Month: October 2014

Over the weekend, CNN and ORC released a poll of North
Carolinians showing the Libertarian candidate for Senate, Sean
Haugh, receiving support from 7 percent of likely voters. He’s one
of several third party candidates receiving
attention this year for their potential to muck up the outcome
of close Senate elections.

Given all that attention, some may be
wondering whether the American people have become so fed up with
the two major parties that they’re finally ready to start throwing
their support behind an alternative. With six in ten disapproving
of congressional Democrats’ job handling and seven in ten
disapproving of congressional Republicans’, could we be looking at
the beginning of a Libertarian Party wave?

The problem is that third party candidates don’t just fail to
win elections—historically, they do even worse at the ballot box
than polling would suggest. In 2012, the Libertarian Party’s
nominee for president, Gary Johnson, received about 1.2 million
votes to capture 1 percent of the electorate. Given that this was
the largest raw number of ballots ever cast for a Libertarian,
readers might be tempted to celebrate. But some pre-election
surveys had Johnson at 5 percent or more. In other words, he
underperformed his polling.

That outcome wasn’t specific to 2012. When Libertarian Robert
Sarvis ran for governor of Virginia last year, there were high
hopes that one in 10 voters might swing his way. The final
RealClearPolitics
polling average before the election put him at 9.6 percent. In
reality, he took about 6.6 percent of the vote—inarguably a
respectable result, but still not as good as surveys
forecasted.

It seems voters find it easier to tell an interviewer they’re
going to punch the box beside the name of a third party candidate
than they do to follow through with that pledge. One theory is that
it feels good to describe yourself as the kind of person who’s
willing to take a principled stand—but in the privacy of the voting
booth, the downsides of “throwing your ballot away” on someone you
know can’t win overpower the upsides of helping a candidate you
like make a strong symbolic showing.

Which isn’t to say that this year’s slate of Libertarian
hopefuls will have no effect on the final results. A third partier
need only take a couple of percentage points to be the difference
in a close election. If a significant number of erstwhile
Republicans choose Haugh over GOP challenger Thom Tillis in North
Carolina, for example, that could be enough to secure the election
for Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan.

It’s also natural to wonder if this might be the election that
breaks the rule. The trend is for third party candidates to
underperform their polling on Election Day, but then, past events
are a good predictor of future events—right up until they cease to
be.

At the end of last year,
millions of Americans with individual insurance policies found out
that, thanks to Obamacare, President Obama’s repeated promise that
anyone who liked their health plan could not keep their health plan
was not, in fact, true. 

This year, on the eve of a midterm election, it’s about to
happen again for hundreds of thousands of people across the
country. 

As the policy news site Morning Consult
notes today, there are reports in multiple states that hundreds
or thousands will see their plans cancelled at the end of the year
as a direct result of not meeting Obamacare’s requirements. Some
14,000 people are expected to lose their current plans in Kentucky,
and another 800 are projected to see their plans cancelled in
Alaska. Both of those states are Senate battlegrounds with close
races. 

According to the Albuquerque Journal, about
30,000 people will have their plans cancelled in New Mexico. The
report leaves no question that Obamacare is the culprit, saying the
plans will be cut off because they “don’t meet the standards set by
the health care law.” 

Last month, reports surfaced
indicating that, according to estimates produced by the state’s
insurance commission, as many as 250,000 people in Virginia will
lose their existing plans this year. 

People who lose their plans are not necessarily doomed to go
without insurance. If they stay on the individual market, they will
have the opportunity to buy new plans through Obamacare’s
exchanges, and those plans may be subsidized. But that’s not what
Obama promised when selling the law. What he said was, “if you like
your plan, you can keep your plan,” not, “if you like your plan, it
may well be cancelled, but you can purchase a different one through
a government-run storefront that federal and state regulators have
deemed compliant.” Administration officials knew full
well that the promise was impossible to keep, much as
Clinton administration advisers knew the same thing during
their push for health care reform in the 1990s. And yet President
Obama went ahead and made the promise anyway, over and over, on
camera, with no caveats, embracing a lie because it was politically
convenient. 

The Obama administration’s blame-shifting response to the latest
round of plan cancellations is barely a response at all. A Health
and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson
tells The Hill that “as was the case before the
Affordable Care Act, private insurance companies operate in a free
market: they may choose to discontinue, change, and replace plans
so long as they let their enrollees know their options.”

It is perhaps debatable whether the heavily regulated health
insurance industry can be credibly described as a “free market,”
but it’s true that insurers can and do decide to cancel
plans, and they often did before Obamacare. In this case, however,
the cancellations are a direct result of Obamacare’s rules and
requirements, which were intentionally and explicitly designed to
kill off plans that did not meet the law’s particular
standards. 

