Month: August 2017

After a congressional baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia, was interrupted by gunfire on June 14, a New York Times editorial revived the much-debunked myth that a graphic created by Sarah Palin’s political action committee had something to do with the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson. Two weeks later, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate sued the Times for defamation, and yesterday a federal judge dismissed the case.

Although correct as a matter of law, the decision should not be interpreted as a vindication of the Times. To the contrary, the details described in U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff’s ruling highlight the journalistic malpractice, magical thinking, and blinkered tribalism that led to this stupid and embarrassing mistake.

The editorial, “America’s Lethal Politics,” used a violent attack on Republicans as a pretext to remind us how awful they are:

Was this attack [on Republicans at the baseball game] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee [SarahPAC] circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’ re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.

The Times thus managed to feign evenhandedness even while suggesting that right-wing rhetoric is more vicious than left-wing rhetoric and more clearly implicated in violence. But as the paper admitted in a correction published the next day, it was all nonsense:

An editorial on Thursday about the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized crosshairs.

Although the editorial was inaccurate and reflected negatively on Palin, Rakoff concludes that she failed to allege facts sufficient to show that it was a product of “actual malice,” the standard that applies in defamation cases involving public figures. Actual malice means the person responsible for a defamatory statement—in this case, James Bennet, the paper’s editorial page editor—knew it was false or published it with “reckless disregard” as to its accuracy. In Rakoff’s view, Bennet was in a rush and screwed up, which does not mean he knew or suspected that what he said was wrong.

“What we have here,” Rakoff writes, “is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected. Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.”

I think that assessment is basically right, but the direction of Bennet’s negligence is telling. It seems unlikely that he would have been so quick to repeat a baseless accusation linking a Democrat to mass murder.

The purported connection between Palin and the Tucson attack was something that stuck in Bennet’s mind, even though it had been repeatedly debunked in the pages of his own newspaper and in The Atlantic, which he used to edit. It stuck in his mind even though it was contradicted by the ABC News article to which the editorial linked, a fact that undermines Palin’s case even while it underlines Bennet’s carelessness. It stuck in his mind because he wanted to believe it, and he wanted to believe it because it was consistent with his preconceptions about nasty right-wingers.

At a hearing that Rakoff convened to clarify how the editorial had been produced, Bennet testified that he instructed Elizabeth Williamson, the editorial writer who composed the first draft, to look up the commentary that the Times had published after the Tucson shooting. Apparently he remembered that attack as motivated by right-wing ideology or hostility toward liberal Democrats, even though there was never any evidence that it was.

Bennet testified that he does not recall reading any of the articles contradicting that notion in the Times, The Atlantic, or anywhere else. Nor did he bother to read the articles he told Williamson to read, which included a column that said “Loughner was likely insane, with no coherent ideological agenda” and a Times editorial that said “it is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members.” Bennet did not even dip into the ABC News article that the editorial cited, which noted that “no connection has been made between [the SarahPAC Map] and the Arizona shooting.”

Bennet’s ignorance on the subject did not stop him from reinforcing the nonexistent link between Palin and Loughner when he rewrote the editorial. Williamson’s draft claimed the Tucson and Alexandria attacks both were motivated by “rage” that was “nurtured in a vile political climate,” and it mentioned criticism of the SarahPAC map. Bennet’s version said “the link to political incitement was clear” and “direct,” citing the map and its banal imagery as evidence.

Bennet testified that he was surprised to hear readers had interpreted what he wrote to mean that Sarah Palin had blood on her hands. He insisted he “did not intend to imply a causal link” between the map and the Tucson shooting, which is hard to believe. By contrast, it is easy to believe that Bennet was disinclined to take even a cursory look at the empirical basis for his assertion that “political incitement” moved Loughner to murder. As far as he was concerned, that was a well-known fact.

Promoting baseless claims because they are ideologically convenient and make your enemies look bad may not be defamation. But neither is it good, or even mediocre, journalism. The best that can be said in Bennet’s defense is that, like Donald Trump, he sincerely believed the nonsense he peddled.

