Author: admin

Five detainees are to be
released from the Guantanamo Bay military prison. The detainees
were “approved
for transfer” after a comprehensive review of their case was
conducted by an interagency government task force, set up following
President Barack Obama’s 2009
executive order to close the facility.  

The release of these men is a victory for habeas corpus and the
rule of law. They were never charged, much less convicted of any
crimes, and their release is completely appropriate.

Unfortunately, despite five years having passed since Obama
signed that executive order, 143 detainees will remain at
Guantanamo. They are all being held without trial, in
violation of both U.S. law and the Geneva Convention.
 

The Obama administration has previously
blamed the delay in closing Guantanamo on congressional
opposition and a “difficulty of deciding what to do with the
remaining 200 or so detainees.”

The first excuse would be more believable if Obama had not
completely abandoned the pro-civil liberties platform he campaigned
on after assuming office. Among other things, he signed a law
allowing for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without
trial. As Sheldon Richman
explained in 2011:

Obama’s intention to sign the NDAA tells us exactly where he
stands on the Bill of Rights. As Human Rights Watch put it:
“President Obama will go down in history as the president who
enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

The administration may well be having a difficult time deciding
what to do with the detainees they do not have enough evidence to
prosecute, but who have nonetheless been deemed too dangerous to
release. However, holding them indefinitely shows a profound lack
of respect for due process. In the words of
Reason’s Jacob Sullum:

How “meaningful” can such due process rights be when a
conviction is the only outcome the government plans to respect?

America should stand for more than just opposition to terrorism.
It should stand for the values of freedom and the rule of law that
it was founded on. Indefinite detention without trial stands in
stark conflict with these values.

Need a refresher on the situation at Guantanamo? Check out this
Reason TV video on the topic:

Here’s a Friday Obamacare news-dump for you: In a
300-page regulatory
proposal released late this afternoon, the
Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is
considering changing Obamacare’s auto-renewal rules so that, within
the health law’s exchanges, instead of being automatically renewed
into your current health plan, you’d be moved into the lowest cost
plan from the same service tier. 

From the
attached fact sheet: 

Under current rules, consumers who do not take action
during the openenrollment window are re-enrolled in the same plan
they were in the previous year, even if that plan experienced
significant premium increases. We are considering alternative
options for re-enrollment, under which consumers who take no
action might be defaulted into a lower cost plan rather than
their current plan.

States running their own exchanges could start doing this in
2016, and federal exchanges could start in 2017. 

Basically, if you like your plan, but don’t go out of your way
to intentionally re-enroll, the kind and wise folks at HHS or state
health exchanges might just pick a new plan—perhaps with different
doctors, clinics, cost structures, and benefit options—for you. And
if you want to switch back? Good luck once open enrollment is
closed. There’s always next year. 

A hassle? Maybe. But have faith: They know what’s
best. 

Presumably the idea came up because, even though by some
measures premiums aren’t rising by large amounts this year,
premiums for many of the lowest cost and most popular plans from
last year are rising quite a bit. And since HHS decided over the
summer to institute auto-renewal, and since the majority of
Obamacare enrollees are expected to take no action and thus stay in
their current plans, the reality is that under the current system a
lot of enrollees are likely to see large premium hikes, just
because they didn’t shop around for a new plan.

This sort of problem was more or less inevitable with automatic
renewal, which was probably instituted as a way to shore up
enrollment and prevent too much attrition in year two. The easy an
straightforward way to fix it would be to turn auto renewal off, or
at least turn it off for any consumer that doesn’t opt in. But that
might result in lower enrollment. And why go the obvious route when
there’s the possibility of having federal and state health
bureaucrats make even more choices for you? 

This isn’t an actual rule yet; it’s just a proposed rule. But
the fact that Obamacare’s overseers are thinking like this says a
lot—about their government-knows-best bureaucratic mentality and
about the complications of the law itself. 

