The Peruta vs. County of San Diego case was a big win for the Second Amendment that happened in, of all places, the well-known liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Here the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson explains the decision and its possible implications.

California law forbids the carrying of firearms in public places without a license and provides that the issuance of such a license requires “good cause.” San Diego County, as part of its implementation of that law, has set a number of restrictive policies on what it will consider good cause, which must be exceptional circumstances (“distinguish[ed]… from the mainstream”), and it specifies that concern for “one’s personal safety alone is not considered good cause.”

That’s a policy in considerable tension with the language of the Second Amendment, which protects individuals’ right not only to “keep” arms, but also to “bear” them. What does the verb “bear” mean in this context?  That has given rise to considerable dispute, and some federal courts, such as the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, appear to believe that it provides very little protection for individuals’ right to possess guns outside the home. In a case last year by the name of Drake v. Filko – now the subject of a certiorari petition to the Supreme Court, as Ilya explained yesterday – the Third Circuit upheld a regulatory regime under which “virtually nobody in New Jersey can use a handgun to defend themselves outside their home.”

Today the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals stepped forward to defend the individual rights that the Third Circuit would not. It ruled that “San Diego County’s ‘good cause’ permitting requirement impermissibly infringes on the Second Amendment right to bear arms in lawful self-defense.” It emphasized, as the Supreme Court had done in Heller, that the individual right in question is compatible with considerable regulation of such matters as the carrying of firearms in sensitive places (government buildings), by persons of questionable capacity, and so forth.

The $10.10 minimum wage offered up by HRM Obama will cost 500,000 jobs, give or take, according to the non-partisan CBO. The real toll is probably much higher since HRM continues to remove all incentives to work or get off the couch to look for work. Check out here what real reform looks like coming out of the other welfare states. At some point the money runs out. Cato friend Michael Tanner writes:

Of course, European welfare states were larger to begin with, but the Telegraph’s report is reflective of an important trend. While the Obama administration presses forward with efforts to combat “income inequality” by expanding the American welfare state, the European nations and other industrialized welfare states are moving in the other direction.

A few examples:

The Netherlands: Just 42 percent of U.S. welfare recipients are engaged in even broadly defined work activities (including job training, college, or job searches), and Republican attempts to restore work requirements to the food-stamp program have been met with a storm of resistance. Meanwhile, the Obama administration touts the idea that Obamacare will enable people to quit their jobs while having their health care subsidized by taxpayers.

The Dutch, on the other hand, have announced a massive reform of their welfare system, designed to put a new emphasis on work. For example, welfare applicants will now be required to prove that they spent at least four weeks actively searching for a job before they become eligible for any assistance. And once they begin to receive benefits, they will have to either work or perform volunteer community service. Dutch welfare recipients would be required to take available jobs even if they had to move or commute up to three hours per day.

Other reforms would reduce benefits by treating families as a single unit, rather than as separate individuals. For instance, a mother with two children would receive a single payment rather than three separate payments. The combined payment would be less than the total of three separate ones, based on the assumption of “shared expense.” According to the Dutch government, the reforms will ensure that welfare is seen as “a safety net, rather than a right.”

Here Cato’s Michael Tanner explains how in the United States welfare spending has grown faster than in any country in Europe except Ireland, Spain and Portugal. The welfare-centric  Obama administration could learn a lot from Australia.

How bad have things become? The British newspaper the Telegraph recently looked at the growth in welfare spending in industrialized nations and found that such spending (including health-care and pension programs) had grown faster in the United States since 2000 than in any country in Europe except Ireland, Spain, and Portugal.

…

Australia: Disability benefits have exploded in the United States over the past decade. Since 2000, the number of people receiving Social Security Disability has increased by almost 60 percent, while spending has increased by 140 percent.

The Abbott government in Australia is planning to introduce extensive reforms, including time limits for some disability payments and greater efforts to move recipients into jobs where possible. Other recipients will be shifted from disability payments to other programs, which frequently pay lower benefits.

Australia is also another country that is reforming its unemployment system, planning, for example, to end provisions that allow unemployed workers to decline a job that is more than 90 minutes from their home. And Australia will strengthen work requirements for other welfare programs as well.

That is, in fact, a common thread among these multinational reforms: the primacy of work as an alternative to welfare. As Australia’s Social Services Secretary Kevin Andrews puts it, “Work is the best form of welfare.”

Read more here.

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In House of Cards, Frank and Claire Underwood are pretty rotten individuals.Here at National Review, Betsy Woodruff tries to explain the irony that is House of Cards.

The dark forces behind House of Cards hate us. They are contemptuous, vengeful, and pre-meditating. They view us with scorn. They want us to suffer.

But the evil doesn’t come in the form of political scandal or backstabbing. Instead it’s something commentators think is revolutionary and fans find fascinating — the show’s all-at-once, binge-viewing release schedule.

“Human beings like control,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos told The New Republic in a December article about the company’s on-demand series release pattern, in which the entire season is put out at once, for viewers to watch on their own schedules. “To make all of America do the same thing at the same time is enormously inefficient, ridiculously expensive, and most of the time, not a very satisfying experience.”

