Tag: hit&run

The United States has maintained some degree of military presence inside Somalia for much of the last three decades, but a pattern of escalation that began late in former President Barack Obama’s second term has markedly accelerated in the two years since President Donald Trump took office.

Somalia is, for all intents and purposes, another addition to Washington’s roster of undeclared, undebated, and unnecessary wars of uncertain connection to U.S. security—and a Friday report from NBC News suggested Trump had finally come to see it that way. But by Monday, the Pentagon had pushed back, denying any strategy shift. This is unfortunate because the initial push to draw down U.S. military intervention in Somalia was the right one, writes Bonnie Kristian for Reason.

View this article.

Last year, 24-year-old Nina Dang broke her arm in a bike riding accident in the city of San Francisco. After someone who saw the accident called the hospital, an ambulance picked her up and took her to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where doctors performed several tests, put her arm in a splint, and provided her with pain medication, then sent her on her way.

Not long afterwards, she received a bill for $24,074.50. Dang carried health insurance—but the emergency room was out of network, and her insurer would only pay $3,830.79, the rate it considered reasonable for the services she received. She owed more than $20,000.

The twist is that the emergency room is out of network for every single insurer, meaning that even people with gold-plated health insurance who ended up there could be stuck with large medical bills.

At first glance, this story, originally reported by Sarah Kliff of Vox as part of a sharply researched ongoing series about high emergency room bills, might sound like a straightforward tale of dubious billing practices designed to take advantage of people in need. As it turns out, however, it is also a story about government price controls, because the unusually high prices charged by Zuckerberg General were set by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Although Kliff didn’t mention it in her piece, she noted in a Twitter follow-up that the rates Dang was charged were explicitly determined by the city via an ordinance designed to “determine and fix the proper reasonable amounts to be charged” to people receiving a variety of medical services, from coronary care ($18,424 last year, $19,714 for the 2018-19 fiscal year), to baby observation ($6,408 last year, $6,857 at present), to “reproduction of documents” ($2 last year, and $2 this year).

The San Francisco ordinance is not nearly as thorough a list of medical incidents as, say, the ICD-10 codes put forth by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—which differentiates between medical problems such as being “sucked into a jet engine” or being involved in an “accident while knitting or crocheting”—but it is fairly comprehensive in laying out different types of potential treatments and the “proper reasonable amounts” that hospitals must charge for them.

The city, in other words, deserves considerable blame for Dang’s medical bill. As Kliff wrote on Twitter, “If you’re a San Fancisco resident frustrated with how Zuckerberg General is billing, a lot of your frustration should really rest with the city board of supervisors.”

I think that’s right. But the deeper problem isn’t that the rates are too high. It’s that the government is setting the prices to begin with. Attempts to mandate prices for medical care almost always lead to headaches and unintended consequences.

Through the 1970s and early 1980s, for example, many states maintained some sort of rate-setting system for hospitals, essentially demanding uniform pricing overseen by the state. The pricing formulas, however, ended up being confusing and inscrutable, even to the state officials in charge of them; large hospitals manipulated the systems for their own gain, and small hospitals responded by demanding that they be paid higher rates. Medicare has struggled for decades to determine proper reimbursement rates, and found that providers often manipulate the system in order to maximize payments, leading to new payment systems and new distortions.

The problem with government-set prices is that they are not really prices; they are based on bureaucratic whims, not the subtle back and forth between supply and demand, which can exist in a world without explicit negotiations, and yes, even in the case of emergency services, where arrangements can be made in advance and pricing models can be developed to account for the possibility of a medical emergency which makes bargaining or shopping around impossible. But a system in which bureaucrats determine prices makes it difficult (if not impossible) for those models to succeed.

The prevalence of employer-sponsored private insurance contributes to this difficulty, but that too is an artifact of a longstanding federal tax policy that privileges employer benefits, artificially lowering the price of health coverage.

The lack of real market pricing isn’t the only problem with American health care, but it’s a big one, and it affects nearly every aspect of the system, distorting incentives for providers, administrators, and payers, often at the expense of the sick. It also creates incentives for poor medical care and practice, because health care providers—or at least the administrators who organize the systems in which they work—end up serving third-party payers rather than the individual humans whose treatment should be paramount. In Dang’s case, the hospital’s justification is that it has to make up for the cost of serving the poor and needy through other patients (like her), which is essentially a way of saying that safety net programs pay so little that hospitals have to come up with ways to extract maximum revenue from everyone else.

