Category: reason

Rodric Braithwaite, the British ambassador in Moscow from 1988
to 1992, recently wrote a column in
The Independent that provides not only valuable historical
context to the ongoing crisis in Crimea, but also outlines why the
best way for the crisis to be resolved is going to involve “eating
of words on all sides.”

Early on in the column,
Braithwaite outlines a brief history of the last thousand years of
the area now known as Ukraine:

So perhaps we should start with a short history lesson. A
thousand years ago Kiev was the capital of an Orthodox Christian
state called Rus with links reaching as far west as England. But
Rus was swept away by the Tatars in the 13th century, leaving only
a few principalities in the north, including an obscure town deep
in the forests, called Moscow.

What became known as Ukraine – a Slav phrase meaning
“borderlands” – was regularly fought over by Tatars, Poles,
Lithuanians, Russians, Turks, Swedes and Cossacks. One large chunk,
including Kiev itself, joined Russia in the 17th century. Galicia
in the west fell to the Austrians in the following century, but was
taken by Poland after the First World War, when the rest of Ukraine
joined the Soviet Federation. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin
handed Galicia and its capital Lviv to Ukraine in 1945. All these
changes were accompanied by much bloody fighting.

Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula followed a different but equally
tumultuous path. The seat of a powerful and predatory Tatar state,
it was conquered and settled by the Russians in the 18th century.
Stalin deported its Tatar minority in 1944 because, he said, they
had collaborated with the Germans. They were later allowed to
return. Crimea only became part of Ukraine in 1954, when Khrushchev
gave it to Kiev as a present.

Ukraine became an independent country for the first time since
the Middle Ages when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Braithwaite goes on to outline the attachment many Russians feel
towards Ukraine:

…most Russians feel strong emotional links to Ukraine as the
cradle of their civilisation. Even the most open minded feel its
loss like an amputated limb.

Braithwaite believes it is irresponsible
to talk of Ukraine joining NATO, an organization he says most
Ukrainians do not want to join. He adds that the majority of
Ukrainians want to be on good terms with Russia.

One of the most important points Braithwaite makes in his column
is that the West does not have the means to stop Russia being
overly involved in Ukrainian affairs:

…the West does not have the instruments to impose its will. It
has no intention of getting into a forceful confrontation with
Russia. Lesser sanctions are available to it, both economic and
political, but they will hardly be sufficient to deflect a
determined Russia from its meddling.

The alternative is for the West to talk to the Russians and to
whoever can speak with authority for Ukraine. So far the Americans
have been ineffective on the sidelines, the British seem to have
given up doing foreign policy altogether, and only the Germans, the
Poles and the French have shown any capacity for action.

Braithwaite concludes by saying a deal that would likely be
better than any other proposed resolution to the crisis would
have to include both the West and Russia agreeing to stop
interfering with Ukraine, NATO making assurances that it will not
work towards recruiting Ukraine, and the West and Russia both
offering support to Ukraine’s economy.

Whether or not you think it’s
fair to describe Obamacare’s risk corridor program as a bailout
probably depends in part on whether you expect it to cost taxpayers
money.

In theory, the program is designed to share risk symmetrically
between health insurers and the federal government: Insurers whose
costs are higher than expected will have a portion of their costs
covered by the federal government, but insurers with
lower-than-expected costs will pay into the system.

When the law was passed, the expectation was that the program
would be revenue neutral, with some insurers paying in, others
getting paid, and the whole thing more or less balancing out. But
with the rocky rollout of Obamacare’s exchanges, and suggestions
from health insurers that exchange-based plans might struggle
financially, it has increasingly seemed like a stretch to expect
that the program would raise as much money as it cost.

The Congressional Budget Office complicated matters further when
it estimated that, over the life of the program, which is currently
set to run through 2016, it would end up netting the government
about $8 billion in revenue. That estimate was based on the
experience with risk corridors in Medicare Part D, which
may not be the best guide to life under Obamacare. 

That’s especially true now that we have an idea of how much the
administration expects the program to cost next year:
about $5.5 billion. That’s the amount President Obama’s new
budget plan requests to fund the risk corridor program during the
next fiscal year. 

Caveats apply. This is for one year, not the life of the
program. And as the administration
likes to note, the budget is a “statement of our values as a
nation,” which is to say that it’s not the sort of thing that’s
likely to pass. But it is a signal about what the White House
expects, and believes, and stands for. Apparently, one of our
values as a nation is bailing out insurers participating in the
rollout of a botched health care overhaul.  

