Cruising the Web

So Trump has pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Typical. I guess he figures that Arpaio opposed illegal immigration so he must be a good guy since anyone who agrees with Trump and supports him is, by Trump’s definition, a good guy. Read through this thread from the Phoenix New Times about some of the things Joe Arpaio has done in his position as sheriff of Maricopa County. It’s a truly horrifying list of a man abusing his power to advance his own agenda. Of course, Trump doesn’t care about any of that. Maybe Trump just wants to show his base that he is doing something about his pledges to stop illegal immigration by pardoning the sheriff most associated with trying to do that even if he broke countless laws and ethical standards in so doing.

Is this any better than Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama pardoning and commuting the sentences of convicted Puerto Rican terrorists in order to win votes with that community? Then there was Obama pardoning Chelsea Manning, a person whose crime endangered many. Oh, and add in Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich after a $450,000 donation by Rich’s ex-wife to Clinton’s presidential library and another $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. They’re all contemptible and should be condemned by all sides. Instead, I see a lot of blather on Twitter throwing out all these outrageous abuses of the pardon power as a defense of Trump. Would you accept that sort of “they did it first” argument from your children? What about just standing for what is right and against what is wrong? Joe Arpaio is a despicable person who abused his power to go after people he thought might be here illegally. He was ordered not to by a judge and he kept doing it.

Philip Bump wonders, if Trump was happy to pardon Arpaio, whom else might he be willing to pardon?

One message from the Arpaio pardon is precisely that Trump sees his evaluation of the boundaries of legality as superior to the boundaries set by the legal system. The Constitution gives him that power. As we’ve noted before the presidential pardon is absolute. He can pardon anyone for any federal crime at any time — even before the person actually faces any charges and even if no crime actually took place. There’s nothing anyone can do about it, except to impeach Trump and remove him from office to prevent him from doing it again. (The president who replaces him might be able to revoke a recent pardon, one expert told us, but it’s far from certain.)

In other words, if any of Trump’s allies decides to tell special counsel Robert Mueller to stick his subpoena in the south side of the National Mall, Mueller can press a court for contempt charges. The person could be convicted of those charges — and then get a pardon identical to Arpaio’s.

Or what if Mueller indicts some of Trump’s associates?

Conservatives who are supporting Trump’s pardon of Arpaio simply because they enjoy his doing something that makes liberals’ heads explode are just betraying an immature approach to governance and the rule of law. And, I suspect, they don’t know much about Arpaio other than that he is against illegal immigration.

Jon Gabriel explains why no conservative and no libertarian should be supportive of Arpaio. As Gabriel writes, convicting Arpaio on tax evasion is akin to convicting Al Capone on tax evasion. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of his malfeasance. If you’re not disgusted by his racial profiling to stop Hispanic-looking people or his placing those he arrested in tent prisons in the Arizona sun, then Gabriel’s list of other actions as sheriff should outrage anyone who purports to support the rule of law or basic competent governance.

Many conservatives outside of Arizona celebrated his headline-grabbing antics, but they don’t know the real story. I’m a conservative Maricopa County resident who has lived under Arpaio throughout his decades-long reign. Arpaio was never a conservative; he just played one on TV.

I saw his love of racial profiling firsthand, especially on my daily commutes through the tiny Hispanic community of Guadalupe, Ariz. When conducting these “sweeps,” helicopters buzzed houses, an 18-wheeler marked “Mobile Command Center” was planted in the center of town, and countless sheriff’s deputies stood on the roadsides, peering into the cars rolling by. Being Caucasian, I was always waved through. The drivers ahead and behind me weren’t so lucky.

Washington’s laxity in border enforcement led many right-of-center Americans to appreciate more robust enforcement, even when it regularly included authoritarian scenes like the one in Guadalupe. But even if you turn a blind eye to the human cost of such race-based enforcement, Arpaio’s other misdeeds are legion.

During one three-year period, his Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office didn’t properly investigate more than 400 alleged sex crimes, many of them involving child molestation. In all, the MCSO improperly cleared as many as 75% of cases without arrest or investigation, a fact outlined in a scathing report by the conservative Goldwater Institute.

When local journalists delved into Arpaio’s dealings, he had them arrested, a move that ultimately cost taxpayers $3.75 million. We paid another $3.5 million after the sheriff wrongfully arrested a county supervisor who had been critical of him.