The HHS spokesperson also notes that last year, under
heavy political pressure after Obama’s obvious and repeated lie
about keeping plans was exposed, the administration issued an
update allowing insurers to keep some many off-limits plans going
through 2016, subject to the approval of state
regulators. 

This move, which allows the administration to shift
responsibility for plan cancellations to insurers and state
officials, has been described as a fix, but it’s not much of one:
At most, it postpones the cancellations. Insurers and state
regulators are not deciding whether or not to cancel plans
that do not pass muster under Obamacare; they are merely deciding
when. Ultimately, the law is to blame. 

When the
news broke yesterday that a man in Dallas had been diagnosed with
Ebola, my colleague Ron Bailey delivered the news with some
sensible advice: “Don’t
Panic!” He had plenty of company. Politico published a

story headlined “Ebola’s here: Don’t panic.” The Los
Angeles Times explained
“why you don’t need to panic,” and Business Insider

told us “Why You Shouldn’t Panic.” Salon,
uncharacteristically cautious,
said “there’s (probably) no reason to panic.” And in Ebola’s
new home, The Dallas Morning News ran an
item headlined “Why a positive Ebola test in Dallas is no cause
for panic.” I
could go on, but you get the picture: The press is filled with
people who don’t want you to panic.

For the record, I don’t want you to panic either. Even if I
thought Ebola was going to spark a public health crisis in America,
I wouldn’t tell you to panic. Panic is always a bad idea, pretty
much by definition. You shouldn’t do it.

But while it’s fine for the media to tell us not to panic about
Ebola, let’s bear in mind that the people most likely to panic
about Ebola are the media. Everyday citizens tend to keep their
heads in situations like this. As I
wrote half a decade ago, when the purported panic on the
horizon involved swine flu, “It’s easy to find examples of public
anxiety, with every hypochondriac in the country fretting
that the cold his kid always catches this time of year was actually
the killer flu. But panic? Where’s the evidence of that?” Going
through a series of stories that were supposed to show flu
hysteria, I was underwhelmed. A Time
feature, for example, had a headline that said a “swine flu
panic” had hit Mexico, but the actual article didn’t demonstrate
that:

It tells us that many Mexicans donned facemasks, as
recommended by their government; that stores quickly sold out of
masks and vitamin supplements; that schools in Mexico City shut
down; that some people left the city and others stayed put. In
other words, it tells us that ordinary Mexicans were taking
ordinary precautions. The Bild report merely informs us
that a few schools in New York had closed and that many children
displaying flu-like symptoms were sent home. The Guardian
timeline includes a series of links to Mexican photographs that
allegedly “capture the sense of panic everywhere.” Click through,
and you’ll see pictures of people calmly going about their business
while wearing masks. My favorite photo features a woman on a subway
reading a newspaper, a vaguely bored look in her eyes. If this is
panic, we need a new word for chaotic stampedes.

Even the CNN story, which at
least involves exaggerated worries and a potentially destructive
diversion of resources, stops well short of describing a public
panic. We learn that the number of patients at the emergency
department at Chicago Children’s Memorial Hospital more than
doubled after the flu hit the news; we learn that some hospitals in
California set up triage tents to separate the sick from the merely
anxious. We learn nothing about people storming ERs, fighting each
other for dwindling medical supplies, or acting in anything other
than an orderly way.

“People are sharing information, they’re seeking out information,
they’re asking questions about whether or not they have the
symptoms,” says Jeannette Sutton, a researcher at the Natural
Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Those are
not incidents of panic or hysteria. That’s rational thinking, where
people are asking questions and trying to make decisions based on
the information they have available to them.”

When I distinguish anxiety from panic, I’m not
just splitting hairs. The fear of panic—actual panic—has shaped
public policy in unfortunate ways. During a disaster, it’s not
uncommon for officials to hold useful information close to their
vests because they don’t want to “spread panic,” even though nine
decades of research have established that the public almost always
remains calm in such a crisis….Now imagine if those officials
instead argued that they should hold back important information
because they don’t want to “spread anxiety.” Their position would
sound absurd. Nothing fans anxieties like a dearth of solid
information, and nothing resolves anxiety like concrete
data.

Yes, “panic” is a flexible word. I myself use
it rather
broadly when the subject
is a so-called moral
panic, trusting readers to understand that the phrase is a
metaphor. But let’s be clear about what social threats (as
opposed to medical threats) should worry us. In Dallas right now,
the chances that people will start stampeding in the streets is
far, far smaller than the chances that scare-mongering coverage
will make it harder to get good information.