• President Trump delivered remarks on tax code reform aimed at “Main Street.”
• The U.S. conducted a missile defense test off the coast of Hawaii.
• Philadelphia became the latest city to sue the Department of Justice over its sanctuary city policies.
• The FBI denied a freedom of information request for files related to the Hillary Clinton investigation, arguing there was a lack of public interest.
• The death toll from a series of mudslides and floods in Sierra Leone has doubled, to more than 1,000.
• The NFL has canceled Thursday’s pre-season game between the Cowboys and Texans, which was scheduled to be played in hurricane-stricken Houston.
• A program to find intelligent life in Berkeley has reportedly recorded 15 high-energy radio bursts from a distant galaxy.

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Leaders in Seattle and King County are pushing forward with plans to open two sites where drug addicts may shoot up safely, but local voters are going to get the chance to block it.

At the start of the year, Seattle’s mayor and King County’s executive announced they were going to build two safe-consumption facilities, based on recommendations from a local task force. The goal is to reduce the likelihood of heroin and opioid overdoses by giving addicts a place to shoot up (that’s also out of public view) that is monitored for safety. The model they’re pursuing is similar to a facility that has been operating for years in Vancouver.

Like many other communities in the United States, King County is seeing a surge in drug overdose deaths: 332 for 2016. They’ve seen increases in drug overdose deaths every year for the past seven years.

But there are some who think reducing the possibility of harm through with an injection facility endorses drug decriminalization and even legalization. So opponents of the facility have gathered signatures in order to force a vote. From the Seattle Times:

Opponents of safe-injection sites argue they amount to the government condoning heroin injection. State Sen. Mark Miloscia, R-Federal Way, a leading critic, has said the sites are a step toward legalization and decriminalization.

“We are losing control when we’re de-stigmatizing these dangerous drugs,” Miloscia said earlier this year. “We need to teach our children and promote not taking these dangerous drugs and stigmatize people who get hooked on drugs to get into treatment.”

Initiative 27 would ban any public expenditures to create a supervised drug consumption site. It also makes it a civil violation with fines of up to $5,000 for any private organization to operate a facility to supervise the consumption of any federally prohibited drug, except for marijuana.

So to be clear, this is not just about keeping the government from spending taxpayer money to subsidize addiction. The libertarian-minded private solution to reduce the potential harms of drug addiction would also be forbidden.

Unfortunately, what we’ve been left with is the typical drug war mentality of hitting drug addicts and dealers with harsher criminal penalties and mandatory minimums. Rather than investing in tools and mechanisms to prevent drug overdoses, we increasingly see communities attempting to prosecute the people who provided these drugs with homicide instead. So instead of fewer dead people, you get dead people and somebody sentenced to decades or life in prison.

The initiative has been scheduled to appear on a ballot in February. But a public health group has just recently filed a lawsuit attempting to block it from a public vote.

No candidate ever lost an election by promising voters too much free stuff, something Seattle mayoral candidate Jenny Durkan is banking on with her proposal for tuition-free community college.

Durkan—a former U.S. Attorney and one of two candidates competing for Seattle’s November mayoral elections—unveiled her “Promise Seattle” program Monday. The proposal actually included two remarkble promises: two years of free community college for any Seattle high school graduate at no additional cost to taxpayers.

Durkan says her goal is to get more low-income and minority students into post-secondary education. “We need to ensure students from all economic backgrounds, and from every neighborhood in Seattle, have the chance to earn a credential, certificate or degree.”

Free community college is becoming a popular promise among members of a certain political class. Four states having passed such schemes: Tennessee was the first in 2014; Oregon followed the next year. Rhode Island and New York passed community college giveaways in 2017, but have yet to implement them.

If these examples hold true, the benefits of Promise Seattle will accrue mostly to the city’s wealthiest students, while proving to be anything but “free.”

That’s because promise programs offer tuition on a “last dollar” basis, meaning their subsidies don’t begin to flow until after students have collected the federal and state aid for which they’re eligible. State and federal aid programs already cover most of the cost of attending a community college for low-income students. Their wealthier counterparts are the real beneficiaries.

Promise Oregon is a case-in-point.

According to a 2016 review by the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission, students whose family income qualifies them for full federal and state grants would get $284 in Promise tuition assistance per term. Students whose family incomes disqualify them from state and federal aid get $1,084 per term.

