Category: reason

• 
  Sandra Fluke has filed papers to run for
  Congress in California to Rep. Henry Waxman’s seat when he retires,
  but she hasn’t made a formal decision as yet whether she’ll
  actually do so.
• Democrats in Congress are introducing legislation to enshrine
  
  “net neutrality” principles into law.
• Scotland’s the latest place to
  legalize recognition of gay marriage. Meanwhile, a federal
  judge in Virginia heard a
  challenge against that state’s ban and promised to rule
  quickly.
• That
  terrible Super Bowl turned out to be the most-watched program
  in television history. At least the halftime show wasn’t
  embarrassing.
• Vladimir Putin has arrived in Sochi for the
  Olympics. And so have the first direct threats, which involve
  two women on Austria’s team receiving a scary letter written in
  German.
• A new study shows a
  drop in suicide rates in states in the years after they
  legalize medical marijuana, particularly among men.

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Ten
years after its original launch on February 4, 2004 as a
Harvard-only website, Facebook’s little blue icon is ubiquitous.
It’s on television ads, fast food menus, even bottles of soda,
looking for a like from you. Time named “you” the
person of the year in 2006, arguing that Web 2.0 brought community,
cooperation, and mass user-generated content to the forefront of
the Internet. Facebook got name-checked once (you made a profile!),
and Twitter. While for a lot of people Facebook is about photos
from family and friends, writes Ed Krayewski, it’s also about the
way we see the rest of the Internet and the rest of ourselves.

View this article.

Eighty-seven — It seems like
such a small number compared to the more than two million adults
currently incarcerated in the United States. Eighty-seven is the
number of people exonerated and freed from prison in 2013, and that
tiny number is a record high.

The National Registry of Exonerations put out its
report (pdf) for 2013 today with these new figures. A couple of
interesting details to note:

• The number of people being freed from prison due to DNA
  evidence is dropping. Only 18 were freed in 2013 due to innocence
  determined by DNA evidence.
• A record number of the exonerations – 15 – were of prisoners
  who had pleaded guilty. The registry reports the number continues
  to climb.
• The number of exonerations that involve non-violent crimes is
  also increasing, though the majority of cases involved murder or
  sexual assault. One exoneration in 2013 was of a person on death
  row.
• More than a third of the exonerations were obtained with the
  cooperation of law enforcement. The registry notes, “[P]olice and
  prosecutors appear to be taking increasingly active roles in
  reinvestigating possible false convictions, and to be more
  responsive to claims of innocence from convicted defendants.”

That small number of 87 may also end up growing. The registry
isn’t always made immediately aware of every exoneration. They
added 234 exoneration cases to the registry during 2013, many from
previous years.

The report also calculates some averages based on all the
exonerations they’ve reported since 1989 (1,281 exonerations). As a
group, these prisoners (mostly men) spent 12,500 years in jail, an
average of 10 years for each improperly convicted prisoner.

Russia was hit by a rare and
tragic event on Monday: a school shooting. Sergei Gordeyev, a
15-year-old student armed with his father’s hunting rifle,
allegedly killed two teachers and briefly held around 20 people
hostages before police detained him. Such incidents are
virtually unheard of in the country, and politicians and others
are offering circuitous remedies.

In an interview with Russian newspaper Pravda, the
Association of Child Psychologists’ Alexander Kuznetsov blamed
video game and TV violence, suggesting that they foment antisocial
attitudes. The State Duma is now considering a
bill that would ban shooter-based video games.

Activist Boris Altshuler
suggests that the nation’s children are burdened by the
loneliness of the internet and should engage in “semi-mandatory
extracurricular activities” as students did during Soviet
times.

President Vladimir Putin asserts that a more refined
and cultured education would teach youths greater empathy,
ultimately preventing them from engaging in crimes.

While some of these propositions may (or
may not) affect the underlying social problems Russian youth
face, they don’t at all address how to actually prevent future
violent crimes like the one that shocked the nation yesterday.

