“The largest semiconductor manufacturer on the planet agreed to open factories in the U.S. instead of abroad. The company wants the government to pick up the tab for the difference in cost, even as it postpones production.”
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“In a January 2023 earnings call, TSMC Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang said that while he couldn’t give an exact number for the financial discrepancy between building in the U.S. and Taiwan, “the major reason for the cost gap is the construction cost of building and facilities, which can be 4 to 5x greater” in the U.S.
Of course, part of that gap can be explained by factors like the difference in the cost of living—by one estimate, over twice as much in the U.S. as in Taiwan. But in November 2022, a month before Biden announced the project, TSMC wrote in a public response to questions from the Commerce Department that it doesn’t “see access to capital as a significant barrier to growth in the US”—rather, specific factors making the project more expensive included “federal regulatory requirements that increase project scope and cost.”
Rather than forking over billions of dollars to a single company, the Biden administration should take steps to ease regulatory burdens on expanding companies. Similarly, plenty of firms could benefit from a greater number of high-skilled workers, like those proficient in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. And yet foreign nationals who graduate in STEM fields from American universities face near-impossible challenges to stay in the country and most end up going elsewhere. Congress could help that situation by raising the number of green cards that can be issued annually.
With TSMC’s delay, Biden and Congress have an opportunity. TSMC admits that its issues are bureaucratic, not financial, so there’s no need to shovel more money at a wealthy company. Instead, lawmakers should get rid of cumbersome regulations and create a more welcoming environment for both businesses and workers.”
“In January 2016, Mesa police responded to a report of a man pointing a rifle out of a hotel window. It was in fact Shaver showing a pellet gun that he used at his exterminator job to a couple other hotel guests in his room.
Police ordered Shaver out of the hotel room and onto the ground, with his hands behind his head. But instead of handcuffing Shaver, officers—bizarrely—started barking confusing and contradictory orders at him to crawl toward them. As a clearly terrified and drunk Shaver tried to crawl toward the police, he appeared to reach toward his waistband to pull up his sagging shorts. A Mesa officer, Philip Mitchell Brailsford, shot Shaver five times with an AR-15, killing him.”
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“In 2017, a jury acquitted Brailsford of second-degree murder and reckless manslaughter. This is because juries are instructed to judge officers not by how a normal civilian would respond, but by how a reasonable police officer is trained to respond to a threat, real or imagined. As Reason’s Jacob Sullum wrote, the acquittal showed that cops on trial benefit from a double standard: “Unlike ordinary citizens, they can kill with impunity as long as they say they were afraid, whether or not their fear was justified.””
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“Brailsford indeed challenged his termination, and in response, the city cut a special deal that allowed him to be temporarily re-hired so he could retire with medical benefits and a disability pension. Brailsford claimed that killing Shaver and his subsequent prosecution gave him post-traumatic stress disorder. Because of this, he will receive a monthly pension check of $2,569.21 for the rest of his life, courtesy of Mesa taxpayers.”
“”If the goal of HB2319 is to prevent interference with law enforcement activities, the Court fails to see how the presence of a person recording a video near an officer interferes with the officer’s activities,” Tuchi wrote in his order issuing a temporary injunction against the law.”
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“multiple federal appeals courts have upheld the right to film police as a core First Amendment activity.”
“Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed a bill into law Wednesday that will make it illegal to film the police within eight feet.
The legislation, H.B. 2319, makes it a misdemeanor offense to continue filming police activity from within eight feet of an officer after receiving a verbal warning. The bill originally restricted filming the police from no closer than 15 feet away, but it was amended after criticisms.
There are also exceptions for filming the police in a private residence, during a traffic stop, and for the subject of a police encounter. But the law qualifies those exceptions, saying they apply only if the person recording is “not interfering with lawful police actions,” or “unless a law enforcement officer determines that the person is interfering in the law enforcement activity or that it is not safe to be in the area and orders the person to leave the area.”
Interfering with police, or obstruction of justice, is one of the most frequently cited justifications for frivolous and retaliatory arrests.”
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“”Can you be arrested for standing still while wearing a GoPro under this statute?” Doucette asked. “It seems the answer here is yes, which would violate the First Amendment (since standing still isn’t interfering with an officer’s duties).””