Dang may well have been taken by a scammy hospital practice. But she was also served rather poorly by government-set prices that ensured her bill would be as unaffordably high as it is.

In a press conference Friday about the border-wall funding he is demanding from Congress in return for reopening the federal government, President Donald Trump told reporters: “This should have been done by all of the presidents that preceded me. And they all know it. Some of them have told me that we should have done it.”

Unsurprisingly, given both the president’s track record of non-veracity and the media’s enthusiasm for documenting it, this anecdote has led to a flurry of headlines such as, “Every living president has refuted Trump’s claim about supporting the wall.”

Equally unsurprisingly, the president’s underlings have embarrassed themselves trying to defend the lie. For instance, Vice President Mike Pence went on the Today show this morning to stammer, soften the initial claim (“I know that the president has said that that was his impression from previous administrations”), and then change the subject.

“Which former presidents told President Trump, as he said, that he should’ve built a wall? All their representatives have denied that that was the case.” @halliejackson to @VP Mike Pence pic.twitter.com/7xAH05aheE

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) January 8, 2019

Yet as far as White House immigration lies go, this exchange was utterly inconsequential. Sure, it’s unseemly when a president lies, it’s degrading to all his willing defenders, and it expends the scarce resource of journalistic time and outrage (just kidding: this never runs out). But unlike other immigration-related fantasia, the other-presidents-support-me shaggy dog story has not translated into concrete policy action.

From illegal-immigrant voter fraud to the diversity lottery visa, from chain migration to sanctuary cities, immigrant-criminality to terrorist infiltration from the south, the Trump administration has spent two years basing policy and enforcement priorities on dystopian fables. Refugee intake has been slashed, asylum laws have been effectively rewritten via executive order and draconian enforcement changes, the legal immigration machinery has been gummed up with deliberately repellant bureaucracy, and families have been cruelly broken apart in the name of deterrence.

All of these changes affect lives more than some idle White House bluster; all are based on the repetition of lies, particularly regarding the alleged danger to Americans posed by those seeking to cross the US.-Mexico border. Now that candidate Trump’s single biggest—and single most unattainable—campaign promise has collided against reality to the point of political impasse, a politically cornered president seeks to persuade a skeptical public tonight that extending and strengthening the existing 654 miles of barriers along the 1,954-mile border is a principle worth closing the federal government over.

What are the chances of Trump not lying while making his case tonight? Judging by his administration’s track record on inflating the northbound threat-risk, not very high.

On Friday, White House Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders asserted on Fox News that “nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists that CPB picked up [in fiscal year 2017] came across our southern border.” That assertion is both false and familiar.

During the pre-election migrant-caravan panic, Vice President Pence told a Washington Post forum that “in the last fiscal year we apprehended more than 10 terrorists or suspected terrorists per day at our southern border from countries that are referred to in the lexicon as ‘other than Mexico’―that means from the Middle East region.” That 10-a-day stat is a staple of administration propaganda about the southern border. And it’s “eye-poppingly bogus,” in the words of The Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake.

In fact, according to an NBC News report yesterday, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered only six immigrants at ports of entry on the U.S-Mexico border in the first half of fiscal year 2018 whose names were on a federal government list of known or suspected terrorists, according to CBP data provided to Congress in May 2018.” More:

Overall, 41 people on the Terrorist Screening Database were encountered at the southern border from Oct. 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018, but 35 of them were U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. Six were classified as non-U.S. persons.

On the northern border, CBP stopped 91 people listed in the database, including 41 who were not American citizens or residents.

Border patrol agents, separate from CBP officers, stopped five immigrants from the database between legal ports of entry over the same time period, but it was unclear from the data which ones were stopped at the northern border versus the southern border.

Further, the State Department concluded in July 2017 that there was “no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States.” So where does that 10-a-day stat come from?

It seems to be the conflation of two separate numbers—the 3,755 people from the government’s Known and Suspected Terrorist (KST) list who were stopped at all points of entry (mostly at airports) in fiscal 2017, and the 3,028 “special interest aliens” (SIAs) who were flagged at the southern border. So who are those eight (not 10) SIAs we’re catching every day down south?

