by 24 percent and save $21,000 a year by switching to Garamond, a lighter font with thinner, less ink-heavy strokes. 

After submitting his work to a journal for young researchers run by Harvard grad students, Mirchandani was encouraged to expand his research. 

The task was tougher. But the potential savings were much, much bigger. CNN reports:

With an annual printing expenditure of $1.8 billion, the government was a much more challenging task than his school science project.

Suvir repeated his tests on five sample pages from documents on the Government Printing Office website and got similar results --change the font, save money.

Using the Government Services Administration's estimated annual cost of ink -- $467 million -- Suvir concluded that if the federal government used Garamond exclusively it could save nearly 30% -- or $136 million per year. An additional $234 million could be saved annually if state governments also jumped on board, he reported.

So will the Government Printing Office make a change? I wouldn't count on it:

Gary Somerset, media and public relations manager at the Government Printing Office, describes Suvir's work as "remarkable." But he was noncommittal on whether the GPO would introduce changes to typeface, saying the GPO's efforts to become more environmentally sustainable were focused on shifting content to the Web.

Sounds like Mirchandani may end up learning two lessons: With a little thought, a smart person can find simple ways for the government to save money—and the government doesn't seem terribly interested in pursuing them. 

Comedy CentralThe Internet is, for better or worse, an amplifying device. Especially on Twitter, whether it's #FreeBieber and #FreeAlaa, people can really crank their opinions up to 11. Amplification does not mean clarification though, and everyone's favorite microblogging site is at the center of another a hot mess, fighting about Stephen Colbert, racism, and the stinging impact of satire.

The Comedy Central pundit ran a segment about the Washington Redskins on Wednesday, mocking the team's owner for starting the Washington Redskins Original American Foundation. To hit home his point that the charity is an empty gesture, Colbert joked about starting his own Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever. The next day, someone in control of the Colbert Report's official twitter account wrote about the satirical foundation.

Cue the outrage.

Suey Park, a self-described writer and activist, saw the tweet and wrote back, "The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals has decided to call for #CancelColbert. Trend it." She also blamed "white liberals" for not doing enough to end racism.

Cue the outrage getting messy.

Today, #CancelColbert is trending in the U.S. and worldwide. The mosaic of 140 character statements in solidarity with Park constitutes an argument that Colbert's attempted anti-racist satire is still hurtful and racist because it relies on racial stereotyping, and is therefore unacceptable. On the other side of the kerfuffle, people are angry that others want a jokester off the air for making a joke. Given the nature of the debate, a lot of the outrage seems to be satire-on-satire posturing. Even Colbert called for canceling his show while noting that he didn't send the original tweet.

Blurring more lines, Park hasn't shied away from using the same kind of ironic humor Colbert does to address race-related issues. She previously started a Twitter campaign called "#NotYourAsianSidekick" and embraces Asian stereotype jokes to make her point in the current argument. She contends that it's not a two-way street, though, because of minority marginalization.

"As a white man, I don't expect you to be able to understand what people of color are seeing," Park charged against HuffPost Live's Josh Zepps, who interviewed her today.

Zepps retaliated on Twitter that Park is a "professional umbrage-taker" and "pretending that a silly idea isn't silly because of the race of the person holding it is condescending and racist."

Some Native Americans are mad that the #CancelColbert indignation has overshadowed the Redskins affair.

The caps-lock-because-I'm-shouting confusion hit new highs when Fox News' Michelle Malkin retweeted Park, and people started blaming conservatives for starting the anti-Colbert push.

At Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams, describing herself as a "a full-time, professional offended feminist" offered some advice: "You don’t like what you see in the world? Speak up about it. Shine a light on it. But don’t insist that other people be shut down."

Park is well within her First Amendment right to speak out against the perceived threat that Colbert poses. But, policing humor threatens a valuable form of free speech that is particularly useful in addressing sensitive issues.

Charles SchultzIt seems as though Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s campaign to “ban bossy” is not going to have the traction she wants. In fact, her efforts resulted in a cultural backlash where the word ended up tossed around left and right. As a tech and social media professional, Sandberg should have predicted the response. The trolls are always looking for ways to upset people and will defy efforts to police language the way rum-runners defied efforts to ban alcohol. Reason’s Scott Shackford explains that attempting to make the world around you responsible for your emotional well-being through language choices is just giving certain reprehensible people the blueprint on exactly how to hurt you.

