Archives: Manny Klausner's Greatest Hits
"As support for gay marriage increases in America, it becomes increasingly unlikely that gay couples will encounter serious difficulty in finding a florist or baker for their weddings. When one vendor turns a couple away, there are numerous others lining up to win that couple's business. The economic harm falls squarely on the person with the moral qualms. There's no doubt that emotional harm can result from being turned away from a business establishment because of who you love. But surely there is also harm when an American is forced to participate in an event that is contrary to his or her deeply held beliefs. A voluntary, market-oriented approach is the best way to reconcile the competing interests in such situations….Reason has favored gay civil unions since the 1970s, long before they received widespread support. But we've always insisted that the law respect views held by minorities, and as libertarians we oppose using coercion to compel conformity in the private sector." "Debate: Bakers Should Not Be Forced To Produce Cakes for Same-Sex Weddings"
"Although it is commonly asserted that public schools are necessary to educate the poor, the term 'twelve-year sentence' has been aptly used to describe the public schools as analogous to a huge prison system which incarcerates the young. Perhaps the strongest case to maintain the present system is the ironic argument that the poor intentionally should be impeded and repressed by inferior schooling. It is hard to visualize a system of schooling that would function any worse for the poor than the system we have today. We urge radical educational reform as a top priority for those interested in personal liberty and in the goal of an educated populace. The program we advocate calls for the complete removal of government from the classroom." "Get Big Brother Out of the Schools"
"What does REASON propose? We're strong advocates of allowing New York City to default. The consequences of a default would be positive and healthy. Instead of a bailout, which would benefit primarily the banks and wealthy investors who chose to buy New York City bonds—at a high yield—we believe it just for those who voluntarily put themselves in the position of lending money to the government to bear the risk of a default. Since these banks and investors never offered to forego their profits when times were good, we're hard put to see anything fair about them insisting that we now share their losses. Whether or not the city defaults, times are going to be rough in New York for awhile. But sooner or later, the city will be forced to change its ways and abandon its big-spending, high-taxing style. The financial crisis in New York was inevitable, and it presents an historic opportunity for reform for the aging metropolis: default." "Default"
"In viewing the recently disclosed willingness of the Nixon administration to embrace extreme measures in the name of national security, it is pertinent to contrast the widespread acquiescence of the public towards encroachments on personal freedom which have regularly been taken by government in the campaign against drugs. The 'Watergate mentality' has its genesis in the imperial attitude that government knows what is best for its citizens and may use any means to accomplish its ends. The President's 1970 'intelligence operations' plan, devised for Nixon by Tom Huston, was not unique in providing for illegal entry and bugging against political dissenters. Authorization for surreptitious entry is expressly contained in the no-knock sections of the Drug Control Act of 1970." "Breaking and Entering as a Way of Life"
"President Nixon's executive order providing for stabilization of prices, rents and wages is an act of supreme defiance against the free market and the freedom of Americans. Nixon's action was born of desperation, in the face of extreme pressure both domestically and internationally. His game plan to reduce inflation and end the recession was not on target, and Nixon was faced with rising unemployment together with rising prices in a dramatic practical refutation of the monetary and fiscal economic policies he sought to implement." "The Wage Price Freeze"
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Politico
2 hours ago
- Politico
'You see your child dying before your eyes, and you can't do anything'
The footage of the Israeli hostages has stirred condemnation. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was 'very shocked' by the videos and 'this unacceptable violation of human dignity,' U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said. The videos were released as international experts say a 'worst-case scenario of famine' is unfolding in the coastal territory, where Israel's offensive has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and made it nearly impossible to safely deliver food and other humanitarian aid. Images of starving Palestinians have drawn international condemnation of Israel's conduct. Families of the hostages fear that the lack of food threatens the remaining hostages, too. Fewer than half of the 50 remaining hostages are believed to be alive, the rest either killed during the October 2023 attack or while in captivity. Netanyahu said he was shocked by the images of the two hostages and met with the Red Cross to ask that it bring hostages food and medicine — access that the organization says has never been granted by Hamas. 'When I see these, I understand exactly what Hamas wants,' Netanyahu said on Sunday. 'They do not want a deal. They want to break us using these videos of horror.' The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was 'appalled by the harrowing videos' and called for access to the hostages. Hamas said it is ready to respond 'positively' to Red Cross requests to deliver food to hostages, if humanitarian corridors for aid deliveries are opened in a 'regular and permanent manner' in Gaza. It denied starving the hostages, saying they suffer from the same hunger as ordinary Palestinians. Braslavski said that in the video of his son, the captors appear to be well-fed. 'This hunger is on purpose, you can see that,' he said. 'It's not because we're not letting aid go in.' Israel has requested an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on the hostages, which will take place on Tuesday. Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said he will travel to New York for the meeting. Israel did not allow any food, medicine or other goods to enter Gaza from early March until mid-May, when it eased its blockade on the territory of some 2 million Palestinians. The United Nations says nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid since then, mostly by Israeli forces as crowds head toward aid sites run by an Israeli-backed American contractor. The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots. Gaza's Health Ministry said Monday that five more Palestinian adults died of malnutrition-related causes in the past 24 hours. A total of 87 adults have died of malnutrition-related issues since the ministry started counting such deaths in late June, it said. Ninety-three children have died of malnutrition-related causes since the war in Gaza began, the ministry said. Israel's government has denied that people are starving to death in Gaza. About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the Hamas attack on southern Israel that sparked the war, and another 251 were abducted. Israel's retaliatory military offensive has killed more than 60,900 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. The ministry, which doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count but says women and children make up over half the dead, is part of the Hamas government and staffed by medical professionals. The U.N. and other independent experts view its figures as the most reliable casualty count. Israel has disputed the figures but hasn't provided its own.