The Department of Homeland Security’s own press release from yesterday trying to put the best possible gloss on recent numerical/classification controversies acknowledges that “the term SIA does not indicate any specific derogatory information about the individual,” and that “[not] all SIAs are ‘terrorists.'” What are they, then?

Generally, an SIA is a non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests. Often such individuals or groups are employing travel patterns known or evaluated to possibly have a nexus to terrorism. DHS analysis includes an examination of travel patterns, points of origin, and/or travel segments that are tied to current assessments of national and international threat environments.

As The Washington Post‘s Salvador Rizzo reported in a useful explainer yesterday:

Alan Bersin, an assistant homeland security secretary in the Obama administration, described them in 2016 as “unauthorized migrants who arrive in the United States from, or are citizens of, several Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries.” For example, a GAO report from 2010 lists “Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan” as special interest countries.

“While many citizens of these countries migrate for economic reasons or because they are fleeing persecution in their home countries, this group may include migrants who are affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, intelligence agencies, and organized criminal syndicates,” Bersin testified in March 2016. (Emphasis ours.)

Bersin also testified that “the majority of individuals that are traveling, be they from special interest alien countries or other places, we found the large majority of these individuals are actually fleeing violence from other parts of the world[.”]

So we’ve gone from 10 “known or suspected terrorists” caught on the southern border each day to eight people who show up on a not-necessarily-terrorist watchlist, a “large majority” of whom are “actually fleeing violence.” No wonder Nielsen is backpedaling behind a cloud of authoritative-sounding vagueness:

The threat is real. The number of terror-watchlisted individuals encountered at our Southern Border has increased over the last two years. The exact number is sensitive and details about these cases are extremely sensitive. But I am sure all Americans would agree that even one terrorist reaching our borders is one too many.

Those italics, contained in the source material, are a useful reminder of what Trump and his administration have really been up to: trying to spin ghastly and all-too-real criminal anecdotes into stubbornly elusive data, in order to sell impossible-to-attain zero tolerance policies that remain popular (solely) among his core base of supporters despite sacrificing the rights of U.S. citizens. Trumpian conservatism, which is the type that currently holds sway in the national GOP, apparently requires vast presidential power grabs and the obliteration of private property rights in rural Texas in order to achieve its politically unpopular goals.

Exaggerating and lying is what the unscrupulous do when they lack confidence in the persuasive power of existing facts. There’s no reason not to expect more of it tonight.

“The overall cancer death rate dropped continuously from 1991 to 2016 by a total of 27 percent, translating into approximately 2,629,200 fewer cancer deaths than would have been expected if death rates had remained at their peak,” notes the American Cancer Society (ACS) in its latest annual update of cancer mortality and incidence statistics. In 1991, the cancer death rate stood at 215 per 100,000 people and has fallen in 2016 to 156 per 100,000 people. The report also notes that the cancer death rate between 2007 and 2016 for both women and men declined annually by 1.4 and 1.8 percent, respectively.

In addition, the ACS reports that the cancer incidence rate between 2006 and 2015 for women has been stable while dropping by approximately 2 percent per year for men. In other words, the modern world is not producing an epidemic of cancer as predicted by so many activists.

Most of the decline in both incidence and mortality is due to reductions in smoking tobacco (which increases the risk of a number of cancers, particularly lung cancer) and advances in the early detection and treatment of cancer. According to the report, LiveScience notes, lung cancer death rates have dropped by 48 percent among men from 1990 to 2016; and 23 percent among women from 2002 to 2016. Breast cancer death rates dropped 40 percent among women from 1989 to 2016; prostate cancer death rates dropped by 51 percent among men from 1993 to 2016; and colorectal cancer death rates dropped by 53 percent among both men and women from 1970 to 2016. The reduction in death rates for breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer reflect the use of screening tests that result in earlier detection and, in the case of colorectal cancer, the removal of precancerous polyps during colonoscopy.

The news is not all good, however. Incidence rates for melanoma, liver, and thyroid cancers in men and women since 1975 have trended slightly upwards.

The report does also note that compared with the most affluent counties, mortality rates in the poorest counties were two-fold higher for cervical cancer and 40 percent higher for male lung and liver cancers during 2012-2016.

Overall, the chances that an American man will be diagnosed with cancer before age 49 is 1 in 30, rising after age 70 to 1 in 3. For American women the chances of being diagnosed with cancer before age 49 is 1 in 18, rising after age 70 to 1 in 4. Still, the lifetime probability of being diagnosed with invasive cancer is slightly higher for men (39.3 percent) than for women (37.7 percent).

