HIT & RUN BLOG

Stanimir Stoev / Dreamstime.comA Tampa, Florida, man is in jail for contempt of court because he couldn't (or wouldn't) unlock a pair of cell phones to comply with a search warrant.

The case of William Montanez, first arrested on June 21, got some attention last week when Tampa's Fox affiliate reported that a judge tossed him in jail for contempt because he couldn't remember the passcodes on two phones deputies wanted access to.

Beyond the issue of whether courts can force a person to provide the passcode to their phone, there's another issue here of why, exactly, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department is demanding access in the first place.

Montanez's attorney, Patrick Leduc, spoke to Reason Wednesday and provided copies of all the police reports and warrants in the case. Montanez was initially pulled over by a deputy who was monitoring his car on outdoor surveillance footage and saw him leave a gas station and drive onto the street without coming to a full stop first. This is a traffic violation in Florida.

The report doesn't indicate why the deputy was monitoring Montanez in the first place, but the deputy used the traffic violation to pull Montanez over. Then things get a little sketchy. According to the deputy's report, he requested a drug-sniffing dog to come to the scene before even approaching Montanez's vehicle.

Montanez's own behavior was a little sketchy as well. He did not have his driver's license, registration, or proof of insurance in the vehicle. The deputy also reported smelling a "strong odor of a freshly sprayed masking cologne." The drug-sniffing K9 was brought in to check the car, and the dog indicated the presence of drugs.

This led to a search where deputies found some marijuana in a plastic baggie in a hidden compartment in the car and some burnt roaches. Montanez acknowledged that the marijuana was his and for his own use. The amount of marijuana found constituted merely a misdemeanor under Florida law. The deputy also found two bottles of oil, which when field-tested, came back positive for THC. Possession of any amount of cannabis concentrate in Florida is a felony. They also found a gun the glove compartment of the car, which even if the gun is legally owned and licensed, counts as a charge of possessing a gun firearm during the commission of a felony because of those two bottles of THC oil. And they also found $1,203 in cash on Montanez. Possessing cash is not a crime, and Montanez has not been charged with any crimes in relation to having all that cash on hand.

None of this explains why police wanted to access Montanez's phones. According to the police reports, the deputy was attempting to power down Montanez's phones. While doing so, a text message popped up that said "OMG, did they find it?" The report states that the text message arrived after the traffic stop, leading the officer to believe that there was evidence on the phone. So the deputy seized the phones. He asked Montanez for the passcodes and Montanez declined. They submitted a search warrant to compel Montanez to supply the passcode and allow them to access all the content on both the phones.

But, the question remains, why? The warrant application explains the contents of the phone could provide evidentiary information related to the four charges filed against Montanez. But they already have the literal physical evidence for the charges they've filed. They've got the drugs and the gun. Montanez is not charged with anything connected to drug trafficking.

Leduc sees a deeper motive in trying to get access to Montanez's phones.

"It's basically a fishing expedition," Leduc says. "This is an intel operation. They're seeking to get into his cellphone to see what data-mining they can do."

Leduc notes that the deputy who pulled Montanez over isn't some general patrol officer. The deputy himself notes on the warrant request that he's part of a street crimes team that investigates drug and narcotics cases. In short, it's unlikely that the stop leading to the discovery of drugs was any sort of coincidence. And the desire to search Montanez's phone may be for something bigger than securing a conviction for the charges Montanez is facing.

Regardless of whether Montanez has a deeper connection to drug trafficking—he has previous arrests for marijuana possession but no felonies—Leduc doesn't believe an arrest for drug possession should logically lead to the police being permitted to search all your technology.

"There's no limiting principle here," Leduc says. "If the state's theory is correct, if you're a dude on a street corner, smoking a joint, they can demand your phone. If I enter a home, if I see marijuana, should I be able to search their laptops?"