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
California cannabis firm raided by ICE unveils big labor changes to avoid a repeat
One of California's largest legal cannabis companies announced Monday that it would radically revamp its labor practices in the wake of a massive immigration raid at two company facilities last month. The raid led to the death of one worker and the detention of more than 360 people, including, according to government officials, 14 minors. Glass House Brands announced it had 'terminated its relationship' with the two farm labor contractors who had provided workers to the cannabis green house operations in Camarillo and Carpinteria. It also announced that it has 'made significant changes to labor practices that are above and beyond legal requirements.' Those include hiring experts to scrutinize workers' documents as well as hiring the consulting firm Guidepost Services to advise the company on best practices for determining employment eligibility. The firm is led by Julie Myers Wood, a former ICE director under President George W. Bush. The company also said it has signed a new 'labor peace' agreement with the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters. Glass House officials declined to comment publicly beyond what was in a press release, but a source close to the company said that officials wanted to 'make sure we never have a situation that we had on July 10. We can't have this ever happen again.' On that day, federal agents in masks and riot gear stormed across Glass House operations in Ventura and Santa Barbara county in the state's largest ICE workplace raid in recent memory. Agents chased panicked workers through vast green houses and deployed tear gas and less-than-lethal projectiles at protesters and employees. One worker, Jaime Alanis Garcia, died after he fell three stories from the roof of a greenhouse trying to evade capture. Others were bloodied from shards of glass broken or hid for hours on the roofs or beneath the leaves and plastic shrouding. More than 360 people — a mixture of workers, family members of workers, protesters and passerby—were ultimately detained, including at least two American citizens including a U.S. Army veteran. In the wake of the raid, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Glass House had been targeted because 'we knew, specifically from casework we had built for weeks and weeks and weeks, that there was children there that could be trafficked, being exploited, that there was individuals there involved in criminal activity.' To date, neither Homeland Security nor the U.S. Department of Justice have announced any legal action regardlng the alleged trafficking and exploitation of juveniles. In its press release, Glass House said that just nine of its direct employees were detained; all others picked up were either employees of its labor contractors or were 'unassociated with the company.' With regards to the government's contention that it had found children working in cannabis, the company said: 'while the identities of the alleged minors have not been disclosed, the company has been able to determine that, if those reports are true, none of them were Glass House employees.' California labor law allows children as young as 12 to work in agriculture, but workers must be 21 to work in cannabis. The raid devastated Glass House and its workforce. Numerous workers were detained or disappeared, terrified to return. Those that remained were so distraught the company called in grief counselors. Across the wider world of legal cannabis, people were also shaken. Glass House, which is backed by wealthy investors and presents a sleek corporate image in the wild world of cannabis in California, has long been known as the 'Walmart of Weed.' Many in California's cannabis industry feared the raid on Glass House was a signal that the federal government's ceasefire against cannabis —which is legal in California but still not federally—had come to an end. In the wake of the raid, the United Farm Workers and other organizations warned farm laborers who were not citizens — even those with legal status — to avoid working in cannabis because 'cannabis remains criminalized under federal law.' In its statement, Glass House said the search warrant served on the company the day of the raid was seeking 'evidence of possible immigration violations.' A source close to the company said officials have had no further contact with the federal government since the raid. Some farm labor advocates were unimpressed by the company's announcement of revamped labor practices, saying it was farm workers who would pay the price. Lucas Zucker, co-executive director of Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, or CAUSE, said Glass House was using farm labor contractors to avoid responsibility 'while their workers are torn away from their families in handcuffs.' 'This shows the double standards of our legal system, where corporations can profit from the immigrant workers their businesses depend on, yet wipe their hands clean when it becomes inconvenient,' he said. He added that 'many farmworkers are still struggling to navigate this mess of labor contractors and have not been paid for the work they did at Glass House.' A source close to Glass House said company officials want to make sure everyone who was at work on the day of the raid receives all the wages they are owed. Company officials authorized all workers to be paid through 11:30 pm on the day of the raid, because workers who had finished their shifts couldn't get out because immigration agents were blocking the doors. The source said the farm labor contractors had been paid and should have released wages to all the workers. 'We don't want anyone to be shorted,' the source said.
