Donald Trump will nominate Gen. John Kelly, the third retired Marine general Trump has picked for a high-level position, to head the Department of Homeland Security. Trump will also nominate Oklahoma attorney general and Environmental Protetection Agency critic Scott Pruitt to the EPA. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, meanwhile, a friend of China President Xi Jinping, will be nominated as U.S. ambassador to China.
A judge in Philadelphia rejected a request by Jill Stein to inspect some of the city’s voting machines.
Two juveniles have been arrested in relation to the wildifres in Tennessee that killed 14 people.
The Syrian army retook the old city in Aleppo, with rebels trying to plan an exit.
A flight in Pakistan carrying 48 people crashed, leaving no survivors.
A magnitude-6.5 earthquake in Indonesia has killed nearly 100 people.
Thomas Szasz is not the hero we deserve, but the one we need right now.
That’s the implicit takeaway from Fusion‘s impressive profile of Yellowbrick, a mental health facility and trauma center for a certain kind of patient: relatively privileged millennials who can’t seem to adjust to the demands of adult life.
It’s a scam, of course. There doesn’t seem to be anything especially wrong with these people, in a medical sense—or, put another way, they’re suffering from the same kinds of fears, traumas, and stresses that plague practically everyone. But the patients have been convinced—scammed may be the better word—to believe that their struggles are diagnosable, treatable, and fixable. With the right therapy and medicine, and for the right price, 20-somethings who can’t hold jobs, finish school, or form lasting relationships will be transformed into fully functioning adults.
Did I mention that Yellowbrick costs $28,000 per month? There’s that. Patients must commit to stay at least 10 weeks, but many stay much longer—until their parents run out of money.
Fusion writer Molly Osberg visited Yellowbrick, interviewing the staff and former patients (she was denied access to current patients, it seems). Here’s how she summarizes the place:
Yelllowbrick was founded a decade ago specifically to treat “emerging adult” brains. It helps its patients navigate the extended period between childhood and adulthood by fostering habits vaguely existential in nature: the realistic setting of life goals, the formation of an adult relationship to one’s family, “identity consolidation” and self-esteem.
The center’s staff of 33 ministers to a live-in population that hovers around 15, as well as a number of outpatients—though in recent years it has been expanding more aggressively. Yellowbrick’s psychologists are nationally recognized. They run the conference circuit and publish their own (non-peer reviewed) research journal. Their approach is holistic in the most extreme sense of the word. Some of the neurological treatments Yellowbrick draws on are still being research-tested; it complements them with yoga and meditation, massage, dramatic role-play, and art therapy.
Yellowbrick describes its emerging adult patients as “troubled.” It treats, among other things, mood and anxiety disorders, PTSD, psychosis, avoidant personalities, substance abuse, eating disorders, and “failure to launch.” Like other forward-looking residential facilities of its kind, it rarely issues a single diagnosis, preferring to treat patients for a handful of behaviors at a time.
Patients live in a building of four communal apartments (“the Res”) on a quiet suburban street in Evanston, 14 miles north of Chicago. Every day they travel by car or foot the half mile downtown to Yellowbrick’s treatment center, a labyrinth of rooms with dark wood desks and soft carpeting, which mutes patient’s clatter as they migrate between sessions. For most of the day, five days a week, they receive treatment, they sit in small rooms with therapists, they debrief, they gossip, they repeat.
Again, the inescapable conclusion is that Yellowbrick is a con job. For one thing, it’s clearly reliant on unproven pseudoscience. “They call it a center for clinical neuroscience, as if this is [all] scientifically founded,” Carrie Bearden, a brain science expert, told Osberg. Unsurprisingly the treatment doesn’t seem to work very well. Relapses are common. One former admitted to Osberg that there’s no model success story. “I don’t know anyone who went to Yellowbrick who’s like, ‘I’m doing awesome!'” the patient said. Nevertheless, the patient was grateful to Yellowbrick for helping her to realize that her parents would just never understand her struggles. Indeed, former patients had fond memories of Yellowbrick, even though their trauma hadn’t left them.
Yellowbrick is not just a con, then: it’s a cult. It drains these young people’s financial assets while promising them some elusive, unreachable sense of fulfillment and hidden meaning.
What’s most interesting about this scam, though, is the phenomenon that made it possible: the emotionally fragile college-aged millennial. No, not all young people are delicate snowflakes, not all college students are obsessed with their own oppression, not all millennials are suffering from weak or imagined cases of PTSD—but some of them are. Indeed, we hear stories about them all the time: from campus newspapers, from professors, and from the students themselves. We hear it from university mental health professionals who can’t keep up with the rising demand for counselling.