Unfortunately for Montanez, the judge who handles first court appearances lacks the jurisdiction to quash a warrant even if he or she were inclined to and could only consider whether to hold Montanez in contempt for not complying. Judge Gregory Holder ordered Montanez to unlock the phones. Montanez said he could not remember the passcodes and was unable to do so. So Holder found Montanez to be in contempt and detained him.

Leduc has submitted an emergency petition for a hearing in order to fight the contempt order. Montanez could be held for up to six months unless he unlocks the phone or unless the court frees him. Leduc's petition challenges whether deputies established probable cause to search the phone and asks the court to declare that Montanez does not have to give up his passcodes.

YURI GRIPAS/REUTERS/NewscomPresident Donald Trump reportedly isn't happy with some aspects of the planes that carry him around the globe. But his issues with Air Force One have nothing to do with things like safety or performance. Rather, he wants a "more American" paint job and a bigger and better presidential bed, according to Axios.

Trump met earlier this year with executives from Boeing, including CEO Dennis Muilenburg, and the two parties agreed Boeing will develop two new Air Force One planes at a cost of roughly $3.9 billion. Trump also detailed his curious specifications for the planes. According to Axios:

We're told that Trump wants a color scheme that "looks more American" and isn't a "Jackie Kennedy color." He doesn't think the current blue (technically "luminous ultramarine") represents the USA.

Some Air Force officials disagree, arguing that the current color scheme is "known around the world," Axios reports. Doesn't matter. Trump wants his planes to be red, white, and blue. He also wants Air Force One's presidential bed "to be larger and more comfortable," like the bed on his personal plane.

Ironically, Trump might not be able to experience the changes in person. The new planes aren't going to be ready until 2021 at the earliest, so he would have to win reelection if he wants to enjoy them. And it could take an additional three years for the Air Force to test the planes, CNN reported in February, meaning they might not be good to go until 2024. But Trump is reportedly keen on the process being completed before he leaves office, with a source telling CNN that the president "wants to fly on that new plane."

At the end of the day, paint jobs and presidential beds likely won't increase the final cost of the new planes very much. But if the current Air Force One fleet isn't broken, why is Trump ordering new ones ahead of schedule?

This order seems like the latest sign of a troubling trend where politicians not only treat the government like a piggybank, but do so without the slightest hint of shame. In February, The New York Times revealed that Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson ordered a brand new, taxpayer-funded $31,000 dining room set for his office. Scott Pruitt's tenure as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which ended last week, was plagued by similar financial scandals, from installing an expensive soundproofed telephone booth in his office, to regularly traveling first class on airlines and taking a security detail on personal trips.

Politicians and policymakers have always played fast and loose with other people's money. It's what they do. But doing it so boldly and publicly normalizes some gross behavior.

Nightryder84 / WIkimedia CommonsAdministrators at the University of Kansas took down a controversial work of art—an American flag covered in black ink—after the state's Republican governor and secretary of state demanded action.

"The disrespectful display of a desecrated American flag on the KU campus is absolutely unacceptable," said Gov. Jeff Colyer in a statement. "Men and women have fought and died for that flag and to use it in this manner is beyond disrespectful. I spoke to leadership to demand that it be taken down immediately."

The flag is meant to symbolize "a deeply polarized country," according to the artist, Josephine Meckseper. Now it represents the speed with which craven university administrations bow to the easily offended. In a statement, KU Chancellor David Girod said:

There has been much discussion today about a public art exhibit on our campus featuring an artist's depiction of an American flag. Our Spencer Museum, along with other institutions nationally, have participated in this year-long series of exhibits intended to foster difficult conversations.

Over the course of the day, the conversation around this display has generated public safety concerns for our campus community. While we want to foster difficult dialogue, we cannot allow that dialogue to put our people or property in harm's way.

We have begun the process of relocating the exhibit to the Spencer Museum of Art, where we can continue the important conversation it has generated.

