Author: admin

• American Airlines and U.S.
  Airways have finally satisfied the Department of Justice enough, by
  giving up some gates and facilities at airports, that the agency
  will
  stop trying to block their merger.
• Deaths in the Philippines because of Typhoon Haiyan will likely
  
  not reach the 10,000 leaders feared, but they’re still likely
  to surpass 2,000.
• A North Carolina man is facing federal charges that he tried to
  
  join an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria.
• MakerBot is trying to get a
  3d printer in every school. Given how Los Angeles Unified
  School District freaked out over iPad hacking, I can only imagine
  the kind of panic will come from kids’ creations.
• More and more retailers are announcing they’re
  opening on Thanksgiving evening. Walmart is the latest.
• SeaWorld is suing the federal government to try to end a ban on
  
  contact between humans and killer whales. A judge put the order
  in place following the death of a trainer in 2010.

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Robert Sarvis, a former tech entrepreneur and
lawyer involved with the free-market think tank Mercatus, won
a surprising amount of the vote as the Libertarian Party’s
candidate in last week’s Virginia governor’s race—6.6 percent, or
around 145,000 votes. That was the third largest vote
percentage any Libertarian has ever won for any governor’s
race. The two who did better, Dick Randolph in Alaska in 1982 and
Ed Thompson in Wisconsin in 2002, had, unlike Sarvis, held elective
office in their states before. Sarvis copped the best third party
result for any party in the south for agubernatorial candidate in
40 years. Many Republicans reacted to Sarvis’ strong showing,
combined with Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s narrow
defeat, with accusations that Sarvis caused Cuccinelli’s loss.
That was clearly not true. Although Sarvis was not the death of the
GOP in Virginia, writes Brian Doherty, he may represent a new lease
on life for the Libertarian Party not just in Virginia but
nationally.

View this article.

Robert Sarvis, a former tech entrepreneur and
lawyer involved with the free-market think tank Mercatus, won
a surprising amount of the vote as the Libertarian Party’s
candidate in last week’s Virginia governor’s race—6.6 percent, or
around 145,000 votes. That was the third largest vote
percentage any Libertarian has ever won for any governor’s
race. The two who did better, Dick Randolph in Alaska in 1982 and
Ed Thompson in Wisconsin in 2002, had, unlike Sarvis, held elective
office in their states before. Sarvis copped the best third party
result for any party in the south for agubernatorial candidate in
40 years. Many Republicans reacted to Sarvis’ strong showing,
combined with Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s narrow
defeat, with accusations that Sarvis caused Cuccinelli’s loss.
That was clearly not true. Although Sarvis was not the death of the
GOP in Virginia, writes Brian Doherty, he may represent a new lease
on life for the Libertarian Party not just in Virginia but
nationally.

View this article.

The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) recently

endorsed a bill that would make the federal ban on marijuana
inapplicable to people who grow, possess, or distribute cannabis in
compliance with state law. H.R. 1523, the Respect State
Marijuana Laws Act of 2013, would essentially repeal (or at least
limit) federal pot prohibition in the 21 states that allow medical
or recreational use of the drug. So far the bill, which was
introduced by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), has 20
cosponsors, including five more Republicans: Justin Amash
(Mich.), Dan Benishek (Mich.), Don Young (Alaska), Duncan
Hunter (Calif.), and Steve Stockman (Texas). 

The NAACP resolution endorsing H.R. 1523, which was adopted
by its board of directors at a meeting last month, notes that “even
though numerous studies demonstrate that whites and African
Americans use and sell marijuana at relatively the same rates,
studies also demonstrate that African Americans are, on average,
almost 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession,
and in some jurisdictions Blacks are 30 times more likely to be
arrested for marijuana possession than whites.” The NAACP, which in
recent years has highlighted the
racially disproportionate impact of marijuana prohibition and
condemned
the war on drugs, last year
supported the successful legalization initiatives in Colorado
and Washington, so it’s not surprising that the organization wants
the feds to step back and let those experiments proceed. But Tom
Angell, chairman of Marijuana Majority,
argues that the NAACP’s willingness to stand up for state’s
rights is significant given the group’s history of battling
segregationists who (erroneously) waved that banner:

For obvious historical reasons, many civil rights leaders who
agree with us about the harms of marijuana prohibition still remain
reluctant to see the states chart their own courses out of the
failed “war on drugs.” Having the NAACP’s support for a states’
rights approach to marijuana reform is going to have a huge impact
and will provide comfort and cover to politicians and prominent
people who want to see prohibition end but who are a little
skittish about states getting too far ahead of the feds on this
issue. 

As I’ve argued
in Reason, there is nothing inherently right-wing about
the Constitution’s division of powers between the states and the
federal government. Properly understood, federalism was never a
license for violating rights protected by the 14th Amendment, and
today it can profitably be employed by progressives to further
their own causes. Ending the war on drugs should be at the top of
the list. 

Washington Post editorial writer Charles
Lane has a
nice takedown today of Tesla, the high-flying federally
subsidized electric car company, as an example of “trickle-down”
economics as practiced by modern-day progressives

Tesla’s corporate fate is ultimately less interesting than the
fact that so many people, especially progressives, have become so
deeply invested in it — politically and psychologically, if not
financially.

Tesla epitomizes the mutation of modern American liberalism.
Once an ideology whose central concern was the plight of
lunch-bucket working stiffs and oppressed minorities, liberalism is
increasingly about environmentalism and related “quality of life”
issues…

This version of green capitalism might be justified if it
delivered the public goods it promises. Tesla’s trickle-down
business plan calls for sales of expensive early models to pave the
way for an everyman electric vehicle later this decade.