In that spirit, I appreciate all those don’t-panic pieces. I
just hope they’re being read in the rest of the newsroom.

When the
news broke yesterday that a man in Dallas had been diagnosed with
Ebola, my colleague Ron Bailey delivered the news with some
sensible advice: “Don’t
Panic!” He had plenty of company. Politico published a

story headlined “Ebola’s here: Don’t panic.” The Los
Angeles Times explained
“why you don’t need to panic,” and Business Insider

told us “Why You Shouldn’t Panic.” Salon,
uncharacteristically cautious,
said “there’s (probably) no reason to panic.” And in Ebola’s
new home, The Dallas Morning News ran an
item headlined “Why a positive Ebola test in Dallas is no cause
for panic.” I
could go on, but you get the picture: The press is filled with
people who don’t want you to panic.

For the record, I don’t want you to panic either. Even if I
thought Ebola was going to spark a public health crisis in America,
I wouldn’t tell you to panic. Panic is always a bad idea, pretty
much by definition. You shouldn’t do it.

But while it’s fine for the media to tell us not to panic about
Ebola, let’s bear in mind that the people most likely to panic
about Ebola are the media. Everyday citizens tend to keep their
heads in situations like this. As I
wrote half a decade ago, when the purported panic on the
horizon involved swine flu, “It’s easy to find examples of public
anxiety, with every hypochondriac in the country fretting
that the cold his kid always catches this time of year was actually
the killer flu. But panic? Where’s the evidence of that?” Going
through a series of stories that were supposed to show flu
hysteria, I was underwhelmed. A Time
feature, for example, had a headline that said a “swine flu
panic” had hit Mexico, but the actual article didn’t demonstrate
that:

It tells us that many Mexicans donned facemasks, as
recommended by their government; that stores quickly sold out of
masks and vitamin supplements; that schools in Mexico City shut
down; that some people left the city and others stayed put. In
other words, it tells us that ordinary Mexicans were taking
ordinary precautions. The Bild report merely informs us
that a few schools in New York had closed and that many children
displaying flu-like symptoms were sent home. The Guardian
timeline includes a series of links to Mexican photographs that
allegedly “capture the sense of panic everywhere.” Click through,
and you’ll see pictures of people calmly going about their business
while wearing masks. My favorite photo features a woman on a subway
reading a newspaper, a vaguely bored look in her eyes. If this is
panic, we need a new word for chaotic stampedes.

Even the CNN story, which at
least involves exaggerated worries and a potentially destructive
diversion of resources, stops well short of describing a public
panic. We learn that the number of patients at the emergency
department at Chicago Children’s Memorial Hospital more than
doubled after the flu hit the news; we learn that some hospitals in
California set up triage tents to separate the sick from the merely
anxious. We learn nothing about people storming ERs, fighting each
other for dwindling medical supplies, or acting in anything other
than an orderly way.

“People are sharing information, they’re seeking out information,
they’re asking questions about whether or not they have the
symptoms,” says Jeannette Sutton, a researcher at the Natural
Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Those are
not incidents of panic or hysteria. That’s rational thinking, where
people are asking questions and trying to make decisions based on
the information they have available to them.”

When I distinguish anxiety from panic, I’m not
just splitting hairs. The fear of panic—actual panic—has shaped
public policy in unfortunate ways. During a disaster, it’s not
uncommon for officials to hold useful information close to their
vests because they don’t want to “spread panic,” even though nine
decades of research have established that the public almost always
remains calm in such a crisis….Now imagine if those officials
instead argued that they should hold back important information
because they don’t want to “spread anxiety.” Their position would
sound absurd. Nothing fans anxieties like a dearth of solid
information, and nothing resolves anxiety like concrete
data.

Yes, “panic” is a flexible word. I myself use
it rather
broadly when the subject
is a so-called moral
panic, trusting readers to understand that the phrase is a
metaphor. But let’s be clear about what social threats (as
opposed to medical threats) should worry us. In Dallas right now,
the chances that people will start stampeding in the streets is
far, far smaller than the chances that scare-mongering coverage
will make it harder to get good information.

In that spirit, I appreciate all those don’t-panic pieces. I
just hope they’re being read in the rest of the newsroom.

Yesterday California Gov. Jerry Brown
signed a bill that strips people of their Second Amendment
rights based on claims that they pose a danger to themselves or
others.
AB 1014 allows a cop or “an immediate family member”—which

includes not just spouses, children, siblings, and parents but
also in-laws and roommates, both current and former—can seek a “gun
violence restraining order” that prohibits an individual from
possessing firearms and authorizes police to seize any he currently
owns. Such an order can initially be obtained without any notice or
adversarial process.