The shooting happened despite the fact that Russia has very
strict gun control
laws. Handguns are entirely banned from private ownership.
Anyone who wants to buy a rifle must demonstrate a genuine reason
for needing it (such as hunting), submit to a background check that
includes criminal, mental, and medical records (suffering from
alcoholism is an immediate disqualifier),
participate in safety training, and renew their license every five
years. Even in one’s own home, guns must be locked up and are
subject to inspections by police. Both concealed and open carry are
largely prohibited.

Russians own fewer than
13 million firearms (compared to the nearly
310 million firearms in America) and predictably face few
gun-related crimes. That’s not to say that guns are inaccessible or
unused for criminal pursuits. Black market arms
dealing
is highly lucrative.
And, last year one of the nation’s top mobsters was
shot and killed in broad daylight.

Meanwhile, law-abiding civilians seem to be most encumbered by
regulations. “Successful use of long-stemmed guns is depressingly
rare,” writes
Vladimir Simonov of RIA-Novosti, because “burglars have already
broken in while you’re still fiddling with the key to the case to
get hold of your favorite gun.”

Yet, violent crime doesn’t appear to be in any way stifled by
the scarcity of legal guns. United Nations’
data from 2011 (the most recently available) shows that Russia
experienced 11.2 homicides per 100,000 people, which is more than
double what the U.S. faced. This may be unsurprising, given a
recent Harvard study that crunched numbers on gun crimes world-wide
and
found “no correlation of high gun ownership nations and
greater murder per capita or lower gun ownership nations and less
murder per capita.”

The loss of life yesterday in Russia deserves much mourning. The
nation has been lucky to experience so few school shootings. But,
if it hopes to prevent similar incidents and curb its overall
homicide rate, both the government and the
people must reconsider their belief in restricting the
self-defense of law-abiding citizens.

Just last week, I passed a Yavapai County
Sheriff’s Office car parked along a rural stretch near absolutely
nothing other than an intersection with unpaved track. He pulled
out, turned on his lights, then sped by to pull over the guy in
front of me who had been exceeding the ridiculously low speed limit
by just a bit more than me. I passed on, then flashed my headlights
at the next two cars I saw as a friendly warning. Cops don’t
necessarily like it when you do that, but I think it’s common
courtesy. Yet another federal judge just chimed in to say that it’s
also protected free speech.

In 2012, Missouri resident Michael Elli was pulled over and
handed a $1,000 ticket for passing along just such a warning to
motorists about a speed trap. While the charges were dropped, he
promptly
sued Ellisville, Missouri, for its speech-discouraging
ways.

Yesterday, he won.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry E. Autrey
pointed out (PDF) in his decision that Ellisville’s ordinance
forbidding any sort of flashing of lights by vehicles other than
buses directly contradicts Missouri Department of Revenue (which
licenses vehicles in the state) advice that lights
should be flashed to signal emergencies. More
importantly, people have the right to communicate with
each other on the road.

Defendant suggested that flashing head lamps might be illegal
interference with a police investigation; however, the expressive
conduct at issue sends a message to bring one’s driving in
conformity with the law—whether it be by slowing down, turning on
one’s own headlamps at dusk or in the rain, or proceeding with
caution… Even assuming, arguendo, that Plaintiff or
another driver is communicating a message that one should slow down
because a speed trap is ahead and discovery or apprehension is
impending, that conduct is not illegal.

Ellisville officials promised, cross their hearts and hope to
die, that they would stop enforcing their law against First
Amendment protected speech. Judge Autrey found that
unconvincing.

The chilling effect of Ellisville’s policy and custom of having
its police officers pull over, detain, and cite individuals who are
perceived as having communicated to oncoming traffic by flashing
their headlamps and then prosecuting and imposing fines upon those
individuals remains, regardless of the limited special order. As
the other preliminary injunction factors are presumed when a
likelihood of success on a First Amendment claim is shown, the
Court will issue a preliminary injunction.

Elli is represented by the ACLU of Missouri, which seeks to have
the injunction made permanent—and the lesson that motorists can
warn each other about speed traps if they damned well please shared
with law enforcement everywhere.

