Category: reason

CPAC Attendees Mocked Coronavirus Fears. Now Some Are Self-Quarantining.

Coronavirus comes to CPAC. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—held just outside Washington, D.C., two weekends ago—attendees mocked media and Democrats for their reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak. Conferencegoers told a Hannity correspondent that Democrats were deliberately freaking out over nothing in order “to make the economy tank” and to make President Donald Trump look bad. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said the disease’s dangers were being overhyped because “they think this will bring down the president.” And the president himself said onstage that the notion they weren’t well prepared for a pandemic was a “hoax” being perpetuated by the Democrats.

CPAC attendees had better hope that Trump was right.

On Saturday, conference organizers announced that at least one attendee had been tested positive for the disease. The organization didn’t say much more than that, assuring attendees that the infected person hadn’t been in the main part of the event.

But as more information comes out, it seems the infected attendee was still in contact with quite a lot of people, spending time in the CPAC “green room” (where speakers and panelists hang out before taking the stage) and possibly attending a CPAC dinner. The many people passing in and out of the green room included White House officials, members of Congress, political organizers, and TV pundits.

Vice President Mike Pence and four other members of the president’s coronavirus task force all gave addresses at CPAC.

Some at CPAC know that they had contact directly with the infected person (whose identity is not being revealed). This includes CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp (who would have been in contact with people all over the event), Rep. Paul Gosar (R–Ariz.), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas).

Gosar and Cruz have announced that they’re self-quaranting themselves.

Some CPAC attendees are angry about what they see as too little information, too late, from CPAC organizers.

Meanwhile, Trump is still insisting there’s nothing to see here:

On Friday, he asked “Does anybody die from the flu? I didn’t know people died from the flu.” (Trump’s grandfather died of the flu.)

As for how his administration has been handling the outbreak, the evidence isn’t reassuring. For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention totally botched its first round of coronavirus tests. Yet no one else could even attempt their own tests, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“FDA rules initially prevented state and commercial labs from developing their own coronavirus diagnostic tests,” notes the MIT Technology Review:

The CDC and FDA reversed course and lifted this rule on February 29, and commercial and academic labs are now allowed to participate….This week, state and commercial labs began testing on their own. We’re already seeing major steps forward; the University of Washington, for instance, has a new diagnostic that will allow it to test 1,500 samples a day. A group in Japan claims to have a test that can detect the virus in just 10 to 30 minutes.

“The great strength the US has always had, not just in virology, is that we’ve always had a wide variety of people and groups working on any given problem,” says Jerome. “When we decided all coronavirus testing had to be done by a single entity, even one as outstanding as CDC, we basically gave away our greatest strength.”

Thankfully, private institutions are stepping up to fill the gaps left by government testing schemes:

QUICK HITS

  • Kamala Harris endorses Joe Biden:

  • It’s still illegal to curse in Arlington, Virginia.
  • U.S. prisons aren’t ready for a coronavirus outbreak:

  • Markets aren’t taking kindly to the coronavirus situation:

  • When (all alone!) in Rome…

 

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CPAC Attendees Mocked Coronavirus Fears. Now Some Are Self-Quarantining.

Coronavirus comes to CPAC. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—held just outside Washington, D.C., two weekends ago—attendees mocked media and Democrats for their reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak. Conferencegoers told a Hannity correspondent that Democrats were deliberately freaking out over nothing in order “to make the economy tank” and to make President Donald Trump look bad. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said the disease’s dangers were being overhyped because “they think this will bring down the president.” And the president himself said onstage that the notion they weren’t well prepared for a pandemic was a “hoax” being perpetuated by the Democrats.

CPAC attendees had better hope that Trump was right.

On Saturday, conference organizers announced that at least one attendee had been tested positive for the disease. The organization didn’t say much more than that, assuring attendees that the infected person hadn’t been in the main part of the event.

But as more information comes out, it seems the infected attendee was still in contact with quite a lot of people, spending time in the CPAC “green room” (where speakers and panelists hang out before taking the stage) and possibly attending a CPAC dinner. The many people passing in and out of the green room included White House officials, members of Congress, political organizers, and TV pundits.

Vice President Mike Pence and four other members of the president’s coronavirus task force all gave addresses at CPAC.

Some at CPAC know that they had contact directly with the infected person (whose identity is not being revealed). This includes CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp (who would have been in contact with people all over the event), Rep. Paul Gosar (R–Ariz.), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas).

Gosar and Cruz have announced that they’re self-quaranting themselves.

Some CPAC attendees are angry about what they see as too little information, too late, from CPAC organizers.