That's right: the university invoked public safety as an excuse to remove a work of art that offended conservatives.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has called on KU to reverse course. KU "should take a strong stand for the First Amendment," FIRE's Peter Bonilla said. "By doing so, KU would stand apart from the numerous institutions that have censored artistic expression—a troubling trend documented in our just-released report, 'One Man's Vulgarity,' drawn from FIRE's many years fighting against art censorship on campus."

Phimchanok/Dreamstime.comAn explosive new report reveals that the Nashville Metro Public Health Department exposed the personal information of thousands of people diagnosed with HIV and AIDS

The Tennessean reports that Metro Health keeps a database of those diagnosed with HIV and AIDS in the middle Tennessee region. The information comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Enhanced HIV/AIDS Reporting System (eHARS), which explains that the information is used to assist "health departments with reporting, data management, analysis, and transfer of data to CDC." Like the national database, the Tennessee list contains sensitive information about each patient, including "social security numbers, birthdays, addresses, lab results and some of the intimate secrets of private lives." Only three government scientists were authorized to see that information, and only to work on a project related to an HIV grant program. But thanks to a mistake made by a person managing the database, access was granted to more than 500 health department employees.

The information sat on a shared government server for nine months. While officials do not believe that the database was ever breached, they've run into a secondary issue. An auditing feature that would be able to track server activity was found to be inactive. Had someone taken it upon themselves to open the files and copy sensitive patient information, they would have been able to do so without alerting officials or leaving a trail. This information suggests that while public officials don't think the database was ever misused, they actually can't know if that's true.

The error was discovered two months ago by Metro Health officials. Metro Health spokesperson Brian Todd explained to the Tennessean how the information made its way to the shared server:

The data was initially moved to a server folder reserved for the Ryan White Program, an HIV grant program, then moved again a day or two later to another server folder that was accessible to all Metro Health employees. The data stayed in this folder until it was discovered by an employee in April.

"To our knowledge, only the employee who moved the file to the public folder inappropriately accessed the file, simply by moving it," Todd said in an email. "Her intent was to provide access to an epidemiologist within the department to analyze the data, but that epidemiologist never opened the file. So the personal information in the database was, to our knowledge, never inappropriately accessed."

An investigation was conducted upon discovery, but no actions were taken against any of the employees, including Pam Sylakowski, director of the Ryan White Program and the employee behind the incident. A new server was reportedly created with tighter security and the incident was used as a teaching moment.

Thunder Kellie Hampton, an HIV advocate with Street Works, tells the Tennessean that the breach will discourage many from being tested out of fear for their private information. "I think the gut reaction for many people when they find out about this is 'I don't want to get tested. I don't want my information out there,'" she explained.

Oivind HovlandThe first time New Hampshire State Rep. Sherman Packard (R–Rockingham) heard of the car-sharing startup Turo, it was from a lobbyist.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Packard says, has a "huge footprint in my community. So they called me up and said, 'Hey, let's be fair about this.'"

To the Enterprise lobbyists, being fair meant forcing Turo—which is basically Airbnb, but for your car—to pay a 9 percent tax, the same one the state charges on hotel rooms, meals, and other tourist expenses, including rental cars. (New Hampshire has no general sales tax.)

The appeal to fairness worked. In January, Packard introduced a bill in the state legislature that would tax and regulate businesses like Turo as if they were rental car companies. Enterprise and its lobbyists had won.

That may seem like a routine dispute between a state government and a disruptive new technology that doesn't easily fit in existing boxes for tax and regulatory purposes. But Packard's bill is just one small part of a national effort by traditional rental car companies to use their political clout against a newcomer that threatens the old business model, writes Reason's Eric Boehm.

Andy Abeyta/ZUMA Press/NewscomTransportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners cannot be held liable for abuse claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), a federal court ruled Wednesday.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a dismissal of a lawsuit filed against the TSA by Nadine Pellegrino and her husband. According to The Hill, Pellegrino was upset after she "was randomly selected for additional screening" at Philadelphia International Airport in July 2006.