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“State legislators should be less concerned with cops’ feelings and more concerned about citizens’ right to document how armed government agents go about their business. Giving officers another discretionary offense to slap on someone who annoys them will lead only to more confusion and more censorship.”
“Most Democrats in Congress are united around the Democratic agenda, but a small number of senators and representatives have so far been able to hold up its passage. “I need 50 votes in the Senate. I have 48,” President Biden said last week, regarding his social spending bill. As for who is standing in the way, his blame was clear: “Two. Two people.”
Those two people are Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The two moderates have forced Democrats to water down several priorities (such as election reform and the $3.5 trillion budget bill) and are blocking more ambitious reforms entirely (such as abolishing the filibuster). But while congressional observers — from the commander-in-chief on down — usually mention Manchin and Sinema in the same sentence, it’s a mistake to lump together their resistance to their party’s priorities. Manchin’s centrism is unsurprising: He has been a conservative Democrat his entire career, and his home state of West Virginia is so red that it might be politically impossible for him to move left, even if he wanted to.
But neither is true of Sinema. Once a staunch progressive, Arizona’s senior senator has taken a hard turn to the right. On the surface, that appears to have been an effort to make her more electable by courting moderate and conservative voters. If so, she may have overcompensated: Arizona is no West Virginia, and no other swing-state senator has vexed Democratic leadership so thoroughly. In fact, Sinema’s established such a firm anti-progressive reputation that she may have lost the support of enough Democrats to endanger her reelection just the same.”
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“Democrats are lucky that Manchin is in the Senate at all. Because of how red West Virginia is, a typical senator from the state would almost certainly be a Republican.2 Indeed, based on Trump’s margin in West Virginia in 2016, we’d expect that a generic replacement for Manchin would have voted in line with Trump’s position 89.3 percent of the time during his presidency. Manchin, though, voted with Trump just 50.4 percent of the time — a lot for a Democrat, but not a lot considering the partisanship of his home state.
Using the same methodology, we’d have expected a generic replacement for Sinema to vote with Trump just 39.8 percent of the time — a reflection of the purpler partisanship of her state and her congressional district at the time. Yet Sinema voted with him 50.4 percent of the time too, as much as Manchin. That made her the only Democratic senator who voted with Trump significantly3 more often than expected based on the politics of senators’ states. Her voting record during the Trump years looked more like Manchin’s, Sen. Joe Donnelly’s, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s or Sen. Claire McCaskill’s — all Democrats from substantially redder states.”
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“If Sinema is acting moderate for electoral reasons, she clearly disagrees with the conventional wisdom about how moderate a swing-state senator needs to be. On one hand, maybe she has a point: Donnelly, Heitkamp and McCaskill all lost reelection in 2018, as did Sen. Bill Nelson, whose home state of Florida is about as purple as Arizona but who voted with Trump less often than Sinema did. All four voted with Trump significantly less often than we’d have expected given the partisanship of their state, suggesting that Sinema’s strategy of hewing closer to expectations might have been smarter. (Although this doesn’t justify her approach of voting with Trump more often than expected.) On the other hand, political science research has found that candidates and congressional aides are really bad at assessing where voters stand on the issues. One 2013 study found that politicians overestimated by several percentage points how conservative their constituents were, in direct contradiction of Sinema’s entire theory of the case.”
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“Sinema is presumably betting that Democrats who dislike her will vote for her regardless, and that at least some Republicans who like her will vote for her, too.”
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“If Democratic opinion of Sinema sinks low enough, she could even be in danger of losing in a primary.”
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“It may be her donors. In a September report, liberal group Accountable.US found that Sinema raised at least $923,065 from business interests that opposed Biden’s budget reconciliation plan, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a longtime Sinema ally. She’s also been the recipient of large donations from the pharmaceutical industry, which critics have blamed for her opposition to letting Medicare negotiate down drug costs. Of course, it’s possible that the causation is reversed — that such interest groups are donating to her because they like her positions on these issues.”
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“Another explanation for Sinema’s centrism could be that she genuinely believes in it. In her 2009 book “Unite and Conquer,” Sinema described how she was initially frustrated at her inability to get things done in the state legislature — so she decided to stop being a “bomb-thrower” and start working with Republicans. Perhaps now, after so many years of embedding with the GOP to get things done (this is the first time she has ever served in a legislative chamber controlled by Democrats), she has internalized the conservatism of her peers — and even embraced bipartisanship as a policy goal unto itself. (That would explain her fierce opposition to ending the filibuster and her dogged negotiation of a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill earlier this year.)”
