Month: February 2014

In what many described as yet another indication
of a monumental shift happening in the Grand Old Party, the
Republican National Committee last week passed a resolution calling
for an end to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of
Americans’ phone records.

But, warns John Glaser, the party’s apparent shuffling to a more
limited government, civil liberties-conscious platform may not be
as genuine as some believe.

View this article.

In what many described as yet another indication
of a monumental shift happening in the Grand Old Party, the
Republican National Committee last week passed a resolution calling
for an end to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of
Americans’ phone records.

But, warns John Glaser, the party’s apparent shuffling to a more
limited government, civil liberties-conscious platform may not be
as genuine as some believe.

View this article.

Stacey Feigel’s husband, Sheldon, is facing
multiple felony counts related to an alleged scam involving filing
fraudulently for adverse possession on abandoned homes. While
arriving in court for a hearing, Stacey collapsed from a “cardiac
event” (according to the coroner) and died. Attorney Mark Coleman
suggested stress from the raid and arrest could have led to her
death.

Via the Fresno Bee:

Stacey Feigel appeared fit and healthy and jogged
regularly, he said. But she also has been stressed by her husband’s
arrest and the commando-style raid on her home when three of their
children were present, Coleman said.

Investigators, with guns drawn, entered their home while family
members were sleeping or just waking up, Coleman said.

“For Chrissakes, the family had never been in trouble before but
police pointed guns at the kids’ heads,” he said.

The Sanger attorney was arrested on suspicion of perjury and
falsifying documents in a statewide real estate scam. He has filed
a claim against the state of California seeking $1 million in
damages for the raid on his family’s home.

His claim alleges that armed officers violated his freedom of
unreasonable search and seizure when they entered his home at 6:30
a.m. on Jan. 15. He was then held all day and denied his right to
speak to a lawyer.

The Feigels also are seeking damages for the assault and emotional
distress inflicted on his three teenage children who were home at
the time.

More Reason on the militarization of
police.

On Friday I
noted that, contrary to what President Obama said in his recent
CNN interview, the executive branch does have the power to
reclassify marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). For
some reason, that observation irked UCLA drug policy expert Mark
Kleiman, who
claims I am 1) ignorant of the facts, 2) willfully blind to the
facts because they clash with my libertarian ideology, and 3) eager
to criticize Democrats because it is in my financial interest to do
so:

The discussion of “rescheduling” marijuana is confused because
most of the people engaged in it don’t know how the law works.

Jacob Sullum, always willing to let his ignorance be the measure
of other people’s knowledge, utterly unwilling to let mere facts
get in the way of libertarian ideology, and eager to please his
paymasters by slagging a Democratic President, illustrates my
point in his response to the latest CNN Obama
interview.

A few paragraphs down, Kleiman concedes that “yes, authority to
reschedule cannabis lies with the Administration.” So what I said
was correct yet somehow also ignorant and unfactual.

Even if I had misrepresented the administration’s authority
under the Controlled Substances Act (which Kleiman admits I did
not), in what sense would that illustrate my libertarian bias? No
matter who is charged with saying which drugs people are not
allowed to have, the CSA is not a libertarian statute by any
stretch of the imagination.

But Kleiman says I am not really motivated by libertarianism
anyway. Rather, I am in it for the money, “eager to please [my]
paymasters by slagging a Democratic President.” Exactly who are
these “paymasters,” and why do they hate Democrats in particular?
Kleiman does not say, possibly because this is a generic ad hominem
attack he uses against people he perceives as political opponents,
whether or not he has any facts to back it up.

In any case, anyone who is even vaguely familar with my work
knows it is absurd to suggest that I criticize Democrats while
giving Republicans a pass. Two days before I criticized Obama for
speaking as if he were powerless to reschedule marijuana, I

defended him against an attack by a Republican senator who
objected to his statement that marijuana is safer than alcohol. A
couple of weeks before that, I
took issue with another Republican senator who criticized Obama
for allowing legalization to proceed in Colorado and Washington by
refraining from arresting and prosecuting state-licensed marijuana
suppliers.

