Category: reason

Police in Salem, MA—or as it’s often referred to, Witch City,
USA—have charged a psychic studio with unlawfully providing curse
removal services. Fatima’s psychic studio, which
has been offering a Romani form of fortune-telling to tourists for
two decades, was caught violating a
city ordinance which states that psychics may only forecast the
future and read the past. Warding off evil spirits and protecting
patrons from bad auras is strictly forbidden.

So when a New York resident issued a formal complaint against
Fatima’s, alleging that he paid a psychic $16,800 over several
weeks for placing a curse shield on him, police closed in. In an
investigation led by Detective Sergeant James A. Page, police
learned that the studio’s fortune-teller license was long expired.
They forced the studio to shut its doors and make a court
appearance.

The Boston Globe
reports:

But on Monday night, when Fatima’s owner Harry Mitchell went
before the city’s licensing board to ask for reinstatement, the
lapse worked in Fatima’s favor. Page…said that without a valid
license, the shop was not technically operating under the
fortuneteller’s ordinance at the time of the cash-for-curse
incidents and therefore could not be charged with violating it.

Instead, he issued two $100 fines for operating without a
license. The board granted a probationary license for Fatima’s to
resume operation until the end of the year, provided they promise
not to meddle in curses again and work with the New York man to
come up with some kind of reimbursement.

Mitchell had
explained to the Salem Licensing Board earlier this week that
he had already settled the dispute with the customer and that he
would return the money.

Detective Page told the Boston Globe that while he
thought Fatima’s was making money off deception and fraudulence, it
would be difficult for police to pursue criminal charges since
“people are embarrassed and they’re not going to come forward.”

In response to the allegations, Christian Day, a local warlock
who owns two fortune-telling shops and has appeared on Penn
& Teller’s Bullshit, said:

If they’re a fraud, then we’re all frauds, and all religion is a
fraud. They’re not regulating the priest who absolves you of your
sins and tells you to put some money in the collection basket, or
the old lady who sends all her money to Pat Robertson.

If customers are looking for a reputable place to get their
palms read, they might just want to avoid Fatima’s completely: the
business has received a 1.5 star rating on both Tripadvisor
and Yelp
with reviews such as, “I had a palm reading and she didn’t even
look at my palm,” “Fraudulent Gypsies!!!,” “She told me I was
having a baby!!!! I had a hysterectamy 12 years ago!!!!!,” and
perhaps most tellingly, “Don’t waste your money. Do some
research.”

Almost nothing about Obamacare’s
federal exchange system is working. It’s almost impressive how
comprehensive the federal system’s technical failures are. Just
about every part of the system that has been reported on seems to
have problems, many of which are quite serious.

• The account creation system necessary to even start the process
  of using the exchanges basically didn’t work at all when the site
  launched. Administrators appear to have improved this functionality
  since launch, but Jeff Zients, who is overseeing the
  troubleshooting project,
  says it’s still not working for about 10 percent of users.
• The vast majority of people who can create accounts still can’t
  complete the enrollment process. According to Zients, only about 30
  percent of users are able to get through the system.
• Anyone who successfully logs in gets to the point of shopping
  for specific plans on the exchanges may see prices displayed
  incorrectly, as the system has
  had problems
  calculating eligibility for public subsidies for
  insurance.(Subsidy calculation has also
  proven
  difficult for
  several state-run exchanges.) 
• Anyone who decides to browse for plans without logging in first
  is also
  liable to see incorrect prices. The “shop and browse” feature
  installed to mitigate problems caused by the broken account system
  often displays the wrong prices, because it lumps together premiums
  for anyone who is 49 and under, and anyone who is 50 or older.
  Everyone under 50 is provided prices for a 27-year-old, even though
  prices for people in their 40s might be quite a bit higher.
• Several exchanges are having
  trouble accurately
  displaying provider and network information for the plans on
  offer. This is not a big problem for the federal exchanges yet
  because they are still so dysfunctional, but if the state-run
  exchanges are any indication, it could eventually create headaches
  for people who want to know which doctors and hospitals are
  attached to which plans. 
• Even with just a trickle of individuals making it all the way
  through the process, insurers are
  not getting correct enrollment information from the exchanges.
  As a result, many are reviewing applications manually. If larger
  numbers of applications ever make it through the system, that won’t
  be sustainable. And there may be longer term problems as well: If
  enrollment data is transmitted incorrectly, people could eventually
  find out they didn’t enroll in the plan they selected, or didn’t
  actually enroll at all.
• The small business exchanges aren’t fully up and running
  either. Enrollment in those exchanges, already delayed once, was
  delayed again, the administration
  announced this week.
• The federal exchanges were supposed to seamlessly interface
  with multiple state Medicaid programs, but that functionality,
  originally delayed until November 1, was
  also further delayed last week. And at this point, federal
  officials won’t say when they expect that functionality will be
  complete.
• Security testing for the federal exchange system was never
  completed. An
  internal memo warned that too little testing “exposed a level
  of uncertainty that can be deemed as a high risk.” (The temporary
  security authorization under which the site is operating also
  
