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Remember when Democrats were going to run on
Obamacare?

In March of 2010, just a few days before the final version of
the law passed in the House, a triumphant White House
Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told The
New York Times that, “if and when this is passed,
Democrats will run aggressively on this.” The law would be a hit,
well-liked and broadly popular, and Democrats would use it to their
advantage.

The law passed, but the aggressive campaign never happened.
Later that year, in fact, several Democrats ran ads against the
health law. Even still, writes Reason Senior
Editor Peter Suderman, Democrats kept promising that the
pro-Obamacare campaigns were soon to come. 

View this article.

The National Security Agency’s
(NSA) snoopy ways with our phone calls is headed to
no less than three federal appeals courts, but long before mass
electronic surveillance was a glimmer in a bureaucratic voyeur’s
eye, the
Post Office was already skimming and scanning through our mail
to track our communications. Unshockingly, it turns out that the
folks who manage to lose your mail and deliver your lingerie
catalogs well-thumbed aren’t so good at respecting even the shaky
privacy protections intended to regulate when and how
correspondence is supposed to be monitored.

Little known by most Americans, the Post Office has been
tracking mail for a century. These days, it photographs and stores
images of the outside of every piece of mail sent as a
matter of course, and can target specific individuals for “mail
covers”—special scrutiny of the outside of their correspondence,
including recording names and return addresses of the people with
whom they exchange mail. But that scrutiny is supposed to
abide by certain rules.

Yeah…well. In a
May audit, the United States Postal Service Inspector General
revealed:

responsible personnel did not always handle and process mail
cover requests in a timely manner and documents relating to the
covers were not always returned to the program files as required.
Of the 196 external mail cover requests we reviewed, 21 percent
were approved without written authorization and 13 percent were not
adequately justified or reasonable grounds were not transcribed
accurately. Also, 15 percent of the inspectors who conducted
[redacted] mail covers did not have the required nondisclosure form
on file.

After examining three fiscal years worth of mail covers, with
49,000 conducted in 2013 alone, the inspector general cautioned
that, “Insufficient controls could hinder the Postal Inspection
Service’s ability to conduct effective investigations, lead to
public concerns over privacy of mail, and harm the Postal Service’s
brand.”

No doubt. The New York Times
points out that the Post Office has been sufficiently sloppy
about checking justifications for surveillance that it has been
sucked into political espionage.

Interviews and court records also show that the surveillance
program was used by a county attorney and sheriff to investigate a
political opponent in Arizona — the county attorney was later
disbarred in part because of the investigation — and to monitor
privileged communications between lawyers and their clients, a
practice not allowed under postal regulations.

That’s a reference to the
shenanigans of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, who did
their best to turn Maricopa County into a banana republic (Arpaio
is still hard at it). They used information gleaned, in part, from
the mail surveillance to determine targets for police raids
intended to destroy a county supervisor who was a thorn in their
sides.

The tactic didn’t work, but not for lack of trying.

Defense attorneys’ snail mail communications with defendants
have also been targeted for scrutiny, in a way that potentially
stacks the deck in favor of prosecutors.

Basically, it’s all the concerns you have about intrusive NSA
snoopiness, applied to an older form of communications, by a
perhaps less competent bureaucracy.

Whether rape happens on U.S. college campuses at
rates similar to elsewhere in America or to rates in Tanzania and
South Africa has been a major subject of dispute recently. Folks
from President Obama to
swearing 5-year-olds princesses have been citing a statistic
that 20 percent of women on college campuses, or one in five, will
be sexually assaulted while there—a stat that has also
been routinely debunked. However, a new sexual assault
survey from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT)—one of the first schools to release broad data on campus sex
crimes—seems to corroborate everyone’s favorite sketchy
stat. 

Or does it? Media are reporting that
one in six female undergraduates at MIT have been
sexually assaulted (with this translating in some headlines and
social media shares to “one in six have been raped“). But
the MIT survey suffers from the same issues that plague previous
studies on campus sexual assault. 

First, the survey’s methodology: In April, MIT emailed its
sexual assault survey to all 10,831 undergraduates and graduate
students. Students could then opt to take the survey or not.
Ultimately, 35 percent of MIT students did. But whenever you have
an opt-in survey, those who self-select to take it are not
necessarily representative of a given population. Or, as MIT
researchers put it, “response bias is expected in virtually any
voluntary survey, particularly one focused on a narrow topic. …
the rates based on those who responded to the survey cannot be
extrapolated to the MIT student population as a whole.” 