This isn’t really millennials’ faults, mind you. A wave of infantilizing trends in education and parenting, coupled with government policies driven by extreme safety paranoia, have convinced young people that everything is dangerous and traumatizing—everything that’s wrong with them can be traced back to some instance of marginalization.
The result is Yellowbrick. The result is young people of incredible wealth and privilege who have been convinced that they are too fragile, too oppressed, too traumatized to succeed at life. Their parents are willing to fork over an unbelievable amount of money to provide them therapy specifically-tailored to their neuroses.
Osberg, to her credit, gets the point across that while life may indeed be stressful for Yellowbrick’s patients, it’s stressful for everyone else, too:
At times, in my conversations with former Yellowbrick patients, my notebook seemed like the only thing separating me from the people I was interviewing. A month after I visited, I dreamt I returned for a follow-up interview, knocked back a few too many IPAs, lost my job, and stayed.
Which isn’t to say that Bethany—who says in a text message weeks after my visit that she “obviously has issues”—and I are dealing with anything remotely similar. It’s just that pairing pathology with emerging adulthood, finding the symptoms of a treatable illness in years of dead-end jobs or overwhelming performance anxiety as much as in violent acts of self-harm, is confounding and humbling territory.
Who hasn’t considered, in their darkest moments, that their poor life choices might be an indication of something inside them that’s deeply and irrevocably damaged? How much do you have to fuck up your life in young adulthood to never recover? Stability is rare and fleeting. It’s not the reality for most people I know.
The stories the affluent tell about their lives, the neuroses they stoke, trickle down and become the standard for everyone else. On some level, everyone in their twenties is waiting for the Big One to come: the final mistake that can’t be corrected, the thing that keeps a promising young person from turning into whatever passes these days for an actualized adult.
A few years ago, the sociologist Jennifer Silva coined the term “mood economy,” to describe the appropriation of therapeutic language among working-class 20-somethings. In extensive interviews with this demographic, she found that rather than telling the story of their ascension to adulthood though traditional markers like marriage or career progression, they told “their coming of age stories as a struggle to triumph over demons of their pasts.” These narratives, she writes, “grounded their adult identities in their personal quests to transform their wounded selves”—usually in terms of overcoming the pain of earlier relationships, the turmoil of mental disorders, or an addiction of some kind.
Privilege, victimhood culture, and un-scientific therapy make quite the toxic combination. There’s something—dare I say it?—unhealthy about the idea that failure can and should be automatically attributed to mental illness: it robs individuals of the autonomy to overcome their setbacks, undermining the libertarian notion that people are generally responsible for their own well-being. And, as the Fusion article argues, it’s not really helping them.
Incoming Florida state attorney Melissa Nelson is inheriting some big shoes to fill. Unfortunately, they happen to be clown shoes, and she would prefer something a bit more professional.
A former assistant state attorney for 12 years before she moved to private practice, Nelson won the race for Florida’s 4th Judicial Circuit State Attorney after demolishing her opponent, incumbent two-term state attorney Angela Corey, by 64 to 26 percent in the GOP primary earlier this year.
Corey was one of a number of controversial prosecutors that was booted out of office in November. Nelson, speaking at a forum Tuesday in Washington, D.C. hosted by the U.S. Justice Action Network, a criminal justice advocacy group, said her victory was part of that wave of backlash from voters.
“I don’t care if its a box of six jurors or twelve jurors or an electorate of thousands, people crave fair outcomes,” Nelson said. “We learn it on the ball field when we’re kids. People want to know that the system is fair, and that was the common denominator. This election wasn’t about me. I was a tool. This was my community’s repudiation of a system and an office they felt was imbalanced and no longer fair, that had lost its way.”
To restore the public trust, Nelson says she wants to increase the diversity of lawyers in her office, create better diversion programs for juveniles, change the way prosecutors handle potential death penalty cases, and create Florida’s first conviction integrity unit—a special team of prosecutors that reviews cases looking for wrongful convictions.
It’s a fairly remarkable agenda for a Republican, NRA-endorsed prosecutor whose constituents include two of the most conservative counties in the U.S. After the forum, Reason caught up with Nelson to ask about her plans as she prepares to enter office on Jan. 3. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
REASON: You talked a lot about the way things were done under your predecessor. What’s your plan going forward, and how do you hope to change that?