The report notes that the disparity between men and women is possibily associated with sex differences in immune function and response. Adult height is also positively associated with cancer incidence and mortality in both men and women, and has been estimated to account for one-third of the sex disparity.*

*Disclosure: This correlation is annoying given that I am six feet and five inches tall.

Libertarian Australian Senator David Leyonhjelm is resigning from national politics, but he isn’t leaving government behind. Instead he’s looking to take his fight against the nanny state to the local level.

Leyonhjelm, of Australia’s Liberal Democratic Party (that’s the country’s label for libertarians), was elected to office in 2013 and re-elected in 2016. He has spent a lot of that time advocating for the liberty to own guns, marry somebody of the same sex, legally smoke marijuana, and be free from unwarranted government surveillance.

Well, at least gay marriage was legalized (after a lengthy, complicated public vote). The rest has been a struggle. Even after the Australian Senate made it easier for terminally ill patients to import medical marijuana, the country’s Department of Health continued to threaten people who attempted to do so. And the country has actually ramped up surveillance authorities on its citizens and is now potentially threatening everybody’s data privacy and security with anti-encryption legislation. Meanwhile, as Australia’s extremely high taxes on cigarettes has created a massive black market for the goods, the country has responded by attempting to stop large cash transactions.

So Leyonhjelm has now decided to focus on fighting the country’s nanny tendencies on the state level. He says he’s planning to run for the Upper House in New South Wales (home of Sydney and the country’s highest population concentration of nearly 8 million).

He told Sky News that he wants to fight against red tape on the state level, focusing on familiar overregulation issues like liquor licensing, rules on where you can smoke or vape, gambling, laws that control business hours, and issues like assisted suicide and, again, drug legalization.

In the interview, which aired Monday night in Australia, he also expressed support for allowing booths for people attending music festivals to test their drugs to make sure that they’re safe. Drug overdoses often happen because pills are adulterated with fentanyl or other opioids of which the user is not aware. But New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian is apparently opposed to allowing open testing. Four people have died from drug overdoses at music festivals in New South Wales since September, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

“The idea that pill-testing shouldn’t be used because it gives the green light to kids to take drugs is a cruel attitude to something that’s taking young kids’ lives,” Leyonhjelm told Sky News.

An election analyst at Australia’s ABC Network (not the same as America’s Disney-owned network of the same name) predicted that Leyonhjelm would have a tough time keeping his Senate seat. The ruling government has made it harder since Leyonhjelm was elected for minor parties to reach the polling thresholds needed to win seats under the country’s preferential voting system. But he could fare better with the New South Wales Legislative Council, though he’s going to be competing against other third parties as well.

Reason interviewed Leyonhjelm not long after he was first seated as a senator. Read it here.

In December, the deaths of two migrant children brought a new wave of questions regarding the treatment of migrants by federal agents. In response to the second high-profile death, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced new policies for children in its custody. More recently, NBC News reported that over the last two years 22 immigrants have died while in federal custody.

But the numerous issues within the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) immigration agencies predate Trump.

A 2005 audit of the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which was conducted by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (OIG), found that budget management was at times so poor employees could not complete work-related travel because “ICE had temporarily run out of money.”

An OIG audit from August 2006 found that a number of misconduct reports ommitted important information. The “lack of reliable tracking and processing procedures prevents ICE from adequately documenting and monitoring completed investigations throughout the adjudication phase,” the report says. As a result, ICE’s “ability to ensure that disciplinary cases are adjudicated in a timely and uniform manner” was compromised.

Another OIG audit from December 2006 found serious mismanagement of migrant detainees at five different facilities. Documentation was missing for new detainees; facilities also failed to conduct initial medical screening, and to adequately document medical screenings when they did conduct them. Additionally, investigators found that 196 of the 481 non-emergency medical requests made at three of the visited facilities were not addressed within the timeframe outlined by each facility’s policies.

The December report also documented a rape allegation, a strip search that occured within the view of other detainees, and a detainee’s refusal to be interviewed by the OIG investigators for fear of retaliation from detention staff.

