You probably won’t be surprised to learn that
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center jumped on the news
that the alleged gunman at last week’s Los Angeles Airport shooting
possessed “anti-government” literature. But you might be surprised
at how Potok describes
the critics of the TSA’s intrusive pat-downs:
The TSA, short for the Transportation Security
Administration, is an agency of the DHS charged with ensuring the
security of transportation, most notably air transportation.
Although it has not been widely singled out by Patriots, it has
been subjected to criticism by far-right homophobes, among others,
who have alleged that TSA agents engaging in hand searches are
really sexually groping travelers.
So: “far-right homophobes, among others.” Among others, yes.
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/04/southern-poverty-law-center-warns-far-ri
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You probably won’t be surprised to learn that
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center jumped on the news
that the alleged gunman at last week’s Los Angeles Airport shooting
possessed “anti-government” literature. But you might be surprised
at how Potok describes
the critics of the TSA’s intrusive pat-downs:
The TSA, short for the Transportation Security
Administration, is an agency of the DHS charged with ensuring the
security of transportation, most notably air transportation.
Although it has not been widely singled out by Patriots, it has
been subjected to criticism by far-right homophobes, among others,
who have alleged that TSA agents engaging in hand searches are
really sexually groping travelers.
So: “far-right homophobes, among others.” Among others, yes.
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/04/southern-poverty-law-center-warns-far-ri
via IFTTT
Pakistan’s interior minister
says the killing of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban has
effectively ended the attempt at a peace process in the country.
Meanwhile,
according to a new book on the Obama Administration, President
Obama bragged to aides that he was “really good at killing
people”.
The intelligence services of France, Germany, Spain and Sweden
have
reportedly been working together with the United Kingdom’s GCHQ
on developing methods to conduct mass surveillance of Internet and
telephone communications. GCHQ and the NSA have been criticized for
those practices in part by some of the political leaders in the
European countries whose intelligence services they have been
cooperating with.
The White House and top lawmakers in Congress continue to
reject calls for clemency for Edward Snowden, whose disclosures
have revealed the breadth of the NSA’s mass surveillance
programs.
John Kerry
went to Egypt to tell Egyptians that democracy brings
stability, which brings jobs, as part of his call for the violence
in the country to stop. Meanwhile, the former president, Mohammed
Morsi, claimed
in front of the court where he is on trial that the case against
him was illegitimate as he remained the country’s legitimate
president.
The White House
denies Barack Obama considered dumping Joe Biden as his running
mate for the 2012 election.
Rep. Mike Michaud, who is running for governor of Maine in
2014, has come out
as gay.
Paul Ciancia has been
charged with the murder of a TSA agent in last week’s shooting
at the Los Angeles International Airport.
An attorney for the mayor of Toronto has called on
the city’s police department to release a video alleged to show
Mayor Bob Ford smoking crack. His attorney says it shows no such
thing.
Keith Speights at The Motley Fool outlines
“3
Huge Differences Between the Medicare Part D and Obamacare
Launches.” As most of us have been lectured by admin officials
and supporters of the president’s health plan, don’t you know that
the prescription drug plan rolled out by the Bush administration in
the mid-Aughts also had a terrible launch? And now, would you
believe it, the seniors who get nearly free drugs from Part D love the program!
It sure did, but Speights stresses that the sheer magnitude of
the technical difficulties, the centrality of the website to the
program’s success, and the incentives for the targeted audience to
sign up are very different this time around.
Read the whole article for details, but on that last point:
Medicare Part D launched with several incentives for seniors to
enroll: new benefits they didn’t have before, low premiums, and
subsidies for individuals with low incomes. There was even a
penalty for enrolling late — although none for declining to
enroll.
Similar incentives are also present with Obamacare. A big
difference, though, is that many individuals could find
it more
financially attractive to forgo insurance — especially in
the first year or two. And because the health-reform
legislation didn’t
give the IRS any real teeth to go after those who don’t
want to pay the penalties, the “stick” of Obamacare probably won’t
look too threatening to some Americans not enticed by the “carrot”
of health insurance.
Let me add one striking – and awful -similarity to the two
programs: They are both unnecessary and expensive.
There’s no question that recipients of drugs under Medicare Part
D love the program.
Something like nine out of 10 seniors say so. Why wouldn’t
they? They got $62
billion of free and/or reduced-price drugs under the program in
2010 and that number will bounce up to $150 billion by 2019!
Billion! None of which was paid for by any sort of dedicated
revenue stream at the time of the legislation’s passage. You, me,
and our great-grandkids are the stream! No one it feels like it’s
raining!
And before anyone starts yammering on about seniors choosing
between Purina Cat Chow and a generic statin (as folks such as Al
Gore did back in
the 2000 campaign), remember that when the plan was being
discussed, retirees paid on average a total of 3.2 percent of their
annual income on drugs. That was less than they shelled out on
entertainment.
Rather than, I don’t know, creating a
smaller, targeted plan that might cover low-income/low-wealth
seniors and other poor people regardless of age, Republicans and
Democrats came up with a sop to one of the most powerful and
wealthy voting blocs in the country. Many Democrats voted against
the prescription drug plan because it wasn’t paid for, which at
least was to their credit
at the time. But it’s appalling spectacle to see both parties
now touting a giveaway that wasn’t necessary in the first place and
whose cost will more than double in less than a decade as some sort
of model of anything except stupidity and wastefulness in
action.