Whitehouse.govObamacare supporters are taking a bit of a victory lap today after yesterday’s administration announcement that six million people have signed up for private plans under the law, equaling the revised projection put out by the Congressional Budget Office after the botched launch of the exchanges last October. 

It’s a weak cause for celebration, given that success, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, was originally "at least" seven million people getting covered under the law by the end of March. And as an Obamacare factoid, the six million sign-ups figure just doesn’t tell us all that much about whether and how the law is working. There are still a lot of major unanswered questions about the law and its future.

1. How many people have actually enrolled? This is the big one. I’ve written about it a lot for a reason: The headline sign-up numbers are often described as enrollment numbers. They’re not. A significant portion of people who sign up for coverage aren’t paying their first month’s premium, and are therefore never enrolled. In California, it’s about 15 percent of sign-ups. In Wisconsin and Georgia, it’s closer to 20 percent. In Nevada and Vermont, it’s more than 30 percent. Until we know how many people have paid, we won’t know how many people got covered.

2. What percentage of those who are enrolled are between the ages of 18 and 34? After the launch of the exchanges last October, the White House repeatedly emphasized that they were less focused on the total number of enrollments and more concerned with the demographic mix—specifically, the number of young adults signing up. Young adults tend to be less expensive to insure, so their premiums are needed to balance out the costs of the older, more expensive enrollees. Early on the administration had been clear that it was aiming for 40 percent of enrollees to be in the youngest cohort. But so far, the administration’s reports have indicated that only about 25 percent of sign-ups are young adults.

3. Are the young people who are enrolling actually healthy? This one will be hard to answer, but it’s important. In the population as a whole, young adults tend to be healthier, and therefore less inclined to use lots of health care services, than their elders. But the characteristics of the 6 million or so folks who end up in the exchange population may not mirror the population as a whole. It’s entirely possible that the young adults who do end up signing up will be sicker, on average, than their peers. If so, that will complicate premium pricing down the road.

4. What are the sign-up totals, demographic breakdowns, and overall health of the individual state markets? The headline national numbers only tell part of the story. By the middle of this month, 13 states had exceeded initial enrollment projections, according to a count by Philip Klein of The Washington Examiner. But another 12 states were at less than half their projected sign-ups, and 24 were at less than two-thirds of sign-up expectations. What this means is that Obamacare is going to look very different depending on what state you live in. Some states will meet or beat enrollment expectations and presumably end up with viable insurance markets in the process. But others will have low enrollment totals and bad demographic mixes, and are likely to face higher premiums and fewer plan choices as a result.

5. How many of the people enrolled under the law were previously uninsured? And how many of them were previously among the long-term uninsured? Even once we find out how many of the people who have signed up for coverage have actually enrolled, we still won’t know the answer to another big question: How many of the enrollees were previously uninsured? Surveys and word from insurance industry insiders suggest that anywhere from a quarter to half of enrollments were previously uninsured—meaning it’s possible that the majority of enrollments are for people who were already covered before the law’s insurance expansion took effect. Moreover, when trying to figure this out, it’s worth thinking about who counts as previously uninsured: Many counts of the nation’s uninsured population count people who went without insurance for a few months, often while transitioning between jobs. But it’s the long-term uninsured—those who have gone years without coverage—we should be focusing on.

6. What will premiums look like next year? This matters both for the politics of the law and for its success as a policy mechanism. President Obama initially sold the health care overhaul as a way to reduce premiums, but recently the administration has trimmed back its promises, saying instead that premiums will still rise, just not as fast as prior to the law. But there are early rumbles from insurers suggesting that, when they set rates for next year, premiums could jump dramatically, with some warning that rates could double, or more. Because of the state-by-state nature of Obamacare’s insurance markets, those effects won’t be felt evenly. But if big hikes do appear in many markets, then you have to wonder: How many people will want to stay with their current plans? And what will this do to the already weak political support for the law?

Steven Mazie thinks it's weird that libertarians like me are defending freedom of religion in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby. I think it's weird that he thinks it's weird.

In a Big Think post headlined "Godless Libertarians Find Their Religion," Mazie says "it's a delicious treat to watch libertarians rise to the defense of Protestant evangelicals." How so? "The libertarians are allergic to religion," he says, "yet speak out in ringing endorsement of the right of the fundamentalist Christian employers to exercise a line-item veto over the contraceptives their employees may access under their health plans." 