NELSON: One of the things I didn’t talk about that matters is the metrics of success. How do we reward prosecutors? What do we teach them is good? I met with The Innocence Project on Friday, actually. We’re trying to put together a conviction integrity unit, which would be the first in Florida if I can do it. I’m very excited about the prospects. One of the things [The Innocence Project] shared with me that I loved is the idea of rewarding young prosecutors for doing justice. They told me an example of a prosecutor dropping a case. He understood that, because he had so much leverage, he could likely have obtained a plea, but he didn’t think it was the right thing to do, so he dropped the case. He was called in, and he thought he was going to be fired. The D.A. actually acknowledged him in front of the whole office. Instead of the metric being how many cases you try, how many convictions you obtain, how many people you put in prison, the idea is: Did you do the right thing? I want to change the culture and thinking process to one of service. We’re tasked with protecting the public and seeking justice.
REASON: One thing you hear a lot of former prosecutors talk about is this “win, win, win” mentality.
NELSON: Win at all costs. When I talk about trust in the community, all it takes is one case where it’s proven you fudged. You know, didn’t play fair. Then it affects every case and undermines every conviction. Do the right thing every day. I was with my husband having coffee, and I said, “I really hope I have some time to build some credibility before I’m faced with a very serious challenge and end up in front of a podium.” He said, “Just do the right thing. It’s that simple.”
REASON: We were talking about juvenile justice earlier. Florida has “direct file,” which allows prosecutors to charge juveniles in adult court at their discretion. Your predecessor came under a lot of criticism for the number of juveniles she charged as adults. How will your office decide when that’s appropriate?
NELSON: We’re going to create and publish, so the public can see it, criteria for direct file. I will make sure the office retains the ability for outlier cases to direct-file a juvenile if appropriate, but there will be criteria the public and the defense bar can rely on that we will use as factors in making the decision. Then the direct file decisions—in the last eight years they were made only in the the juvenile division—are going to go up to the highest level of leadership. I have two chief assistants and one of them is tasked with looking at every direct file decision. He will be a backstop.
REASON: The Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project found that several “outlier” death penalty counties—counties that return a high number of death penalty sentences—are in Florida. Prosecutors play a large part in this. How will your office handle potential death penalty cases?
NELSON: That’s the most serious decision in the state’s attorney office. Our state supreme court has just indicated, and hopefully our legislature will enact legislation this spring to reflect this decision, that unanimity is required in a death recommendation. [Florida was, until recently, one of two states in the U.S. that allowed judges to impose death penalty sentences on non-unanimous jury recommendations.] This means, on the front end, prosecutors have to be all the more careful about the cases where they intend to seek death. Whereas twelve months ago, prosecutors might pursue it if they thought it was appropriate, now you have to ask yourself if twelve people will also agree, which is a high standard. In my office, prosecutors had the unilateral ability to seek death. No longer. We’re going to do what Miami-Dade does, which is a review board. So if a prosecutor thinks it’s appropriate to seek death, they’re going to have to come before the review board and make their case. We’re going to invite the defense as well to bring their mitigation, so that we get the decision right up front.
REASON: You started out as an assistant prosecutor, and then did some criminal defense work, and now you’re going to be a state attorney. How did that defense work change your perspective going into your new job?
NELSON: My dad was a law enforcement officer, and I as a prosecutor believed that I respected the power I had. It wasn’t until I had a client and I was on the other side of the table that I really came to appreciate all the contours of the government’s power—when I had a client who had to respond to a subpoena that affected their business, or when I had a client facing life in prison. That power, I now have a different respect for it that will hopefully inform the decisions I make in a better way.
Incoming Florida state attorney Melissa Nelson is inheriting some big shoes to fill. Unfortunately, they happen to be clown shoes, and she would prefer something a bit more professional.
A former assistant state attorney for 12 years before she moved to private practice, Nelson won the race for Florida’s 4th Judicial Circuit State Attorney after demolishing her opponent, incumbent two-term state attorney Angela Corey, by 64 to 26 percent in the GOP primary earlier this year.
Corey was one of a number of controversial prosecutors that was booted out of office in November. Nelson, speaking at a forum Tuesday in Washington, D.C. hosted by the U.S. Justice Action Network, a criminal justice advocacy group, said her victory was part of that wave of backlash from voters.
“I don’t care if its a box of six jurors or twelve jurors or an electorate of thousands, people crave fair outcomes,” Nelson said. “We learn it on the ball field when we’re kids. People want to know that the system is fair, and that was the common denominator. This election wasn’t about me. I was a tool. This was my community’s repudiation of a system and an office they felt was imbalanced and no longer fair, that had lost its way.”
To restore the public trust, Nelson says she wants to increase the diversity of lawyers in her office, create better diversion programs for juveniles, change the way prosecutors handle potential death penalty cases, and create Florida’s first conviction integrity unit—a special team of prosecutors that reviews cases looking for wrongful convictions.
