Month: February 2016

• If you’re not excited about the Iowa caucuses tonight, this link will probably not make you any more excited. Nevertheless, prepare for intensifying news coverage.
• President Barack Obama wants Congress to fund a $4 billion program to increase availability of computer science classes in public schools.
• A citizen in Southern Florida, with an amazing amount of guts, chased and pulled over a police officer for speeding. She has so far survived the experience.
• Chicago saw 51 homicides in January, the highest number for that month since the year 2000.
• An Egyptian cartoonist whose works sometimes criticize the ruling government was arrested for running an unlicensed website.
• Cuban leader Raul Castro is in France, visiting Europe in the first trip from a Cuban leader there in two decades.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily updates for more content.

A grand jury in Texas responded to an undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue practices by indicting not employees of the abortion and women’s healthcare provider but rather the investigators. They are charged with using fake California identifications for the investigation (a felony) and attempting to buy fetal remains (a misdemeanor).

Law professors Sherry Colb and Michael Dorf, who have written a book about the relationship between arguments used for abortion rights and those used for animal rights, took to CNN to express concern about these indictments. They are pro-choice and support Planned Parenthood. Nevertheless, they are concerned about how indictments like this could affect citizen investigations not just of Planned Parenthood but elsewhere:

The felony charge of tampering with government records relates to their alleged use of false IDs, and the misdemeanor charge of attempting to buy fetal remains seemingly overlooks the fact that Daleiden and Merritt were only posing as buyers to expose what they believed was illegal conduct by others.

Whatever the precise facts of this case prove to be, the prosecution has broader implications, and not just for abortion and anti-abortion speech. Undercover exposés play a vital role in informing the American public of important facts that would otherwise remain hidden.

For example, Upton Sinclair’s muckraking 1906 novel “The Jungle” was based on his incognito work in the Chicago meatpacking industry. Timothy Pachirat’s more recent “Every Twelve Seconds” shows the impact of a modern slaughterhouse on the workers and animals unlucky enough to find themselves in its confines. Unfortunately, the courts have not consistently protected undercover reporting.

Animal rights activists who gain access to farms, slaughterhouses and laboratories by disguising their true intent may face criminal charges. In a carefully reasoned opinion last August, a federal district judge invalidated Idaho’s “ag-gag” law on First Amendment grounds, but the state has appealed, and the ultimate outcome remains uncertain.

Read more here, and more about striking down “ag-gag” laws here.

I do want to take issue with some of Colb and Dorf’s argument though. They do not seem to want to moderate the rights of citizen or undercover journalists with any sort of understanding that there’s such a thing as private property. They complain about censorship that can be brought about through the application of general laws that aren’t about speech at all, just as with this case. But they also seem to think that the antidote for this is essentially the government giving a pass to all sorts of possible crimes, including trespassing, in the pursuit of a story:

To be sure, legislators and judges have good reason to tread carefully in recognizing a journalist’s right of access to private property. In the age of Facebook and YouTube, anyone with a mobile phone can plausibly claim to be a citizen journalist.

Accordingly, any right of undercover access would need to be limited to matters of genuine public concern, lest snoops posing as door-to-door salespeople and housekeepers violate legitimate interests in privacy. Even journalists or activists investigating a story in which the public has a real interest should not be given carte blanche to expose truly private facts, such as the identity or medical history of Planned Parenthood patients.

Problem one: Anyone with a mobile phone is a citizen journalist. Journalism is a thing that people do, not a thing that people are. Problem two: Who would be the person who would be deciding what are “matters of genuine public concern” in the first place? It would undoubtedly be a government authority of some sort. Would people have to seek permission in advance from this nebulous authority figure for permission to engage in undercover journalism? Or would they have to hope after the fact that these same government authorities will objectively make a decision? Why on earth would anybody trust such a system?

Like every other right, journalistic practices are limited to the extent that they interfere with the rights of others. Maybe the appropriate way to evaluate investigative journalists’ behavior is to ask “Whose rights were violated here?” when trying to determine whether the law should apply. Whose rights did the Center for Medical Progress violate by having fake identifications and pretending they wanted to buy fetal tissue (when they obviously had no intention of doing so)? That’s a little bit different from the government giving clearance to activities like trespassing and vandalism to try to get access to where somebody thinks something bad may be happening. 

