Category: reason

They may track our every statement and hobble our every move,
but the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland
Security ought not be immune to parody, says Dan McCall. The
details on
his suit to protect his, and our, right to laugh at Leviathan
from Sauk City Times:

A St. Cloud State University graduate and Sauk Rapids resident
is suing the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland
Security after they issued cease-and-desist letters against
merchandise he was producing through his web-based business.

Dan McCall, who runs LibertyManiacs.com from an office in his
home, filed the suit Tuesday in federal court in Baltimore. He says
the agencies violated his First Amendment rights, and is being
assisted in his suit by Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based
government watchdog organization.

McCall sells T-shirts, mugs and posters, often with satirical
messages.

To ridicule electronic surveillance disclosures, he paired the
NSA’s official seal on T-shirts for sale with the slogan: “The only
part of the government that actually listens.”

He also has one with the sub-heading “Spying On You Since 1952,”
and altered the NSA seal to read “Peeping While You’re
Sleeping.”….

Zazzle, which prints some of McCall’s designs on merchandise,
received the letters in 2011. Zazzle informed him of the letters in
June and the company said it would no longer carry his items with
the NSA seal because they infringed on the NSA’s intellectual
property rights. McCall is now selling those items on on CafePress,
an online business similar to Zazzle.

According to Public Citizen, the NSA and DHS threatened Zazzle
with litigation or criminal prosecution unless McCall’s designs
were removed.

Public Citizen claims no reasonable person would believe
McCall’s graphics were produced by the NSA or DHS. The organization
also believes the First Amendment guarantees McCall’s right to use
the seals to identify the agencies he’s criticizing….

The lawsuit asks the court to declare provisions of the National
Security Agency Act can’t stop McCall from displaying his
merchandise and that two other laws are unconstitutional because
the violate the First Amendment….

McCall graduated from St. Cloud State in 2001 with a degree in
political science and emphasis on economics and philosophy. He
started selling items that combined art, politics and humor a
decade ago and turned it into a full-time job in 2010. As recent as
2011, Libertymaniacs.com was on pace to generate $1 million in
sales annually and had three other employees.

Reason on the
NSA.

News stories increasingly
feature accounts of militarized police forces employing weaponry
and tactics more commonly seen on the battlefield. As Steven
Greenhut observes, such accounts raise a question rarely asked
about policing policies today: Do they unnecessarily endanger the
public’s safety?

View this article.

In the opening days of
Obamacare’s October 1 launch, federal officials touted high
web-traffic numbers, but repeatedly refused to provide enrollment
data for the federally facilitated exchanges.

On October 3, White House spokesperson Jay Carney, pressed for
enrollment numbers,
said, “No, we don’t have that data.” On October 7, in an
appearance on the Daily Show, Health and Human Services Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius repeated the claim when questioned about
enrollment: “I can’t tell you,” she said, “because I don’t
know.” 

But that simply wasn’t true—at least not during the first few
days.

Leaked meeting notes from high-level war room briefings inside
the federal health bureaucracy on October 2 and October 3 report
that federal officials were aware of the exact number of federal
enrollees on the first and second days in which the exchanges were
running.

And,
as seemed likely at the time, it turns out that the numbers
were very, very low.

According to the
notes, which were released by the House Committee on Oversight
& Government Reform and taken from daily briefings in the
Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the
federal office directly in charge of the exchanges, there were just
six successful enrollments across the 36 federal exchanges on
launch day.

The second day was a little better. By the morning of October 3,
officials reported that the number had reached triple digits on the
second day of operation. “As of yesterday, there were 248
enrollments,” it says, with the enrollment figure in bold. Later
that same day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told
reporters asking for enrollment figures that “we do not have that
data.”

It’s possible that Carney didn’t have the numbers at the time.
And I suppose it’s even possible that, four days later, HHS
Secretary Sebelius hadn’t seen the numbers either. But that
explanation is not particularly believable, especially in the case
of Sebelius, whose is the nation’s top health bureaucrat and is
therefore expected to keep informed of such things. And on the
vanishingly small chance that it is true that neither Sebelius nor
Carney were at all aware of the enrollment numbers themselves, then
that reveals that both remained, perhaps by choice, clueless and
out of the loop regarding crucial details about Obamacare’s
operations. 