If the applicant is a cop, he must have “reasonable cause” to
believe “the subject of the petition poses an immediate and present
danger of causing personal injury” to himself or someone else. If
the applicant is a relative or roommate, he must show there is a
“substantial likelihood” that “the subject of the petition poses a
significant danger, in the near future, of personal injury” to
himself or someone else. Either standard suffices to take away
someone’s right to arms for three weeks, after which he has an
opportunity for a hearing where the petitioner has to show by
“clear and convincing evidence” that he “poses a significant danger
of personal injury” to himself or others. If the judge decides that
test has been met, he issues a one-year restraining order than can
be renewed annually.

“Clear and convincing evidence” is a fairly demanding standard,
weaker than “beyond a reasonable doubt” but stronger than a mere
“preponderance of the evidence,” which may amount to a probability
just a hair above 50 percent. Clear and convincing evidence, by
contrast, is supposed to mean a claim is “highly and substantially”
more probable than not to be true. Still, one can imagine
circumstances in which innocent people who pose no threat to others
lose their Second Amendment rights for a year or longer, especially
since preventing self-harm is considered a valid reason for
granting a petition.

The standards for 21-day orders are even more troubling. The
“reasonable cause” that police officers have to show is barely more
than a hunch. It is even weaker than the “probable cause” standard
for a search warrant, which has no precise definition but is pretty
easy to meet. (For example, the Supreme Court has said a police
dog’s purported “alert,” which may
correspond to a probability of around 16 percent even when the
alert is genuine and the dog is properly trained, is
enough for probable cause.) The flimsy standard for taking
someone’s firearms is especially striking because a gun violence
restraining order based on reasonable cause automatically justifies
a search warrant, which ordinarily requires probable cause. If the
subject of an order fails to surrender his guns, police can get a
warrant to seize them. The “substantial likelihood” that “an
immediate family member” has to demonstrate may in practice be
equivalent to probable cause, but it seems like taking away
someone’s constitutional rights for three weeks should require
evidence stronger than you need to search his apartment for an
hour.

These standards leave lots of room for mistakes and mischief.
Now that the option is available, police, relatives, and judges may
be inclined to err on the side of what they take to be caution,
giving little weight to the loss of liberty these orders entail.
The orders may also be an appealing method of revenge or punishment
for angry ex-lovers, disgruntled former roommates, and hateful
brothers-in-law. It is a misdemeanor to make false claims in a
petition or to file one “with the intent to harass,” but that
offense generally will be hard to prove, especially since the
evidence cited by petititioners may amount to unverifiable reports
of what the subject said or did.

This law is ostensibly a response to Elliot Rodger’s murders in Isla
Vista last May, which is puzzling. Although Rodger’s mother was at
one point concerned that he might harm himself (based on a YouTube
video she had seen), as far as I know no one in his family was
aware that he owned guns. In a case with different facts, of
course, it is conceivable that one of these new restraining orders
might stop a would-be mass murderer. But it’s more likely this law
will become a tool of meddling and harassment that mostly affects
people with no homicidal intent.

Webcam performer Sasha Pain is putting her sexual
prowess and social-media popularity to use in support of Ferguson,
Missouri, protesters. Pain, her boyfriend, and video-journalist
Jessica Hollie traveled from San Francisco to Ferguson last weekend
with the goal of filming what’s happening there and sharing it with
her significant fan
base and friends back home whom she says haven’t paid
attention to Michael Brown’s
shooting and its aftermath.

“I want people who follow me to have to see it,” Pain
told St. Louis alt-weekly Riverfront Times.

“This isn’t something that happened to me or in my town, but
it’s something that happened to a citizen of my country and a son
to somebody. That’s enough for me to be here. This is what people
need to focus on.”

Pain and crew arrived in Ferguson Saturday night, where they
found fellow protesters welcoming and local police officers acting
as we’ve come to expect from them:

“The cops keep fucking pulling up bullshit laws and telling
people they can’t do things that they should legally be able to do.
(The protesters are) not letting it get them down. They’re working
around it, and they’re becoming more creative and resilient. It’s
amazing.”

While in Missouri, Pain said she plans to continue making webcam
sex videos, with all proceeds beyond her and her friends’ basic
living expenses going to help supply protesters with things like
food, first-aid supplies and gas masks. The trio doesn’t plan to
partake in protests because “that’s not my place,” Pain told the
Times.  

“But I will do what I can to make it less painful, more safe and
easier on them because that’s what I’m here for.”

See Jessica Hollie’s Ferguson videos
here, Pain’s Ferguson
videos here, and support a good cause here
(NSFW).