Around that same time, Arpaio sought charges against another supervisor, a county board member, the school superintendent, four Superior Court Judges, and several county employees. All of these were cleared by the courts and also resulted in hefty taxpayer-funded settlements for his targets.

As a U.S. District Court judge presided over a civil contempt hearing, Arpaio’s attorney hired a private detective to investigate his wife.

On the pretext of going after an alleged cache of illegal weapons, a Maricopa SWAT team burned down an upscale suburban Phoenix home and killed the occupants’ nine-month-old dog. There were no illegal arms, so they arrested the resident on traffic citations.

Arpaio’s staff concocted an imaginary assassination attempt on the sheriff, presumably for media coverage. Taxpayers had to pay the framed defendant $1.1 million after he was found not guilty.

The MCSO misspent $100 million on the sheriff’s pet projects, and wasted up to $200 million in taxpayer money on lawsuits. Yet he still found money to send a deputy to Hawaii to look for President Obama’s birth certificate.

As the Washington Examiner editorializes, there is a big difference between supporting law and order and the type of stuff that Arpaio did as sheriff.

There’s plenty of overlap between toughness and law and order. Tough policing under the “broken windows” theory was central to the restoration of law and order in New York City in the 1990s. President Obama’s softness on illegal immigration, especially late in his administration, amounted to disregard for immigration law. Trump’s pledge to enforce immigration law with toughness has restored some order, with the number of illegal crossings apparently dropping in a few months.

But “law and order,” if the words have any meaning, has to apply to government actors as well. Lawless sheriffs promote disorder, and that’s what Arpaio did to get himself convicted.

Arpaio’s defiance of a judge’s order to stop detaining people simply based on the suspicion that they were illegal immigrants was worthy of punishment. His career as a veteran and a long-time public servant does not change that. As sheriff, Arpaio’s office would routinely detain Latinos solely on the suspicion they had broken immigration law, without any evidence whatsoever that a crime had been committed. It was government overreach that was backed up by Arpaio’s authority, all while it was supposed to be Arpaio’s job to protect the people of Maricopa County from injustice.

And Trump’s pardon circumvented the normal pardon process.

In the normal pardon process, convicts apply to the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the Department of Justice. That office reviews each case and makes a recommendation to the deputy attorney general, who gives a recommendation to the president. It’s an established process that is only rarely slighted, and with good reason: the president has wide authority to grant pardons, and it’s an authority that can easily be abused.

In this case, it’s clear Trump has abused that power for a friend and political ally.

To be sure, Democratic attacks that Arpaio shouldn’t have been pardoned simply because he committed a crime were silly. Furthermore, Obama also granted some inappropriate pardons – just look at his commutation of the sentences of terrorist Oscar López Rivera and Chelsea Manning.

But no amount of “Whataboutism” makes it okay for Trump to disregard the rule of law for his friends.

Trump promised to drain the swamp if elected. But America hates the swamp because politicians and bureaucrats give special, undeserved favors to their friends and the well-connected.

America needs tougher immigration enforcement. But enforcement, like all government action, needs to follow the precepts of law and order.

Apparently not, in Trump’s world.

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Anyone willing to assert that we shouldn’t worry about slippery-slope arguments when it comes to removing Confederate monuments has to recognize that we have gone way beyond slippery slopes and now we’re just plunging off the cliffs of good sense. Within a week or so, the agitation to take down statues for leaders of the Confederacy has spread to just about anyone who was problematic for some reason that is no longer acceptable in our society.

New disputes seem to be springing up daily.

In a Democratic mayoral candidates’ debate in New York on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio did not rule out removing Manhattan’s 76-foot Columbus Circle monument as the city reviews “symbols of hate.”

Continue reading the main story
Philadelphia placed barricades and guards around a statue of Mr. Rizzo, loathed by some African-Americans for his harsh tactics toward blacks in the city, after protesters surrounded the bronze edifice and a city councilwoman, Helen Gym, wrote on Twitter, “Take the Rizzo statue down.”

Mr. Rizzo, who died in 1991, cultivated a law-and-order image as a police commissioner that included raiding gay clubs and once forcing Black Panthers to strip naked in the street.

“Just because Philadelphia wasn’t a part of the Confederacy doesn’t mean we get a pass,” Ms. Gym said in an interview. She is less concerned about turning off voters who support the president than in rousing members of the Democratic base, including minorities, who did not vote in November.

“My concern is about the number of people who stayed home, who felt government doesn’t speak for them,” she said. “I’m trying to show government can be reflective in a time of anguish.”

