Tag: posts

• President Trump told James Comey that the former FBI director “better hope there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations,” which is pretty much straight-up intimidation.
• The racist incident at St. Olaf College was a hoax.
• Education Secretry Betsy DeVos had kind words for the students who protested her commencement address.
• Join the resistance: practice anti-Trump aerobics.
• Is the Rock running for president?

Colgate University officials are in trouble after wrongfully placing the campus under lockdown in response to a student wielding a very serious weapon: a glue gun.

It was a sticky situation.

The student, a person of color, was carrying a glue gun because he had to finish a project for an art class, but someone felt threatened by it and reported him to campus security. Soon after, administrators placed the campus on lockdown—for four hours—and sent a text alert to students warning them that an “active shooter” situation was in progress, according to Heat Street.

That was obviously a mistake. Now security directory Bill Ferguson is on leave while the school investigates whether the mistake was a result of racial bias. Some students think the connection is obvious:

“We spent all night on lockdown fearing for our lives because a young black man was doing an art project,” another student wrote on Twitter. “This is racism—this is Colgate.”

And Tolu Emokpae, another black student at Colgate, told the New York Daily News that the incident “shows me that I really cannot simply live.”

Angel Trazo, a senior at Colgate who does not want to be “complicit regarding the events of last night and today,” writes that the incident was “an example of the criminalization of black bodies.”

“This is an example of the racist and prejudiced biases that exist at our institution,” she wrote.

Is it? Colgate really screwed up here, and it’s proper to investigate how this could have happened. Racism is certainly a possible explanation.

But let’s not forget that schools are notoriously paranoid about guns. Elementary schools use absurd “zero tolerance” discipline rules to punish anyone caught with a weapon, or a lookalike weapon, or indeed anyone who brings a weapon onto school property, or anything that vaguely resembles a weapon, even accidentally. And colleges and universities are no better: administrators support “gun free zones,” even though it seems unlikely that a deranged madman intent on shooting up campus would be thwarted by an unenforced and unmonitored no guns policy.

So it’s possible there was more than one kind of irrational, discriminatory fear in play here.

I Love Dick, the TV show based on Chris Kraus’ novel, is full of laugh-out-loud burlesque.

Glenn Gavin writes:

The popularity of Chris Kraus among feminists has always eluded me. For 20 years now, she has been writing novels in which thinly disguised—and often not disguised at all—versions of herself endure serial humiliations as they pursue somewhat unpleasant and utterly uninterested men, frequently with her husband Sylvère Lotringer acting as a sort of cheerleader.

There’s considerable doubt about how much of this is true—Kraus labels her works novels, rejects the description of them as “confessional,” and adds, without clarification that “life is not personal.” But the title character of I Love Dick, the 1997 novel that started everything, a UC-Santa Barbara cultural critic named Dick Hebdige, found it close enough to reality that he sued.

What’s not in doubt is that Kraus’ character is so heedless of degradation in her sexual charges of the Light Brigade that literary critics almost inevitably invoke the term “female abnegation” in describing her. I myself prefer the term “marching boldly into self-abasement” used in the introduction to I Love Dick.

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Earlier this week, Aetna, one of America’s biggest insurance companies, pulled out of Obamacare’s insurance exchanges. Now its CEO thinks it’s time for America to start talking about moving to a single payer health care system.

“Single-payer, I think we should have that debate as a nation,” Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini told a group of employees at a meeting on Thursday, according to Vox’ Sarah Kliff.

Here’s the thing. We’ve had that conversation. Several times, in fact. It’s always ended the same way.

We had that conversation in 2009 and 2010 during the congressional debates on the Affordable Care Act. Progressives wanted the law to include a public option that would be run by the government and compete with private insurers, but there wasn’t enough support for that to pass. Instead, the ACA allowed states to create government-run health care cooperatives that would be unmoored from the economic principles of profit-seeking and could compete with private insurers. Twenty-four states exercised the option to create co-ops, but by the end of last year only four were still running. The rest collapsed because they were too expensive and poorly managed (in part because no one with any experience running a health insurance business was allowed to run them).