HHS has attempted to drum up uncertainty about the figures in
the leaked documents. “These appear to be notes, they do not
include official enrollment statistics,” an HHS spokesperson said
in a statement, according to The Washington Post. But
while the notes do mention that some insurers didn’t get the
enrollment forms they were expected to receive, they express no
doubts about the specific enrollment numbers presented. Indeed, the
notes from the first day’s meeting list exactly which insurers have
reported successful enrollments. 

The more likely explanation here is that Carney and Sebelius
simply lied because the enrollment numbers were embarrassingly
low.

These early denials came while  top administration
officials were still
suggesting that the problem with the exchanges was too much
traffic, and major improvements in the exchanges were right around
the corner. They hoped that the exchange problems would be resolved
rapidly, and didn’t want to reveal how poorly the launch had
gone—which might generate more bad press, and perhaps scare more
people away. It’s possible, in other words, that the denials were a
result of cluelessness and incompetence—but more plausible that
federal officials knowingly lied because it was convenient for
their purposes.  

California Democratic Sen.
Dianne Feinstein’s bill to “reform” the National Security Agency’s
surveillance systems is moving forward, having
passed a vote in the Senate Intelligence Committee Agency,
11-4. Tech privacy experts are banging their faces against their
keyboards for good reason.

Here’s how Feinstein promotes the reform in her own
statement: “[It] prohibits the collection of bulk communication
records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act except
under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the
bill.” Emphasis added.

The specific procedures and restrictions set forth? It’s what
they were already doing. This isn’t a ban. It’s
permission. The Electronic Frontier Foundation
notes:

Don’t be fooled: the bill codifies some of the NSA’s worst
practices, would be a huge setback for everyone’s privacy, and it
would permanently entrench the NSA’s collection of every phone
record held by U.S. telecoms. We urge members of Congress to oppose
it.

We learned for the first time in June that the NSA secretly
twisted and re-interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act six years
ago to allow them to vacuum up every phone record in
America—continuing an unconstitutional program that began in 2001.
The new leaks about this mass surveillance program four months ago
have led to a sea change in how Americans view privacy, and poll
after poll has shown the public wants it to stop.

But instead of listening to her constituents, Sen. Feinstein put
forth a bill designed to allow the NSA to monitor their calls. Sen.
Feinstein wants the NSA to continue to collect the metadata of
every phone call in the United States—that’s who you call, who
calls you, the time and length of the conversation, and under the
government’s interpretation, potentially your location—and store it
for five years. This is not an NSA reform bill, it’s an NSA
entrenchment bill.

Other parts of the bill claim to bring a modicum of transparency
to small parts of the NSA, but requiring some modest reporting
requirements, like how many times NSA searches this database and
audit trails for who does the searching.

But its real goal seems to be to just paint a veneer of
transparency over still deeply secret programs. It does nothing to
stop NSA from weakening entire encryption systems, it does nothing
to stop them from hacking into the communications links of Google
and Yahoo’s data centers, and it does nothing to reform the PRISM
Internet surveillance program.

Reason’s Ron Bailey previously
warned about this terrible legislation and noted the much
better alternatives by other congressmen that actually would limit
bulk data collection and preserve Americans’ online privacy.

 

Politico has an
article out about President Barack Obama’s increasingly
frequent off-the-record White House meetings with various opinion
journalists and columnists. Here are some named names:

Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there
are regulars. [David] Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a
frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The
Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred
Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s
David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’
Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with
conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist
and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential
representatives from the right.

Also named are New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd. No,
Reason hasn’t been invited. Sniff.

More details:

He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The
president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most
nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the
columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of
the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these
columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as
two-and-a-half hours.

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads
the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging
those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings.
“He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he
wants to win columnists over,” said another.

These anonymous quotes from the journalists invited to these
off-the-record bull sessions are kind of hilarious.

Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask
his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring
the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very
issue.