In Chicago, a campaign is underway to remove a monument to Italo Balbo, an Italian air marshal, which the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini presented to the city in 1933. Balbo Drive is a well-known street in the heart of downtown.

In Boston, there are calls for renaming historic Faneuil Hall because Peter Faneuil, who donated the building to the city in 1743, was a slave owner and trader.

In Canada there is now a push to strip the name of its first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald from all the buildings, especially schools, that are named for him because of his racist policies in the 19th century against indigenous people. But as Tristin Hopper writes in the National Post, the protests aren’t going to stop with MacDonald. There are many places and institutions and monuments throughout Canada that are dedicated to people whose actions wouldn’t pass muster in 2017. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of days before we heard the demands to rename Montreal’s McGill University because James McGill, the fur trader who founded the university owned slaves. What about renaming British Columbia? Then there shouldn’t be anything named after Jacques Cartier or Winston Churchill? Those are just some of the people whom I’ve heard of. Apparently, there are all sorts of heroes and heroines of Canadian history whose total biographies wouldn’t pass musters with today’s mob.

So, while I have sympathy for the arguments about taking down Confederate monuments that were often put up to reject civil rights for blacks during the era of Jim Crow or the civil rights movement to celebrate people whose defense of slavery gave them the impetus to try to destroy the union, I know it won’t stop there. We’ll be diving over that cliff of stupidity until there is nothing of history that will be deemed untainted.

Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young provides some common sense about what a distraction from real problems this whole debate is.

Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and civil rights leader, has argued against calls to remove the enormous carved tableau of Confederate leaders on Stone Mountain, Ga., and other Confederate monuments, saying those disputes make more enemies than friends and distract from more substantive issues.

“I personally feel that we made a mistake in fighting over the Confederate flag here in Georgia, or that that was an answer to the problem of the death of nine people to take down the Confederate flag in South Carolina,” he said, referring to the deadly shooting at a landmark black church in Charleston in 2015. He added, “I’m always interested in substance over symbols.”

Jeff Jacoby ridicules Trump for his constant attacks on Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Trump has joined on the bandwagon of retailers who blame Amazon for their diminishing businesses and who try to argue that Amazon is denying tax money to states. But he’s behind the times on Amazon.

Whether he knows it or not, Amazon today is as much a tax-paying retailer as any of its competitors. And, far from being a net job killer, Amazon is creating new jobs at a breathtaking pace.

The point about taxes is banal and straightforward. Under longstanding US law, merchants only have to collect sales taxes in states where they have a meaningful physical presence. Back when Amazon had brick-and-mortar facilities in just a few states, its customers were charged sales tax in only those states.

Despite much griping by traditional vendors, there was nothing unfair about this. No retailer is obliged to collect taxes for states it doesn’t operate in. If a Connecticut jewelry store sells a silver bangle to a customer from Los Angeles, it doesn’t have to remit sales tax to California. All merchants — conventional “Main Street” stores, mail-order catalogs, and Internet retailers — play by the same rule: They only collect sales taxes in the states where they’re physically located.

Since Amazon now is physically located everywhere, it charges sales tax everywhere (except in the five states that don’t levy one: Alaska, Delaware, Oregon, Montana, and New Hampshire). All told, Amazon remits a fortune in taxes to jurisdictions at every level: The total last year was $412 million.

And, as Jacoby goes on to argue, Amazon is providing, not killing jobs.

The latest Fortune 500 rankings put Amazon among the nation’s Top 10 employers, just ahead of FedEx and UPS and not far behind McDonald’s. If, as planned, it hires another 100,000 employees over the next year, it may soon be the second-largest corporate employer in America. (Walmart, with 2.3 million employees, holds the No. 1 rank by a wide margin.)

Trump likes to pretend that he’s all about providing jobs, but that goal comes in second to his personal animus against some companies. And Jeff Bezos, by owning the Washington Post, is now a target.

But were Trump to obstruct Amazon’s astonishing revolution in commerce and logistics, it is he and his administration that would have problems. Amazon is one of the most robust generators of wealth and employment in contemporary American life. Considering Trump’s repeated declarations that he would be the greatest jobs president “that God ever created,” his disdain for Amazon is irrational. Doubly so, given his much-ballyhooed admiration for winners.