Are libertarians "allergic to religion"? Many of them are, but many are not. Some of them are even fundamentalist Christians. There is no inherent contradiction between libertarianism or classical liberalism and religion, as long as religion is not forcibly imposed on people by the state. In any case, since when must you be religious to defend freedom of religion, which includes the freedom not to be religious at all?

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which in my view has taken the wrong position in the Hobby Lobby case, nevertheless has a Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. That organization, which probably has more than its fair share of agnostics, atheists, and secular humanists, has been known to defend the religious liberty of people whose beliefs it does not endorse, just as it defends the free-speech rights of people whose views its members abhor. That is the sort of thing civil libertarians are supposed to do. If religious conservatives and secular libertarians are a "novel conglomeration" of "strange bedfellows" in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, as Mazie says, how would he describe the left-liberals and neo-Nazis who were allied in National Socialist Party v. Skokie?

In the comment thread under his post, Mazie concedes that "many secular libertarians coherently (and rightly) support religious free exercise rights," and the "same holds true for secular non-libertarians." He says "the incoherence comes when libertarians leap to defend individuals and corporations requesting an exemption from otherwise generally applicable laws." Here is why Mazie claims that position is incoherent:

For libertarians, the contraceptive mandate is wrong, full stop. No one should be required to pay for birth control for their employees, they say. Having a religious belief should not give you a stronger claim to exemption than anyone else. Yet Hobby Lobby is basing its claim to exemption squarely on its religious objection to abortifacients.

YouTube screengrabFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the social media giant intends to connect the two-thirds of the world currently offline to the Internet by using solar powered drones, satellites, and lasers. In the announcement, published on his Facebook wall, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would be working with Internet.org to launch the drones:

Today, we're sharing some details of the work Facebook's Connectivity Lab is doing to build drones, satellites and lasers to deliver the internet to everyone.

Our goal with Internet.org is to make affordable access to basic internet services available to every person in the world.

We've made good progress so far. Over the past year, our work in the Philippines and Paraguay alone has doubled the number of people using mobile data with the operators we've partnered with, helping 3 million new people access the internet.

We're going to continue building these partnerships, but connecting the whole world will require inventing new technology too. That's what our Connectivity Lab focuses on, and there's a lot more exciting work to do here.

In the promotional video from Internet.org (below), Facebook’s Yael Maguire outlines how solar powered drones, satellites, and lasers could be used to bring the Internet to more of the world’s population.

Google has a similar project, "Project Loon," which aims to get more people online by using 20-kilometer high balloons. Thirty of these balloons were launched in New Zealand last summer. In the video for Facebook’s project, Maguire explains that the solar powered drones Facebook is working on would also be operating roughly 20 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Watch the video from Project Loon below:

Predictably, governments could hamper Facebook's and Google's attempts to get more people online, as Mark Little, an analyst at the consultancy firm Ovum, told the BBC:

"It is going to have a lot of political hoops to jump through. Some governments won't put up with having that fleet over their airspace."

Mr Little thinks that for both Facebook and Google, the technology in their projects may prove to be "the easy bit" and that the real challenge will lie in persuading governments around the world that its alternative networks are viable.

"Mobile operators are always under threat from alternative ways of delivering net services. This becomes a concern for governments when a nation's communications rest on an outside provider," he said.

More from Reason on drones here.

Congressional PhotoMichigan Republican Rep. Mike Rogers puts pretty much every other political defender of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance tactics to shame. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he even manages to outdo Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) defense of NSA intrusions with his fearmongering and accusations that Edward Snowden is under the influence of the Russians.

Rogers was still pushing that story last weekend, with no real evidence. He has introduced his own version of NSA "reform" that experts say is anything but. His "End Bulk Collection Act" doesn’t end bulk collection at all and could actually allow the NSA to analyze even more of our data without oversight (Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation explains more here).

But raise a glass and toast: Mike Rogers is retiring from Congress. He announced this morning that he will not run for re-election at the end of his term and will, instead, start a conservative talk radio show. He told a Detroit radio show, "It's a pretty rare opportunity. They don't come around very often." I don’t think I need Politifact to assess the accuracy of that observation.