Like many of the greatest media-propelled narratives, the notion that Bernie Sanders’ online supporters are uniquely-malicious harassers lacks credulity.

But this hasn’t stopped several left-of-center news sources from making the striking, mostly false claim claim that armies of pro-Sanders activists on Twitter—animated by misogyny—constantly lash at members of the Hillary Clinton campaign and their allies in the press.

“The bros who love Bernie Sanders have become a sexist mob,” asserted Mashable. “The Sanders campaign knows the ‘Bernie Bros’ are a problem,” declared The New Republic’s Jamil Smith. “Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Is Concerned About the ‘Berniebro,’ As They Maybe Should Be,” suggested Jezebel. Buzzfeed News upped the ante with, “The Bernie Bros Are a Problem and the Sanders Campaign Is Trying to Stop Them.”

It’s true enough that some Sanders staffers are making an effort to encourage social media users to be respectful toward people involved with other campaigns, and have apologized to a few specific recipients of Sanders-inspired hate. But here’s the thing: there’s scant evidence that said apologies are actually warranted.

Baltimore Post-Examiner columnist Carl Beijer investigated the phenomenon and discovered this:

Look for the BernieBro, and at the most you’ll find a few examples that are easily explained as statistically insignificant.

Or you will find the flat refusal to provide any examples at all.

Or you will find the repeated and demonstrable misrepresentation of quotes, as in the case of Rebecca Traister’s article. Or as in a Jezebel article posted yesterday, where the “Berniebro” quoted turns out to be a woman.

Sometimes you’ll get a variation on this when another journalist cites the misrepresented quote, as Jessica Valenti does for the article above. Or more recently, when BBC and Mashable both quote uncritically another journalist, Emily Nussbaum, claiming that “the Feel the Bern crew” called her “psycho” – when it was, in fact, a Tea Party Republican Congressman from Georgia. …

UPDATE: Turns out one the Republican Congressman who called Emily Nussbaum a “psycho” doesn’t even exist. So just to clarify: this Berniebro story exists because

1) Wonkette’s Kaili Joy Gray is citing
2) The New Republic’s Jamil Smith, who cited
3) Mashable’s Emily Cohn, who cited
4) New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who credited to a Berniebro a quote from
5) A Republican Congressman’s Twitter account, who turns out to not even be a Congressman, but rather
6) A random troll who created a character “based on J.D. ‘Boss’ Hogg from the classic TV show, ‘The Dukes of Hazzard'”.

To elaborate on the Jezebel allegation: a purported Bernie Bro left the following comment on the Facebook page of Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who supports Clinton: “You should have supported someone with integrity instead of a lying shitbag like HRC.” First of all, the commenter was a woman, not a man. Second of all… Clinton is a lying shitbag! How can it be harassment to harshly criticize a federal lawmaker for backing her?

Similarly, it certainly looks like at least some of the journalists who are so upset about being called out for their Clinton-shilling… are shills for Clinton.

It’s not harassment to tell the truth. It’s not misogyny to assert that a Clinton presidency would be a disaster for women. Many women think that. Sanders is actually more popular among young women than Clinton is.

The Nation’s Liza Featherstone, a supporter of Sanders, called the contention that Sanders’ people are disproportionately abusive trolls “grotesquely exaggerated.” In an email to Reason, she wrote:

I was called an ugly cunt on the Nation magazine’s comment section by liberals and libertarians, back when these alleged Berniebros were still in preschool. Political discourse on the internet can be unpleasant. It would be surprising if Bernie Sanders had no knuckle-draggingly sexist followers given the prevalence of alienated and misogynist men on the internet. If all Sanders supporters were sweet sensitive males it would be a sign that he wasn’t reaching anyone outside the Burlington famers market, I’m sorry to say.  But the Berniebro phenomenon is grotesquely exaggerated—we are seeing an epidemic of think pieces and hundreds of references to “Berniebros” per day, with laughably little substantiation. Everyone writing and tweeting this garbage should be embarrassed. Misogyny is real, but accusations of misogyny have become the new red baiting. It’s a way for centrists and media elites to bash the left while sounding progressive, and we’re going to see it intensify especially if Sanders does well in these early primaries.