We kept having that conversation after Obamacare passed. In 2011, Vermont passed a law calling for the creation a state-wide single-payer health care system. But in 2014 the state scrapped the system before it even got off the ground because it was simply too expensive. Funding it would have required an extra $2.5 billion annually, almost double the state’s current budget. Paying for it would have required a 11.5 percent payroll tax increase and a 9 percent income tax increase, and Gov. Peter Schumlin, who had advocated for single-payer and signed the bill to create the system, realized that even in deep-blue Vermont that was tantamount to political suicide.

“You’d think that, if there was any state where this could fly politically, it should have been Vermont,” Matthew Dickinson, a political science professor at Middlebury University, told Vox’ Kliff in 2014 as part of her detailed post-mortem of the state’s experiment with single-payer health care. “But in this case, the price was so big that even a state as solidly blue as Vermont wasn’t able to swallow it.”

Still, we kept having the conversation. Referendum-happy Colorado, in 2016, asked its voters if they would want to have a single-payer health care system—and if they would support increasing payroll taxes by 10 percent to meet the estimated $25 billion annual price tag. They soundly rejected it. Despite Bernie Sanders traveling around the state to promote the idea, 79 percent of voters in November said “no.”

Sanders is still having that conversation, but now in California. Lawmakers in Sacramento are working on a bill to create a single-payer health care system for the state, but a new poll shows 66 percent of the state’s residents are opposed to the idea (opposition increases to 75 percent when those polled are told the price tag for the system is $179 billion annually).

Just this week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), hardly a conservative voice in Congress, told constituents she was opposed to a single-payer health care system. When it comes to a “total takeover” of health care by government, “I’m just not there,” she said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Is there a scenario where we end up with a national single-payer health care system within the next five years? Sure. Maybe there’s a dramatic collapse of the insurance market—not impossible, given Obamacare’s various ongoing troubles—and the government responds with a bailout that effectively nationalizes insurers and gives us a de facto single payer system.

Maybe the backlash against Trump is enough for Democrats to overcome the disadvantages they face—a bad Senate map and gerrymandered House districts—in the 2018 midterms and take control of Congress. Maybe they strike a deal with Trump, who has expressed favor for single-payer systems elsewhere in the world, to implement such a system. Maybe.

A more plausible scenario would see Democrats winning back control of Congress and giving Trump the boot in 2020, by which time maybe the health care market is such a total disaster that a new president can claim single-payer is the only solution and get Congress to go along. Or maybe Republicans will completely abandon their free market principles and will dive into the single-payer pool, as conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer speculated this week. In a poll conducted last month, almost half of Republicans said they supported a single payer system built around Medicare.

Still, I’m more than a little skeptical. Even with the Democratic Party moving to the left, it’s unlikely that a new Democratic majority—which, by definition, would require Democrats to win elections in 2018 or 2020 in Republican-leaning districts—would coalesce around a position that’s too far left for someone like Feinstein.

There are other political problems too. The AHCA has been battered in the media because it would disrupt health coverage for an estimated 24 million Americans over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of an early version of the bill. Going to a single-payer model would disrupt everyone’s existing health care plans. Sure, Democrats could argue that the change would be a good one, but change is scary and it’s easier to scare people into opposing a new policy than reassure them that everything will be OK.

Even if Democrats solve the political issues of transitioning to single-payer, they still have to solve the economic issues. That’s a little bit easier on the federal level than it is at the state level because most states are required to balance their budgets, but a national single-payer system could just be added to the federal government’s tab. Still, the price tag—one analysis of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ single-payer campaign promise pegged the cost at $32 trillion in the first decade, alone—is likely to make many Democrats blanche (especially those in newly-seized Republican-leaning districts who will already be looking over their shoulders at potential challengers).