Justin Ross of Des Moines, Iowa told local TV
station WHO 13 that police from nearby Ankeny might’ve shot him
after using a battering ram to enter his mother’s home executing a
warrant over alleged credit card fraud. Ross said he drew his
weapon after hearing what sounded like a home invasion, but
re-holstered it when someone in the next room said “police,” and
before cops entered the bathroom where he was. WHO 13
reports:

The whole search was caught on surveillance
video.

Ankeny police tell us they knocked first, but the video shows one
officer pounding on the side of the house and seconds later,
officers use a battering ram to force their way in.

The video also shows an officer destroying a security camera
outside the home.

Another officer is seen on the surveillance video (seen as part
of WHO 13’s segment
here) covering another camera inside the home. At one point,
the video appears to show nine SWAT-like cops marching near the
home.

Ross’ mother, Sally Prince, said she would’ve opened the door if
police had knocked. Ankeny cops found nothing listed on their
warrant for the Des Moines home, but made two unrelated arrests of
non-family members, one for a probation violation, the other for
possession with “intent to deliver.”

Prince told WHO 13 she was traumatized by the incident and
couldn’t sleep at night. Ankany police say they don’t have a
written policy (!) on executing search warrants and wouldn’t
comment because there’s an “ongoing investigation”. No word on
whether Des Moines police, in whose jurisdiction the incident took
place, is investigating.

No one was hurt, including a dog seen in the video, so this
almost-home invasion could qualify as a “good” story with nothing
to see here.

More Reason on militarization
of police.

h/t Mark Johnson

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke yesterday at the
University of Hawaii and when the subject of the Court’s notorious
1944 decision upholding the wartime internment of
Japanese-Americans came up, the conservative justice had a sobering
message for his law school audience. As Audrey McAvoy of the
Associated Press
reports:

Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944
decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the
convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu for violating
an order to report to an internment camp.

“Well of course Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have
repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you
think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students
and faculty during a lunchtime Q-and-A session.

Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning, “In times of war, the
laws fall silent.”

“That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the
invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was
wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time
of war. It’s no justification, but it is the reality,” he said.

I guess this means Justice Elena Kagan is not the only
“paranoid libertarian” on the bench.

The Congressional Budget Office
just released
a big new budget report outlining its most up-to-date
expectations for the economy, the deficit, and Obamacare over the
next decade.

It’s the first major budget document from the office since the
launch of the health law’s exchanges last year, so there are plenty
of interesting new figures and projections. Here are six key
takeaways from the report:

1. Over the next decade, there will be millions fewer
full-time jobs because Obamacare creates disincentives to
work. In 2024, the labor force will be smaller by about
2.5 million full-time equivalent jobs than it would have been in
the absence of the health law. This represents a significant
upwards revision; CBO had previously estimated that there would be
about 800,000 fewer full-time positions in 2021 because of the law.
As before, the expectation is that this reduction will stem largely
from a reduction in the labor supply; with Obamacare in place, CBO
expects that fewer people will choose to work in order to maintain
their health coverage. The effect is expected to be concentrated in
amongst part-time workers, for whom “the loss of [Obamacare’s
health insurance] subsidies upon returning to a job with health
insurance is an implicit tax on working.”

2. Fewer people are expected to gain insurance through
Obamacare as a result of the botched rollout of the
exchanges. The CBO expects that 1 million fewer people
will enroll in Medicaid, and 1 million fewer will get coverage
through the exchanges, thanks to the “significant technical
problems that have been encountered in the initial phases of
implementing the ACA.” The CBO’s projections were finished last
year, however, so they don’t incorporate the latest enrollment
data. 

3. CBO estimates that Obamacare’s risk corridors
program—the provision which has been dubbed a bailout of insurance
companies—will result in a net revenue gain for the government
rather than a net payout to insurance companies. The CBO
projects that the government will make about $8 billion in payments
to insurers under the program and receive about $16 billion in
revenue in return, for a net gain of $8 billion. That estimate,
which was completed in early December, is based on the experience
with insurers participating in Medicare Part D, which also includes
a risk corridor program. This is a hard one to estimate. As CBO’s
report says, “the government has only limited experience with this
type of program, and there are many uncertainties about how the
market for health insurance will function under the ACA and how
various outcomes would affect the government’s costs or savings for
the risk corridor program.” Whether you think this is a likely
estimate, then, depends on whether you think Medicare Part D offers
a useful guide for what to expect from Obamacare. 