Not all Sanders supporters are dicks. Not all Sanders supporters have dicks. The mainstream left-leaning press’s attempts to insist otherwise are a shameful indictment of the fact that many of them are in the tank for Clinton—and they don’t like being called on it.

Via The Washington Post comes this outraged attack on National School Choice Week, an annual event designed to promote interest in K-12 education reform. As readers of Reason.com know, we have been a sponsor of and participant in NSCW, which took place last week, for several years. View our related posts and videos here.

Sarah Lahm, a freelance journalist who has been an education fellow for The Progressive magazine, writes that “what passes for acceptable school choice rhetoric, behind closed doors, is frightening.”

This a nice opening to a hit piece on NSCW, especially to describe a public event that was held at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Not a lot of closed doors at that event, I’m guessing, especially since it was free and open to the public, but details, shmetails, right?

Lahm also clucks that the panel was all-white even as she notes that one of the intended participants was African American but he “was not able to make it.” And there’s this slag: “But that’s not all. The whole room was white, as far as I could see.” That would include Lahm, by the way.

Lahm is up front about her opposition to school choice, which is all well and good, but it seems to incapacitate her analytic skills. For instance, she identifies the Institute for Justice as a “right-wing group” as a way of suggesting that it is somehow opposed to equal rights or in touch with minority communities. She is apparently unfamiliar with the libertarian outfit’s extensive work on occupational licensing and early cases defending the rights of Washington, D.C.’s African hair braiders, who were being forced to jump through all sorts of bogus and expensive regulatory hoops. Same for the group’s work on pushing back against anti-jitney laws. 

Lahm writes:

One Democrat plus one right-leaning Republican plus one far-right lawyer [Richard Komer of Institute for Justice] does not add up to a “bipartisan” panel, in my opinion….

The morning’s panel began with a quick dismissal of the desegregation lawsuit filed in Minnesota last fall, which, if successful, could require the state’s charter schools to develop and implement integration plans. All of the panelists, and moderator Hawkins, seemed to agree that the resegregation happening across the country now is simply due to “parental choice.” Reichgott Junge–the Democrat–declared herself “not neutral” on this topic, and told the audience not to worry because “this is not the civil rights era.” What she meant, I guess, was that we solved all of that bad racism stuff back in the ’60’s. Case closed….

Is there any safe place to express concern that the rapid resegregation of our public school system is not a happy accident, brought on by the heavenly solution of school choice?

In fact, there are plenty of “safe places” to express concern over every aspect of public education. There’s the whole internet, for instance, not to mention school board meetings, and legacy media outlets such as The Washington Post, which reposted Lahm’s piece. The idea that charter schools are somehow singlehandedly “resegregating” public education is popular among choice opponents, who routinely overstate the facts as yet one more way to get around the inconvenient truth that the primary beneficiaries of charters tend to be lower-income students, many of whom belong to ethnic and racial minorities.

From the government’s own data:

From school year 1999–2000 to 2012–13, charter schools experienced changes in their demographic composition similar to those seen at traditional public schools. The percentage of charter school students who were Hispanic increased (from 20 to 29 percent), as did the percentage who were Asian/Pacific Islander (from 3 to 4 percent). In contrast, the percentage of charter school students who were White decreased from 42 to 35 percent. The percentages who were Black and American Indian/Alaska Native decreased as well (from 34 to 28 percent and from 2 to 1 percent, respectively). Data were collected for charter school students of Two or more races beginning in 2009–10. Students of Two or more races accounted for 3 percent of the charter school population in 2012–13.

So charters and traditional public schools are kind of the same when it comes to demographics. Oh, except for this:

In school year 2012–13, the percentage of students attending high-poverty schools—schools in which more than 75 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL) under the National School Lunch Program—was higher for charter school students (36 percent) than for traditional public school students (23 percent). In the same year, 20 percent of charter school students and 21 percent of traditional public school students attended low-poverty schools, in which 25 percent or less of students qualify for FRPL.