Some more from the parade of awfulness that is Rogers’ political career since he joined Congress in 2000:

• Rogers introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which promoted sharing of data between the government and private Internet companies for the stated aim of preventing cyberattacks. It was criticized for lacking civil liberties safeguards and died after President Barack Obama threatened to veto it. He referred to critics of CISPA as "14-year-olds in their basements clicking around on the Internet."
• He has argued that publishers could or should be charged with espionage for printing classified information if they were paid for their work.
• He called for American intervention in Syria, saying, "This is the time to act. Don’t wait until we have 5,000 dead. That’s too late."
• He has co-sponsored multiple bills to outlaw Internet gambling.
• He was the primary sponsor of the censorious Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act, the legislation targeting the Westboro Baptist Church that makes it illegal to protest within 300 feet of a military funeral on a federal cemetery an hour before or after the services.

Read his consistently terrible stands on choosing security over liberty here. Farewell, Rogers. Tech and privacy journalists probably beat the candy out of the Big Security piñata you represent weeks ago.

Www.CourtneyCarmody.com/ / Foter / CC BYNew York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, continuing his crusade to make the Big Apple a kinder and gentler place to live (as enforced by penalties prescribed by law), has pushed through an amendment to the city’s still-new Earned Sick Time Act. The amended rule goes into affect April 1, and requires small businesses of five or more employees—down from 15—to provide paid sick leave to workers.

Supporters of the measure trumpet it as a victory not just for workers, but for businesses that will enjoy improved morale at a low, low cost. Even so, at least one of the city councilman who voted for the sick leave mandate already has second thoughts about the impact on small firms.

A nice summary of the law's measure comes courtesy of Think HR:

• The Act now covers employers with five or more employees (rather than 15).
• The definition of "family member" has been expanded to include sibling, grandchild, and grandparent. "Grandchild" means the child of an employee’s child, "Grandparent" means a parent of an employee’s parent, and “Sibling” means an employee’s brother or sister, including half-siblings, step-siblings, and siblings related through adoption.
• The exemption for employers in the manufacturing industry has been eliminated.
• Employers must maintain sick time compliance records for three years (rather than two).
• Employees have two years to file a complaint (rather than 270 days).

All of this benefit to ailing employees! And at little or no cost to businesses for whom even a single paid sick person can represent as much as one-fifth of the work force. At least, so we're told by one pro-regulation research outfit and the journalists citing it.

According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), after Connecticut passed a sick leave mandate, everything was swell.

The law had minimal effects on businesses. A large majority of employers reported that the law did not affect business operations and that they had no or only small increases in costs. Businesses most frequently covered absent workers by assigning the work to other employees, a solution which has little effect on costs. Just 10 percent of employers reported that the law caused their costs to increase by 3 percent or more. Since the implementation of the paid sick days law, Connecticut employers saw decreases in the spread of illnesses and increases in morale...

The Associated Press reported this to mean "many small businesses say they don't find complying with the laws a burden. Many already gave employees paid sick time before the laws were passed. And having paid sick time makes employees happy."

But the Connecticut measure applies to businesses with 50 or more employees, while the New York City measure sweeps up those with as few as five. And CEPR doesn't give us context for a 3 percent boost in costs—that may or may not be a lot, depending on a firm's profit margin. And that 3 percent is likely to rise for a smaller outfit for which a sick employee is a higher percentage of the total work force.

By contrast, a study by Ernst and Young on behalf of the Partnership for New York City found significant costs associated with sick leave mandates.

Implementation of the Paid Sick Time Act would raise costs, on average, to 48 cents per employee per hour. Large businesses would see an increase to 57 cents per employee per hour and small businesses 24 cents per employee per hour.

This does not include the costs of benefits such as health insurance, employment taxes or indirect costs that may be incurred as a result of providing paid sick leave to employees. Nor does the estimate include the administrative costs of compliance with the bill. These costs could not be captured in the scope of the survey, but anecdotal evidence suggests they are significant.

Although the payroll cost increase may seem small to advocates, it is roughly equivalent to the .34% payroll tax (the “Mobility Tax”) that New York State imposed on all employers in 2009 to help fund the MTA capital program. Small business, government and nonprofit employers have widely described this tax as very burdensome and its rescission was one of the biggest issues in the last session of the State legislature and in the upcoming elections.

The Ernst and Young study has been criticized for overstating costs, but its estimates don't seem out of line with CEPR's—and it provides some context for the numbers it produces.