All of this is fun to speculate about, but it’s actually somewhat beside the point. Let’s go back and look at what Bertolini, Aetna’s CEO, actually said about single-payer health care:

“The government doesn’t administer anything. The first thing they’ve ever tried to administer in social programs was the ACA, and that didn’t go so well. So the industry has always been the back room for government. If the government wants to pay all the bills, and employers want to stop offering coverage, and we can be there in a public private partnership to do the work we do today with Medicare, and with Medicaid at every state level, we run the Medicaid programs for them, then let’s have that conversation.”

I don’t think he’s actually advocating for single-payer health care at all. What he seems to be saying is that he’d be open to having the government play a larger role in paying for health care, while contracting services through existing insurance companies—in other words, adding even more cronyism to a health care system that’s already full of it. Libertarians and progressives alike should be suspicious of anyone advocating for having his own industry be “the back room for government.”

Sadly, that’s probably where we are heading. There seems to be little interest in Congress—and virtually none in the White House—for market-based health care reform, so the AHCA will further entrench government’s role in health care. It seems plausible that we could end up with a Medicaid-for-all-style system like the one that Bertolini seems to be discussing, which I suppose would be nominally a single-payer system, but not really in line with what progressives mean when they use the term.

We’ll continue having the discussion about single-payer health care, I’m sure. But until progressives can solve the economic and political barriers that have sunk that idea, repeatedly, in the past decade, I’m not sure it will ever be more than a conversation.

More than 250 police officers in Georgia have been trained as “drug recognition experts” (DREs), a type of training that is supposed to make it possible for cops to determine that someone is under the influence of drugs. As drunk driving arrests have dipped, 11 Alive in Atlanta reports, drugged driving arrests are up, but as an investigation by the television station shows, and common sense might dictate, such training is liable to rack up false positives.

11 Alive spoke to three victims of such false positives, all attributed to just one Cobb County officer, T.T. Carroll, who was given a silver medal last year for 90 DUI arrests.

Katelyn Ebner, a bartender, was pulled over on her way home from work and told Carroll she had not been drinking. After passing a number of tests to detect alcohol consumption, Carroll asked her the last time she smoked marijuana. Ebner explained that she had never smoked marijuana and could take a drug test if necessary.

Carroll told Ebner she was giving him “several, several indicators” that she’s smoked marijuana.

“Okay, so when I do a drug test, I’ll be free to go, correct?” Ebner asked Carroll. Seems reasonable enough.

Carroll answered: “You’re going to jail, ma’am. Okay? I don’t have a magical drug test that I can give you right now.”

However, as the 11 Alive reporter, Brendan Keefe, noted to Ebner, “he just did the ‘magical drug test’ that resulted in your arrest.”

Ebner filed an internal affairs complaint after passing a drug test, but said Cobb County investigators insisted “the test results come back wrong all the time.” She said investigators told her a urine test would have come back positive. Ebner says she took a urine test, which came back negative, herself.

The Cobb County Police Department would not let 11 Alive speak to Carroll, but commanders defended him, standing behind the three arrests mentioned by the station (none of which resulted in charges), and re-iterating their belief that their drug recognition experts can be more accurate than physical tests.

Carroll was promoted last year, with his supervisors claiming in his evaluation most of his arrests ended in convictions or pleas (the lawyer for at least one of the victims 11 Alive spoke to recommended a plea deal despite their client insisting she hever smoked marijuana) and calling him their “go-to officer when it comes to DUI-drugs.” According to 11 Alive, the evaluation did not mention the 3 arrests they reported on.

Read the whole story and watch the dash cam footage at 11 Alive, which is also seeking more Georgians with first-hand accounts of dealing with “drug recognition experts”.

h/t Jerryskids

A recent study found that MDMA-assisted therapy could help veterans suffering from PTSD. Another paper from Johns Hopkins presented evidence that therapy in conjunction with psilocybin mushrooms can help ease the mental suffering of terminal cancer patients.

These findings, among others, were presented at the 2017 Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland, California, where researchers gather every few years to discuss the potential medical applications of psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and MDMA. The field has exploded thanks to reforms at the Food and Drug Administration that allow researchers, for the first time in decades, to study the effects of these drugs.

