Month: February 2018

In 2015, Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the massively popular comic strip Dilbert, boldly predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election.

“The reason I can see it coming is because I have studied this field of persuasion,” says Adams. “I saw this Trump character and he had the full tool set.” The 60-year-old Bay Area resident doesn’t agree with Trump on many political issues, but his prediction was enough for his to receive death threats from embittered Hillary Clinton supporters.

Adam’s new book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, is both a detailed analysis of how Trump reframed political rhetoric during the 2016 campaign and a guide to how all of us can communicate more effectively and persuasively.

Adams sat down with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in front of a live audience in San Francisco to talk about his book, his “extreme liberal” views, the popularity of his live broadcasts with followers via Twitter, and why Trump is a “master persuader.”

Click here for full text, and downloadable versions.

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Did the FBI mislead the federal surveillance court about the credibility of the information it submitted to get authorization to snoop on an aide to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign? Or did the source of the information mislead the FBI about his own behavior, prompting the FBI to mislead the court accidentally in its warrant applications?

Essentially the question is this: What did the FBI actually know about the controversial “Steele dossier” that alleges all sorts of ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and what did it know about former British Intelligence Officer Christopher Steele when it used his information to get authorization to snoop on former Trump aide Carter Page?

This week the Senate Judiciary Committee released a redacted copy of a January memo by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), asking the Department of Justice to consider charges against Steele for lying to the FBI.

The release of this Senate Intelligence memo relates directly to the “Nunes memo,” produced by the staff of House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in January and made public last week. In some ways the two documents dovetail nicely. Both memos argue that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was not properly informed that the dossier was put together by Fusion GPS and funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And both argue that Steele’s motivations to keep Trump from getting elected prompted him to leak information inappropriately to the media while he was working with the FBI.

But a close look at the Grassley memo shows an important difference from what Nunes has claimed. Nunes’ memo argued that the FBI knew that Steele had been leaking to media outlets and concealed this information from the court. After all, the FBI continued using his information after it learned Steele was leaking and cut ties with him. But the Grassley memo suggests that that Steele misled the FBI:

A few paragraphs down:

This disagreement matters in terms of determining whether the FBI had a good sense of Steele’s credibility when using his documents to bolster its wiretapping request. The bureau acknowledged to the court that there were some political motivations behind the dossier’s creation, but it didn’t go into detail. How much did it grasp that Steele wanted to stop Trump from getting elected president, and how much should the court have been able to consider those circumstances when authorizing Page’s wiretapping?

This different interpretation of how the dossier was actually used to justify snooping on Page is yet another reason why the underlying warrant documents should be released. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum just noted, the public is not seeing much actual evidence of lawbreaking that can be pinned on Trump as a result of this surveillance. It’s very much worth exploring whether this investigation was a fishing expedition.

Read Grassley’s memo here.

Today the Virginia House of Delegates passed a pair of narrowly tailored reforms to state rules that artificially limit the supply of health care for critically ill infants and psychiatric patients.

Virginia is one of 30 states where Certificate of Public Need (COPN) laws limit the availability of a wide range of medical services. If a hospital wants to build a new surgical facility, install a new MRI machine, or offer specialty care for sick infants, it first has to get permission from the state Department of Health. Before 2015, Virginia hospitals had to get permission just to add new parking spaces.

In practice, hospitals use the law to limit the competition they face. Last year, Reason highlighted the tragic consequences with the story of an infant who died at Lewis-Gale hospital in Roanoke, Virginia. The hospital had twice applied for a COPN license to build a neonatal intensive care unit, but both times had been rejected by the state. In both instances, a cross-town rival hospital (which advertises itself as having the only NICU in southwestern Virginia) successfully lobbied to have the applications blocked, even though Lewis-Gale had the support of local officials, civic leaders, doctors, nurses, and residents.

One of the bills passed today would directly address that conflict by exempting hospitals in the Roanoke area (“Planning Region 5” in state bureaucratese) from COPN rules that require the state to assess the impact of competition on other hospitals. The exemption only applies to hospitals seeking a COPN license to build a NICU.

It’s a classic government move, one that responds to the most recent crisis in a way that may placate the immediately aggrieved interests but does nothing to prevent something similar from happening somewhere else. If the bill clears the Senate and gets a signature from Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, Lewis-Gale will finally get to build its NICU but the state COPN regime will remain in full force for everyone else.