As USA Today recounts, Pellegrino asked for a private screening, though she took issue with the way the officers treated her bags. When the officers were done searching her luggage, she took her larger bag and started to leave, but not without incident. According to USA Today:

The bag struck one of the TSA officers in the stomach, according to the officers. Pellegrino said an officer stood in her way as she tried to retrieve her smaller bag, and the bag hit him in the leg as she left, according to the officers.

Pellegrino was detained, and two TSA officers decided to press charges. Though she was acquitted in 2008, Pellegrino and her husband sued the TSA in 2009 for "false arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution," Reuters reports.

In a 2-1 ruling, the 3rd Circuit said TSA officers are immune to abuse claims from passengers like Pellegrino. The court reasoned that agency employees are not classified as "investigative or law enforcement officers" under the FTCA, which is the law that enables people to file claims against federal employees.

In his dissent, Judge Thomas Ambro argued that the FTCA's definition of "investigative or law enforcement officers" includes people with the "legal authority" to carry out searches looking for violations of the law. Ambro also noted that it will now be very difficult for victims of TSA abuse to get the justice they deserve. "By analogizing TSA searches to routine administrative inspections, my colleagues preclude victims of TSA abuses from obtaining any meaningful remedy for a variety of intentional tort claims," he wrote.

Writing for the majority, Judge Cheryl Ann Krause noted that the court was "sympathetic to the concerns" the ruling may raise, and recognized that "individuals harmed by the intentional torts" of TSA officers "will have very limited legal redress."

Pellegrino, who said she's reviewing the court's ruling, could take several different courses of action.

"If I were the plaintiffs, I'd get new counsel with a proven track record of winning cases at the Supreme Court and appeal this decision," Patrick Eddington, a policy analyst who studies civil liberties at the Cato Institute, told Reason. Eddington said Pellegrino and her husband could "make this an issue" in their local House race, which might put the ruling on Congress's radar.

"There's nothing to stop the House member representing the plaintiffs from filing impeachment articles against all involved TSA employees," Eddington says. "Just filing the impeachment resolution might be enough to make TSA give the implicated screeners the boot."

Sirens/Facebook"They are devoting law enforcement resources to sting operations for this?" Adult film star and locus of national scandal Stormy Daniels was arrested last night at Sirens, a strip club in Columbus, Ohio. The stop was part of a tour Daniels is taking across the country, which included a visit to D.C. Monday and Tuesday nights.

Attorney Michael Avenatti, who is representing Daniels in her lawsuit against Donald Trump, tweeted early Thursday morning that Daniels was arrested while "performing the same act she has performed across the nation at nearly a hundred strip clubs. This was a setup & politically motivated. It reeks of desperation. We will fight all bogus charges."

At the D.C. show I saw Monday night, Daniels got up close and personal with the audience, but in a clearly theatrical way. This seems to have continued in Columbus, where Daniels was arrested for allegedly allowing a customer to come in contact with her in a non-sexual manner, according to Avenatti on Twitter.

Ohio prohibits any touching—sexual or otherwise—between nude or semi-nude performers and members of the audience at "sexually oriented" establisments. According to the police report, Daniels, while "topless and wearing a G-string," touched an undercover police officer "in a specified anatomical area." Specifically, she is accused of putting "both hands on officers buttocks" and "then put her breast in officers face."

Columbus Police report

"Are you kidding me?" Avenatti tweeted early this morning. "They are devoting law enforcement resources to sting operations for this? There has to be higher priorities!"

Higher priorities for local cops than getting to take in naked ladies for a few hours and then assert their authority over the most famous of them? Avenatti can't be that naive.

Daniels was officiall charged with three misdemeanor counts of touching a patron at a sexually-oriented business. She's slated to be arraigned in the Franklin Municipal Court Friday morning. She will plead not guilty, according to Avenatti.

In a statement, Daniels announced that she would have to cancel her second scheduled night of Columbus performances. "I deeply apologize to my fans in Columbus," she said.