More generally, while Obama is the president I have been
“slagging” most since January 2009, I was never shy about slagging
his Republican predecessor. Last week I linked to some of that
criticism while
arguing that Republicans who fault Obama for abusing executive
power, if they want to be taken seriously, should not downplay
similar sins committed by Republican presidents. In case it still
is not clear, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the
Republican Party. But in Kleiman’s mind, I am a partisan interested
only in picking apart members of the other team.

Kleiman also suggests that if I really understood how the law
works, I would have criticized the administration for impeding
research by maintaining a monopoly on production of marijuana used
in studies. Yeah, why have I never talked about
that?

The one valid point Kleiman makes is that placing marijuana on a
lower schedule would not automatically make it available by
precription, since any cannabis preparation would still have to be
approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But the practical
result of reclassifying marijuana is distinct from the question of
whether it meets the criteria for Schedule I and whether the Obama
administration has the power to move it, which is what I was
talking about in the post that set Kleiman off, as people who
actually read it may be surprised to learn.

On Friday I
noted that, contrary to what President Obama said in his recent
CNN interview, the executive branch does have the power to
reclassify marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). For
some reason, that observation irked UCLA drug policy expert Mark
Kleiman, who
claims I am 1) ignorant of the facts, 2) willfully blind to the
facts because they clash with my libertarian ideology, and 3) eager
to criticize Democrats because it is in my financial interest to do
so:

The discussion of “rescheduling” marijuana is confused because
most of the people engaged in it don’t know how the law works.

Jacob Sullum, always willing to let his ignorance be the measure
of other people’s knowledge, utterly unwilling to let mere facts
get in the way of libertarian ideology, and eager to please his
paymasters by slagging a Democratic President, illustrates my
point in his response to the latest CNN Obama
interview.

A few paragraphs down, Kleiman concedes that “yes, authority to
reschedule cannabis lies with the Administration.” So what I said
was correct yet somehow also ignorant and unfactual.

Even if I had misrepresented the administration’s authority
under the Controlled Substances Act (which Kleiman admits I did
not), in what sense would that illustrate my libertarian bias? No
matter who is charged with saying which drugs people are not
allowed to have, the CSA is not a libertarian statute by any
stretch of the imagination.

But Kleiman says I am not really motivated by libertarianism
anyway. Rather, I am in it for the money, “eager to please [my]
paymasters by slagging a Democratic President.” Exactly who are
these “paymasters,” and why do they hate Democrats in particular?
Kleiman does not say, possibly because this is a generic ad hominem
attack he uses against people he perceives as political opponents,
whether or not he has any facts to back it up.

In any case, anyone who is even vaguely familar with my work
knows it is absurd to suggest that I criticize Democrats while
giving Republicans a pass. Two days before I criticized Obama for
speaking as if he were powerless to reschedule marijuana, I

defended him against an attack by a Republican senator who
objected to his statement that marijuana is safer than alcohol. A
couple of weeks before that, I
took issue with another Republican senator who criticized Obama
for allowing legalization to proceed in Colorado and Washington by
refraining from arresting and prosecuting state-licensed marijuana
suppliers.

More generally, while Obama is the president I have been
“slagging” most since January 2009, I was never shy about slagging
his Republican predecessor. Last week I linked to some of that
criticism while
arguing that Republicans who fault Obama for abusing executive
power, if they want to be taken seriously, should not downplay
similar sins committed by Republican presidents. In case it still
is not clear, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the
Republican Party. But in Kleiman’s mind, I am a partisan interested
only in picking apart members of the other team.

Kleiman also suggests that if I really understood how the law
works, I would have criticized the administration for impeding
research by maintaining a monopoly on production of marijuana used
in studies. Yeah, why have I never talked about
that?

