July | 2016 | Praxis

Conservative Skepticism About Government Has Become Nihilism

When populism exploded again with the 2008 financial collapse and TARP bailout, the next generation of Republican leaders — led by Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan, the self-named Young Guns — took the Gingrich playbook and ran with it, exploiting and fueling populist anger at the political establishment and the new black president to take back power. The theory was that a deliberate strategy to make all government action in Washington look disastrous, whether by stopping legislation or delegitimizing the process and its…

GOP Missed Opportunity to Adopt Trump’s More Centrist Social Positions

People form their opinions about a party based on what its platform includes. Political scientists Elizabeth Simas at the University of Houston and Kevin Evans at Florida International University have found that in years that parties adopt particularly conservative platforms, voters tend to see the nominee as more conservative too. “Voters are in fact picking up on the parties’ objective policy positions,” they wrote in a 2011 paper. That means that a platform like this one could have lasting impacts on how the Republican Party…

Baltimore Attorney Marilyn Mosby Faces Bar Complaint for Freddie Gray Prosecutions

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has been under fire. Now she could potentially face being disbarred, WJZ’s Meghan McCorkell reports. A new complaint filed with the Maryland Bar Counsel calls Mosby “a runaway prosecutor” and alleges she violated ethics rules, claiming she never had probable cause to charge six officers in the death of Freddie Gray. “I think Marilyn Mosby has harmed the city of Baltimore. And if she continues, that harm will get worse,” said law professor John Banzhaf, George Washington University. Banzhaf,…

Trump’s Ghostwriter Regrets Helping ‘Sociopath’ Billionaire

Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel personally implicated. Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of…

9th Circuit: Visiting Private Websites Against Owners’ Wishes Is Trespass

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has handed down a very important decision on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Facebook v. Vachani, which I flagged just last week. For those of us worried about broad readings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the decision is quite troubling. Its reasoning appears to be very broad. If I’m reading it correctly, it says that if you tell people not to visit your website, and they do it anyway knowing you disapprove, they’re committing…

Big Supermarkets Join Hands With Food Police to Nudge SNAP Recipients

Can you socially engineer a foodie? The latest case of Spending Paternalism involves SNAP (formerly known as Food Stamps). Under SNAP, eligible households receive an electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card that gets reloaded with money once a month to spend on food and groceries. There are already myriad rules and restrictions about what SNAP benefits can be spent on, built directly into the card. While many of the country’s poor would clearly prefer cash, buying and selling an EBT card is illegal. Punishments vary by…

The GOP’s Strategic Sclerosis Is Becoming Fatal

Somewhere in recent years, the GOP’s engagement with modern America and how to best project those values into a nation of 320 million people became dysfunctional. As the country has diversified, the party has remained monochromatic, has grayed, and rather than allowing some birch-like give on shifting cultural norms, has become an unbending oak of ideological purity. The GOP now finds itself lacking an intimate’s ability to criticize productively, given its demographic and cultural divergence from the majority of the country. […] According to the…

To Stop Aspiring Muslim Terrorists, Help Their Families Stop Them

Yet for all his faults and demagoguery, Trump has repeatedly emphasized a point which many of his rivals and critics are perhaps a little too eager to gloss over—namely that in many instances, a would-be terrorist’s family, friends or religious advisors know that their loved one is heading down a dark path, but fail to report it. Trump’s insinuation, of course, is that friends and family fail to contact law enforcement because they are, themselves, sympathetic to ISIS or al-Qaeda and want to see terror…

Lawsuit: DOJ and FBI Deliberately Use Obsolete Software to Stymie Information Requests

A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DOJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”. In an effort to demonstrate that the…

Hispanics Least Worried About Presidential Election, Black Women Most Worried

Despite Donald Trump’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric throughout this year’s presidential campaign, Hispanics are less likely than either whites or blacks to “strongly agree” that they are afraid of what will happen if their candidate loses. Hispanics also are less likely to agree that the stakes in this year’s presidential election are higher than usual. Large majorities of all three major U.S. racial and ethnic groups agree the election stakes are higher this year than in prior years, with 66% of blacks, 63% of whites and…

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