There is nothing theoretical about Amazon’s appeal. To take a single measure: An estimated 85 million Americans subscribe to Prime, Amazon’s $99-a-year membership service. That amounts to one-third of the adult population of the United States, or roughly two-thirds of all American households. It is also 22 million more than the number of Americans who voted for Trump on Election Day.

I know that, in our lives, we’ll look to Amazon for almost anything we need to purchase besides food, and that is gradually also changing. My life would be worse without Amazon. And so would the lives of all those people who have jobs working for the company.

On net, Americans are much better off because Amazon is good at what it does. The president is under no obligation to sing the company’s praises. Couldn’t he at least refrain, though, from the false and gratuitous tweets?

But hey, the Washington Post criticized Trump, so forget all the good that the company has done for consumers and workers. Conservatives criticized Obama for attacking individual companies with whose policies he disagreed or which were opposing Obamacare. Is Trump carrying his personal animus against a great American company any better?

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Here is the story from a professor at the University of Utah of how he had to spend over $14,000 in attorney’s fees to defend himself against a sex discrimination/harassment complaint made about him by a female colleague apparently upset about things he said more than a decade earlier. He had gone out for drinks with some female colleagues and told them how he proposed to his wife while at a strip club. While that might seem an odd way to propose to one’s wife, it doesn’t seem like harassment to tell colleagues the story over drinks. This professor was lucky. After an investigation, he was cleared.

After I provided my written rebuttal of the charges, my Title IX investigator proceeded to interview twelve of my colleagues (my other two colleagues failed to respond, as did a number of graduate students). Four and a half months after I first heard from him, I received a written report that exonerated me of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. The costs to me—scores of hours of my time and $14,000 in attorney fees—were minor compared to many other victims of Title IX abuse. Faculty members have been forced out of their jobs; students have been expelled from school.

The report stood out in several ways. First, it was clear that the complaint had been instigated by a single faculty member in my department, someone who’s long harbored animus toward me and other colleagues. It’s for this reason I’d had virtually no interactions with her for over fifteen years, long after I’d recounted my strip club marriage proposal. But no matter: the inquisition inspired by the Dear Colleague letter had provided the means for my accuser to carry out an anonymous vendetta against a colleague based on conjecture and trumped-up evidence. It was irrelevant that the majority of the “assaults” occurred off-campus and well over a decade ago.

All of this should be troubling to anyone who works or attends classes on a college campus. What’s more, complaintants don’t even have to be affiliated with the university.

It sounds like something that could be happening in revolutionary France or the Soviet Union when people who don’t like you can make anonymous allegations against you and then they’re sucked into a Kafkaesque experience totally unrelated to the constitutional protections provided for someone accused of an actual crime.

Respondents are routinely notified of the charges against them by nameless accusers only when they appear at hearings. They are denied protections we take for granted in criminal proceedings, such as representation by counsel or the Miranda warning against self-incrimination. Had my case actually involved a hearing, I would have discovered that I had no right to cross-examine anyone testifying against me.

Powerful forces keep the Title IX machinery humming. The 2011 Dear Colleague letter threatened colleges and universities with denial of federal funds if found out of compliance with its directives. To date, no school has lost its funding. But many have faced expensive compliance reviews, as well as public shaming: for years the DoE Office of Civil Rights has published a list of colleges and universities accused of mishandling Title IX cases. Therefore schools have a strong incentive to pursue every case brought to their attention, no matter how flimsy. This is how a regulatory regime designed to crack down on sexual assault managed to ensnare a faculty member for telling his colleagues about proposing to his wife at a strip club.

The outside pressures supporting the status quo are equally strong. Anyone questioning the current interpretation of Title IX risks being labeled an apologist for campus rape.

It’a a topsy-turvy world when the mere allegation is enough to ruin someone’s life and the accused has so few protections. However, more and more of the accused are fighting back with lawsuits against the universities and the schools are losing those cases. It seems that, once a case gets into a court of law, real judges are unamused by the denial of due process.

The case joins three other legal wins for accused students in the past two months, and at least 10 in the last year. Some legal experts, including the federal and state judges deciding the cases, say the flurry of recent successes for disciplined students may show how some colleges and universities are eliminating “basic procedural protections” in an attempt to combat campus sexual assault.

“In over 20 years of reviewing higher education law cases, I’ve never seen such a string of legal setbacks for universities, both public and private, in student conduct cases.” Gary Pavela, editor of the the Association of Student Conduct Administration’s Law and Policy’s Report and former president of the International Center for Academic Integrity, said. “Something is going seriously wrong. These precedents are unprecedented.”