Meanwhile, Trump is still insisting there’s nothing to see here:

On Friday, he asked “Does anybody die from the flu? I didn’t know people died from the flu.” (Trump’s grandfather died of the flu.)

As for how his administration has been handling the outbreak, the evidence isn’t reassuring. For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention totally botched its first round of coronavirus tests. Yet no one else could even attempt their own tests, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“FDA rules initially prevented state and commercial labs from developing their own coronavirus diagnostic tests,” notes the MIT Technology Review:

The CDC and FDA reversed course and lifted this rule on February 29, and commercial and academic labs are now allowed to participate….This week, state and commercial labs began testing on their own. We’re already seeing major steps forward; the University of Washington, for instance, has a new diagnostic that will allow it to test 1,500 samples a day. A group in Japan claims to have a test that can detect the virus in just 10 to 30 minutes.

“The great strength the US has always had, not just in virology, is that we’ve always had a wide variety of people and groups working on any given problem,” says Jerome. “When we decided all coronavirus testing had to be done by a single entity, even one as outstanding as CDC, we basically gave away our greatest strength.”

Thankfully, private institutions are stepping up to fill the gaps left by government testing schemes:

QUICK HITS

  • Kamala Harris endorses Joe Biden:

  • It’s still illegal to curse in Arlington, Virginia.
  • U.S. prisons aren’t ready for a coronavirus outbreak:

  • Markets aren’t taking kindly to the coronavirus situation:

  • When (all alone!) in Rome…

 

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An Algorithm for Predicting Recidivism Isn’t a Product for Products Liability Purposes

From Friday’s Third Circuit opinion by Judge Cheryl Krause, joined by Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith and Judge Thomas Hardiman, in Rodgers v. Christie:

June Rodgers’s son was tragically murdered, allegedly by a man who days before had been granted pretrial release by a New Jersey state court. She brought products liability claims against the foundation responsible for the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), a multifactor risk estimation model that forms part of the state’s pretrial release system….

The NJPLA [New Jersey Products Liability Act] imposes strict liability on manufacturers or sellers of certain defective “product[s].” But the Act does not define that term…. [B]oth parties agree the Third Restatement [of Torts] definition [of “product”] is the appropriate one. We therefore assume that to give rise to an NJPLA action, the “product” at issue must fall within section 19 of the Third Restatement.

The PSA does not fit within that definition for two reasons. First, as the District Court concluded, it is not distributed commercially. Rather, it was designed as an “objective, standardized, and … empirical” “risk assessment instrument” to be used by pretrial services programs like New Jersey’s….

Second, the PSA is neither “tangible personal property” nor remotely “analogous to” it. As Rodgers’ complaint recognizes, it is an “algorithm” or “formula” using various factors to estimate a defendant’s risk of absconding or endangering the community…. “[I]nformation, guidance, ideas, and recommendations” are not “product[s]” under the Third Restatement, both as a definitional matter and because extending strict liability to the distribution of ideas would raise serious First Amendment concerns.

Rodgers’s only response is that the PSA’s defects “undermine[ ]” New Jersey’s pretrial release system, making it “not reasonably fit, suitable or safe” for its intended use. But the NJPLA applies only to defective products, not to anything that causes harm or fails to achieve its purpose….

 

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An Algorithm for Predicting Recidivism Isn’t a Product for Products Liability Purposes

From Friday’s Third Circuit opinion by Judge Cheryl Krause, joined by Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith and Judge Thomas Hardiman, in Rodgers v. Christie:

June Rodgers’s son was tragically murdered, allegedly by a man who days before had been granted pretrial release by a New Jersey state court. She brought products liability claims against the foundation responsible for the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), a multifactor risk estimation model that forms part of the state’s pretrial release system….

The NJPLA [New Jersey Products Liability Act] imposes strict liability on manufacturers or sellers of certain defective “product[s].” But the Act does not define that term…. [B]oth parties agree the Third Restatement [of Torts] definition [of “product”] is the appropriate one. We therefore assume that to give rise to an NJPLA action, the “product” at issue must fall within section 19 of the Third Restatement.

The PSA does not fit within that definition for two reasons. First, as the District Court concluded, it is not distributed commercially. Rather, it was designed as an “objective, standardized, and … empirical” “risk assessment instrument” to be used by pretrial services programs like New Jersey’s….

Second, the PSA is neither “tangible personal property” nor remotely “analogous to” it. As Rodgers’ complaint recognizes, it is an “algorithm” or “formula” using various factors to estimate a defendant’s risk of absconding or endangering the community…. “[I]nformation, guidance, ideas, and recommendations” are not “product[s]” under the Third Restatement, both as a definitional matter and because extending strict liability to the distribution of ideas would raise serious First Amendment concerns.