It’s a fairly remarkable agenda for a Republican, NRA-endorsed prosecutor whose constituents include two of the most conservative counties in the U.S. After the forum, Reason caught up with Nelson to ask about her plans as she prepares to enter office on Jan. 3. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
REASON: You talked a lot about the way things were done under your predecessor. What’s your plan going forward, and how do you hope to change that?
NELSON: One of the things I didn’t talk about that matters is the metrics of success. How do we reward prosecutors? What do we teach them is good? I met with The Innocence Project on Friday, actually. We’re trying to put together a conviction integrity unit, which would be the first in Florida if I can do it. I’m very excited about the prospects. One of the things [The Innocence Project] shared with me that I loved is the idea of rewarding young prosecutors for doing justice. They told me an example of a prosecutor dropping a case. He understood that, because he had so much leverage, he could likely have obtained a plea, but he didn’t think it was the right thing to do, so he dropped the case. He was called in, and he thought he was going to be fired. The D.A. actually acknowledged him in front of the whole office. Instead of the metric being how many cases you try, how many convictions you obtain, how many people you put in prison, the idea is: Did you do the right thing? I want to change the culture and thinking process to one of service. We’re tasked with protecting the public and seeking justice.
REASON: One thing you hear a lot of former prosecutors talk about is this “win, win, win” mentality.
NELSON: Win at all costs. When I talk about trust in the community, all it takes is one case where it’s proven you fudged. You know, didn’t play fair. Then it affects every case and undermines every conviction. Do the right thing every day. I was with my husband having coffee, and I said, “I really hope I have some time to build some credibility before I’m faced with a very serious challenge and end up in front of a podium.” He said, “Just do the right thing. It’s that simple.”
REASON: We were talking about juvenile justice earlier. Florida has “direct file,” which allows prosecutors to charge juveniles in adult court at their discretion. Your predecessor came under a lot of criticism for the number of juveniles she charged as adults. How will your office decide when that’s appropriate?
NELSON: We’re going to create and publish, so the public can see it, criteria for direct file. I will make sure the office retains the ability for outlier cases to direct-file a juvenile if appropriate, but there will be criteria the public and the defense bar can rely on that we will use as factors in making the decision. Then the direct file decisions—in the last eight years they were made only in the the juvenile division—are going to go up to the highest level of leadership. I have two chief assistants and one of them is tasked with looking at every direct file decision. He will be a backstop.
REASON: The Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project found that several “outlier” death penalty counties—counties that return a high number of death penalty sentences—are in Florida. Prosecutors play a large part in this. How will your office handle potential death penalty cases?
NELSON: That’s the most serious decision in the state’s attorney office. Our state supreme court has just indicated, and hopefully our legislature will enact legislation this spring to reflect this decision, that unanimity is required in a death recommendation. [Florida was, until recently, one of two states in the U.S. that allowed judges to impose death penalty sentences on non-unanimous jury recommendations.] This means, on the front end, prosecutors have to be all the more careful about the cases where they intend to seek death. Whereas twelve months ago, prosecutors might pursue it if they thought it was appropriate, now you have to ask yourself if twelve people will also agree, which is a high standard. In my office, prosecutors had the unilateral ability to seek death. No longer. We’re going to do what Miami-Dade does, which is a review board. So if a prosecutor thinks it’s appropriate to seek death, they’re going to have to come before the review board and make their case. We’re going to invite the defense as well to bring their mitigation, so that we get the decision right up front.
REASON: You started out as an assistant prosecutor, and then did some criminal defense work, and now you’re going to be a state attorney. How did that defense work change your perspective going into your new job?
NELSON: My dad was a law enforcement officer, and I as a prosecutor believed that I respected the power I had. It wasn’t until I had a client and I was on the other side of the table that I really came to appreciate all the contours of the government’s power—when I had a client who had to respond to a subpoena that affected their business, or when I had a client facing life in prison. That power, I now have a different respect for it that will hopefully inform the decisions I make in a better way.
It looks like President Barack Obama will be leaving office the same way he arrived: overestimating his actual commitment to rule of law and government transparency.
That’s one takeaway from the president’s counterterrorism speech at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa Florida, yesterday. As is typical of an Obama speech, particularly one coming as his administration winds down, it’s heavy on summarizing his successes and calling on actions from Congress, yet flat out either refuses to acknowledge or is quick to justify his misuses of power.
Obama raised the issue of America’s rule of law, clearly an attempt to pre-critique the incoming Donald Trump administration, given its apparent lack of interest in civil liberties. On the same day Obama gave his speech, one of the CIA psychologists responsible for the use of waterboarding as an interrogation tool defended coercive techniques when speaking at the American Enterprise Institute and encouraged Trump to consider harsher methods.