  appears to violate the administration’s own web security
  guidelines.)
• The Spanish language version of the website has been
  delayed indefinitely.
• The “data hub” that routes information between multiple
  databases has gone
  down on
  multiple occasions due to hosting facility outages.

It’s a near-total failure. All the major segments of the
system—the user end, the insurer end, the data-routing in the
middle, the plan information on display, the connections with
state-run legacy systems—are either problem-plagued or broken
entirely.

Almost nothing about Obamacare’s
federal exchange system is working. It’s almost impressive how
comprehensive the federal system’s technical failures are. Just
about every part of the system that has been reported on seems to
have problems, many of which are quite serious.

• The account creation system necessary to even start the process
  of using the exchanges basically didn’t work at all when the site
  launched. Administrators appear to have improved this functionality
  since launch, but Jeff Zients, who is overseeing the
  troubleshooting project,
  says it’s still not working for about 10 percent of users.
• The vast majority of people who can create accounts still can’t
  complete the enrollment process. According to Zients, only about 30
  percent of users are able to get through the system.
• Anyone who successfully logs in gets to the point of shopping
  for specific plans on the exchanges may see prices displayed
  incorrectly, as the system has
  had problems
  calculating eligibility for public subsidies for
  insurance.(Subsidy calculation has also
  proven
  difficult for
  several state-run exchanges.) 
• Anyone who decides to browse for plans without logging in first
  is also
  liable to see incorrect prices. The “shop and browse” feature
  installed to mitigate problems caused by the broken account system
  often displays the wrong prices, because it lumps together premiums
  for anyone who is 49 and under, and anyone who is 50 or older.
  Everyone under 50 is provided prices for a 27-year-old, even though
  prices for people in their 40s might be quite a bit higher.
• Several exchanges are having
  trouble accurately
  displaying provider and network information for the plans on
  offer. This is not a big problem for the federal exchanges yet
  because they are still so dysfunctional, but if the state-run
  exchanges are any indication, it could eventually create headaches
  for people who want to know which doctors and hospitals are
  attached to which plans. 
• Even with just a trickle of individuals making it all the way
  through the process, insurers are
  not getting correct enrollment information from the exchanges.
  As a result, many are reviewing applications manually. If larger
  numbers of applications ever make it through the system, that won’t
  be sustainable. And there may be longer term problems as well: If
  enrollment data is transmitted incorrectly, people could eventually
  find out they didn’t enroll in the plan they selected, or didn’t
  actually enroll at all.
• The small business exchanges aren’t fully up and running
  either. Enrollment in those exchanges, already delayed once, was
  delayed again, the administration
  announced this week.
• The federal exchanges were supposed to seamlessly interface
  with multiple state Medicaid programs, but that functionality,
  originally delayed until November 1, was
  also further delayed last week. And at this point, federal
  officials won’t say when they expect that functionality will be
  complete.
• Security testing for the federal exchange system was never
  completed. An
  internal memo warned that too little testing “exposed a level
  of uncertainty that can be deemed as a high risk.” (The temporary
  security authorization under which the site is operating also
  
  appears to violate the administration’s own web security
  guidelines.)
• The Spanish language version of the website has been
  delayed indefinitely.
• The “data hub” that routes information between multiple
  databases has gone
  down on
  multiple occasions due to hosting facility outages.