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Boston Bruin’s star goalie Tuukka Rask, playing for Finland, helped to shutdown mighty Russia in the quarterfinal round of men’s ice hockey. The huge win should wipe the smirk off of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face. Things aren’t exactly turning out as planned. His Winter Olympics are the most expensive in history, his hockey team is out, and meanwhile Ukraine is burning at his doorstep. The Wall Street Journal details the Russians’ disappointment here.

Appearing as the highest-profile home team in the most expensive Olympics in history, Russia’s men’s hockey team seemed to carry the insecurities of an entire nation on its shoulders. The front page of daily Sport Express shouted on Wednesday: “Do We Have a Team? We’ll Find Out Today.”

To critical Russian hockey fans, the answer turned out to be no. Wednesday’s loss is the second time in a row that Team Russia, heirs to a Soviet Union hockey dynasty that won gold in seven of the nine Winter Olympics from 1956 to 1988, has exited the tournament in the quarterfinals.

In a postgame news conference, Russian head coach Zinetula Bilyaletdinov parried intense questions from his countrymen, who peppered him with queries such as, “Is this a catastrophe?”

“This has certainly been an unsuccessful appearance,” Bilyaletdinov responded. “Call it what you will.”

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Talking with NPR, Campbell Harvey, a financial economist at Duke University, contends that Bitcoin is 10 times more volatile than the changes in the price of gold and 20 times more volatile than holding U.S. dollars.

But just as the fluctuation can take you from rags to riches, bitcoin transactions can also go downhill for merchants. The value of the digital currency fell in the first week of February from a steady $850 to $700, according to CoinDesk, which tracks current bitcoin prices. Currently, the value hovers around the low- to mid-$600s.

“As a store of value, Bitcoin is very unreliable today,” [Campbell] Harvey says. “It is 10 times more volatile than the changes in the price of gold. It is 20 times more volatile than holding U.S. dollars.”

That’s why some food merchants, like [Giuseppe] Lanzone and his brother, Mario, have opted to cash in their bitcoins right after they make a sale.

The future of the 5-year-old bitcoin is still uncertain. Millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoins were seized from the infamous bust of Silk Road, a shadowy illicit online marketplace, and bitcoin prices have taken a nosedive in the past months. Just last week, a glitch in Mt. Gox, the leading bitcoin exchange site, made prices drop once again.

 

In Johnny Winter’s 70th year, he’s still going strong. The Wall Street Journal details Johnny’s rise to fame here, and introduces his new box set “True to the Blues: The Johnny Winter Story.”

In December 1968, guitarist Johnny Winter and his manager Steve Paul went to New York’s Fillmore East to hear blues-rockers Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. Mr. Winter was staying with Mr. Paul, who ran a club in the city and had brought him up from Houston. Backstage, Mr. Paul nudged Mr. Winter to ask Mr. Bloomfield if he could sit in. What followed changed Mr. Winter’s career and influenced several generations of blues-rock guitarists.

“I had already known Mike from Chicago, and he said yeah, I could come on,” said Mr. Winter, who turns 70 on Sunday and whose four-CD box “True to the Blues: The Johnny Winter Story” (Sony) is due Tuesday. “After Mike introduced me, I came out and we played B.B. King’s ‘It’s My Own Fault.’ It was my solo shot and I went at it, but I had no idea who was out there.”

In the audience that night was an impressed friend of Clive Davis —then president of Columbia Records—who told Mr. Davis about Mr. Winter. Anticipating the shift from rock singles to albums, Mr. Davis beat out RCA and Atlantic and signed Mr. Winter in February 1969 to a deal that paid $50,000 an album for six albums over three years with an option for four more—with each of Mr. Winter’s albums for the label eventually selling nearly 400,000 copies.

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The media, in this case the neocon media, will always bend an event to its own purposes. The way events like the Ukrainian uprisings are reported in the media are always much less complicated than the facts on the ground. When this editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, I asked Chris Preble, Cato Institute Senior Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, for comments. There’s no one better to explain than Chris, and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with me on the WSJ editorial and the situation in Ukraine.

Not terribly surprising that the WSJ thinks Obama has it wrong, that the US must lead, etc. I’m not convinced that the US has much influence here, even had we tried to wield it three or four months ago.

This from the WSJ that is a tad misleading:

Despite a truce late Wednesday, that transition will be much harder now that Mr. Yanukovych’s enforcers have cracked down on the opposition protesters in Kiev and at least 25 people have been killed. The violence will deepen the polarization between the government forces that are allied with Mr. Putin and the Ukrainians who want closer ties to the democracies and prosperity of Western Europe.

The implication here is that there are heroic Ukrainians who love freedom and Europe and the West, on one side, and craven Ukrainian officials who are really just Putin puppets on the other side.

The reality is a lot more complicated. Much as we might wish it otherwise, some, probably many, Ukrainians, especially those living in the eastern part (and speak Russian, and were once part of Russia), lean Russian. Yanukovych appeals to this group, but enrages the western-leaning Ukrainians. Hence the recent protests, but also the general chaos of Ukrainian politics since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Thus, attempting to pull Ukraine into the Western orbit, as the WSJ would have us do, may actually succeed in tearing the place apart. I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea, per se, but I think the implementation is likely to be a lot messier than this editorial implies.

Best,
Chris

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