The same report found that the Promise Oregon spent only 7.9 percent ($860,000) of its funding on students expecting no assistance from their families. Meanwhile, 60 percent of Promise Oregon funds ($6.6 million) went to those students who’re expected to receive over $8,673 in yearly family support—much more than the average tuition cost for an Oregon community college.

Fifty three percent of Promise Oregon recipients were wealthy enough to be disqualified for federal Pell grants. The number is 47 percent for Tennessee’s Promise Scholarships. Expect Durkan’s proposal to follow the same pattern.

Durkan’s suggestion that the program could be run without tax increases is also questionable. Her outline suggests the program could be funded by revenue from a couple of Seattle’s other recent bad ideas, including its soda tax and fees from the $54 billion ST3 light rail expansion.

That could be enough, but only if the free tuition project stays within the suggested budget caps, something other Promise programs have failed to do.

Spending on Promise Oregon has escalated, from $10 million for the 2016-2017 academic year to $40 million for 2017-2018. Even with that four-fold boost in funding, the program is still $8 million short of covering all applicants, requiring the Oregon legislature to at last means-test the program.

While the evidence suggests nothing Durkan is promising is really free, it also suggests that hasn’t stopped taxpayers from believing in and voting for it.

At the beginning of the summer, as congressional Republicans were pushing to pass health care legislation, it looked as if, in some places, a major component of Obamacare might simply cease to exist, all on its own.

More than 40 counties across the country appeared likely to have no insurer available in the health law’s exchanges. Major news organizations published reports warning that, after insurers made their final decisions, hundreds of counties could ultimately be left bare under the law.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

All of the counties that were expected to be bare now have at least one participating insurer. The Republican effort to rewrite the health care law has stalled indefinitely, and may never be revived. A new government report published today finds that health insurance coverage has increased nationally this year by about 500,000 people. Obamacare, which languished in the polls throughout President Obama’s time in office, is now more popular than ever.

Yet all is not entirely well with the law. Although there are no bare counties, major health insurance companies like Aetna and UnitedHealth have pulled out of the program, and 47 percent of counties, covering about 23 percent of health law enrollees, will have just one option in the exchange.

This is hardly the boon for consumer choice that President Obama promised back in 2009, when he declared, in a speech making the case for health care reform, “My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition. That’s how the market works. Unfortunately, in 34 states, 75 percent of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies. In Alabama, almost 90 percent is controlled by just one company. And without competition, the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down.”

Under Obamacare, dramatic price increases are exactly what’s happening. In Maryland, for example, a state that has generally favored the law, exchange premiums will jump an average of 33 percent. And that hike is lower than what insurers requested: State insurance regulators negotiated carriers down from initial requests for rate increases averaging 43 percent.

Although the majority of the people covered under Obamacare will be relatively insulated from those hikes thanks to the law’s insurance subsidies, that just means that taxpayers will shoulder the additional cost. And those who earn too much income to qualify for subsidies will be stuck with substantially higher bills, yet again. So it’s no surprise that they are fleeing: The market for unsubsidized coverage shrank 29 percent in the last year, according to insurance industry consultant Bob Laszewski.

Among the insurers that has stepped in to fill many of the counties that were expected to be bare is Centene, which built its business on Medicaid managed care, in which insurers take over caseloads from states. Centene has been more successful than other companies in Obamacare’s exchanges, in part by relying on narrow provider networks. Under these sorts of plans, coverage through Obamacare looks more like coverage through Medicaid than what most people expect from private insurance.

Even the bare county problem, meanwhile, may be merely delayed rather than solved. In Ohio, which earlier this year expected to have 20 counties with no insurer, the state’s Department of Insurance Director, Jillian Froment said, “This is a temporary solution and one that only applies to 2018. Beyond that, insurers are still looking for predictability in the health insurance market.”

Predictability, in this case, may turn out to mean “stabilization funds“—or, less generously, publicly funded bailouts. The future of the health care law looks less like total collapse and more like consistent unsteadiness and worries about decline, while lawmakers attempt to prop it up on a nominally temporary basis.

The health care law may have avoided repeal, or any of the not-quite-repeal options that congressional Republicans considered. And it may have plugged the holes in the insurance market, at least for now. But it has hardly settled into a stable equilibrium, and the ways in which it is unstable and inadequate are unlikely to improve rapidly on their own. Obamacare may not be failing. But in many ways, it is flailing.