The organizer of the conference was the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which is also funding much of this breakthrough research.

“It’s a fundamental right to explore one’s own consciousness,” says MAPS founder Rick Doblin. “We have the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, and the freedom of religion, and all those are based on the freedom of thought.”

At this year’s conference, Reason talked to researchers about the past, present, and future of this controversial and promising area of medical research.

Watch the full video above, or click the link below for downloadable versions.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Alex Manning and Weissmueller. Music by Kai Engel, Selva de Mar, and Lee Rosevere.

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“Trump signs order at the EPA to dismantle environmental protections,” declares a March 28 headline in The Washington Post. An April 27 article in the Post described an “effort to remove environmental protections.” Two days later, another Post article stated that Trump’s term in office has “already seen multiple rollbacks of environmental protections.” And the Post isn’t the only publication pushing such language.

Whatever happened to environmental regulations? Many mainstream and activist publications appear to be following the advice of University of California, Berkeley linguist and fierce political progressive George Lakoff to reframe issues. Protections sound so much nicer than regulations, don’t you think?

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In a memo to U.S. attorney’s offices released Friday morning, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered federal prosecutors to seek the toughest charges and maximum possible sentences available, reversing an Obama-era policy that sought to avoid mandatory minimum sentences for certain low-level drug crimes.

While the two-page directive leaves some discretion for prosecutors to avoid federal sentencing guidelines, the overall message is clear: Federal prosecutors have the green light to go hard after any and all drug offenses. “It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” Sessions wrote in the memo.

“We are returning to the enforcement of the laws as passed by Congress, plain and simple,” Sessions said in a speech Friday. “If you are a drug trafficker, we will not look the other way, we will not be willfully blind to your misconduct.”

The shift marks the first significant return by the Trump administration to the drug war policies that the Obama administration tried to moderate. In 2013, former Attorney General Eric Holder ordered federal prosecutors to avoid charging certain low-level offenders with drug charges that triggered long mandatory sentences.

The federal prison population dropped for the first time in three decades in 2014, and has continued to fall since, although the Bureau of Prisons is still operating at over its rated capacity.

In a statement released Friday, Holder sharply criticized the new policy, saying it would “take the nation back to a discredited past” and put the Justice Department “back on track to again spending one third of its budget on incarcerating people, rather than preventing, detecting, or investigating crime.”

“The policy announced today is not tough on crime,” Holder said. “It’s an ideologically motivated, cookie-cutter approach that has only been proven to generate unfairly long sentences that are often applied indiscriminately and do little to achieve long-term public safety.”

The announcement also drew instant condemnation from criminal justice and civil liberties groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice, Human Rights Watch, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

In a statement, Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a nonprofit that works to repeal mandatory minimum sentencing laws, said it was “gravely disappointed” in Sessions’ memo.

“While we appreciate the attorney general’s commitment to reducing crime and combating dangerous opioid abuse, we think his strategy is misguided, unsupported by evidence, and likely to do more harm than good,” FAMM said. “Indeed, the drug epidemic challenging our country today is a devastating indictment of the one-size-fits-all punishment regime that General Sessions seeks to expand. His charging memo throws decades of improved techniques and technologies out of the window in favor of a failed approach.”

For an example of what that one-size-fits-all approach looks like, take one of FAMM’s most infamous cases: Weldon Angelos was arrested in 2002 for selling marijuana to an undercover officer on three separate occasions. Angelos was carrying a firearm during one of those transactions, although he never displayed or brandished it, which triggered an automatic sentencing enhancement under federal mandatory minimum guidelines. Despite it being Angelos’ first drug offense, the judge in his case had no choice but to sentence him to 55 years in prison. Angelos was 23. He was freed after 13 years in prison last year under an arrangement with U.S. Attorneys. Under less stringent guidelines, a thoughtful prosecutor could have looked at Angelos’ case and decided not to push for the sentencing enhancements that added decades to Angelos’ prison time.