It’s a near-total failure. All the major segments of the
system—the user end, the insurer end, the data-routing in the
middle, the plan information on display, the connections with
state-run legacy systems—are either problem-plagued or broken
entirely.

Because Fed-created money enters the economy at
particular points (through banks and bond dealers), a select few
people get it sooner than the rest of us. Those who are
thus privileged are able to buy at the old, lower prices,
while the rest of us don’t see the money until prices have risen.
Sheldon Richman contends that that places an implicit tax and
transfer on the rest of us when the government pursues a policy of
deliberate inflation.

View this article.

The other day Matt Welch

argued that the insurance cancellations triggered by Obamacare
represent “a gut-check moment for the mostly left-of-center
journalists who have made such a show these past few years of
dropping false equivalence and calling out political bullshit at
the source.” So far The New York Times has risen to
the challenge pretty well. A few days ago, reporters Jonathan
Weisman and Robert Pear matter-of-factly
stated that cancellation letters received by people who buy
their medical coverage on the individual market “directly
contradict Mr. Obama’s oft-repeated reassurances that if people
like the insurance they have, they will be able to keep it.”
Meanwhile, in an article published the same day, Reed
Abelson perceived a
“debate” about “whether President Obama misled Americans when he
said that people who like their health plans may keep them.”
Apparently Abelson no longer considers that proposition
controversial. In today’s paper, he and Katie Thomas
write:

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law by Mr. Obama in
2010. Since then he has assured Americans: “If you like your
insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that
away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the
future.”

But it is happening.

Furthermore, Abelson and Thomas say “insurance companies are
canceling millions of individual plans that fail to meet minimum
standards,” up from the “hundreds of thousands” estimated by
Weisman and Pear on Tuesday. In other words, according to the
Times, it is indisputable that Obama broke his
promise and that millions of Americans are bearing the
consequences.

That seems clearly accurate to me, but yesterday Obama
implicitly
argued that it’s not:

If you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable
Care Act became law and you really liked that plan, you’re able to
keep it. That’s what I said when I was running for office. That was
part of the promise we made. But ever since the law was passed, if
insurers decided to downgrade or cancel these substandard plans,
what we said under the law is you’ve got to replace them with
quality, comprehensive coverage—because that, too, was a central
premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very
beginning. 

Note that “substandard” means “below the standard I have set,”
which is another way of saying that you may like your health plan
but
the president does not. Still, Obama is not claiming that his
personal distaste for your health insurance choices is enough to
void his guarantee. Instead he is retroactively adding a caveat to
his promise: If you like your plan, you can keep your plan—provided
it is exactly the same as the coverage you had before the law took
effect. If any of the terms have changed, all bets are off.

It will be illuminating to see whether the
Times and other news outlets dignify this
Clintonesque evasion by presenting it as a plausible alternative to
the view that Obama has not delivered what he said he would. As
Welch observed, “You can subject the policy and politics of
Obamacare to truth-scans, or you can carry water for the president.
You cannot do both, at least without a laugh track.”

The other day Matt Welch

argued that the insurance cancellations triggered by Obamacare
represent “a gut-check moment for the mostly left-of-center
journalists who have made such a show these past few years of
dropping false equivalence and calling out political bullshit at
the source.” So far The New York Times has risen to
the challenge pretty well. A few days ago, reporters Jonathan
Weisman and Robert Pear matter-of-factly
stated that cancellation letters received by people who buy
their medical coverage on the individual market “directly
contradict Mr. Obama’s oft-repeated reassurances that if people
like the insurance they have, they will be able to keep it.”
Meanwhile, in an article published the same day, Reed
Abelson perceived a
“debate” about “whether President Obama misled Americans when he
said that people who like their health plans may keep them.”
Apparently Abelson no longer considers that proposition
controversial. In today’s paper, he and Katie Thomas
write:

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law by Mr. Obama in
2010. Since then he has assured Americans: “If you like your
insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that
away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the
future.”