“Once upon a time, the Arizona GOP nursed a distinctly individualistic skepticism of government and politicians. Long-time U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater famously wrote, “my aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” A hand-wringing September 2020 Kurt Anderson column in The New York Times held Goldwater responsible for introducing Milton Friedman’s free-market economic ideas to a wide audience during events that “opened the door to libertarian economics.”
Sam Steiger, a colorful five-term member of the House of Representatives, said there were some of his colleagues “you wouldn’t hire to wheel a wheelbarrow.” He ran for governor as a Libertarian in 1982, earning 5 percent of the vote. When he returned to the Republican fold to unsuccessfully seek the party’s 1990 gubernatorial nomination, the Phoenix New Times noted that while he had backed off advocacy of drug legalization, Steiger “is an admitted ‘Libertarian at heart.'”
Those were Republicans you couldn’t really imagine assuring party faithful that a politician “loves” them. Grudging tolerance for an officeholder was more characteristic for their breed.
Since then, however, the Arizona GOP has undergone a strange transformation. It took a distinctly nativist and nationalist turn, best exemplified by Joe Arpaio, who held the office of Maricopa County sheriff for 24 years.
Where Goldwater promoted a Bracero-type temporary worker program to make illegal border crossings less tempting, and Steiger accused the Immigration and Naturalization Service of exaggerating illegal immigration in order to pad its budget requests, Arpaio made border enforcement the focus of his local law enforcement department. He went so far as to ignore a judge’s order to stop detaining people his officers suspected of undocumented status—earning himself a conviction for contempt of court in the process. (Trump pardoned the former sheriff.)”
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“The party isn’t yet entirely consumed by Trumpism. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, has championed old-school issues such as school choice. He’s been savaged by the usual suspects for his relatively light touch in terms of mandated restrictions and lockdowns in response to the pandemic. Ducey also appointed libertarian legal scholar Clint Bolick to serve on the Arizona Supreme Court.
But the governor’s defense of the integrity of the state’s voting process won him a juvenile slap from Kelli Ward, who tweeted #STHU (shut the hell up) at her party’s own elected official. Ward had unsuccessfully challenged the vote tally after the presidential election.
The Arizona Republican Party’s transformation into a Trumpist cult isn’t just antagonizing a governor elected from its ranks, it’s eroding the organization’s support by alienating whole segments of the population. After Flake decided against running for reelection, his former seat went to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in 2018. Democrat Mark Kelly defeated incumbent Trumpist Republican Martha McSally (who was appointed) for the other seat in 2020. And, in a squeaker of a vote, the state’s electoral votes went to Joe Biden in the latest presidential contest.”
“Arizona is one of 12 states seeing a rise in hospitalizations from Covid-19 and one of eight states that experts say are the new hot spots for the virus. The relatively fast rise in new cases in Arizona makes it one of the most concerning outbreaks because its health care system could soon be overwhelmed. Hospital capacity was at 83 percent as of Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.
It’s not entirely clear what’s driving the rise in new cases, but on May 15 Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey lifted the stay-at-home order enacted on March 31. The state’s reopening is guided by an executive order that “allows businesses to gradually and safely open in compliance with federal guidelines as the state continues to mitigate and prevent the spread of Covid-19.””
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“the state issued protocols for public health measures like physical distancing, hygiene, and wearing masks, the executive order didn’t provide a way to enforce them or to ensure compliance. (Many experts believe masks should be mandatory in crowded public spaces to reduce transmission, and several other states have made them so.)
“They were ‘recommendations’ instead of ‘requirements,’” said Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association and the former director of the ADHS.
Three weeks later, infections are spiking.
“If you do a root cause analysis of what’s going on and what’s wrong, it’s that word [recommendations],” said Humble.”
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“Meanwhile, countries like Italy that have lifted their restrictions have not seen a resurgence of the virus. Experts aren’t sure why. It may be due to changes in habits and hygiene that have stuck. The difference in outcomes highlights the importance of early action and vigilance. States like Arizona meanwhile are launching a real-world experiment, and an extremely risky one at that.”