FREE MARKETS

Presidents have been trying unsuccessfully for years to get Germany and other rich NATO Nations to pay more toward their protection from Russia. They pay only a fraction of their cost. The U.S. pays tens of Billions of Dollars too much to subsidize Europe, and loses Big on Trade!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2018

Trump continues boorish and bizarre behavior at NATO summit. The president announced that NATO allies will increase spending, as he desires, but offered little in the way of details. French President Emmanuel Macron has since denied Trump's claim.

FREE MINDS

Kansas govenor censors campus art. The Kansas governor and secretary of state are demanding that the University of Kansas remove a work of art from the school's "Pledge of Allegiance" exhibit, part of a nationwide public art series from New York nonprofit Creative Time. The offending flag, Josephine Meckseper's "Untitled (Flag 2)," is "a collage of an American flag and one of my dripped paintings which resembles the contours of the United States," said Meckseper.

Here's a good roundup from FIRE of art censorship on college campuses.

QUICK HITS

Gawker auction today. This will be interesting. https://t.co/ZpMCLfBXzT

— Sharon Weinberger (@weinbergersa) July 12, 2018

• The feds are reopening an investigation into the murder of Emmett Till.
• Is the demise of liberalism overhyped? "Scholars and statesmen have been declaring liberalism dead or in deep crisis for at least a century and a half. A review of the many deaths of liberalism might have something to teach us about what, in fact, is happening in the world today."
• John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John's, has resigned as chairman of the company. Papa John's stock fell nearly 6 percent on Wednesday, and Major League Baseball suspended a long-running Papa John's promotion campaign, after it was reported that Schnattner used the word "niggers" during a May conference call. He allegedly noted that "Colonel Sanders called blacks niggers" but didn't face a backlash like the one Schnattner experienced for comments made about the NFL.
• Twitter is plotting another bot purge.
• Comcast and Fox are in a bidding war over the U.K.'s Sky News.
• TSA officials "have sovereign immunity while working in their official functions as screeners and security agents under the Federal Tort Claims Act," according to a new ruling from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
• England is out of the World Cup after losing 2-1 to Croatia last night.
• RIP James Wells.
• Abolishing ICE isn't a very popular idea (yet).

Imagine China/NewscomPresident Donald Trump doubled down on his trade war Wednesday and members of Congress finally took their first tiny steps toward containing the economic damage.

Markets fell Wednesday as the White House announced a new round of 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese products, a move that will force American consumers and businesses to pay higher taxes for imported goods including refrigerators, cotton, electronics, and fish. The Trump administration said the tariffs were a response to China's decision last week to place tariffs on $34 billion worth of American exports, which was itself a retaliatory move aimed to strike back at the Trump administration for placing a 25 percent tariff on the same amount of Chinese goods on July 6.

As the trade war between the world's two largest economies escalates, we still don't know what the White House hopes to gain from the confrontation. American and Chinese trade officials told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that there are no negotiations scheduled between Washington and Beijing.

While the administration says the trade barriers will force China to stop stealing American intellectual property, it appears more likely that non-Chinese businesses will bear the brunt of the tariffs, according to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Economists say the tariffs are unlikely to force China to change its trade practices, though they could succeed in doing significant damage to the economies of both nations.

The new set of tariffs will be the subject of hearings in late August, and will not take effect until after those hearings have concluded.

Meanwhile, the Senate voted to include a provision in the Farm Bill limiting the president's power to lay tariffs for national security reasons. An amendment co-sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker (R–Tenn.), Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.), and Pat Toomey (R–Pa.) would require congressional approval before the president could impose tariffs under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962—the authority that Trump has invoked to impose steel and aluminum tariffs, and which he has threatened to use to slap new tariffs on imported cars and car parts.

"This Section 232 provision is being misused," Toomey said. The delegation of those powers to the presidency were meant to ensure that America's military could obtain materials necessary for fighting a war, he explained, but Trump has seized on that authoity "as a way to impose tariffs on some of our closest allies, closest friends, and most important trading partners."