But it is happening.

Furthermore, Abelson and Thomas say “insurance companies are
canceling millions of individual plans that fail to meet minimum
standards,” up from the “hundreds of thousands” estimated by
Weisman and Pear on Tuesday. In other words, according to the
Times, it is indisputable that Obama broke his
promise and that millions of Americans are bearing the
consequences.

That seems clearly accurate to me, but yesterday Obama
implicitly
argued that it’s not:

If you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable
Care Act became law and you really liked that plan, you’re able to
keep it. That’s what I said when I was running for office. That was
part of the promise we made. But ever since the law was passed, if
insurers decided to downgrade or cancel these substandard plans,
what we said under the law is you’ve got to replace them with
quality, comprehensive coverage—because that, too, was a central
premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very
beginning. 

Note that “substandard” means “below the standard I have set,”
which is another way of saying that you may like your health plan
but
the president does not. Still, Obama is not claiming that his
personal distaste for your health insurance choices is enough to
void his guarantee. Instead he is retroactively adding a caveat to
his promise: If you like your plan, you can keep your plan—provided
it is exactly the same as the coverage you had before the law took
effect. If any of the terms have changed, all bets are off.

It will be illuminating to see whether the
Times and other news outlets dignify this
Clintonesque evasion by presenting it as a plausible alternative to
the view that Obama has not delivered what he said he would. As
Welch observed, “You can subject the policy and politics of
Obamacare to truth-scans, or you can carry water for the president.
You cannot do both, at least without a laugh track.”

Back in 2008, Al Gore urged America “to
commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable
energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years,” a goal
that he pronounced “achievable, affordable and
transformative.” His plan was possible, he explained, because
the price of the technologies needed to produce no-carbon
electricity—solar, wind, and geothermal—were falling dramatically.
Was Gore right five years ago? And are the folks at Greenpeace,
Friends of the Earth, and Climate Solutions right now that the
no-carbon energy technologies needed to replace fossil fuels are
readily available and ready to go? Not really, concludes a new
report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Looking at the current state of the art, Reason Science
Correspondent Ronald Bailey writes that deploying current renewable
energy technologies would be akin to forcing everybody to drive
Model T Fords.

View this article.

According to
the new book
Double Down by Mark Halperin and
John Heilemann, some of Obama’s aides were keen to have Hillary
Clinton replace Joe Biden as vice president in late 2011. 

From
ABC News:

On Election Night 2012 after clinching a second term, President
Obama hailed Joe Biden as “the best vice president anybody could
ever hope for.”

But a new account of the year leading up to the election,
detailed in the book “Double Down,” reveals that many of Obama’s
closest aides weren’t always as convinced.

In late 2011, several top Obama campaign officials secretly
considered a VP swap for Hillary Rodham Clinton, convening
focus-groups and commissioning opinion polls to determine whether
the president could get a boost among voters.

Follow this story and more at Reason
24/7.

Spice up your blog or Website with Reason 24/7 news and
Reason articles. You can get the widgets
here. If you have a story that would be of
interest to Reason’s readers please let us know by emailing the
24/7 crew at 24_7@reason.com, or tweet us stories
at @reason247.

Breaking, few details available now, but
this from Los Angeles Times:

A Transportation Security Administration agent and a suspect
were wounded in a shooting at Los Angeles International
Airport on Friday morning, sources told the Los Angeles
Times.

Law enforcement officers were flooding the airport, authorities
said, and terminals 2 and 3 were evacuated….

TV footage showed dozens of offficers swarming the airport.
Images also showed a law enforcement officer being treated by
paramedics. He appeared to be alert. Another officer had a bloody
hand. 

UPDATE: Second suspect reported in custody, one
shooter shot in leg,
via L.A. Weekly:

Police have confirmed the shooting. The suspect has apparently
been apprehended, according to news reports. CBS reported that he’s
been shot in the leg…..

CBS is now reporting that a second suspect is in custody
— and he was armed….