4. Taken by themselves, Obamacare’s insurance provisions
will increase the deficit by $1.4 trillion. The Affordable
Care Act is a sprawling piece of legislation with a variety of
revenue mechanisms built in that are supposed to offset the
significant cost of the law. But CBO broke out the provisions that
are specifically related to the provision of insurance coverage—the
cost of the subsidies, the Medicaid expansion, the penalty payments
made as a result of the mandate, the tax on high-end coverage,
etc.—and found that, over the next 10 years, they will increase the
deficit by $1.48 trillion. (See the CBO’s table below.) This
doesn’t mean that Obamacare, as a legislative whole, is now scored
as a deficit hike. But it does mean that its central component, the
coverage expansion scheme, is. 

5. Under current law, annual budget deficits will remain
roughly equal to their current size for a few years before they
start to rise again. This year’s deficit is projected to
total $514 billion, a big drop from the $1 trillion annual
shortfalls we were seeing during Obama’s first term. And next
year’s is projected to be slightly smaller—about $478 billion. But
that’s where the reduction stops. After that, CBO projects that
deficits will begin to rise again, both in dollar terms and as a
percentage of the economy.

6. Total federal debt is huge. In part
because the nation has run such large annual deficits over the past
few years, the total amount of federal debt is enormous. By the end
of this year, outstanding national debt will equal about 74 percent
of gross domestic product (GDP), rising to 79 percent over the next
decade. That’s going to create a drag on the economy for a long
time to come. “The amount of debt relative to the size of the
economy is now very high by historical standards,” the CBO’s report
says. “Such large and growing federal debt could have serious
negative consequences, including restraining economic growth in the
long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to
unexpected challenges, and eventually increasing the risk of a
fiscal crisis.”

The Congressional Budget Office
just released
a big new budget report outlining its most up-to-date
expectations for the economy, the deficit, and Obamacare over the
next decade.

It’s the first major budget document from the office since the
launch of the health law’s exchanges last year, so there are plenty
of interesting new figures and projections. Here are six key
takeaways from the report:

1. Over the next decade, there will be millions fewer
full-time jobs because Obamacare creates disincentives to
work. In 2024, the labor force will be smaller by about
2.5 million full-time equivalent jobs than it would have been in
the absence of the health law. This represents a significant
upwards revision; CBO had previously estimated that there would be
about 800,000 fewer full-time positions in 2021 because of the law.
As before, the expectation is that this reduction will stem largely
from a reduction in the labor supply; with Obamacare in place, CBO
expects that fewer people will choose to work in order to maintain
their health coverage. The effect is expected to be concentrated in
amongst part-time workers, for whom “the loss of [Obamacare’s
health insurance] subsidies upon returning to a job with health
insurance is an implicit tax on working.”

2. Fewer people are expected to gain insurance through
Obamacare as a result of the botched rollout of the
exchanges. The CBO expects that 1 million fewer people
will enroll in Medicaid, and 1 million fewer will get coverage
through the exchanges, thanks to the “significant technical
problems that have been encountered in the initial phases of
implementing the ACA.” The CBO’s projections were finished last
year, however, so they don’t incorporate the latest enrollment
data. 

3. CBO estimates that Obamacare’s risk corridors
program—the provision which has been dubbed a bailout of insurance
companies—will result in a net revenue gain for the government
rather than a net payout to insurance companies. The CBO
projects that the government will make about $8 billion in payments
to insurers under the program and receive about $16 billion in
revenue in return, for a net gain of $8 billion. That estimate,
which was completed in early December, is based on the experience
with insurers participating in Medicare Part D, which also includes
a risk corridor program. This is a hard one to estimate. As CBO’s
report says, “the government has only limited experience with this
type of program, and there are many uncertainties about how the
market for health insurance will function under the ACA and how
various outcomes would affect the government’s costs or savings for
the risk corridor program.” Whether you think this is a likely
estimate, then, depends on whether you think Medicare Part D offers
a useful guide for what to expect from Obamacare. 