The one valid point Kleiman makes is that placing marijuana on a
lower schedule would not automatically make it available by
precription, since any cannabis preparation would still have to be
approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But the practical
result of reclassifying marijuana is distinct from the question of
whether it meets the criteria for Schedule I and whether the Obama
administration has the power to move it, which is what I was
talking about in the post that set Kleiman off, as people who
actually read it may be surprised to learn.

Health-care costs are up and demand for services will only
increase under Obamacare. In many areas, nurse practitioners can
provide high-quality care at cheaper costs than traditional
doctors.

So why do doctors and other regulators want to clamp down on
nurse practitioners?

This video was originally released on December 3, 2013.
Go here for more details, resources, and downloadable
resources.

Here’s the original writeup:

“The major motivation in this opposition is kind of a turf war,”
says Dale Ann Dorsey, a nurse practitioner (NP) who runs her own
women’s health clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona.

A nurse practitioner is a registered nurse (RN) who has pursued
extra clinical training and a master’s degree and is able to
practice medicine beyond the scope of what a regular RN can. How
far beyond that scope NPs should be allowed to go is a question
facing legislators across the country.

Arizona is one of 18 states that allow nurse practitioners to
run independent primary care practices, with full prescribing
privileges, and without the oversight of a licensed physician.
Earlier this year, nurse practitioners in California pushed to
liberalize scope-of-practice rules in the Golden State, only to
be stopped
dead in their tracks by the powerful California Medical
Association (CMA), which poured
more than $1 million into lobbying efforts in the first
half of 2013 to defeat the legislation.

“[Nurse practitioners’] training is very limited compared to
physicians,” says Paul Phinney, a California pediatrician and
former CMA president. “They lack a certain kind of experience that
I believe is very important to the safety of patients and the
quality of medical care that they’re providing.” 

He has a point. Physicians are required to obtain far
more education and clinical experience than are nurse
practitioners. But there’s little to no evidence showing that, when
it comes to primary care, all of that extra education makes any
difference in the health outcomes of patients. A 2012 Health
Affairs survey of the medical literature foundno
difference in patient health between groups treated by
doctors and by nurse practitioners. The survey did find a slightly
higher satisfaction rate among patients of nurse practitioners.

So if outcomes are similar, and patients are satisfied, why are
states such as California hesitant to let more nurses open their
own practices? The question is especially pressing since groups
such as the Association of American Medical Colleges
are expecting
a severe doctor shortage in the near future due to the
aging population. Reason Foundation analyst Adam Summers says that
concern for the public good is a secondary consideration at best in
this case.

“Licensing laws are almost always sold as being in the public
interest,” says Summers. “But in reality all they do is drive up
prices and reduce competition, which reduces the incentive to
provide good services to the consumer.”

Watch the video to learn more about the nurse practitioners’
struggle for clinical independence – a fight that just make health
care cheaper and more available.

Scroll down for downloadable links, and subscribe
to Reason TV’s YouTube
channel for daily content like this.

Approximately 5 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by
Tracy Oppenheimer and Weissmueller. Graphics by William Neff.

Last month,
freelance journalist Amanda Hess, in a lengthy feature in Pacific
Standard, declared that women are not welcome on the Internet.
After describing her own frightening experience of online stalking,
Hess lists other ugly incidents and cites statistics and studies
arguing that women on the Internet—journalists, bloggers, and
general users—are routinely terrorized solely because of their sex.
New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat called
the article “a candidate for the most troubling magazine essay of
2014.” 

Troubling, indeed. But is it true?

There is no doubt that many women, prominent and obscure, have
experienced severe online harassment that can spill over into “real
life,” writes Cathy Young. Hess’s stalker, who repeatedly
threatened her with rape and murder, went from emails to phone
calls and voice mail messages. Whether such harassment is a
female-specific problem and so pervasive as to actually deter
women’s online participation, is far less clear.

View this article.