The amendment passed 88-12, with all "nay" votes coming from Republicans.

The nonbinding vote is, for now, mostly meaningless. Still, the bipartisan support for limiting the president's ability to abuse the Section 232 tariff authority is the first sign that Republicans in Congress might be willing to stand up to Trump as he continues escalating an unnecessary trade war.

In a statement, Corker said he believed support for the proposal would grow as "American businesses and consumers begin to feel the damaging effects of incoherent trade policy."

That might already be happening. Wednesday's vote could also signal a shift on trade within the Senate's GOP leadership: when Corker tried to offer a similar amendment back in June, his colleagues prevented him from doing so.

In the last month, Trump has followed through on the threat to impose tariffs on Chinese imports (those tariffs were not issued under Section 232, however, and would not be subject to the congressional oversight included in Corker's proposal, which targets the broader steel and aluminum tariffs that took effect in early June). In response to the White House's bellicose trade policies, several American businesses—including famous motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson—have announced plans to close, move, or eliminate jobs

"This vote represents the strongest and most straightforward message this chamber has delivered against the administration's abuse of trade authority," said Flake in a statement. "Imposing tariffs on products from allies that pose no threat to our national security is just plain wrong."

Gage Skidmore / Flickr.comWhen it comes to trade, we should take President Trump at his word, writes Veronique de Rugy. This is one policy area where he's been remarkably consistent over the years. As we embark on a trade war, let's put this question to rest. Deep down, President Trump is not a free trader. In face, she writes, nothing in what the president has ever said suggests that he's anything but a diehard mercantilist.

mathisworks/iStockWhen Sam Cygler started AllCar Rent-A-Car in 1979, New York City was home to over 100 mom-and-pop rental car companies. Cygler, who at the time was running an auto repair shop in Brooklyn far from the subway, noticed that his customers often needed loaner vehicles to get to work. So he bought a couple of cars and put them up for rent. The idea took off, eclipsing the repair business altogether. AllCar Rent-A-Car grew to have 12 locations in the Big Apple with a fleet of about 2,000 vehicles.

Chains like Hertz and Avis, with their national reach and corporate partnerships, have long dominated the car rental industry. But New York's low rate of vehicle ownership provided plenty of market opportunities for local operators. By constantly "nipping at the heels of the majors," says Sharon Faulkner, executive director of the American Car Rental Association (ACRA), the independents helped keep overall rates down.

Then, a decade after Cygler got started in the industry, a series of punitive state laws started wiping out New York's mom-and-pop rental car shops, writes Jim Epstein.

Bowie15 / Dreamstime.comUgandan President Yoweri Museveni says the mouth is for eating, not sex. Museveni, who has overseen a crackdown on LGBTI people, says "outsiders" are trying to corrupt Ugandans by promoting oral sex.

The press wants access to footage that might show what Broward County sheriff's deputies were doing during the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School earlier this year. Broward County officials would rather not give it to them. After a judge ruled in the media's favor, the school board and the state attorney appealed the ruling. Yesterday the Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach, Florida, heard oral arguments in the case.

The battle began when the sheriff confirmed that the school's resource officer, Scot Peterson, did not go inside of the school to confront the shooter. (Peterson eventually resigned from the department with a $8,702.35-a-month lifetime pension.) Then members of the Coral Springs Police Department claimed to CNN that three more sheriff's deputies remained outside the school and hidden behind their vehicles when they arrived on the scene. It was not clear whether the shooter was in fact still in the building when the officers arrived, but the Coral Springs cops were upset either way that the deputies did not join them inside the school.

Hoping to explain the deputies' behavior, several media organizations sued for the exterior footage. Officials resisted the request, claiming that releasing the footage could facilitate future attacks by revealing blind spots in the school's surveillance system.

Attorney Dana McElroy, representing the plaintiffs, points out that Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie has promised to improve school surveillance. So even if someone somewhere really is plotting a second attack, whatever info he might glean from the video would be outdated.