But thoughtful prosecutors and discretion aren’t going to happen under Sessions’ new guidance. Instead, we’ll get more cases like Angelos, more cases like the thousands of nonviolent drug offenders who received commutations under Obama (and the thousands more who were denied clemency because of dysfunction in the White House and pressure from recalcitrant prosecutors).

While it’s easy to point the finger at Sessions, though, Congress ultimately passed the laws the Justice Department is tasked with enforcing. Lawmakers in Congress had a golden window of opportunity over the past three years to revise federal sentencing laws—with bipartisan winds at their back and a friendly administration in White House—and failed miserably. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn’t bring a reform bill to the Senate floor, despite significant compromises to assuage tough-on-crime Republicans like Tom Cotton (R-AR). House leadership, meanwhile, waited for the Senate to move before it brought up a slate of criminal justice bills that had passed out of the House Judiciary Committee. Which of course it never did.

Sessions’ policy change drew rebukes from some Republicans in Congress who support criminal justice reform.

“Mandatory minimum sentences have unfairly and disproportionately incarcerated too many minorities for too long,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said in a statement. “Attorney General Sessions’ new policy will accentuate that injustice. Instead, we should treat our nation’s drug epidemic as a health crisis and less as a ‘lock ’em up and throw away the key’ problem.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), although he did not directly criticize Sessions, wrote in a tweet Friday morning that “to be tough on crime we have to be smart on crime. That is why criminal justice reform is a conservative issue.” Lee has been one of the leading GOP lawmakers pushing for criminal justice reform after being elected to the Senate in 2010. He became a staunch reform advocate, coincidentally, after witnessing Weldon Angelos’ case as an assistant U.S. attorney.

One of Angelos’ other biggest supporters was Mark Holden, the chairman of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce. In a statement, Holden, speaking for Freedom Partners, says “we favor a different approach which requires changing some of the existing federal laws.”

“Fortunately, there are already federal reform bills from last year that have broad bipartisan support that will address this issue,” Holden says. “These reforms are consistent with those enacted by many states the past 10 years. The states have proven that communities and law enforcement are safer when the punishment fits the crime through sentencing reforms. There are less costly and more effective ways to help low level offenders who aren’t a threat to public safety other than incarceration. This is also an issue that receives overwhelming public support from across the political spectrum. In one recent poll, 81 percent of voters who supported President Trump described criminal justice reform as in important priority.”

Say, if you’re intersted in the power of prosecutors, you should register to attend Reason’s upcoming panel discussion on the subject, featuring Fordham University law professor John Pfaff, author of Locked in: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform; Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor whom you probably know better as Popehat; and the Reason Foundation’s director of criminal justice reform, Lauren Krisai. The event is on May 25 at Reason’s D.C. office.

Forests in drylands are much more extensive than previously reported and cover a total area similar to that of tropical rainforests or boreal forests, according to a new study published in Science. Researchers discovered these hidden forests by scrutinizing high resolution satellite images covering more than 200,000 half-hectare-sized plots. The survey used ultra–high-resolution Google Earth images with each pixel representing a patch of ground less than a meter wide.

“We show that in 2015, 1327 million hectares of drylands had more than 10% tree-cover, and 1079 million hectares comprised forest,” report the researchers. “Our estimate is 40 to 47% higher than previous estimates, corresponding to 467 million hectares of forest that have never been reported before. This increases current estimates of global forest cover by at least 9%.”

To the extent that greater forest area helps mitigate environmental problems – soil erosion, declines in biodiversity, water retention issues – this adds to the good news that global deforestation rates are slowing. As the Food and Agricultural Organization reported two years ago: Over the past 25 years forest area has changed from 4.1 billion ha to just under 4 billion ha, a decrease of 3.1 percent. the rate of global forest area change has slowed by more than 50 percent between 1990 and 2015.

If Jesse Ausubel, head of the Human Environment Program at Rockefeller University, is right, humanity is on the cusp of peak farmland with the result that global forest cover could well expand by nearly 400 million hectares by 2060, an area nearly double the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River.