It’s also worth noting that the definition of sexual assault—in
both the MIT survey and previous campus sexual assault studies—is a
broad one, including forced sexual penetration, forced oral sex,
and unwanted “sexual touching” or kissing. Of course there are all
sorts of levels of sexual assault, and just because something
doesn’t approach the level of forced intercourse (i.e., rape)
doesn’t mean it’s not a serious violation. But let’s be clear that
MIT’s “1 in 6” stat is decidely not about the
number of students who are rape victims, nor is the much
bandied-about “1 in 5” college women stat. 

So!, now that we’ve cleared up what the MIT study did not find,
let’s look at
what it did, starting with intriguing student
attitudes toward sexual assault. Contra the affirmative
consent crowd, it doesn’t seem that a lack of respect or enthusiasm
for obtaining sexual content is a big problem: 98 percent of
females and 96 percent of males agreed or strongly agreed that it’s
important to get consent before sexual activity. 

But students are confused about how alcohol
and intoxication affect consent, which perhaps speaks to increasing
progressive activism around the idea that drunk people can’t give
consent. Only about three-quarters of respondents said they feel
confident in their own ability to judge whether someone is too
intoxicated to consent to sex. And more than half agreed that “rape
and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if
alcohol is involved.” 

I just want to repeat that one more time: Half of
MIT students think it’s possible to “accidently” rape
someone. When you consider undergraduates
alone, this rises to 67 percent.

This is what we get when people push an idea that rape is really
often a matter of consent confusion or a drunken misunderstanding
and not something that one person (the rapist) intentionally does
to another. This is exactly what those of us opposed
to affirmative consent standards mean when we worry about it
muddying the waters of consent and confusing
the definition of rape. About a fifth of female undergraduates
and a quarter of male undergraduates surveyed agreed that “when
someone is raped or sexually assaulted, it’s often because the way
they said ‘no’ was unclear or there was some
miscommunication.” 

When it comes to experiences of sexual assault since starting at
MIT:

• 1 in 20 female undergraduates, 1 in 100 female graduate
  students, and zero male students reported being the victim of
  forced sexual penetration
• 3 percent of female undergraduates, 1 percent of male
  undergraduates, and 1 percent of female grad students reported
  being forced to perform oral sex
• 15 percent of female undergraduates, 4 percent of male
  undergraduates, 4 percent of female graduate students, and 1
  percent of male graduate students reported having experienced
  “unwanted sexual touching or kissing”

All of these experiences are lumped together under the school’s
definition of sexual assault.

When students were asked to define their own experiences, 10
percent of female undergraduates, 2 percent of male undergraduates,
three percent of female graduate students, and 1 percent of male
graduate students said they had been sexually assaulted since
coming to MIT. One percent of female graduate students, one percent
of male undergraduates, and 5 percent of female undergraduates said
they had been raped. 

For undergraduates, most of these “unwanted sexual experiences”
(the umbrella term MIT uses) occured while on campus, while
graduate students were more likely to report incidents that took
place away from MIT. A little under three-quarters (72 percent) of
respondents said the perpetrator was a fellow MIT student. For
women, all but 2 percent of perpetrators were males; for male
victims, 35 percent of the perpetrators had been male and 67
percent had been female.

Young
Americans—conservative, libertarian, independent—are as fed up with
big government as their parents and grandparents. We are the party
that is willing to address their unique concerns and in doing so,
we will build a new majority that might finally turn this country
around. The Republican Party is not perfect and there is some
dissent within the ranks, but we’ve seen how abusive the Internal
Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, and the National
Security Agency have been under Democratic leadership. Sen. Rand
Paul (R-KY) writes, that by contrast, the heart of the Republican
Party embraces freedom and we need to vote and then massage the
party to get the party to fight harder to implement a positive
vision of economic freedom, low taxation and individual
liberty.

View this article.

Over at
The Washington Post, Greg Sargent
notes that Democrats have a frequent turnout problem in midterm
elections, and it doesn’t appear to be going away. Despite having
sunk tons of cash and effort into boosting turnout amongst core
consituencies, it looks likely that the party’s midterm turnout
problem is going to continue this year. Here’s Sargent: 

What stands out is how intractable this problem appears.
Democrats have thrown everything they have at solving it —
emphasizing a slate economic and cultural issues designed to give
women, minorities, and young voters a reason to care about who
controls the Senate — but the GOP edge is either the same or even
more pronounced than it was in polling last spring.