Lahm’s attack on the panel and the larger concept of charter schools is heavy on invective; memories of longtime Minnesota senator, vice-president, and civil-rights champion Hubert Humphrey; and quotes from a 2011 op-ed by left-wing historian Rick Perlstein and lyrics from The Clash song “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.”

Yet it is remarkably light on anything approaching information about the educational outcomes of charters compared to traditional public schools when using “randomized control trials (RCTs), which are acknowledged to provide the most meaningful comparisons. Of course her account is light on that sort of material, because it undercuts the pretense that charter schools are some sort of sinister ploy to screw over minorities. In fact, when you compare charters to the sorts of schools that low-income, minority students would otherwise attend, you get results such as this:

Students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter schools than if they attend a traditional public school.  These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large.  In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found:  “The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”

Lahm is absolutely correct to note that some charter schools are no good and fail their students. As Reason’s education expert, Lisa Snell, told audiences at our three-city tour two weeks ago (watch video here), something like 200 charters closed their doors last year. That’s a good thing: It means that bad schools go out of business, which rarely happens in many awful public schools that may remain open for years and decades after losing accreditation.

School choice, especially in the form of charters, is growing in America. That’s not because it is screwing over the poor and the dispossessed. Those are the very groups that are utilizing charters at higher rates. School choice broadly gives them the right of exit from an educational system that has failed them for decades despite massive increases in per-pupil spending. Critics of school choice can denounce giving poor kids and their parents the same option that middle- and upper-class families take for granted, but they will convince nobody if they insist on presenting fact-free arguments dripping with completely unconvincing charges of racial prejudice.

Lahm and other critics of charters and choice would do well to watch this 2015 video by Jim Epstein about charters in Camden, New Jersey, one of the country’s poorest and most-segregated cities. School choice isn’t about marginalizing minorities—that’s the traditional K-12 system’s job and it’s doing a bang-up job. No, school choice is about empowering parents and kids who need it the most.

One of the many ironies of Hillary Clinton campaigning heavily on her opposition to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010 is that the Clinton family’s money machine, through her political activities and also the nonprofit Clinton Foundation, are arguably far more murky, extensive, and potentially corrupting than any other candidate’s campaign-finance operation.

The overlaps and potential conflicts of interest between the foundation and Hillary’s turn as secretary of state are large enough to account for their own journalistic sub-genre; here’s one follow-the-money exercise from the Washington Post, and a quick interpretative column by Steve Chapman. To that add this big new pile from Simon Head at The New York Review of Books, which does not prove that Secretary Clinton based her decisions on Clinton Foundation fundraising, but rather tosses out a series of large juxtapositions designed to make you go hmmm:

During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, US defense corporations and their overseas clients also contributed between $54 and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation. (Because the foundation discloses a range of values within which the contributions of particular donors might fall, only minimum and maximum estimates can be given.) In the same period, these US defense corporations and their overseas government clients also paid a total of $625,000 to Bill Clinton in speaking fees.

In March 2011, for example, Bill Clinton was paid $175,000 by the Kuwait America Foundation to be the guest of honor and keynote speaker at its annual Washington gala. Among the sponsors were Boeing and the government of Kuwait, through its Washington embassy. Shortly before, the State Department, under Hillary Clinton, had authorized a $693 million deal to provide Kuwait with Boeing’s Globemaster military transport aircraft. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton had the statutory duty to rule on whether proposed arms deals with foreign governments were in the US’s national interest.

Further research done by Sirota and Perez of International Business Times and based on US government and Clinton Foundation data shows that during her term the State Department authorized $165 billion in commercial arms sales to twenty nations that had given money to the Clinton Foundation. These include the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, all of whose records on human rights had been criticized by the State Department itself. During Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of state, arms sales to the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation ran at nearly double the value of sales to the same nations during George W. Bush’s second term. There was also an additional $151 billion worth of armaments sold to sixteen nations that had donated funds to the Clinton Foundation; these were deals organized by the Pentagon but which could only be completed with Hillary Clinton’s authorization as secretary of state. They were worth nearly one and a half times the value of equivalent sales during Bush’s second term.