America’s Longest War, Reason TV’s feature-length
documentary film about drug prohibition, is now available for
digital download from Java Films. Go to Java Film’s Vimeo On
Demand site to purchase the film for only $4.99!

Abby Martin, an American anchor at the Russian
government-sponsored cable network Russia Today, slammed Russia’s
military intervention in the Ukrainian region of Crimea at the end
of her show last night. “What Russia did is wrong,” she told her
viewers, admitting she didn’t know as much as she should about the
history and cultural dynamics of the region, but that nevertheless
she did know that “military intervention is never the answer.”

In pointing out that American journalists and political
commentators who were some of the biggest cheerleaders for U.S.
intervention are now the loudest voices against Russian
intervention,
Glenn Greenwald notes that Martin’s “unapologetic denunciation”
of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on an “unquestionably”
pro-Russian network doesn’t quite have a parallel in the U.S.
Writing at the Intercept, Greenwald asks:  “was there even a
single U.S. television host who said anything comparable to this in
the lead-up to, or the early stages of, the U.S. invasion of Iraq?”
If Pat Buchanan had a show in 2003, the answer is yes.
Nevertheless, Pat Buchanan is not representative of American media
culture or politics.

Russia Today responded to Martin’s segment, and the hoopla
surrounding it, by
insisting it “doesn’t beat its journalists into submission” and
that they’re free to express their opinions, in private and on-air.
In its response, the network announced it would be sending Martin
to Crimea to “give her an opportunity to make up her own mind from
the epicentre of the story.”

Watch Martin’s segment below:

Disclosure: I’ve been
on
RT
several
times and have no complaints about those appearances. If I only
appeared on media outlets I agree with 100 percent, or even just
most of the time, I probably wouldn’t appear anywhere.

Are you an obnoxious jerk who enjoys deliberately pissing people
off? Well, good news:
You are now legal in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The city has
officially moved to decriminalize annoyingness.

Under current city code, “no person shall willfully annoy
another person” in Grand Rapids without facing consequences. The
Grand Rapids City Commission is now seeking to repeal the
38-year-old code because what constitutes “willfully annoying” is
“subject to a variety of interpretations.” City Attorney Catherine
Mish told The
Grand Rapids Press the section was unconstitutionally
vague and “simply unenforceable.” 

It seems 2014 is shaping up to be a good year all around for
freedom of annoyingness. In January, the
British House of Lords voted against a clause imposing
sanctions on anyone in England and Wales engaging in “conduct
capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person.” And last
month the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled
that simply being drunk and annoying wasn’t a crime. 

No comment:

A senior aide to [British Prime Minister] David Cameron
resigned from Downing Street last month the day before being
arrested on allegations relating to child abuse images.

Patrick Rock, who was involved in drawing up the government’s
policy for the large internet firms on online pornography filters,
resigned after No 10 was alerted to the allegations….

Rock helped to draw up government policy which led to the deal with
the internet giants on online filters. Under the deal, all
households connected to the internet will be contacted to be asked
if they would like the filters installed.

Gene Healy reflects on the last five years of the
Tea Party, and suggests its poor choice of banner carriers helps
explain why the brand has suffered, and libertarian identification
with the movement has waned over time. Still whatever errors
they’ve made along the way, the Tea Partiers identified the right
target: our profligate political class. 

View this article.

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway has said
that he will not appeal
a recent order issued by U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II
directing Kentucky to recognize out of state same-sex marriages.
The order made official Heyburn’s previous Feb. 12 ruling.

After Heyburn’s order was issued Reason asked Sen. Rand
Paul (R-Ky.) to comment on the order. Paul’s response below:

I believe in the historic and religious definition of marriage.
I also believe this power belongs to the states and the people, not
the federal government. It is illegitimate for the federal courts
to intrude here.

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear (D) has responded to Conway’s
comments. From the
Associated Press:

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear says the state will hire outside
attorneys to appeal a judge’s decision granting legal recognition
to same-sex couples married in other states and countries.

Head over to
Reason 24/7 for recent news on gay marriage. More from
Reason.com on gay marriage here.