“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about
‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about
‘x,'” one columnist explained. […]

Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you
can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what
you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the
United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”

Read the whole emetic here.

Politico has an
article out about President Barack Obama’s increasingly
frequent off-the-record White House meetings with various opinion
journalists and columnists. Here are some named names:

Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there
are regulars. [David] Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a
frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The
Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred
Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s
David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’
Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with
conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist
and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential
representatives from the right.

Also named are New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd. No,
Reason hasn’t been invited. Sniff.

More details:

He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The
president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most
nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the
columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of
the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these
columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as
two-and-a-half hours.

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads
the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging
those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings.
“He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he
wants to win columnists over,” said another.

These anonymous quotes from the journalists invited to these
off-the-record bull sessions are kind of hilarious.

Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask
his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring
the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very
issue.

“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about
‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about
‘x,'” one columnist explained. […]

Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you
can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what
you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the
United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”

Read the whole emetic here.

For well over a decade, Saudi women have been
fighting to convince their Islamic rulers to give them driving
rights. But now their argument has taken a strange twist, Shikha
Dalmia notes. They are invoking the same law that has for centuries
subjugated them to argue their case. They claim that lifting the
driving ban would be more consistent with sharia that, elsewhere,
has been used to circumcise them and make them subordinate to men.
Is this a wise strategy?

View this article.

Although the Obama administration has made
enrollment cheerleaders out of the
Baltimore Ravens,
Organizing for America, and the now-disgraced
Chad Henderson, many major unions who were allies of the
president are now treating Obamacare-advocacy like a hot
potato.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations (AFL-CIO), which has over 11 million members and is
the largest federation of unions in the country, is displeased
about the
false promises of Obamacare and refuses to promote enrollment
on the government’s behalf. It’s not just private sector unions,
though. Politico
explains:

The AFL-CIO isn’t lifting a finger to help the White House — it
remains in negotiations at the White House and on Capitol Hill to
change elements of the law it finds objectionable to workers. Those
talks were put on hold earlier this month during the government
shutdown — a far larger concern for the federal government employee
unions — and have begun to restart only in recent days, according
to officials from multiple unions.

Major public-sector unions also aren’t fired up to help the
White House with a law that won’t affect the vast majority of their
members. Nor are they ready to register people who aren’t union
workers for a benefit they won’t receive themselves.

Beth Moten, legislative and political director of the American
Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents over
650,000 federal employees,
said that although the AFGE would like to help, but “frankly,
we have our hands full in everything else, and we don’t have [the]
luxury of getting involved.”

Even the American Federation of Teachers, the largest teacher
union in the U.S., though they have made presentations for their
own members, refuse to get involved in the touting enrollment to
the communities in which they work. Furthermore, they expressed
concerns about how the healthcare system will impact part-time
teachers whose hours have been cut.

The imbroglio began earlier this year when the union leaders
realized that Obamacare was
not actually beneficial to their members and pensioners. The
Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union,
and UNITE HERE, which collectively have over 2.5 million members,

sent a strongly-worded letter to the president demanding that
changes be made so Obamacare would not hurt union workers. The
president did not come through. Unions recently made another effort
through the Senate Democrats, but that
failed, too. The
persistent problems that have been exposed since the Oct. 1
opening of the exchanges has done nothing to help the
situation.

Unions are not the only one-time supporters who have now turned
on Obamacare. Reason’s Nick Gillespie covered another
prominent advocate who recently abandoned ship.

In 2007, David Goldhill’s father was admitted to a New York City
hospital with pneumonia, and five weeks later he died there from
multiple hospital-acquired infections. “I probably would have been
like any other family member dealing with the grief and disbelief,”
says Goldhill, a self-described liberal Democrat who is currently
the CEO of the Game Show Network. “But,” as Goldhill recounts,

A month later there was
a profile in The New Yorker of physician Peter
Provonost, who was running around the country with fairly simple
steps for cleanliness and hygiene that could significantly reduce
the hospital-acquired infection rate, but he was having a hard time
getting hospitals to sign up for this. I had helped run a movie
chain, and we had a rule that if a soda spilled, it had to be
cleaned up in five minutes or someone got in trouble. And I thought
to myself, if we can do that to get you not to go to the theater
across the street, why are hospitals having such a hard time doing
simple cost-free things to save lives?