State Rep. Sam Rasoul (D-Roanoke) urged his colleagues to vote against a bill that did little to fix the underlying problems.

“We aggressively need COPN reform,” Rasoul said. “But this specific bill is a carve-out.”

The other bill is slightly broader, but it still represents only a small change to Virginia’s COPN rules. Under the terms of HB 1606, psychiatric facilities would be exempt from the COPN process if they wanted to purchase additional beds to expand access to care.

There are more than a dozen COPN reform bills kicking around in the Virginia legislature this year. Most deal with small exemptions for particular services or geographic areas rather than wholesale changes or repeal.

That’s unfortunate, because Virginia’s COPN laws have real, if somewhat hidden, consequences for residents of the state. A 2015 study by the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank, found that there are 131 fewer hospital beds per 100,000 people in Virginia when compared to the rest of the United States. Virginia also has fewer hospitals offering MRI services and CT scans than national averages. Hospital beds, MRI machines, and CT scanners are all subject to COPN licensing in Virginia, which means adding those services can be costly and difficult.

States with some form of COPN laws for hospitals have higher mortality rates for patients with pneumonia, heart failure, and heart attacks than states without such restrictions, according a separate Mercatus Center study published in 2016. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department have found that COPN laws “raise considerable competitive concerns and generally do not appear to have achieved their intended benefits for health care consumers,” while allowing hospitals and other large health care providers to inflate costs.

It’s heartening to see that COPN laws are losing some of their grip in Virginia, but it’s a shame that lawmakers are unwilling to do more than chip at parts of the system.

“If policy makers are interested in increasing access to care, increasing the quality of care, and reducing the cost of care, the evidence is quite clear that CON laws should be entirely eliminated,” Matt Mitchell, a senior research fellow at Mercatus, told Reason. “Unfortunately, political incentives don’t encourage wholesale repeal. Instead, they encourage piecemeal exceptions granted to highly organized individuals.”

U.S. oil production will surge above its 1970 “peak” of 9.6 million barrels per day this year, according to the latest projections from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The agency estimates that American oil production will average 10.6 million barrels per day this year and will rise to a daily average of 11.2 million barrels in 2019.

Only a decade ago, the world was in the grip of one of its periodic “peak oil” panics. Dire predictions everywhere announced that humanity was on the cusp of a disastrous and accelerating decline in oil production. One prominent analyst declared in 2009 that global oil production had peaked at 82 million barrels per day in 2008 and would thereafter begin declining at a rate of 2.2 million barrels per day. Reaching peak oil would result in a “meltdown of society” and a “dying civilization” with a “landscape littered with the rusting hulks of SUVs.”

What happened?

Russia and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have been trying to boost prices by cutting back on production. Political chaos has engulfed several big oil producers—Iraq, Iran, Libya, South Sudan, Venezuela. The International Energy Agency (IEA) notes with understated charm that “declines are accelerating in Venezuela, which posted the world’s biggest unplanned output fall in 2017.” Yet the IEA expects global production to average about 98 million barrels per day this year.

Even in 2018, you can find die-hard peak oilers projecting doom. Just this week, J. David Hughes of the Post Carbon Institute questioned the EIA’s projections. “There is no doubt that the U.S. can produce substantial amounts of shale gas and tight oil over the short- and medium-term,” Hughes declared. “Unrealistic long-term forecasts, however, are a disservice to planning a viable long-term energy strategy. The very high to extremely optimistic EIA projections impart an unjustified level of comfort for long-term energy sustainability.”

Keep in mind that Hughes flirted with peak oil predictions back in 2010, forecasting that global crude production would peak in 2012. He based this conclusion on a consensus estimate (excluding the “optimistic” views of EIA and Cambridge Energy Research Associates) of more than 20 predictions.

After my 2016 column “Where Have All the Peak Oilers Gone?” appeared, I received an anonymous email chastising me for daring to report on this subject. My interloctor wrote:

How can you say that peak oil is dead, when oil’s sell price is one third of the price needed to sustain current production level? That’s silly. Many oil companies are going broke, oil exporting countries will be broke soon. You just don’t understand the subject. But when you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t write articles about it. Peak oil happened in 2015, instead of 2005-2007 probably only because of coal boom in China. But that coal boom has now ended. Before making a fool of yourself again, please get to know the subject first.