But getting back to Obama, here’s what he said on upholding the rule of law:
[W]e need the wisdom to see that upholding our values and adhering to the rule of law is not a weakness; in the long term, it is our greatest strength. The whole objective of these terrorists is to scare us into changing the nature of who we are and our democracy. And the fact is, people and nations do not make good decisions when they are driven by fear. These terrorists can never directly destroy our way of life, but we can do it for them if we lose track of who we are and the values that this nation was founded upon.
And I always remind myself that as Commander-in-Chief, I must protect our people, but I also swore an oath to defend our Constitution. And over these last eight years, we have demonstrated that staying true to our traditions as a nation of laws advances our security as well as our values.
Reminder: This is a president who has developed a complex system by which he executes suspected terrorists in countries where America is not legally involved in a war through the use of drone strikes in a system that is both deliberately secretive but also not subject to review by the judicial branch. The Department of Justice under Obama has, in fact, used claims of national security to try to keep judges from even being able to hear cases connected to the constitutionality of some of its practices.
Furthermore, this is a president who oversaw military intervention in Libya without authorization by Congress. And in this very speech he calls on Congress to use its authority to determine whether to allow for military force, an absurd incongruity Tim Carney makes note of in the Washington Examiner.
Obama calls for an updated Authorized Use of Force (the Congressional authorization for warmaking) but stubbornly clings to an insistence that everything he’s been doing is already authorized. It’s a muddled argument. Either the president’s military actions have been legal and a new authorization isn’t needed, or the president’s military actions have not been legal (in which case he should stop). He even recently added, via executive declaration, a terrorist group in Somalia that didn’t even exist at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks to the list of authorized targets.
Here’s what the president had to say about his administration’s transparency:
Transparency and accountability serve our national security not just in times of peace, but, more importantly, in times of conflict. And that’s why we’ve made public information about which terrorist organizations we’re fighting and why we’re fighting them. We’ve released assessments of non-combatants killed in our operations, taken responsibility when mistakes are made. We’ve declassified information about interrogation methods that were wrong so we learn from past mistakes. And yesterday, I directed our government for the first time to release a full description of the legal and policy frameworks that guide our military operations around the world.
This is a remarkable paragraph in that it completely and utterly ignores that the administration has only made information about its practices public after years of resistance, even fighting lawsuits to keep from making information available to the public. The assessment of non-combatants killed in drone strikes was dumped on the American public on an afternoon right before an Independence Day holiday weekend. And even that came after years of independent international groups providing their own counts and after people leaking inside information about how the drone strikes work and the many, many flaws with the system.
The president defends drone strikes in this very speech, right before the previous quote:
Now, under rules that I put in place and that I made public, before any strike is taken outside of a warzone, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured. And while nothing is certain in any strike, and we have acknowledged that there are tragic instances where innocents have been killed by our strikes, this is the highest standard that we can set. Nevertheless, we still have critics who suggest that these strikes are wrong. And I say to them, you have to weigh the alternatives. Drone strikes allow us to deny terrorists a safe haven without airstrikes, which are less precise, or invasions that are much more likely to kill innocent civilians as well as American servicemembers.
So the actions that we’ve taken have saved lives at home and abroad. But the point is, is that we do have to be careful to make sure that when we take actions, we’re not alienating local populations, because that will serve as recruitment for new terrorists.
Again, the making of the rules “public” came after a lengthy period where the administration refused to admit that these drone strikes were even happening and only after they were independently leaked to the media.
And drone strikes arebeing used as a recruitment tool to inspire terrorists! These two paragraphs are so bizarre. The president in the speech acknowledges internal radicalization that has resulted in domestic terror attacks in Boston and Orlando under his administration, but doesn’t acknowledge that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, during his 911 calls during the attack, demanded that America stop its military strikes in Iraq and Syria.
Of course, we should avoid such a thing as a terrorist’s veto. Military interventions may be why Mateen justified his murders to himself, but that doesn’t really mean we should accept or alter our practices based on the ravings of a madman. And Obama’s refusal to elevate the terrorist threat presented by the Islamic State to the panic level some others would is an admirable and important response for a sober leader.
Nevertheless, Obama’s suggestion that drone strikes are less likely to lead to bad consequences is the invocation of a talking point based on the reality that Americans don’t readily see the consequences. We don’t see our soldiers getting killed and we don’t even hear about their innocents getting killed. But we also get less information about terror plots because we’re killing the sources and we’re less aware of how it might be fomenting anger at us in other countries.
In the end, when the president calls for Congress to play a role in war and counterterror activity, it’s clear from his speech that he believes that Congress’s role is to authorize it. He calls for an “update” of an AUMF, not for its revocation and it’s certainly not for the purposes of restraining his actions but to give them more legal cover. When Congress doesn’t act he sees it as “obstructionism” and not Congress essentially telling him “no.” Mind you, Congress’ failure to do anything one way or another in regards to the president expanding his own military authority is itself a problem, but Obama certainly thinks everything he’s done was appropriate.