Universities are now being forced to choose with their natural desire to protect the victim making the complaint and their fear of what the federal government might do to them if they don’t prosecuted the accused with the present fear that they could lose large sums of money if they lose a suit brought by the accused student. As the Washington Post reported in April, in an article very sympathetic to the victims and the effect on them of these lawsuits against the universities, the schools start to get worried if they lose a motion to block the suit from going to trial.

But a growing number of suits, Miltenberg said, are surviving the dismissal motion. That means the cases move to the fact-finding phase known as discovery.

Anxious to avoid that phase, many universities then choose to settle out of court. Often, the terms of the settlement call for the administration to rehear the original sex-assault allegation, with a new focus on protecting the accused student’s due-process rights.

The agreements can award a modest sum of money, expunge the suspension or expulsion from a student’s record and offer immediate reinstatement.

“Getting over the hurdle of the motion to dismiss is a victory in itself,” Miltenberg said, noting that colleges then opt to settle “because they don’t want to get into discovery or open their books, so to speak.”

….For universities, the lawsuits are expensive to fight in court and can result in costly settlements. Last year, a University of Montana football player was awarded $245,000 after he was expelled for sexual misconduct in a case highlighted in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling 2015 book “Missoula.”

The difficulties that universities are facing is a good argument why this should be taken out of their hands. Accusations of sexual assault are quite serious and shouldn’t be left to untrained and biased Title IX officials who are predisposed to find against the accused, especially when they don’t have to grant the accused due process rights. If a crime is alleged, the police and legal system should be investigating. That is what would happen outside the university system if something happened after a couple met up at a bar as is the case in many of these stories. A woman who is drunk doesn’t deserve to be raped; however, a man who has had a drunken hook-up that was consensual at the time doesn’t deserve to have his life ruined because the woman later regrets what she did.

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Feminists in America who are constantly seeking out imagined inequities should turn their focus to what women in Saudi Arabia have to endure such as revealed in this story.

A Saudi man has divorced his wife for walking ahead of him despite repeated warnings, a media report said today. Saudis are becoming increasingly alarmed over the rate of divorces in the kingdom for trivial reasons as growing calls are emerging to provide married couples, especially newlyweds, with counselling services.

The man, who was not identified, gave his wife repeated warnings to keep a step behind him, but she kept walking ahead of him after which, he divorced her, The Gulf News quoted the Saudi daily Al Watan as saying.

In another case, a Saudi man divorced his wife after she forgot to put the sheep head — “the most important part of the dinner” — on the main dish presented by her husband as he hosted his friends for dinner, the report said.

The woman said that after the guests left, her angry husband accused her of embarrassing him by forgetting to present the most important part of the dinner to his guests.

In another case, a husband divorced his wife during their honeymoon for wearing foot bangles.

Humood Al Shimmari, an official who conducts marriages, said that there has been a spurt in divorce cases in the last two years.

It turns out that that black man prominently sitting behind Trump at some of his rallies holding up a sign saying “Blacks for Trump,” might not be all the sort of person that politicians should want to feature at their rallies.

This success with the GOP is a credit to Michael’s fervent anti-Obama stance, which is less about policy than Michael’s belief that the president, whom he calls “The Beast,” is the Antichrist whose rise was foretold in the Bible. Not that he doesn’t disapprove of Obama’s policies, too. Michael told the Miami New Times that he believes the president’s backing of child support could bring about the extinction of the free black man.

Before he was winning attaboys from prominent members of the GOP, Michael ran with a vicious black-supremacist cult. In the early ’90s, Michael and 15 other members of the Yahweh ben Yahweh cult were charged with conspiring in two murders, and even though his own brother testified that Michael stabbed a man in the eye with a sharp stick, he was let off by a Florida jury. In the decades since, he’s become a novel figure in South Florida, racking up criminal charges but no convictions and running a radio show that features his rants on “Demon-crats.”

The full spectrum of Michael’s political philosophy can be observed on his website Gods2.com, which he advertises on his signs at Trump rallies. It includes claims about Obama and Hillary Clinton being in the Illuminati, a video proving “that Hillary is in the KKK,” and more than a dozen personal videos related to an eviction and bankruptcy.

Trump might like to have someone holding up a sign saying “Blacks for Trump,” but does he really want to encourage this nutjob? Probably so. After all Trump was quite willing to spout similar silliness with his promulgation of birther rumors.