The public employee pension
system in Illinois is an absolute disaster. It’s objectively in the
worst state in the whole country. According to a
recent analysis by non-profit State Budget Solutions, it’s at
or near the top of several different lists for underfunding. Its
liabilities are worth more than $300 billion, and the pensions are
only 22 percent funded, leaving each resident of the state on the
hook for $25,000 in potential debt if the funds miss their targets.
Employees barely contribute to their own pensions and the state has
also frequently skipped its own payments.

The state managed to push through some extremely modest pension
reforms last year after a lot of wrangling and hand-wringing. It
froze cost-of-living increases, raised the retirement age, and
capped the maximum salary used to determine pensions. But employee
unions have fought it, and today they were handed a victory. A
judge ruled the reforms violate the state’s constitution.
From Reuters:

Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge John Belz, who heard oral
arguments for and against the state’s pension reform law on
Thursday, ruled that the law both diminishes and impairs retirement
benefits for public sector workers in violation of a state
constitution provision. The judge rejected the state’s argument
that its ability to invoke its sovereign powers in an emergency
trumps protections in the state constitution for pensions.

“In summary, the state of Illinois made a constitutionally
protected promise to its employees concerning their pension
benefits,” Belz’s ruling stated. “Under established and
uncontroverted Illinois law, the state of Illinois cannot break
this promise.”

The matter may now head to the Illinois Supreme Court. Read more
about the sorry state of Illinois’ pensions
here at Illinois Policy.

A
few days ago, my colleague Robby Soave blogged about a talk on Brown University’s
campus between Guardian columnist Jessica
Valenti and Canadian author Wendy McElroy. Robby was sympathetic to
McElroy’s view about “rape culture”, which seems to be that the
term should be reserved for cultures where rape is used liberally
and systematically as a tool of terror, subjugation, or war. Both
scoffed at Valenti’s comment that rape jokes could contribute to
U.S. assault rates. “Rape is the work of a small number of serial
predators, rather than a cultural phenomenon,” wrote Soave.

But why can’t it be both? Perhaps rape is something best looked
at as a phenomenon driven by a small number of serial predators
that are enabled by the culture. Callow attitudes toward rape don’t
“cause” rape, but they could—in aggregate—create conditions where
it’s easier for rapists to get away with it.

Do Valenti and company overstate the extent to which
socialization influences rapists? Sometimes. But there’s also a
tendency among conservatives and many libertarians to dismiss
feminist talk of “rape culture” as patently absurd. And I like to
think (or hope, at least) that this is partly a function of parties
talking past one another. 

Much of the skepticism surrounding “rape culture”—and from here
I’m moving beyond Soave or McElroy’s critiques to criticism more
broadly—takes the term to imply a) radical Islam-levels of female
oppression, b) coordinated male conspiracy, or c) a consensus that
all elements of rape culture contribute equally to rape rates.

But when feminists decry rape culture in the U.S., they’re not
suggesting life for American women is literally a constant struggle
to avoid being raped. No one’s saying we face the same level of
sexual violence as women in, say, Syria right now. That would be
absurd. Which is why I find the “South Africa—now there’s a
rape culture, ladies!” argument to be oversimplified and
unproductive. “If somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t
really change the fact that you have what you have,” to quote a navel-gazing coming-of-age
novel. We don’t need to be experiencing epidemic levels of sexual
violence to still be experiencing too
much sexual violence and, perhaps, have a conversation
about how culture contributes to that. 

Invoking “rape culture” is simply a way of looking, academically
or anecdotally, at how the ephemera around sex and sexual violence
may systematically create subtle biases in behavior and perception.
That’s all “rape culture” really means: that certain beliefs and
norms in our society may make it easier for sexual violence to take
place. 

These norms aren’t generally seen by feminists as some
coordinated, intentional campaign of “the patriarchy.” As Cory
Mossimo wrote recently at Students for Liberty, it may be best to
think of rape culture as spontaneous order. “There is no
conscious effort on the part of men to establish ‘rape culture’ as
we know it,” writes Mossimo. “However, the actions of rapists”—and
here I would also add the unwitting people who perpetuate certain
ideas about sex and sexual violence—”have unconsciously created an
unplanned culture that afflicts all women and men.”