This is the presidency Trump will be inherited, one that is going out criticizing Trump for not respecting the rule of law before he even takes power (which is a legitimate concern), but also declines any sort of introspection for its own transgressions. They were the “right people,” so giving them executive leeway led to the right outcomes. Trump and his incoming cabinet are not the right people, so now the danger suddenly exists.
It looks like President Barack Obama will be leaving office the same way he arrived: overestimating his actual commitment to rule of law and government transparency.
That’s one takeaway from the president’s counterterrorism speech at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa Florida, yesterday. As is typical of an Obama speech, particularly one coming as his administration winds down, it’s heavy on summarizing his successes and calling on actions from Congress, yet flat out either refuses to acknowledge or is quick to justify his misuses of power.
Obama raised the issue of America’s rule of law, clearly an attempt to pre-critique the incoming Donald Trump administration, given its apparent lack of interest in civil liberties. On the same day Obama gave his speech, one of the CIA psychologists responsible for the use of waterboarding as an interrogation tool defended coercive techniques when speaking at the American Enterprise Institute and encouraged Trump to consider harsher methods.
But getting back to Obama, here’s what he said on upholding the rule of law:
[W]e need the wisdom to see that upholding our values and adhering to the rule of law is not a weakness; in the long term, it is our greatest strength. The whole objective of these terrorists is to scare us into changing the nature of who we are and our democracy. And the fact is, people and nations do not make good decisions when they are driven by fear. These terrorists can never directly destroy our way of life, but we can do it for them if we lose track of who we are and the values that this nation was founded upon.
And I always remind myself that as Commander-in-Chief, I must protect our people, but I also swore an oath to defend our Constitution. And over these last eight years, we have demonstrated that staying true to our traditions as a nation of laws advances our security as well as our values.
Reminder: This is a president who has developed a complex system by which he executes suspected terrorists in countries where America is not legally involved in a war through the use of drone strikes in a system that is both deliberately secretive but also not subject to review by the judicial branch. The Department of Justice under Obama has, in fact, used claims of national security to try to keep judges from even being able to hear cases connected to the constitutionality of some of its practices.
Furthermore, this is a president who oversaw military intervention in Libya without authorization by Congress. And in this very speech he calls on Congress to use its authority to determine whether to allow for military force, an absurd incongruity Tim Carney makes note of in the Washington Examiner.
Obama calls for an updated Authorized Use of Force (the Congressional authorization for warmaking) but stubbornly clings to an insistence that everything he’s been doing is already authorized. It’s a muddled argument. Either the president’s military actions have been legal and a new authorization isn’t needed, or the president’s military actions have not been legal (in which case he should stop). He even recently added, via executive declaration, a terrorist group in Somalia that didn’t even exist at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks to the list of authorized targets.
Here’s what the president had to say about his administration’s transparency:
Transparency and accountability serve our national security not just in times of peace, but, more importantly, in times of conflict. And that’s why we’ve made public information about which terrorist organizations we’re fighting and why we’re fighting them. We’ve released assessments of non-combatants killed in our operations, taken responsibility when mistakes are made. We’ve declassified information about interrogation methods that were wrong so we learn from past mistakes. And yesterday, I directed our government for the first time to release a full description of the legal and policy frameworks that guide our military operations around the world.
This is a remarkable paragraph in that it completely and utterly ignores that the administration has only made information about its practices public after years of resistance, even fighting lawsuits to keep from making information available to the public. The assessment of non-combatants killed in drone strikes was dumped on the American public on an afternoon right before an Independence Day holiday weekend. And even that came after years of independent international groups providing their own counts and after people leaking inside information about how the drone strikes work and the many, many flaws with the system.
The president defends drone strikes in this very speech, right before the previous quote:
Now, under rules that I put in place and that I made public, before any strike is taken outside of a warzone, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured. And while nothing is certain in any strike, and we have acknowledged that there are tragic instances where innocents have been killed by our strikes, this is the highest standard that we can set. Nevertheless, we still have critics who suggest that these strikes are wrong. And I say to them, you have to weigh the alternatives. Drone strikes allow us to deny terrorists a safe haven without airstrikes, which are less precise, or invasions that are much more likely to kill innocent civilians as well as American servicemembers.
So the actions that we’ve taken have saved lives at home and abroad. But the point is, is that we do have to be careful to make sure that when we take actions, we’re not alienating local populations, because that will serve as recruitment for new terrorists.