4. Taken by themselves, Obamacare’s insurance provisions
will increase the deficit by $1.4 trillion. The Affordable
Care Act is a sprawling piece of legislation with a variety of
revenue mechanisms built in that are supposed to offset the
significant cost of the law. But CBO broke out the provisions that
are specifically related to the provision of insurance coverage—the
cost of the subsidies, the Medicaid expansion, the penalty payments
made as a result of the mandate, the tax on high-end coverage,
etc.—and found that, over the next 10 years, they will increase the
deficit by $1.48 trillion. (See the CBO’s table below.) This
doesn’t mean that Obamacare, as a legislative whole, is now scored
as a deficit hike. But it does mean that its central component, the
coverage expansion scheme, is. 

5. Under current law, annual budget deficits will remain
roughly equal to their current size for a few years before they
start to rise again. This year’s deficit is projected to
total $514 billion, a big drop from the $1 trillion annual
shortfalls we were seeing during Obama’s first term. And next
year’s is projected to be slightly smaller—about $478 billion. But
that’s where the reduction stops. After that, CBO projects that
deficits will begin to rise again, both in dollar terms and as a
percentage of the economy.

6. Total federal debt is huge. In part
because the nation has run such large annual deficits over the past
few years, the total amount of federal debt is enormous. By the end
of this year, outstanding national debt will equal about 74 percent
of gross domestic product (GDP), rising to 79 percent over the next
decade. That’s going to create a drag on the economy for a long
time to come. “The amount of debt relative to the size of the
economy is now very high by historical standards,” the CBO’s report
says. “Such large and growing federal debt could have serious
negative consequences, including restraining economic growth in the
long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to
unexpected challenges, and eventually increasing the risk of a
fiscal crisis.”

British Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of
the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg has
said that British drug policy is not working. According to the BBC,
Clegg said that he does not back legalization and that the Liberal
Democrats will publish a study on an alternate drug policy later in
the year.

Clegg’s recent comments are not the first time that he has
criticized British drug policy. Last October,
Clegg said, “I don’t think we’re winning the drugs war,” and
expressed frustration that the Conservatives, led by Prime Minister
David Cameron, “are not prepared to look more openly” at
alternative drug policies.

Clegg is right. In December 2012, Cameron rejected
a report on drug policy written by members of the Home Affairs
Committee, who said that the Portuguese model of decriminalization
“is a model that merits significantly closer consideration.” and
that “We were impressed by what we saw of the Portuguese
depenalised system.” The report recommended “the establishment of a
Royal Commission to consider the best ways of reducing the harm
caused by drugs in an increasingly globalised world.”

Responding to the report, Cameron
said, “I don’t support decriminalisation. We have a policy
which actually is working in Britain.”

In the BBC’s reporting on Clegg’s recent comments it is
mentioned that The Home Office does not think that drug policy in
the U.K. needs to be changed because the use of illegal drugs has
been falling.

According to the British government’s figures on England and
Wales, this is the case. The
graph below from the British government plots the percentage of
people between the ages of 16 and 59 who used illegal drugs
(excluding mephedrone) in the last year in England and Wales from
1996 to 2013. Class A
drugs are crack cocaine, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, LSD, magic
mushrooms, methadone, and methamphetamine.

While it might be the case that there has been a decrease in the
number of people who have used illegal drugs in England and Wales,
this does not necessarily mean that British drug policy should not
be changed.

While the U.K.’s war on drugs is nowhere close to the scale of
the American effort to fight the use of illegal drugs, it is still
the case that Britons face time behind bars if caught in possession
of illegal drugs. In fact, some of those who work in British
prisons are not pleased about current drug policy. The president of
the Prison
Governors Association said last year that “The current war on
drugs is successful in creating further victims of acquisitive
crime, increasing cost to the taxpayer to accommodate a higher
prison population and allowing criminals to control and profit from
the sale and distribution of Class A drugs.” and that “A
fundamental review of the prohibition-based policy is desperately
required.”

Cameron might think that the current British drug policy is
working, but he should be open to changes, especially if they would
reduce the prison population and save taxpayers some money.