Democrats have long known this problem would bedevil them
through Election Day, which is why they invested $60 million
in the Bannock Street Project to mobilize voters who sat out
2010.

But when the Obamacare web site crashed last fall, and
predictions of a Dem bloodbath were everywhere, it became apparent
to Democrats that voter mobilization would be even more crucial to
holding the Senate than previously thought. Bad news about the
President’s signature domestic achievement, combined with a
sluggish recovery and continuing Washington gridlock, risked
depressing core voter enthusiasm in truly debilitating ways,
particularly given the red-state tilt of the Senate map. 

Obviously part of this is just the structure of the midterm map.
But what this makes me wonder is if voter turnout is somewhat like
social sharing. As anyone who logs into Facebook with any frequency
knows, people like to share things that either make them very happy
or very excited or very upset. So your Facebook feed is probably
filled with cute puppies, news about the new Avengers
movie, and various local and national outrages.

What you see less of, though, are things that make people glum
and depressed. People are less likely to share, say, news about
disappointing movie casting (unless, of course, this news also
makes them
very angry). 

The research tends to back up the anecdata here. In a 2011
study
for the Journal of Marketing Research, two marketing
researchers from the Wharton School looked at what makes content go
viral and found that “content that evokes high-arousal
positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more
viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions
(e.g., sadness) is less viral.”

I suspect there’s a similar tendency when it comes to voting.
People will turn out when they are excited, as many were by Obama’s
first presidential campaign, or when they are outraged and upset,
as a lot of Republicans are now. And in this election, Democrats
are depressed (or disinterested), and Republicans are angry, and
that gives Republicans an advantage. 

Pick a problem. Any problem.
There’s a pretty good chance both major parties—Republicans and
Democrats—share responsibility for it. The $17 trillion national
debt? Thank bipartisan over-spending. Republicans love to highlight
the explosion of the debt under Democrat Barack Obama, but they
conveniently forget about the doubling of the debt under Republican
George W. Bush. The mass surveillance state? Thank bipartisanship.
The so-called “Patriot” Act infamously sailed through the U.S.
Senate in 2001 with only one dissenting vote. The failed drug war?
The highest incarceration rate in the world? Militarized police?
Abusive asset-forfeiture regimes? Republicans and Democrats have
staunchly supported all of it. Libertarian candidate for
Senate Robert Sarvis explains why libertarians can break the
bipartisan disaster trend by voting for many qualified candidates
of his party. 

View this article.

This may be the strangest porn-prosecution story I’ve ever
seen. According to The Independent,

A bus driver wrongly accused of
owning a film of a woman having sex with a tiger is trying to
change the law on extreme pornography after a 14-month campaign to
clear his name.

Andrew Holland, 51, suffered a heart attack, received hate mail and
was targeted by vigilantes after being charged with possessing two
videos that he was sent by friends as a joke.

After more than six months on bail, the charge of possession of an
extreme pornographic image was dropped in December 2009 when
prosecutors realised that the “animal” was a man dressed up in a
tiger suit.

The Crown Prosecution Service said it only recognised that it was a
man when the tiger was heard on the soundtrack saying “that’s
grrrrrrreat”, like Tony the Tiger from Frosties’ breakfast cereal
adverts.

The other video, called The Pain Olympics, is
described in The News Statesman as a “clip depicting
simulated damage to a man’s genitals.” The Independent
reports that it was made with “prosthetics, cocktail sausages and
ketchup.”

The U.K.’s law banning possession of “extreme pornography” was
passed in 2008. According to The Independent, it

has resulted in more than 5,500 prosecutions, the
majority for clips of bestiality. Ministers had predicted that
there would be just 30 cases a year.

Under the law, a person can be prosecuted for possession of a
pornographic image labelled “extreme” if it shows necrophilia or
bestiality, threatens someone’s life or could cause serious injury
to anus, breasts or genitals. In addition, the law applies to
“grossly offensive” or “disgusting” images—a highly subjective
test.

Bestiality itself has been illegal in the United Kingdom for
ages—and even if it hadn’t been explicitly prohibited, the
producers of bestiality videos could probably be prosecuted under
the statutes governing animal cruelty. This law was aimed at people
who merely possess such movies, even if they did not
purchase the videos and thus cannot be said to be creating a
financial incentive to produce more of them. Indeed, as Holland’s
prosecution shows, the law can be wielded against people who merely
receive clips in unsolicited emails. It’s hard to defend that, and
it’s even harder when the ban is enforced by officials who can’t
tell a real beast from a furry doing Tony the Tiger cosplay.