Though federal immigration services have at least 16 years of mismanagement and misconduct under their belt, criticism has been most intense under President Trump. Following the death of the first child, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen blamed limitations faced by federal agents. Cynthia Pompa of the American Civil Liberties Union disagrees. She said the tragedy represented “the worst possible outcome when people, including children, are held in inhumane conditions.” Pompa blamed a lack of “accountability and a culture of cruelty within CBP.” Almost 20 years of recorded mismanagement would seem to back up her argument.

Just last month, videos showing staff at Southwest Key shelter dragging, slapping, and pushing migrant children throughout the facility were obtiained and released. Law enforcement in Maricopa County, Arizona, initially insisted that the actions were acceptable restraint techniques.

Due to a lack of oversight from Congress and the Justice Department, as well as our broader broken immigration system, we can sadly expect this abuse and mismanagement to continue.

More than four years after they first filed a lawsuit alleging free speech violations, two professors have reached a settlement with Chicago State University (CSU).

CSU, a public university, agreed to pay Philip Beverly and Robert Bionaz $650,000 and revise the unconstitutional policies that prompted the lawsuit.

On July 1, 2018, Bevery and Bionaz filed suit after CSU ordered them to shut down a faculty-run website that had criticized the administration. Administrators had alleged that this criticism violated the university’s policy against cyberbullying, and one public relations director even filed a harassment complaint against Bionaz. These were obvious violations of the faculty’s rights; the hurt feelings of university PR officials do not trump the First Amendment.

The professors were represented by the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, and the suit was brought with the assistance of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). This was among the first four lawsuits filed by FIRE in conjunction with its Stand Up for Speech Litigation Project, which I wrote about years ago.

“The victory is the 13th settlement in FIRE’s Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project,” noted FIRE in a press release. “After each victory, FIRE will target another school—sending a message that unless public colleges obey the law, they will be sued. More than 90 percent of top public colleges maintain policies that restrict First Amendment rights.”

John Bolton, President Trump’s National Security Advisor and a committed foreign policy hawk, has derailed his boss’s plans for a quick withdrawal from Syria.

Bolton told U.S. allies in the region that America would not beat a hasty retreat and would leave some troops behind to protect the Kurds, non-Arab Sunni Muslims who have done the lion’s share of the fighting to defeat ISIS. Trump has not contradicted Bolton, and in fact, is now pretending that was always the plan.

America does need to worry about the Syrian Kurds, whose support has been crucial to its efforts to defeat ISIS. Turkey, their mortal enemy, has every intention of slaughtering them once America leaves. The U.S. can’t leave them more vulnerable than when it intervened, something it has done to them—and other groups elsewhere—far too often, fueling the perception that America is a selfish power that uses and discards local allies at will.

But the best way to help the Kurds, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia, is not by staying in Syria forever. It is by giving them exit options to come to America.

That, however, would require this administration to get rid of its misguided “Muslim” travel ban, which includes Syria.

View this article.

Ten states plus Washington, D.C., have legalized pot for adults.

In several states, it’s been legal now for five years. How has it worked out?

John Stossel visited legal weed stores in California and talked with people on the street.

Almost unanimously, people said that legalization has worked well.

But Paul Chabot, a drug warrior who served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, disagrees. Years ago, he told Stossel that legalization would create all kinds of problems. He hasn’t changed his mind.

Click here for full text and downloadable versions.

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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

View this article.

President Donald Trump is scheduled to give an immigration talk tonight, during which we can expect more bloviating about the billions in border-wall funding that he wants. On Monday afternoon, the president tweeted “I am pleased to inform you that I will Address the Nation on the Humanitarian and National Security crisis on our Southern Border.”

ABC, CBS, and NBC have all announced that they’ll air the primetime speech live, starting at 9 p.m. Trump’s speech will allegedly last only eight minutes. That move isn’t sitting right with some people, since the networks all refused to air a 2015 immigration broadcast from then-president Barack Obama. (Obama didn’t get the ratings Trump does, though.) “Cable networks CNN, Fox News, and Fox Business all confirmed they would carry the speech” as well, notes The Daily Beast.

Now House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are demanding Democrats get equal on-air time too.

Full @SpeakerPelosi / @SenSchumer statement here: “Now that the television networks have decided to air the President’s address, which if his past statements are any indication will be full of malice and misinformation, Democrats must immediately be given equal airtime” pic.twitter.com/oREAjvUaPn

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 8, 2019

Tonight’s Trump talk is predicted to be heavy on The Wall and perhaps include the declaration of a state of emergency.