Ultimately, paid sick leave is a nice thing to have, if you're an ailing employee or one with a sick family member. But very little in life, including the helpful and desirable things, comes without a price tag attached. The price of mandating popular policies like paid sick leave for employees may well be that some businesses close or cut back, and some workers end up not on leave, but unemployed.

evmaiden-CC-BY-NCAsian-American and Pacific Islander students make up 14 percent of the state’s high-school graduates but nearly half of freshmen at Berkeley. Unfortunately, students from other ethnic groups haven’t always had as much success getting into the state’s top universities. So Democratic senators in January passed SCA 5, which would have restored racial and ethnic quotas. Their stated goal wasn’t to reduce Asian attendance, but given that top-university admissions are a zero-sum game, that would have been an end result. Steven Greenhut highlights how the Asian-American community defeated the measure.

Sleep Less Think More! The summer seminars sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies offer an exciting opportunity to discuss libertarian ideas morning, noon, and late into the night with professors and peers from around the world. Participation, including meals and housing, is free! www.TheIHS.org/summerseminars. Apply by March 31.

TMZFormer Democrat Congressman and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner has a new column at Business Insider, and for his first column he decided to defend Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.). He tells readers it might be surprising that he's decided to defend a "conservative" in his first column. It shouldn't be.

Christie may consider himself a conservative, but like Weiner he often sees government as the solution to, not the cause of, various problems. This time, Weiner thinks Christie was right about cracking down on direct sales of electric cars by Tesla. He writes that the regulations that prevent direct sales are a good idea, probably, but he's not confident he knows why:

Why would you want to have laws that require a car be purchased through a local dealer?  Perhaps to protect a purchaser's rights to easily enforce the warranty. To ensure the state's ability to enforce the reams of unique state legal requirements that govern automobile sales, service and even disposal maybe. Or, it might just be a run-of-the-mill instinct for local rather than federal regulations to govern what, for many Americans, is the biggest purchase of their lives. You may not agree with these conclusions, but these are longstanding laws and there was a robust back-and-forth about them well before Tesla drove onto the scene.

Perhaps, maybe, might. Weiner is willing to provide a vigorous defense of regulations whose purpose he can't identify with certainty. Perhaps Weiner is a slimeball. Maybe. He might be. To his credit, Weiner admits he received donations from car dealers as a politician, but then explains how lobbyists lobby about regulations in one of the most backward ways I've seen:

You can't swing a dead cat in Washington or any of the 50 state capitals without hitting a lobbyist pitching the idea some regulation is overreaching, unnecessary, or stifling of competition.

The statement is just as, if not more true from the other direction: You can't swing a dead cat in any capital without hitting a lobbyist pitching the idea some new regulation is needed (often to stifle his employer's competition).

With all the Cold War nostalgia in the air, I thought I'd post this relic from either the final days of the Soviet Union or the first moments of the post-Soviet era, I'm not sure which:

I've blogged this all-star pop cover of the Soviet national anthem once before, but it's one of those things you just need to remind the world about from time to time. The video's maybe-earnest, maybe-ironic, maybe-kinda-both nostalgia for the USSR feels like it was made by someone trying to create an East Bloc version of an American patriotic montage. That Bizarro-world effect is intensified by the fact that half the musicians in the video look like ersatz versions of the West's pop stars. The last time I posted this, a commenter spotted the Soviet Sebastian Bach, the Soviet Culture Club, the Soviet John Oates, and several more—and he didn't even mention the Soviet Meat Loaf. Clearly, the Communists were growing pod versions of our celebrities.

Kim Jong Il, who was the supreme leader of North Korea until his death in 2011, was a leading authority on gymnastics, cinema, literature, war, cooking, and the arts. He wrote 1,400 works when he was in college, including a senior thesis that was an achievement comparable to Columbus' discovery of America. He revolutionized the opera, personally discovered that Paleolithic man originated on the Korean Peninsula, and came up with a theory of art that was as impactful on modern culture as the Copernican Revolution. Why did the supreme leader always wear sunglasses? That's because his eyes were constantly bloodshot from staying up all night figuring out ways to help his country.

These are details from celebrity ghostwriter (and former editor of Overheard in New York) Michael Malice's new book Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, a strange, tragic, and humorous first-person account of the supreme leader's life. On March 18, 2014, at an event held at New York City's Museum of Sex and sponsored by the Reason Foundation, The New York Times columnist John Tierney sat down with Malice to discuss the book.