There’s so much data and activity here that it can make your eyes glaze over, which may be the point—no use having one or two big potential conflicts of interest when you can get away with 20 or 200. But even in a world where all of this stuff is and should be legal, and where the juxtapositions are just coincidences, the milieu that it depicts is a foul-smelling crony capitalism factory by which the corrupt one percent of the one percent of the one percent try to exchange their bottomless dollars for even more precious access to Western respectability.

Take this NYRoB example of how a Canadian oil tycoon and the lousy president of illiberal Kazakhstan consummated their relationship at the altar of Bill Clinton, to the detriment of those who would prefer multilateral institutions to be free of tinpot tyrants:

Among the most important, and lucrative, business friendships the Clintons have formed through the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiatives has been that with Canadian energy billionaire Frank Giustra. A major donor to the foundation for many years, Giustra became a member of its board and since 2007 has been co-sponsor of the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, or CGGI. In turn, Bill Clinton’s political influence and personal contacts with foreign heads of state have been crucial to Giustra’s international business interests.

In September 2005, Bill Clinton and Giustra travelled to Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, to meet with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. At their meeting Clinton told Nazarbayev that he would support Kazakhstan’s bid to become chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE is a body with the responsibility for verifying, among other things, the fairness of elections among member states. According to multiple sources, including the BBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, Nazarbayev coveted this position for Kazakhstan, primarily as a mark of European diplomatic respectability for his country and himself.

Clinton’s endorsement of the Kazakh bid was truly bizarre in view of Kazakhstan’s ranking by Transparency International as among the most corrupt countries in the world—126th, on a par with Pakistan, Belarus, and Honduras. Freedom House in New York judges Kazakhstan to be “not free,” with Nazarbayev clocking up Soviet-era margins of victory of 90 percent or more in Kazakh presidential elections. Yet in a December 2005 letter to Nazarbayev following one of his landslide victories, Bill Clinton wrote: “Recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life.” It is unclear what influence, if any, Bill Clinton’s support for Nazarbayev may have had in Kazakhstan’s efforts to lead the OSCE, but in 2007, after the United States gave its backing to the bid, Kazakhstan was chosen as the next chair of the OSCE, a position it assumed in 2010.

Possible reasons for Clinton’s support become clearer when we scrutinize the activities of Frank Giustra. In a January 31, 2008 article in The New York Times, Jo Becker and Don Van Natta, Jr., provided detailed evidence that Nazarbayev brought his influence to bear to enable Giustra to beat out better-qualified competitors for a stake in Kazakhstan’s uranium mines worth $350 million. In an interview with the Times, Moukhtar Dzakishev, then chair of the state-owned nuclear holding company Kazatomprom, confirmed that Giustra had met with Nazarbayev in Almaty, that Giustra had told the dictator he was trying to do business with Kazatomprom, and that he was told in return, “Very good, go to it.”

The deal was closed within forty-eight hours of Clinton’s departure from Almaty. Following this successful visit to Central Asia, Giustra donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation. He then made a further donation of $100 million to the foundation in June 2008.

In an interview with David Remnick for a September 2006 New Yorker profile on Clinton’s post-presidency, Giustra described how his ties to Clinton could work for him and his interests. With Bill Clinton at that moment riding aboard his private executive jet for a journey across Africa (“complete with leather furniture and a stateroom,” according to The New Yorker), Giustra told Remnick that “all of my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton. He’s a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.”

Gee, I wonder why a surprising number of Democrats are flocking to an idealistic geezer who actually believes that stuff about money corrupting politics? You don’t have to agree with Bernie Sanders on that point to conclude that, at minimum, the Clintons’ fundraising machinery has been unseemly, and worthy of several yellow flags. What did you do in the private sector, mommy and daddy? Oh, you know, for-hire favors for the president of Kazakhstan, that kind of thing.