Again, the making of the rules “public” came after a lengthy period where the administration refused to admit that these drone strikes were even happening and only after they were independently leaked to the media.
And drone strikes arebeing used as a recruitment tool to inspire terrorists! These two paragraphs are so bizarre. The president in the speech acknowledges internal radicalization that has resulted in domestic terror attacks in Boston and Orlando under his administration, but doesn’t acknowledge that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, during his 911 calls during the attack, demanded that America stop its military strikes in Iraq and Syria.
Of course, we should avoid such a thing as a terrorist’s veto. Military interventions may be why Mateen justified his murders to himself, but that doesn’t really mean we should accept or alter our practices based on the ravings of a madman. And Obama’s refusal to elevate the terrorist threat presented by the Islamic State to the panic level some others would is an admirable and important response for a sober leader.
Nevertheless, Obama’s suggestion that drone strikes are less likely to lead to bad consequences is the invocation of a talking point based on the reality that Americans don’t readily see the consequences. We don’t see our soldiers getting killed and we don’t even hear about their innocents getting killed. But we also get less information about terror plots because we’re killing the sources and we’re less aware of how it might be fomenting anger at us in other countries.
In the end, when the president calls for Congress to play a role in war and counterterror activity, it’s clear from his speech that he believes that Congress’s role is to authorize it. He calls for an “update” of an AUMF, not for its revocation and it’s certainly not for the purposes of restraining his actions but to give them more legal cover. When Congress doesn’t act he sees it as “obstructionism” and not Congress essentially telling him “no.” Mind you, Congress’ failure to do anything one way or another in regards to the president expanding his own military authority is itself a problem, but Obama certainly thinks everything he’s done was appropriate.
This is the presidency Trump will be inherited, one that is going out criticizing Trump for not respecting the rule of law before he even takes power (which is a legitimate concern), but also declines any sort of introspection for its own transgressions. They were the “right people,” so giving them executive leeway led to the right outcomes. Trump and his incoming cabinet are not the right people, so now the danger suddenly exists.
Opponents of the Maine referendum to legalize marijuana, which passed by a margin of 4,073 votes, or half a percent, have been unable to muster together the 10 volunteers they were asked to contribute to a recount effort they’ve demanded.
The Portland Press Heraldreports that No on 1, which requested a recount, has not offered a full list of volunteer counters to authorities—instead, proponents of marijuana legalization (Yes on 1), have offered additional volunteers for the recount process in order to prevent delays. The recount will continue until December 16, then resume on January 1 after the holidays. Legalization is supposed to go into effect in January, although it’s unclear when, and it will take at least one more year for the state to set up the regulatory structure it wants to impose on the marijuana industry in the state.
Yes on 1’s campaign manager noted that it was “silly” that his side had to offer its own volunteers in lieu of their opponents, who requested the recount. “The whole point is to ensure the integrity of the vote and they can’t be bothered to do that,” David Boyer said, according to the Press Herald. “What are we doing here?”
It’s not so surprising that opponents of marijuana legalization would request a recount and then not offer help to accomplish it. One hallmark of the nanny stater is the belief that someone else should be responsible for their desires. The recount is expected to cost nearly half a million dollars and, according to Boyer, the recounts completed so far haven’t significantly changed the totals—the state will not release recount numbers until the counting is finished.
Donald Trump an Terry McAuliffe have more in common than they’d probably like to admit.
A. Barton Hinkle writes:
Last week Trump jawboned air-conditioner maker Carrier into reversing a plan to move jobs to Mexico. The deal gives Carrier $7 million in state tax breaks.
Trump also has warned companies thinking about offshoring that they will face steep tariffs if they try to ship goods to the U.S. (No word on what threats Trump might have made regarding the cancellation of Defense Department contracts with Carrier’s parent company.) And he has dangled “incentives” to convince Apple to start making iPhones in the U.S.
This is nothing new. In fact, it’s how Trump has run his own business. As a New York Times investigation reported in September, Trump “used his father’s, and, later, his own, extensive political connections, and relied on a huge amount of assistance from the government and taxpayers in the form of tax breaks, grants and incentives to benefit the 15 buildings at the core of his Manhattan real estate empire.”
Trump also once tried to use eminent domain to take a widow’s home so he could bulldoze it and use the land for limousine parking. Because he’s such a friend of the little guy, you see.
McAuliffe has not gone that far. But McAuliffe—another deal-maker—also sees politics as just another side of business. When he put his electric-car company, GreenTech Automotive, in Mississippi rather than Virginia, he said he did so because “I have to go where, obviously, they’re going to put incentives.”