But even if widely adopted, Teslas would have little impact on
climate change as long as drivers have to charge their vehicles
from a coal- and natural gas-fired U.S. electric grid. In May,
JPMorgan Chase analysts calculated that the
Model S’s annual fossil fuel “footprint” is bigger than that of a
Honda Civic hybrid.

Nor is there a case for electric cars based on their
contribution to U.S. energy security. Thanks to increased oil and
natural gas production, United States imported only 40 percent of
its oil in 2012, down from 60 percent in 2005,
according to the Energy Department. That trend is projected
to
continue…

Of course, jobs — “green jobs” — are supposed to square the
ideological circle for liberals, making taxpayer “investment” in
Tesla and other environmentally friendly firms a “win-win” for
plutocrats and proletarians.

Tesla employs 2,000
people at good wages. But others would have used the same
resources to employ people, perhaps more than 2,000, if the
government had not funneled them into Tesla — both directly through
loans, emissions credits and tax breaks and indirectly by
encouraging private investors to buy stock in a government-favored
company.

Tesla’s market capitalization, more than $17 billion, represents not
only a possible government-aided stock bubble but also a huge
societal opportunity cost.

Tesla’s Model S is, no doubt, a cool car. Whether it serves any
public purpose commensurate with the public resources it has
absorbed is another question.

For now, all we know is that [Tesla founder] Elon Musk, backed
by Wall Street and Washington, has built a very efficient machine
for the upward distribution of wealth and income.

Can you spell C-R-O-N-Y C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-M?

So far, the administration has
consistently refused to release information about actual health
insurance enrollment through Obamacare. But as Scott Shackford
noted,
multiple news outlets are now
reporting that, according to knowledgable sources, somewhere in
the range of 40,000 to 50,000 people have enrolled in health
insurance through Obamacare’s problem-plagued federally facilitated
exchange system,

These aren’t official numbers, although an official release is
expected sometime this week. But taken at face value, and presuming
they are accurate, they indicate that Obamacare is struggling so
far to meet its enrollment goals. An internal document released
earlier this month by Rep. Dave Camp (R-Michigan) noted that the
administration’s goal for the first month was 500,000 enrollees.
Combine the reported federal enrollments with the 49,000 people
estimated to have enrolled in state-based exchanges, and you still
have less then twenty percent of the administration’s enrollment
goal.

But these numbers shouldn’t be taken at face value. That’s
because the administration isn’t actually counting enrollments.
Instead, it’s
counting the number of people who have placed health plans in their
online shopping carts—not people who have signed up and agreed
to be billed, and certainly not people who have actually paid the
premium for the first month of coverage. It’s the equivalent of
Amazon counting a TV sold every time someone puts a TV in his or
her online shopping cart, regardless of whether or not they
actually go through the checkout process.

Now, there’s some legitimate room for debate and disagreement
about the best way to count enrollments. The best way to understand
the different methods is to look at some of the counts we’ve seen
for the District of Columbia.

According to documents made public by the Senate Finance
Committee last week, only five people had enrolled in private
insurance through the D.C. exchange.

That’s a pretty small number. But it doesn’t provide the entire
picture. What that means, as The Washington Post’s Sarah
Kliff
noted last week, is that five people have enrolled in plans and
paid an initial premium by October 21. A significantly larger
number—164 people—however, have selected plans and agreed to be
billed. They just haven’t paid their premiums yet. And an even
greater number—some 321 people—have moved to the shopping cart
stage, selecting a plan and putting it in their cart, but not
agreeing to be billed.

I’m willing to believe that the majority of those 164 people who
have picked a plan and told an insurer to send them a bill will end
up with coverage. But the federal government is trying to count
people from the much larger third category—the group that in D.C.
encompasses the 321 people who have merely picked a plan and put it
in a virtual shopping cart.

If D.C.’s numbers are relatively representative—and, granted,
it’s possible that they may not be—then the actual number of people
who have gotten to the billing stage is only about half the number
who have simply selected a plan. So it’s entirely plausible that
the actual enrollment in the federal exchanges is more like
20,000-25,000 people.

And that’s presuming that everyone who agrees to be billed
actually pays. Which is not a foregone conclusion.

As Jon Kingsdale, who ran the Massachusetts health exchange for
years and helped advise the federal government on Obamacare, wrote
in The Washington Post over the weekend, “Tracking billing
and collections was a much bigger challenge than getting our Web
site to work.” And Kingsdale
thinks the collections effort will actually be harder in the
federal system:

Enrollees are not covered until their first month’s premium is
received. In the individual insurance market, premium billing and
collection is difficult to track. Folks frequently pay late or in
weekly installments, or send too little or even too much. And when
they stop paying, they often do not notify the insurer; the company
must determine whether it is an intentional termination, an
oversight, or a lost or late payment. Unlike most of today’s 15
million direct enrollees, who pay premiums on their
own, an
estimated 27 percent of those who will be eligible for tax
credits under
the ACA do not have checking accounts. So they must use cash,
money orders or prepaid debit cards to pay their share of monthly
premiums.

Under the health-care law, premium billing and tracking will be
even tougher. There are hundreds of prices across each of the
thousands of plans in the federal marketplace. Having enrollees pay
partial premiums, and the IRS issue tax credits for the rest, means
twice as much billing. Calculating subsidies based on personal
income tax filings also creates security issues: In addition to the
problems with verifying consumers’ identities online, which have
created delays on HealthCare.gov, tens of thousands of unlicensed
“navigators” are fanning out across the country to help folks
enroll. Many of these people don’t have to submit to thorough
background checks, although they will gain access to personal
financial information. 

The point is that even by the administration’s standards, these
early enrollment figures aren’t good. And because of the
administration’s chosen counting method, it’s almost certain that
they are actually worse than they seem.