"The footage is the only objective evidence of what occurred and when," Barbara Petersen of the First Amendment Foundation, which has joined the media side of the lawsuit, tells the Miami Herald. "The whole purpose of our open government laws is oversight and accountability. Access to the video footage allows us to hold those accountable who may not have done their jobs."

Though the sheriff's office fought the initial lawsuit, it did not join the school board and the state attorney in the appeal. Spokesperson Veda Coleman-Wright has said the office has no objection to publicizing the footage.

New mom Cardi B, star of the cover story in the first issue of the redesigned Rolling Stone, doesn't generally worry about old-fashioned bourgeois respectability. As described in that story, "she's an ex-stripper with butt injections who's after your money; she's a possible former member of the Bloods...and says today that she still carries a knife."

She's apparently willing to step outside ideological respectability as well. Cardi B, the first female solo hip hop artist to earn two number-one Billboard singles, says this to reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis:

Rolling Stone

"God forbid, the government tries to take us over, and we can't defend ourselves because we don't have no weapons." She adds, "How do you think American colonizers went to Africa and it was so easy for them to get those people? Because they had guns. No matter what weapon you have, you can't beat a gun." She shrugs. "They have weapons like nuclear bombs that we don't have. So imagine us not having any weapons at all."

Even many defenders of gun rights find it less than politically expedient to emphasize the Second Amendment's value in resisting government's depredations, though it was one of the major reasons we have it in the first place. Still, Vox gave space to gun rights scholar David Kopel back in 2016 to preemptively explain why Cardi B isn't being as outrageous as some might think.

As Kopel explains, "The Second Amendment does not create a right of revolution against tyranny. That inherent right is universal." He points out that even the United Nations acknowledges this in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But by barring the government from disarming the people, the Second Amendment does "reinforce the rule of law and anti-tyranny structure of the US Constitution." And the "well-regulated militia" described in it was imagined as one of those bulwarks:

Explaining the proposed Second Amendment, Madison's ally Tench Coxe, a delegate to the Continental Congress for Pennsylvania, wrote: "As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." Madison thanked Coxe for the newspaper essay.

More recently, Kopel notes, even as proper a liberal as future vice president Hubert Humphrey wrote in 1960: "Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible." One of the tyrannies Humphrey recognized was the "local tyranny in the Jim Crow system of the South."

Cardi B throwing her hands up over government's nuclear bombs brings to mind an old gag from the Church of the SubGenius: While the Powers That Be possess hundreds of nuclear weapons, the SubGenii have only three. Still, may Cardi imbue her family with the spirit of that declaration—that it's never a good idea to cede all authority to powerful people who claim rights that they deny you.

Cardi B previously spoke out against taxation as well and inspired this Reason TV video from Remy:

Glenn C. Silva/Pool/ZUMA Press/NewscomMichelle Carter was convicted last year of involuntary manslaughter because she told her boyfriend to kill himself. She has now appealed this decision on grounds that her conduct was permissible under the First Amendment.

"Carter's words encouraging Roy's suicide, however distasteful to this Court, were protected speech," wrote her lawyers in a recently filed brief. "A criminal law that penalizes a person who encourages another person to commit suicide cannot survive strict scrutiny."

Carter wasn't present for the suicide of her boyfriend, Roy Conrad. But she communicated with him on the phone shortly before he attached a water pump to his car and poisoned himself with carbon monoxide. Carter had previously urged Conrad to go through with it, though her lawyers argue it was never definitively established that she egged him on at the very end, when he was actually taking the steps to kill himself.

She later told a friend that Conrad's suicide was her fault, though it's possible she just said that for attention. She is clearly a very disturbed person, as was Conrad.

