NY Times:
An abandoned recreational vehicle was the first clue. In this hamlet two hours north of San Francisco and barely a mile from the largest natural freshwater lake in the state, the trailer sat on a hill, hidden from the main drag. Behind it rose a flimsy fence, tall enough to shield its bounty: 50 marijuana plants in hastily constructed wooden boxes.
“This is common,” said Michael Lockett, the chief building official here in Lake County, giving a tour of the now-derelict plot, where a pipe ran from a stream to a large water tank.
It was just one of hundreds of illegal marijuana operations in Lake County, officials said, some of which have been diverting water for thousands of plants.
Paul Waldman:
From that, you might conclude that that the Tea Party is waning, beaten back by a Republican establishment determined to rid itself of this meddlesome faction. But the truth is that in some ways the movement continues to get stronger.
The Tea Party wins when it wins, and it wins when it loses. Five years after it began and long after many people (myself included) thought it would fade away, it continues to hold the GOP in its grip. For a bunch of nincompoops prancing around in tricorner hats, it’s quite a remarkable achievement.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Politico:
The New York Times will now use the word “torture” to describe any incident in which interrogators "inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information," a reversal from the paper's previous policy of referring to "harsh" or "brutal" interrogation methods.
The change was announced late Thursday in a note from executive editor Dean Baquet.
"Over time, the landscape has shifted," Baquet wrote. "Far more is now understood, such as that the C.I.A. inflicted the suffocation technique called waterboarding 183 times on a single detainee and that other techniques, such as locking a prisoner in a claustrophobic box, prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling people’s bodies into painful positions, were routinely employed in an effort to break their wills to resist interrogation."
"Meanwhile, the Justice Department, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program," he continued. "The result is that today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked – that is, whether they generated useful information that the government could not otherwise have obtained from prisoners. In that context, the disputed legal meaning of the word 'torture' is secondary to the common meaning: the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk."
Dean Baquet's statement is
here.
Greg Sargent takes a deep dive on deportations:
John Sandweg was acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security from 2012-2013, during the establishment of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He was also acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from late 2013 until early this year, when he stepped down amid GOP criticism. He is among those who is most knowledgeable on the topic.
I asked him to detail what he sees as the legal justification for DACA and any potential expansion of it, and pressed him to respond to conservative criticism. An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows:
NY Times:
Libertarians, who long have relished their role as acerbic sideline critics of American political theater, now find themselves and their movement thrust into the middle of it. For decades their ideas have had serious backing financially (most prominently by the Koch brothers, one of whom, David H., ran as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian Party ticket), intellectually (by way of policy shops like the Cato Institute and C.E.I.) and in the media (through platforms like Reason and, as of last year, 'The Independents'). But today, for perhaps the first time, the libertarian movement appears to have genuine political momentum on its side.
Susannah Locke with a useful list:
24 Twitter accounts you should follow to understand the Ebola outbreak
Washington Post:
In nearly 30 years at Heckler & Koch, a legendary German gunmaker, Ernst Mauch designed some of the world’s most lethal weapons, including the one that reportedly killed Osama bin Laden. A state regulator once called him a “rock star” in the industry.
Now the gun world sees him a different way: as a traitor. The target of their fury is the smart gun Mauch designed at Armatix, a start-up near Munich. The very concept of the weapon has been attacked by U.S. gun rights advocates even as it has helped Mauch resolve a sense of guilt that has haunted him his entire career. He knows children have killed each other with his guns. Crimes have been committed with them.
“It hurts my heart,” the 58-year-old gun designer said. “It’s life. It’s the lives of people who never thought they’d get killed by a gun. You have a nice family at home, and then you get killed. It’s crazy.”