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
Don't whine about federal budget cuts, lefties — put your money where your mouths are
Before politics overwhelmed the word, the primary meaning of 'liberal' was 'generous.' President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress have given political liberals a chance to take that meaning back — by opening their wallets to show just how much they value NPR, PBS and other programs defunded by the GOP. There's no shortage of funds on the left. Laurene Powell Jobs, the mega-rich backer of The Atlantic, has a net worth estimated at above $11 billion a year ago and believed to be even higher today. George Soros, at 94, has a fortune in the vicinity of $7 billion, with billions more in his Open Society Foundation. Bill Gates has about $115 billion, his ex-wife Melinda around $30 billion. Any one of these left-leaning billionaires could single-handedly make up the $535 million that NPR, PBS and local stations were getting annually from taxpayers before Congress zeroed out the subsidies. If half a billion a year is too much for one zillionaire, a half-dozen of them — or more — could share the burden without feeling a pinch. But are wealthy liberals willing to put their money where their mouths are? Citing Michal Heiplik, president of the public-media analytics organization Contributor Development Partnership, The New York Times reports PBS and NPR have reaped a windfall from small-dollar donors in recent months, with 120,000 new supporters stepping up to give some $20 million. Overall, donations are running $70 million above last year. And what works for PBS and NPR will work for humanitarian programs formerly funded as part of USAID as well, though the cuts to be made up there are bigger: Congress has eliminated about $8 billion in funding for USAID and other foreign-aid efforts, according to the Cato Institute. That's a lot of money — but not a dime of it has disappeared. After all, where does government get its money in the first place? Washington could only give to foreign aid or nonprofit broadcasting what it took — or borrowed — from the American people in the first place. When government doesn't spend money, society doesn't lose any of its resources: They just stay with the taxpayers, and the middlemen in government don't get their cut. That, for liberals, is a big part of the problem. The Democratic Party depends on shunting everyone's tax (or debt) dollars into the hands of bureaucrats, one of the party's most loyal constituencies. It's not just NPR and PBS that have been publicly financed — it's also liberalism as a movement. Bureaucrats in government, in government-supported nonprofits and other less-than-fully-private parts of the 'private sector' may work for organizations that are officially nonpartisan, but their campaign-giving heavily favors Democrats. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! Their employers may be nonpartisan in theory, but the employees have a strong partisan tilt, and personnel is policy: Any organization is only a collection of people. USAID and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were both born in the Kennedy-Johnson years, at mid-century liberalism's zenith. Liberalism had been dominant for so long — starting with the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration — that liberal intellectuals and policymakers came to think of themselves as more than just one side of American politics. They claimed to speak for everyone, as if a single party could define what it meant to be nonpartisan. But even then, the conservative movement was taking off while the Democrats were being dragged to the left by young radicals who wanted 'acid, amnesty and abortion.' Start your day with all you need to know Morning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters The agencies and programs the Republican Congress has defunded were never as neutral as they claimed to be. And as liberals, under the influence of the left, adopted a more adversarial attitude toward America's past and present, it only became more obvious that the agencies and public-private partnerships they ran represented only one side of any argument. But this doesn't mean liberals can't continue to fund everything they funded before. Now they just have to do it with their own money. Some centrist liberals rightly see that as an opportunity, not an imposition: When I told a friend at a government-supported think tank I was sorry for the professional upheaval he was going though, he noted that his institution had in fact been coasting by ever since the end of the Cold War. He said it needed a renewed sense of mission, and having to raise private funds would give it the impetus it had been lacking for decades. Republicans aren't worried NPR or PBS will move further left if they court progressive billionaires, considering what little presence conservatives had on those networks already. But if they're smart, the broadcasters will see the loss of government funding as a spur to court a wider spectrum of support — and to put to the test what it means to be nonpartisan. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.