Rodgers’s only response is that the PSA’s defects “undermine[ ]” New Jersey’s pretrial release system, making it “not reasonably fit, suitable or safe” for its intended use. But the NJPLA applies only to defective products, not to anything that causes harm or fails to achieve its purpose….

 

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Congress Quietly Repeals More of Obamacare

At the end of 2019, Congress repealed three significant tax components of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Each of them had been included in the initial legislation to raise the revenue required to pay for the new spending the law called for.

The biggest of the three was the so-called Cadillac tax, which was expected to raise about $197 billion over the next decade. Congress also nixed the law’s health insurance tax, projected to raise $150 billion over 10 years, and the medical device tax, projected to raise $25.5 billion. All three taxes were eliminated as part of a $1.4 trillion year-end budget bill that President Donald Trump signed at the last possible minute in order to keep the government open.

The repeal of these taxes was predictable. Implementation of the Cadillac tax had already been delayed, thanks to pressure from unions, among others, who worried that it would hit their high-priced health benefits. The health insurance and medical device taxes both faced opposition from the industries for which they were named.

What’s the problem with the repeal of a bunch of taxes no one ever really liked? That’s probably what the lawmakers who voted to end the taxes were thinking too. The main effect will be to increase the deficit by a little more than $373 billion over the next decade—and, in the process, to further weaken a central argument made by supporters of the legislation.

Obamacare was passed on a promise that it would be deficit-neutral or even reduce the deficit slightly. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the law would reduce the deficit during its first decade, provided that all of its provisions were enacted as the statute called for. As The New York Times noted last summer, the Cadillac tax “was expected to be a key cost-containment provision in President Barack Obama’s signature health law and one of the main ways it was supposed to pay for itself.”

There are obvious lessons here about what we might expect from various plans to “pay for” Medicare for All now being touted by various Democratic presidential hopefuls. If nothing else, this episode is a reminder of how Washington works: First, Congress passes a law setting up an expensive new program along with (if we’re lucky) a system to pay for it. Years later, amid a bipartisan spending binge, those taxes are repealed while the rest of the program remains on the books. The public barely notices, and the lawmakers involved shrug and move on.

The result is legislation that is fiscally ruinous, but also more popular than it would be if taxpayers were actually made to foot the bill.

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Congress Quietly Repeals More of Obamacare

At the end of 2019, Congress repealed three significant tax components of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Each of them had been included in the initial legislation to raise the revenue required to pay for the new spending the law called for.

The biggest of the three was the so-called Cadillac tax, which was expected to raise about $197 billion over the next decade. Congress also nixed the law’s health insurance tax, projected to raise $150 billion over 10 years, and the medical device tax, projected to raise $25.5 billion. All three taxes were eliminated as part of a $1.4 trillion year-end budget bill that President Donald Trump signed at the last possible minute in order to keep the government open.

The repeal of these taxes was predictable. Implementation of the Cadillac tax had already been delayed, thanks to pressure from unions, among others, who worried that it would hit their high-priced health benefits. The health insurance and medical device taxes both faced opposition from the industries for which they were named.

What’s the problem with the repeal of a bunch of taxes no one ever really liked? That’s probably what the lawmakers who voted to end the taxes were thinking too. The main effect will be to increase the deficit by a little more than $373 billion over the next decade—and, in the process, to further weaken a central argument made by supporters of the legislation.

Obamacare was passed on a promise that it would be deficit-neutral or even reduce the deficit slightly. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the law would reduce the deficit during its first decade, provided that all of its provisions were enacted as the statute called for. As The New York Times noted last summer, the Cadillac tax “was expected to be a key cost-containment provision in President Barack Obama’s signature health law and one of the main ways it was supposed to pay for itself.”

There are obvious lessons here about what we might expect from various plans to “pay for” Medicare for All now being touted by various Democratic presidential hopefuls. If nothing else, this episode is a reminder of how Washington works: First, Congress passes a law setting up an expensive new program along with (if we’re lucky) a system to pay for it. Years later, amid a bipartisan spending binge, those taxes are repealed while the rest of the program remains on the books. The public barely notices, and the lawmakers involved shrug and move on.

The result is legislation that is fiscally ruinous, but also more popular than it would be if taxpayers were actually made to foot the bill.

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Brickbat: Blow This

Illinois state Sen. Laura Fine, a Democrat, has introduced a bill that would ban the sale and operation of gasoline-powered leaf blowers in the state. Those who violate the law could face fines of up to $500. The bill states that leaf blowers produce emissions that contribute to smog and acid rain.

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