That’s how Goldhill first got interested in the economics of the
American health care system. In 2009, he published a much-discussed

article in The Atlantic, which he has now expanded
into a book, titled
Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My
Father–and How We Can Fix It.

View this article.

Yesterday, I wrote about how
President Barack Obama’s approach toward journalists while selling
the Affordable Care Act has arguably amounted to “working
the refs.” But there are some professional truth-slingers who
require no extra nudge–they’re here to tell you that Obamacare
critics are all wet, that maybe the president went a
wee bit too far with that whole you-can-keep-it stuff, but
that the more important thing is that these aren’t the health plans
you were looking for.

Here’s a sampling from the genre; bolding is mine to emphasize
apologia for presidential mendacity and other WTFery:

David Firestone, New York Times, “The
Uproar Over Insurance ‘Cancellation’ Notices“:

Most lawmakers mentioned President Obama’s unfortunate
blanket statement that all Americans would be allowed to
keep their insurance policies if they liked them. He failed to make
an exception for inadequate policies that don’t meet the new
minimum standards. […]

The so-called cancellation letters waved around at yesterday’s
hearing were simply notices that policies would have to be upgraded
or changed. Some of those old policies were so full of holes that
they didn’t include hospitalization, or maternity care, or coverage
of other serious conditions.

Republicans were apparently furious that government
would dare intrude on an insurance company’s freedom to offer a
terrible product to desperate people. […]

Luckily, a comprehensive and affordable insurance policy
is…now a basic right….Ms. Sebelius never lost her cool in
three-and-a-half hours of testimony, perhaps because she knows that
once the computer problems and the bellowing die down, the country
will be far better off.

Michael Hiltzik, Los
Angeles Times, “Obamacare
hysteria: Don’t believe the canceled insurance hype“:
 

We’re supposed to be scandalized by this, since
President Obama himself assured everyone that if they
liked their insurance they’d be able to keep it. […]

Back in March, Consumer Reports published a study of many of
these plans and placed them in a special category: “junk
health insurance.” Some plans, the magazine declared, may be
worse than none at all. […]

It’s time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these
health plan cancellations. Many of the departing plans are
being outlawed for good reason, and many of the customers
losing them have no idea how much financial exposure they were
saddled with in the old days. That’s the real scandal in American
health insurance, and Obamacare is designed, rightly, to fix
it.

Henry J. Aaron, New York Daily News,
“The
truth about those Obamacare coverage letters”:

Of late, numerous reports have told of people surprised by
letters telling them that insurance plans they now have will not be
renewed. Many are puzzled. Weren’t they told that if they like
their insurance they could keep it? Opponents of health reform in
general are seizing on the fact and asking in an accusatorial
manner: “Isn’t this a betrayal of trust?”

No. […]

[Obamacare] bars certain common practices of insurance companies
that most people find unacceptable at best, outrageous at
worst. […]

People should be no more shocked when substandard insurance
plans are removed from the market than they would be if food purity
legislation caused some products to be removed from a grocer’s
shelf. Obamacare is removing insurance products from the
market that are bad for your health.

“Terrible” insurance products that are “bad for your health” and
being “outlawed for good reason”? You might want to ask
Robert Laszewski about that.

Read Peter Suderman for more on how “The
Obama Administration’s Response to Insurance Plan Cancellations Is
Misleading and Condescending.” An excerpt from that:

The argument here, essentially, is that anyone whose plan gets
canceled didn’t really like his or her plan—that, even though the
beneficiary might not know it, the plan being canceled wasn’t worth
having anyway.

It’s a fundamentally condescending argument that makes a blanket
assumption that people don’t know whether or not they liked their
plan. It’s also a bunch of nonsense.

The administration can’t possibly know what sort of insurance
each and every individual likes or wants, and it can’t account for
the people who are losing plans that clearly did meet the needs of
the individuals who purchased them.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal‘s
James Taranto has a
piece making similar points to mine, and with more examples
worth reading.