The FAA has reportedly grounded all flights to and from
LAX.

CBS reports that police are focused on a series of “multiple,
suspicious” packages — which, in light of how many packages are at
any airport on any given day, particularly one when people are
fleeing in panic — is going to be no easy investigation.

From the beginning of the NSA mass-surveillance scandal,
revelations that the U.S. spy agency was not only scooping up
international communications, but had
conscripted American companies into the effort have
opened doors for foreign firms. Tech companies in other
countries are relatively shielded from pressure by U.S. spooks
(whatever their relationships with spy agencies in their own
countries) and some American entrepreneurs, like Ladar Levison of Lavabit, actively urge
people to avoid U.S.-based services. Worse, though, the NSA’s
connection to some companies is giving European politicians cover
to discriminate against American businesses. Never mind that
Europeans do their own fair share of spying; they now have
legitimate concerns to raise about the security of data in the
hands of Apple, AT&T, Google, and other familiar names.

Reports Juergen Baetz of the
Associated Press:

BRUSSELS—The backlash in Europe over U.S. spying is threatening
an agreement that generates tens of billions of dollars in
trans-Atlantic business every year—and negotiations on another pact
worth many times more.

A growing number of European officials are calling for the
suspension of the “Safe Harbor” agreement that lets U.S. companies
process commercial and personal data—sales, emails, photos—from
customers in Europe. This little-known but vital deal allows more
than 4,200 American companies to do business in Europe, including
Internet giants like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Revelations of the extent of U.S. spying on its European allies
is also threatening to undermine one of President Barack Obama’s
top trans-Atlantic goals: a sweeping free-trade agreement that
would add an estimated $138 billion (100 billion euros) a year to
each economy’s gross domestic product.

The Safe Harbor agreement allows companies to move data around
their networks as needed. In its absence, data from Europeans might
have to be stored and processed only within the physical confines
of Europe—a huge expense and possibly insurmountable hurdle for
many companies. Many U.S. companies would effectively be unable to
operate in Europe if they were reachable by European law.

Some companies could explicitly be barred from expanding their
presence in Europe out of fears that they operate as pipelines to
the NSA. According to the Wall Street Journal‘s
Anton Troianovski:

AT&T Inc.’s ambitions to expand in Europe have run into
unexpected hurdles amid the growing outcry across the region over
surveillance by the National Security Agency. German and other
European officials said any attempt by AT&T to acquire a major
wireless operator would face intense scrutiny, given the company’s
work with the U.S. agency’s data-collection programs.

Resistance to such a deal, voiced by officials in interviews
across Europe, suggests the impact of the NSA affair could extend
beyond the diplomatic sphere and damage U.S. economic interests in
key markets. AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson has
signaled repeatedly in recent months that he is interested in
buying a mobile-network operator in Europe, highlighting the
potential for growth on the continent at a time when the U.S.
company faces headwinds at home.

Some of this resistance to American companies is legitimate;
Europeans are as outraged as Americans about the spying
scandal—quite possibly more so, given that continent’s long history
with authoritarian regimes and secret police. And some of these
moves are just opportunistic; the NSA has turned into a great
excuse for European politicians to openly favor well-connected
companie in their own countries at the expense of U.S. firms.

In a recent report
(PDF), the European Parliament called out Britain, France, Germany,
and Sweden for tapping directly into communications networks—though
it insisted “The capacities of Sweden, France and Germany (in terms
of budget and human resources) are low compared to the magnitude of
the operations launched by GCHQ and the NSA and cannot be
considered on the same scale”. Germany’s
BND worked closely with the NSA to facilitate spying, and
France’s
DGSE needed no encouragement to hoover up communications data,
though it apparently
aided the NSA, as did a counterpart agency in Spain. Britain’s

GCHQ is reported to have burrowed its way into Begian
telecommunications firms in the course of its extensive
cooperation with the NSA.

In other words, European government officials are shocked.
Shocked!

But, however cynical the response, by compromising the
independence of American firms, U.S. officials created a hell of a
justification for other countries to torpedo those companies and
favor their own.