A measure that would ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected—that’s around three- to four- weeks post-conception—has managed to pass both houses of the Ohio legislature, despite the fact that federal courts have struck down all similar bans as unconstitutional. The measure, which cleared the Senate Tuesday as a last-minute addition to a larger bill concerning state child-abuse laws, states that “except when there is a medical emergency or medical necessity,” Ohio doctors shall not perform abortions “if it has been determined that the unborn human individual the pregnant woman is carrying has a detectable fetal heartbeat.”
Detection of a fetal heartbeat is “a milestone with no meaning to the federal laws governing abortion,” as Molly Redden noted back in 2013, when Arkansas and North Dakota first passed heartbeat-based abortion bans. But “the people who support these laws dream that they will provide a legal basis for overturning Roe v. Wade,” in which the U.S. Supreme Court said states cannot ban abortion before a fetus could live on its own outside of the womb.
Generally, a fetal heartbeat can be detected at a “gestational age” of around six weeks. But gestational age is calculated from the first day of a pregnant woman’s last menstrual period, and doesn’t actually refer to the number of weeks a zygote or fetus has existed. A gestational age of six weeks means it’s been some three to four weeks since an egg was fertilized.
In effect, a measure like the one Ohio approved would ban abortion at a point in pregnancy when many women don’t even realize they’re pregnant yet, and long before common chromosomal and developmental abnormalities can be detected. And even if a pregnant woman takes a test exactly 28 days after the start of her last period, that leaves her with just about two weeks to come to a decision about the pregnancy and then obtain the money for, schedule, and obtain an abortion (all while circumventing Ohio’s various waiting periods), in a state where many women live hours from the nearest abortion clinic.
This could put the heartbeat bill at odds with not just Roe but the more recent Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That case upheld the idea “that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages,” but presented a new standard for analyzing whether restrictions on abortion were unconstitutional: did they pose an “undue burden” on women’s access to abortion. Even if a fetus could somehow be declared viable at around a month old, presenting women with a mere one or two week window to terminate a pregnancy would seem to fail the undue burden test.
Many prominent anti-abortion advocates have opposed measures like Ohio’s heartbeat bill, recognizing that they “have no chance in the courts,” as Paul Linton, longtime general counsel for Americans United for Life, has said. State and federal courts have struck down such measures from Arkansas and North Dakota, with North Dakota’s bill going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In January, the Court upheld a lower court’s ruling striking down the measure.
But that was before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the election of Donald Trump. A future Supreme Court could perhaps rule differently. Ohio Senate President Keith Faber (R-Celina) said repeatedly that previous versions of the heartbeat bill weren’t worth passing because they would be struck down as unconstitutional, but “Trump’s election changed the dynamic,” he said.
Just as the detection of a fetal heartbeat has no particular relevance to federal abortion guidelines, it’s a similarly poor marker of any medical significance. The heart is already developing before it can be detected. Our ability to detect it doesn’t change anything in terms of a fetuses’ consciousness or ability to feel pain or be viable outside the womb. It’s an arbitrary point picked because of symbolic value and then justified post-hoc with dubious science.
“As many as thirty per cent of natural pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage,” the bill states. “Less than five per cent of all natural pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage after detection of fetal cardiac activity. … Fetal heartbeat, therefore, has become a key medical predictor that an unborn human individual will reach live birth.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) estimates that about 10 to 25 percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. And it’s generally accepted that most miscarriages happen in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. But while chances of miscarriage do decrease with time, there’s no evidence that 95 percent of all first-trimester miscarriages happen in the first six weeks, as Ohio claims. And detection of a fetal heartbeat alone isn’t a good predictor of miscarriage likelihood; what matters is the fetal heart rate.
As Trump’s constitutionally contemptuous comments about flag burning illustrate, he supports free speech the same way he supports free trade: with preferential exceptions designed to protect the people he cares about most. Trump thinks “nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag,” notwithstanding two Supreme Court decisions saying such expressive activity is protected by the First Amendment. Both rulings were joined by Antonin Scalia, the late justice whom Trump says he wants to replace with someone similar.
Trump’s call for jailing flag burners or stripping them of their citizenship may sound like knee-jerk patriotism, writes Jacob Sullum. But in light of the fact that anti-Trump protesters in several cities burned flags after his election, attributing his position to mindless jingoism probably gives him too much credit. Remember, Trump has a long, astonishingly petty history of using the legal system to punish people who offend him.
Donald Trump will nominate Gen. John Kelly, the third retired Marine general Trump has picked for a high-level position, to head the Department of Homeland Security. Trump will also nominate Oklahoma attorney general and Environmental Protetection Agency critic Scott Pruitt to the EPA. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, meanwhile, a friend of China President Xi Jinping, will be nominated as U.S. ambassador to China.