But is she a killer? As I wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times a year ago, her conviction runs afoul of the First Amendment:

Ms. Carter's conduct was morally reprehensible. But—at least until today's ruling—it was clearly legal. While some states criminalize the act of convincing people to commit suicide, Massachusetts has no such law. Moreover, speech that is reckless, hateful and ill-willed nevertheless enjoys First Amendment protection. While the Supreme Court has carved out narrowly tailored exceptions for literal threats of violence and incitement to lawless action, telling someone they should kill themselves is not the same as holding a gun to their head and pulling the trigger. Nor is it akin to threatening to kill the president, which is specifically prohibited by law—and in any case, only considered a felony if done "knowingly and willfully." (Merely expressing hope that the president dies isn't enough.)...

For decades, efforts have been underway to criminalize every obnoxious or problematic social interaction between K-12 kids in American schools. Hardly a week passes without a national news story about teenagers who were arrested on child pornography charges—and face unfathomably long prison sentences—because they had inappropriate pictures of classmates (or even themselves) on their phones. In Iowa, in June 2016, authorities tried to brand a 14-year-old girl as a sex offender for Snapchatting while wearing a sports bra and boy shorts. The following month, Minnesota police officers busted a 17-year-old for swapping consensual sexts with his 16-year-old girlfriend. Such matters should be handled by parents and teachers, not the cops. The same is true for the various issues that plagued Ms. Carter and Mr. Roy.

Carter is despicable. But defending free speech means protecting even vile expression from prosecution.

Both before and after he became president, Donald Trump has talked about reducing drug prices, though he has rarely offered much in the way of details about how he'd do it. This week he singled out Pfizer, the massive pharmaceutical conglomerate, for a little Twitter abuse:

Pfizer & others should be ashamed that they have raised drug prices for no reason. They are merely taking advantage of the poor & others unable to defend themselves, while at the same time giving bargain basement prices to other countries in Europe & elsewhere. We will respond!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2018

Soon after the tweet, Pfizer's stock price took a minor hit. After a brief phone call with the president yesterday, the CEO bowed to political pressure and rolled back many of the company's price increases.

It might be tempting to praise Trump for that, but presidential bullying really isn't the best solution to the problem of costly medications.

IGOR STEVANOVIC / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/NewscomOne big reason for those prices is patents, says Gilbert Berdine, associate professor of internal medicine at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and a faculty affiliate with Texas Tech's Free Market Institute.

"The patent monopoly interferes with the market mechanism against raising prices however high you want," Berdine says. Freed from competition, drug companies can at least partially monopolize domestic markets and charge disproportionately high prices.

Supporters of patents argue that they give companies an incentive to produce new drugs and treatments. It's true that loosening drug patent laws might reduce the flow of new drugs to the market, but that's not a one-way street. Current patent laws keep drug prices high and take away resources from other productive sectors of the economy.

Public funding of precription drugs is another reason for rising drug prices. Medicare and Medicaid boost demand for these medicines and pay for them out of the government's deep coffers. "Taxpayers who are going to pay taxes," Berdine says, "and then Medicare or Medicaid will disperse their tax money to Pfizer."

And then there's an idea from a suprising source, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Not ordinarily an advocate for laissez faire, the Vermont socialist has called for freer trade in prescription drugs. In response to Trump's tweet attacking Pfizer, Sanders wrote:

If you are serious about this issue, tell your Republican pals in Congress to pass bills requiring Medicare to negotiate drug prices and enabling the importation of safe, low-cost drugs from Canada and other countries. (2/2)

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 9, 2018

Requiring Medicare to negotiate drug prices is more debatable, but opening the American medication market to foreign competition could bring down prices 35 to 55 percent, according to some estimates. Trump was right about that part: Other countries are getting "bargain basement prices," at least in comparison to America. Bringing in drugs from those countries would give pharma companies a reason to reduce their prices—or at the very least to stop subsidizing medicines abroad with American consumers' dollars.

Downsizing patent protections and reforming entitlement programs would do much more to achieve a long-term, sustainable decreases in medical costs than clumsy programs and presidential tweets ever could.