Beyond the cultural and border
history between Ukraine and Russia, let’s not forget the
trade issues that actually brought about this current conflict.
Certainly natural gas producers haven’t, and they’re using this
conflict to encourage the United States to loosen up on our energy
export laws so America can ship more overseas and take a bit of
wind out of Vladimir Putin’s sails without resorting to violence or
military responses.

Bloomberg notes
today:

Russia, the world’s second-largest producer of natural gas after
the U.S., has twice since 2006 cut supplies of the fuel to Ukraine,
a conduit for energy to Europe. Greater access to U.S. supplies
would blunt the ability of Russia to use energy as a weapon,
according to supporters of lifting export curbs.

“This is a geopolitical fulcrum that we could be utilizing if we
didn’t have this protectionist constraint on U.S. energy,”
Christopher Guith, vice president for policy at the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, said in a phone
interview.

Russia is canceling the price discount on natural gas for
Ukraine because of its debt owed to Russian gas giant OAO Gazprom
(OGZD), President Vladimir Putin said today during a news
conference. At the same time, the U.S. is preparing a
financial-assistance package for Ukraine that would include $1
billion in loan guarantees to help the nation offset reduced energy
subsidies, according to a White House statement today.

The United States is typically awful, bureaucratic, and slow
about permitting fuel sales overseas to countries with whom we do
not have free trade agreements. Bloomberg notes that the Department
of Energy is weighing 24 applications to export liquefied natural
gas. They’ve approved six applications since 2010. Unfortunately,
though, the process is so involved that even if the Energy
Department approved them all today, it would be years before our
natural gas would be heading overseas.

Over at the Daily Beast, Christopher Dickey
noted, while this conflict was starting to truly unspool last
week, that Putin likes to use environmental arguments to make a big
deal about the alleged horrors of fracking, as he and Russia
benefit financially by keeping the rest of the world from accessing
that shale gas:

Vladimir Putin just hates fracking—at least, he hates it when
other countries do it. As the Russian president told an economic
conference last year, in places where companies are fracking to
extract natural gas, they turn on the faucet and “black stuff comes
out of the tap.” Consider the environment, he begged his
audience.

 While you’re at it, consider the many European countries
that depend on Russia for their natural gas or might compete with
it as suppliers. Think of Bulgaria, Romania, Poland; and think,
especially, of Ukraine. …

If the natural gas reserves in Ukraine are anything like as
large as analysts believe—and that is a big “if,” but far from an
impossibility—then the geopolitical and economic position of the
former Soviet republic could be transformed; its independence from
Moscow assured; its value to the West unquestioned.

Even the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych understood that. (He
was never so reliable a Putin ally as his opponents painted him.)
Last November, Yanukovych’s government signed a $10 billion deal
for shale gas exploration and exploitation with the American-based
multinational Chevron, following on another massive deal with Royal
Dutch Shell.  Together, Yanukovych claimed, those agreements
would enable Ukraine “to have full sufficiency in gas by 2020 and,
under an optimistic scenario, even enable us to export energy.”

Read more, including how Bulgaria passed a sudden moratorium on
drilling to be rewarded later with a 20 percent cut in the price of
fuel from Russia,
here.

MarijuanaDoctors.com might not
have the most inspired name, but the website is set to make U.S.
television history
with the first medical marijuana-related TV ad. The 1-minute
spot—slated to air on Massachusetts Comcast channels come
April—compares buying drugs illegally to buying sushi off the
street and urges potential patients to visit MarijuanaDoctors.com to
find pot prescribing physicians.

Jessie Quintero Johnson, a University of Massachusetts-Boston
health communication professor, viewed the ad positively. “This is
a great example of the producer of the ad trying to create an
association with credibility,” she told The Patriot
Ledger. 

Medical marijuana is still relatively
new for Massachusetts. Though voters approved it in 2012, state
regulators just issued
the first permits for medical marijuana dispensaries in
late January 2014. The first of these dispensaries are expected to
open this summer or fall. 

In what is perhaps the first and only likable thing I’ve ever
heard about Comcast, MarijuanaDoctors.com CEO Jason Draizin said
the cable conglomerate was “happy to do business” with him, even as
other companies balked at the idea. Draizin bought 200
ads, which
will also air in New Jersey and the greater Chicago area. A
Comcast spokeswoman said that the ads would only air between 10
p.m. and 5 a.m. on cable channels without children’s
programming.