Hugh WilfordAt a time when intelligence services have come to play an outsized role in American foreign policy, Hugh Wilford's informative and highly enjoyable book America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East imparts some especially important lessons. Among these lessons, reviews Michael Young, is the fact that spies cannot substitute for diplomats. Allowing them to pursue political agendas, then as now, defeats the purpose of having a non-partisan intelligence agency.

Credit: Gage Skidmore / Foter / CC BY-SA

• President Obama announced yesterday that more than 6 million people have signed up for health coverage through the Obamacare exchanges ahead of the March 31 deadline. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said a year ago that having 7 million people enrolled is what "success looks like."
• A New Zealand military plane has spotted possible debris from MH370.
• Russia has condemned a United Nations resolution declaring the March 16 referendum in Crimea invalid.
• NSA cheerleader and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) won’t seek re-election in November.
• Legislation allowing gay couples in England and Wales to get married will go into effect tomorrow. Polling shows that 20 percent of British adults say that they would turn down an invitation to a same-sex wedding.
• Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie says that the lane closure scandal that has hit his administration will not affect whether or not he decides to run for president in 2016.

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ParamountKurt Loder reviews Darren Aronofsky's Noah. He writes that the film opens with a rush of imaginative filmmaking whose energy, unfortunately, can’t be maintained. It is a serious project from a director whose visionary gifts have never been in question. But it sometimes feels like two, maybe three movies contending for narrative dominance. The filmmakers must surely be praying there’s one audience for all of them.

Here's a real test to see if House Republicans are serious about making any cuts in government spending.

As you'll recall, with a few notable exceptions such as Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), it's tough to find GOP members who really stick to their guns, especially when spending is in any way related to the military spending rather than, say, food stamps, funding for the arts, or foreign aid.

The Pentagon says that even though wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are effectively over, well, they still need money as if we're still at war. The Defense budget is one of the most inscrutable documents ever written (it puts Melville's The Confidence Man to shame in this regard). On top of a "base budget," there is also money for "overseas contingency operations" (OCO), which is where most of the money to fund wars in Afghanistan and Iraq came from. OCO funds also cover some other things such as disaster relief and evacuation efforts. You would expect OCO to be cut massively as troops come home. But you would be wrong.

The enacted base budget for fiscal 2014 was $496 billion, and DOD received $85 billion for OCO.

But the military has also been using OCO to train troops, refurbish and modernize its equipment, maintain bases and force presence outside of Afghanistan, and do other activities not directly related to the war effort. Pentagon leaders want that extra money to continue flowing in an era when Congress has put caps on the base budget. A final OCO request has not yet been made for fiscal 2015, but in budget documents, DOD listed $79 billion as a “placeholders” figure.

“Any transition from OCO to base at the current base topline or, worse, under sequester laws, would drive all of our bases down, and our limited budget will pressurize our already difficult decisions as we work to balance our force structure, modernization and readiness. Without additional supplemental funding, I’m concerned that all three of these areas will suffer,” Vice Adm. Joseph Mulloy, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources, told members of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness on Thursday.

The OCO budget is not subject to budget caps imposed by past law and thus exists as what one analyst calls "an uncapped funding stream that exists for DOD." You can understand why the military wants to keep the spigot open. And here's a preview of how Republicans, apart from the odd duck such as Amash, are likely to respond. Take it away, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.):

“Some would characterize OCO as unnecessary after 2014. However, the fact of the matter is that the rapidly broadening scope of challenges now facing our military has led the Department to become increasingly dependent on OCO to support enduring activities — activities beyond Afghanistan’s borders that must continue after combat operations have ended. OCO funds a multitude of enduring high-priority activities like building partner capacity, providing humanitarian assistance, conducting training exercises, and performing intelligence functions,” he said. “Until we are able to [move those funds to the base budget], we have a responsibility to provide the necessary OCO resources to allow our troops to do the job we have asked them to do.”

More in Stars & Stripes.

Some would characterize it? No, just people who are interested in having an actual conversation about how much money the government spends, including how much it spends on defense, which is likely to receive lesser scrutiny precisely because it is universally accepted as a core government function. How else do you explain massive, Titanic-sized boondoggles such as the F-35 jet program, a $1.5 trillion exercise in flushing tax money down the toilet.

Hat tips: The excellent Twitter feed of Outside the Beltway's James Joyner and Small Wars Journal.