I replied: Well, I guess you told me! As the mirage of peak oil continues to recede, I await future emails from you confidently asserting that peak oil occurred in 2020, in 2025, in 2030, etc.

I just can’t seem to help making a fool of myself on this subject.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions thinks marijuana may be a gateway to prescription opioid and heroin addiction. In fact, a number of academic studies show lower rates of opioid abuse and overdoses in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Speaking at a Heritage Foundation event last night in honor of the late Ronald Reagan’s birthday, Sessions lamented the “permissive rhetoric” and media coverage surrounding marijuana and other drugs.

“We don’t think illegal drug use is ‘recreation.’ Lax enforcement, permissive rhetoric and the media have undermined the essential need to say no to drug use. Don’t start,” Sessions said. “That’s what President Trump said to us the other day in a meeting. What did Nancy Reagan say? Just say no. Don’t start this stuff.”

Sessions was also asked during a Q&A section about the opioid crisis. “My goal for 2018 is to see a further declin,” he replied “We had a 7 percent last year decline in actual prescriptions of opioids. We think doctors are just prescribing too many….These pills become so addictive, and the DEA said a huge percentage of the heroin addiction starts with prescriptions. That may be an exaggerated number—they had it as high as 80 percent—but we think a lot of this is starting with marijuana and other drugs, too. We’ll see what the facts show, but we need to reduce the prescription abuse and hopefully reduce the addiction that’s out there.”

WATCH: Attorney General Jeff Sessions says his goal for 2018 is to see a further decline in prescriptions of opioids, and says, “we think a lot of this is starting with marijuana and other drugs.” pic.twitter.com/paWSsEuNrl

— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 7, 2018

If marijuana use leads to opioid abuse, you might expect states where pot can be obtained legally to have a bigger opioid problem. Yet numerous studies have found the opposite:

• A 2017 study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence found that states that legalized medical marijuana reported on average 23 percent fewer hospitalizations for opioid addiction and 13 percent fewer hospitalizations for opioid overdoses.
• A 2017 study found that New Mexico patients with chronic pain who enrolled in the state’s medical marijuana program were likely to reduce their opioid dosage or even cease opioid use altogether.
• A 2017 study in Colorado found that marijuana legalization “was associated with short-term reductions in opioid-related deaths.”
• A 2016 study published by the American Journal of Public Health reported that fatally injured drivers in car crashes were less likely to test positive for opioids in states with legal medical marijuana.
• A 2016 study looking at prescriptions covered by Medicare found that “the use of prescription drugs for which marijuana could serve as a clinical alternative fell significantly once a medical marijuana law was implemented.”
• A 2014 JAMA study found that states with legalized medical marijuana had on average a nearly 25 percent lower mortality rate for opioids.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment or additional information.

Donald Trump’s longstanding desire for a military parade in D.C. has turned into a presidential directive, according to a report in The Washington Post.

That led to the usual back-on-forth in the punditocracy. Liberals got a bit of collective amnesia about America’s storied history of jingoism, claiming that a military parade doesn’t reflect American values. In fact, like it or not, many presidents have found comfort in wrapping themselves in the flag and hiding behind service members and veterans.

Trump supporters, and even some conservatives who don’t support Trump, lauded the idea. National Review‘s David French—the guy Bill Kristol once touted as a potential third-party candidate in 2016—said he was “fine” with a military parade because of the things he says the military has done since 9/11, like toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He didn’t note that American troops remain in Afghanistan more than 16 years after toppling the Taliban, and that they’re also present in Hussein’s old Iraqi stomping grounds and in Syria.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) may have had the most relevant take:

I’m all for a parade if it’s to celebrate bringing our young men and women home from these unauthorized wars overseas.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) February 7, 2018

Reason‘s own Jesse Walker made a similar suggestion earlier in the day:

I’m fine with a big military parade, but only if they invite every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan and then let them head home from there.

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) February 7, 2018

Trump’s desire for a military parade is certainly on-brand. He’s spoken highly of France’s traditional Bastille Day Military Parade ever since being invited as President Emmanuel Macron’s guest last year, and he made a big deal during his presidential campaign of saving a veterans’ parade in New York in 1995.

At the same time, Trump has sometimes flirted with understanding that U.S. foreign policy is dangerously interventionist. A military parade would be a small price to pay for declaring victory and ending the war on terror, if someone could convince the president to link the two. It would certainly be an ego-booster.