The White House “knows GOP holding together is critical,” tweeted Washington Post political reporter Robert Costa yesterday. “That’s why POTUS and VP are phoning mbrs. That’s in part why there is a speech to nation and trip to border. Direct msg to skittish Rs that this is the line, this is a crisis, so hold on tight.”

6. While VP Pence’s pitch today signaled the admin’s possible action, so did voices on right who have POTUS’s ear. Trump confidant Sean Hannity said, “I’m guessing he’s going to declare a national emergency.” https://t.co/9PJ7imlAei

— Robert Costa (@costareports) January 8, 2019

The impediments to such action would be myriad, thank goodness. Trump “could declare a national emergency,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) on CNN. “But what that may mean in terms of adding new elements to this—court hearings and litigation that may carry this on for weeks and months and years. To me, injecting a new element in this just makes it more complicated.”

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D–N.Y.) said Democrats “will oppose any effort by the president to make himself a king and a tyrant. The president has no authority to usurp Congress’ power of the purse.”

Has anyone explained to Trump (or those encouraging him) that it’s not like you say “state of emergency” and billions of $ start falling from the sky? You have to actually unlock specific funding sources? And you can’t declare one until you spell out how you’re using it?

— Dara Lind (@DLind) January 8, 2019

FREE MINDS

Israel boycott bill divides Democrats. The Senate is voting today on a measure that includes the “Combating BDS Act” from Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.). The measure “seeks to counter the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement against Israel over its treatment of Palestinians and the settlements,” explains the Associated Press. The measure has divided Democrats, with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) and other prominent liberal legislators strongly opposed.

The Israel anti-boycott legislation being brought before the Senate tomorrow would give states a free pass to restrict First Amendment protections for millions of Americans. Despite my strong support for Israel, I oppose this bill because it clearly violates the Constitution.

— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) January 7, 2019

FREE MARKETS

The “skills gap” was a lie. A lot of think pieces and government initiatives were devoted to pondering an alleged skills gap between what U.S. employers needed and what U.S. workers could do. The idea was that massive worker re-training programs might be needed. But, as Vox puts it, “new research shows it was the consequence of high unemployment rather than its cause.” Companies requested more specific skills and credentials after being flooded with applications owing to a lot of recently laid-off workers. “The education and experience qualifications employers were looking for got steadily higher as the unemployment rate rose during the Great Recession,” writes Matthew Yglesias. But “as the unemployment rate started to fall, so did employers skill needs.”

Read the whole study here.

QUICK HITS

I have some good news pic.twitter.com/wB3kVMjUSR

— Christopher Mims (@mims) January 7, 2019

• And here’s some more:

Gov. Bill Haslam grants full clemency to Cyntoia Brown. She will be released from prison on August 7, 2019. “Imposing a life sentence on a juvenile … is too harsh, especially in light of the extraordinary steps Ms. Brown has taken to rebuild her life.” https://t.co/J7cCIhJy4x

— The Appeal (@theappeal) January 7, 2019

• However, the state will still make Brown jump through some hoops:

Please remember that #CyntoiaBrown has full clemency and will still have to serve 10 years of probation – she has not been paroled

— Senator Brenda Gilmore (@SenatorGilmore) January 7, 2019

• Rhode Island’s iconic Foxy Lady strip club will be able to reopen, at least temporarily, as it fights back against city regulators and vice cops in the state’s Supreme Court.

• Former Utah Republican Rep. Mia Love was hired by CNN as a political commentator.

• Owning the libs with grass-fed beef:

Everything in our house, including geothermal heat-pump and deep freezer (full of grass-fed beef we raised), is running on this rekt ModelS tesla battery right now. It was charged by solar today. I built it & programmed it in C on a Pi.

TFW haters call me anti-science… pic.twitter.com/x90e6wQya4

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 8, 2019

• Sigh:

The middle of the Venn diagram of people who think Trump is a dangerous immoral authoritarian and people who think Trump should have power to throw more people in jail is significantly larger than it should be https://t.co/xYH2kI1DkY

— Eric Boehm (@EricBoehm87) January 8, 2019

• And another:

Anyone who reports as if “holiday steak” in an American prison is some kind of luxury should be forced to eat it https://t.co/g34DskiODV

— Kerry Howley (@KerryHowley) January 7, 2019