Two things to consider:

1. From a Keynesian perspetive, defense spending is often thought of as the ultimate government multiplier. How many of us were taught in undergrad econ that it was spending on World War II that finally got us out of the Great Depression? That's simply not true. Recent research by Harvard's Robert Barro and Mercatus Center economist and Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy shows that defense spending actually finds that "a dollar increase in federal defense spending results in a less-than-a-dollar increase in GDP when the spending increase is deficit-financed." The idea that maintaining defense spending is a way of propping up our current economy is simply wrong and that fact should be front and center as the Defense Department works a pliant House GOP for more and more money.

2. Defense spending is one of the few items in the budget that can and has been cut in the past. Massive drops in spending took place after World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the end of the Cold War. 

The libertarian Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), leader of the House Liberty Caucus, tells The Hill that President Barack Obama's suggested reforms to the way the National Security Agency collects bulk data may actually make a bad situation worse:

Amash told The Hill that he wants the Judiciary Committee to pass Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr.'s (R-Wis.) "USA Freedom Act," which goes further than the administration and Intelligence leaders to curb the NSA's surveillance programs.

The bill from Sensenbrenner, a primary author of the 2001 Patriot Act, would stop the bulk collection of phone records and require data collection to be tied to a specific investigation.

"We don't have enough information about the administration's proposal to really understand where they're going with it," Amash said Wednesday.

"We've seen some of what the House Intelligence Committee has put out. … Based on what I've read about it, it appears to expand the NSA's authority," he said. "It doesn't end bulk collection but actually puts more Americans in danger of having their constitutionally protected rights violated."

Amash told The Independents Wednesday that the USA Freedom Act would pass the House if it were brought up for a vote:

Nick Gillespie interviewed Amash last year.

Anita Belle's granddaughter accused her of spanking her, prompting an investigation by Michigan's Child Protective Services (CPS). The investigation cleared her of abuse, but CPS placed Belle on a state registry of child abusers anyway. A Detroit TV station reports that the list includes the names of about 275,000 people. Those people haven't necessarily been charged with, much less convicted of, any crimes. And many people aren't even aware their names are on the list, since all it takes is one CPS worker to decide they should be on there to end up on the list.

Department of Defense/Public DomainArizona lawmakers may not have a reputation as rocket scientists (smart Arizonans know better than to waste time and effort in government), but this time they've come up with a stroke of genius: a solution to the battle over border control that should satisfy all parties. Who could object to a virtual virtual fence? No, I didn't stutter.

Faced with a lack of enthusiasm for the expense involved in a measure to install a chain of high-tech towers intended to monitor border crossings, Sen. Bob Worsley (R-Mesa) settled for mandating the fence, but providing no resources for its actual construction.

According to Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services:

PHOENIX -- A Senate panel voted Tuesday to set up a "virtual fence' along the U.S.-Mexico border -- but provided absolutely no cash to do that.

The 8-1 vote came after Sen. Bob Worsley, R-Mesa, realized he could get no traction for his original proposal to spend $30 million to build a network of 300 towers, each equipped with cameras and radar. So the scaled-back version, HB 2461, simply authorizes the virtual fence -- and delayed until next year the question of whether Arizona taxpayers will actually pick up the tab.

That's right. Senators voted for tough border surveillance of the sort to please immigration warriors, but with the low price of nothing sure to charm fiscal hawks. Open border advocates will, of course, be happy about the lack of actual fencing provided by the virtual virtual fencing measure.

If only lawmakers elsewhere would adopt this sort of can-pretend-to-do attitude, the rest of us would have so much less to worry about when legislatures met. We could either applaud their firm intent, or their merciful lack of follow-through, depending on our inclinations.

• Gage Skidmore CC BYRand Paul's campaign organization has assembled 200 people across all 50 states, making him the first potential presidential candidate for 2016 to establish a nationwide network in preparation for the election.
• A law firm that Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) hired to investigate New Jersey bridge closure scandal concluded that the governor was not involved.
• The International Monetary Fund announced that it intends to give Ukraine $14–18 billion. Part of that package will come from the U.S.
• The IRS says it will take years to respond to all of Congress's requests regarding the targeting of Tea Party groups.
• Citigroup shares fell 5 percent after the bank failed a Federal Reserve stress test, an indicator of Citigroup's (in)ability to withstand serious economic downturn.
• If you live in New York City and don't like juggling your groceries, you better start hoarding plastic grocery bags. The city council just introduced a bill that would impose a 10-cent fee on each bag.

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