Which brings us to Obamacare, whose cost estimate for its first
full decade had doubled even before this awful Healtcare.gov
apparition appeared. As Peter Suderman
noted in 2012, the Congressional Budget Office figures that
instead of boasting a gross operating cost of just (!) $938 billion
for its first decade, the tab for the first decade of actual
coverage is looking closer to $1.76 trillion. Who would have
thought that a government health care plan might have been more
expensive than originally claimed?
Only anyone who actually tracks what past reforms ended up
costing.
Then there’s Obamacare’s great failure when it comes to insuring
the uninsured (let’s leave aside the question of whether insurance,
spending on health care, and actual health outcomes are clearly
related,
which they are not). Of the 50 million folks that don’t have
insurance, Obamacare will, under its most optimistic projections
cover an additional 25 million over the next decade. And it will
leave
31 million uninsured over the same time frame.
When it comes to universal coverage, then, Obamacare is
an-out-of-the-box failure that needs to go back into the box and
stay there. Then we might start a conversation about
what insurance is actually to supposed to do and build a
consensus around how best to design a law that might actually work
and doesn’t just massively increase government’s power and spending
to no clear end.
15-second video, starring Barack Obama, Kathleen
Sebelius, and Mr. T: Time to bring in the A-Team? It’s always time to bring in The A-Team.
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/04/3-big-differences-and-1-awful-similarity
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When it was enacted in 2010, Obamacare was
supposed to be the final culmination of 60 years of effort by
Democrats to realize the dream of universal health insurance. It
was a complicated scheme, designed in such a way as to bridge the
gap among Americans of different ideologies on how to address an
alleged evil. But dreams are rarely easy to bring into reality,
especially when one person’s dream is another’s nightmare. As Steve
Chapman points out, Republicans have advocated their own costly and
burdensome programs in the past, but Obamacare has generated no
national consensus. As a result, the battle over the scheme is
unlikely to end anytime soon.
When it was enacted in 2010, Obamacare was
supposed to be the final culmination of 60 years of effort by
Democrats to realize the dream of universal health insurance. It
was a complicated scheme, designed in such a way as to bridge the
gap among Americans of different ideologies on how to address an
alleged evil. But dreams are rarely easy to bring into reality,
especially when one person’s dream is another’s nightmare. As Steve
Chapman points out, Republicans have advocated their own costly and
burdensome programs in the past, but Obamacare has generated no
national consensus. As a result, the battle over the scheme is
unlikely to end anytime soon.
The European Parliament has banned
photos and other images of infants on baby
formula. Lawmakers say they hope to prevent parents from
idealizing formula over breast milk.
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/04/brickbat-babyface
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2013 is going to be remembered
as the year the drug war died as a political issue, writes Nick
Gillespie.
The headline of the latest Gallup Poll on the subject says it
all: “For First Time, Americans Favor Legalizing Marijuana.” Fully
58 percent of respondents agreed that “the use of marijuana should
be made legal.”
Not decriminalized, medicalized, or any
other weasel-worded synonym to keep the squares and the cops and
the addiction-industry lobbyists from getting the vapors and
reaching for a legal chill pill. Legalized. This
year’s figure represents a massive, 10-point bounce from last year
and an even longer, stranger trip from 1969, the first year Gallup
popped the question, when just 12 percent said pot ought to be sold
like beer, wine, and alcohol…. A large majority of Americans
favor legalizing it and that’s not going to change. No politician
is going to ever again gain votes or win an election by talking
tough about pot.
It’s a rare day when you can’t read about a city in the U.S.
threatening to shut down an innovative new ride-sharing service
such as Uber or Lyft. Bureaucrats and elected officials
usually cast their opposition in terms of public safety, but the
motivation is crystal-clear. Every burg with a taxi industry also
has regulations and barriers to entry that exist mostly to protect
folks who are already in business. Customer satisfaction and safety
has little or nothing to do with it. Indeed, the new services that
take advantage of smart-phone technology are all about
customer satisfaction, allowing users to post reviews online
immediately. When’s the last time you felt you empowered to do the
same with a conventional taxi service?
On October 22, Reason TV released the video above, which details
the lengths to which the Washngton, D.C. government went to kill
Uber, one of the best known and most-popular new car service. The
effort failed and it’s well worth watching to see what it took to
beat back a blatantly anti-competitive attack in the nation’s
capital city.
Go here for more links, resources, and downloadable versions.
Here’s the original writeup:
The on-demand car service Uber is one of the most inventive
transportation technologies of the new century. In over 20
countries – and two dozen U.S. cities – Uber uses a smartphone app
to connect people who need rides with drivers of a range of
vehicles from luxury towncars to regular taxis.
Like most powerful innovations, Uber disrupts the status quo by
competing with established business interests. In Washington, D.C.,
the service was an instant hit with city residents – and almost as
quickly found itself at odds with D.C.’s powerful taxi lobby and
its allies on the city council.
The result was the Uber Wars, which ended in a striking victory
for the company and its customers.
For more on the Capital City’s taxicab cartel, watch “DC Taxi
Heist.” And for Reason’s coverage of Uber and its regulatory
run-ins, go
here….
About 10 minutes.
Written and directed by Rob Montz (follow him on
Twitter @robmontz)
and executive produced by William Beutler at Beutler Ink (@BeutlerInk). For more
information and inquiries, email TheUberWars@gmail.com
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/03/cities-screw-residents-by-squelching-ube
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This will not go over well for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
winner.
According to the new book Double Down, in which
journalists Mark Halperin and John
Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President
Barack Obama told his aides that he’s “really good at killing
people” while discussing drone strikes.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that
Keith Speights at The Motley Fool outlines
Rather than, I don’t know, creating a
When it was enacted in 2010, Obamacare was
The European Parliament has banned
2013 is going to be remembered
From