Does hearing rape jokes make an individual likely to suddenly go
and commit rape? Of course not—sexual
assault is largely perpetrated by people with
premeditated intent, not people bizarrely lured to it by the power
of suggestive humor. But I’d say it’s also uncontroversial that the
meta ways in which we talk and think about rape can contribute to
how we treat rapists and rape victims in law, media, and society at
large. 

And this is what Valenti and other feminists fret over: callow
attitudes toward rape could contribute to a culture where the
seriousness of the violation is devalued. And while this
devaluation won’t drive more people to start committing
assault, it could allow those who do to thrive.

The idea isn’t that “rape culture” directly causes rape, but
that it makes people less likely to speak up if they have been
assaulted, or less likely to speak out against someone they know
has committed sexual assault. That it drives online threats and
harassment. That it influences the way our police and the criminal
justice system treat sexual assault allegations.

It’s not just about rape jokes, either, but sexual norms more
broadly. We’ve come a long way, but there is still a very pervasive
idea in American culture that men want sex (always, from whoever,
however) for sex itself and women only use sex, withholding it and
then doling it out in exchange for drinks or love or good behavior.
That women say no because they want to be chased. That
women should say no so they can be chased. That
sex is not something two people do to have fun together but
something we give or take from one another. 

How much difference does any of this make when it comes to
actual rape rates? I have no idea. Neither does anyone else,
really. It’s key to remember that we’re all just playing armchair
sociologist here. (I also want to stress that believing cultural
attitudes matter isn’t the same as saying no one
should ever joke about rape.) But I believe
these are all legit areas of inquiry and discussion—especially for
those of us who would reject more heavy-handed government
intervention into things like how colleges handle sexual assault or
how law enforcement reacts to rape threats on Twitter. 

To sum up, talking about “rape culture” isn’t meant as an
indictment of men, masculinity, or expressions thereof. It is an
indictment of rapists—an an acknowledgement that maybe, in
myriad tiny ways, we all make it a little bit easier or harder for
them to get away with it. 

My review of
the third Hunger Games movie, from The Washington
Times:

Jennifer
Lawrence is as much the hero of “The Hunger Games” as is
her on-screen alter ego Katniss Everdeen, the sullen, brave,
self-obsessed, self-sacrificing protagonist at the center of the
movies.

On paper, the character doesn’t make much sense,
but Ms.
Lawrence does a masterful job of turning the script’s
creations into an unruly and fascinating character.

It’s easy to accept those contradictions, even when they don’t
seem to add up, because Ms.
Lawrence seems to be struggling with them as well, slowly
coming to terms with the mess of who she is. It’s that struggle
that makes her so watchable, and that carries the movies.

That’s good, because there’s a lot that doesn’t add up in the
latest entry, “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1,” which adapts
the first half of the third and final book in the enormously
popular Hunger Games series of young adult novels.

The story picks up shortly after the second film left off:
Katniss, after sabotaging the murderous games at the heart of her
society’s dystopian social order, has been whisked away by the
resistance to a secret buried city: District 13, a low-lit,
utilitarian bunker that looks like a cross between an airport, a
dorm and a cafeteria.

Once there, she becomes the Mockingjay — a symbol of the
rebellion, cast in propaganda films designed to spur on the
resistance of the other districts, which are, for all practical
purposes, slaves to the rich, elitist denizens of the Capitol.

Newcomers will likely be lost, but even casual viewers may find
themselves with nagging questions about the series’ lore. The
political and economic structures employed by the Capitol, led by
the malevolent President Snow (a delightfully icy Donald
Sutherland) to control the outer districts, never really make
sense.

Read the complete review, which focuses heavily on the
problematic social mechanics that undergird the story. As I say in
the review, it’s in many ways the most interesting of the films so
far, but it’s also the weakest.