WASHINGTON D.C. — In a rare instance of leaking under the Clinton Administration, a newly published memo authored by F.B.I. Director James Comey proves that he thought that he and President Hillary Rodham Clinton would: "Live in a mansion in Hawaii, have 74 children, and drive a limo," according to instincts that Comey committed to paper during an epic game of M.A.S.H.
In intelligence circles, "M.A.S.H." is spy slang for "Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House."
According to people who have seen the memo, Comey's ultimate prediction for his occupation is unintelligible: Comey drew a vague, halting and self-referential circle encompassing two seemingly contradictory options:
1) “All-powerful attorney.”
2) “Starbucks barista.”
F.B.I insiders say that Comey attributes the moral ambiguity and physical blurriness of his blundered M.A.S.H. "occupation" answer to his "Misogyny"-colored Crayola crayon.
President Clinton, when reached for comment, did not deny the existence or contents of the memo.
“I mean, there’s no reason for me to doubt that this memo exists, was written by Comey, or that it represents anything other than the numeric truth of this fickle game of M.A.S.H.,” Clinton said.
However, she did take issue with some of the results. “Well, 74 children—that would be something! But hey, at least we’ve got room for them in our seaside mansion!” she joked with her trademark not-at-all-scary grin.
Comey was visibly embarrassed by the leak, but stood by the memo.
“I admire President Clinton greatly. We all do. Obviously, I did not want her to know about the existence of this memo. But now that she does. Well. I guess it’s out there.”
I'm pretty sure you can get a job in Lesbian Dance Theory in North Hollywood.
The only reason college graduates can’t find jobs is because no one wants to pay them for their degree in something like lesbian dance theory or philosophy.
The Pope of Physics (Segrè and Hoerlin) On the one hand, I enjoyed this book. On the other, for such an important and fascinating character as Fermi, I couldn’t help but think this book was a bit of small beer. I would’ve happily enjoyed a book three times its length. Relatedly, I would’ve liked fewer asides about the general aspects of the Manhattan Project.
Perhaps there’s no good way to get all the info now, but I would’ve loved to get a stronger feel for all those deathbed conversations with great and controversial thinkers. I don’t want to say it’s a bad book - in fact it might be the best Fermi biography available. It also has the incidental point of interest that one of the authors is the nephew of Emilio Segrè, which may explain why the sections about Fermi’s friends were some of the best and most detailed of the book. If you, like me, enjoy biographies from the Heroic Age of Physics, it’s definitely worth a read.
Pandemic (Shah) This was a solid pop science book on how diseases spread, and what we’re doing (or not doing!) to stop them. The book is structured according to human behaviors vis-a-vis diseases, and also uses cholera as a particular case of a disease with which to weave together the general complexity of epidemiology. I found the overall book a bit disjointed, though many individual parts were quite enjoyable. That said, overall I would’ve liked a bit more depth, especially in the sections concerned with policy.
Shenzhen (DeLisle) These DeLisle books are just delightful. They’re light and fun, but you really get a feel for his experiences going to work in other countries. This one was less funny than the North Korea one, but as a comic I think it was better. He does such a good job of capturing the feeling of loneliness and isolation he experienced. In part this is accomplished by developing a set of silent images for different people and places in the city. These images recur over the course of a book that is sometimes funny and sometimes sad, but either way serves very well to convey his experience as a guy who doesn’t speak Chinese going to work in a city with few English speakers. Highly recommended.
In 2014, filmmaker Tom Leveritt used an ultraviolet camera to show people their skin like they’d never seen it before. Now, you can do the same thing with the Sunscreenr: a tiny, waterproof UV camera that is meant to keep you slathering on sunscreen by showing you when you’ve used enough and where it’s worn off.
The Sunscreener, currently on Kickstarter and already fully funded, was developed by two founders, both of whom have experience with skin cancer in their families. In an attempt to better protect people from the dangers of UV rays, they turned to camera technology. Thus was born the patent-pending Sunscreenr camera:
“With Sunscreenr, we’ve taken powerful imaging technology used by scientists and re-imagined it in a simple device that makes it easy to see if your skin is protected,” explains co-founder Dave Cohen.
Like in the viral video we mentioned at the top, areas protected by sunscreen appear black when viewed through the Sunscreenr. And if you need to check your own skin, the colorful camera even comes with a tripod/selfie stick mount.
May is actually National Melanoma/Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Month, so they couldn’t have picked a better month to release a tiny, sunscreen spotting UV camera.
The Sunscreenr will cost $109 when it makes it onto retail shelves, but if you support the campaign on Kickstarter you can get one for as little as $74. To learn more or put down your own pledge, head over to the campaign page by clicking here.
On the up-side, if she does win this suit, the settlement might be fore more money than the moon rock and the heat shield would have garnered.
Joann Davis of Lake Elsinore, Calif., in 2011. (Sarah Burge/The Press-Enterprise via AP)
Agents of the U.S. government are entitled to immunity from lawsuits for what they do in the line of duty, as long as they do it right, in accord with the Constitution.
But what one NASA investigator did to Joann Davis, a financially distressed widow of an engineer on the Apollo program who was trying to raise a little money, was too much for a federal court of appeals to stomach. And on Thursday, the judges let her suit against him go forward.
Here’s what happened, as described in an opinion issued by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Pasadena.
Robert Davis was, by all accounts, a brilliant engineer, employed by North American Rockwell as manager of NASA’s Apollo 11 program.
When he left, he took with him two mementos: One “contained a rice-grain-sized fragment of lunar material, or ‘moonrock;’ the other contained a small piece of the Apollo 11 heat shield.”
According to “family lore,” Neil Armstrong gave the paperweights to Davis in recognition of his service to NASA.
Robert Davis died in 1986. His widow, Joann, who later remarried, fell on hard times in 2011. Her son had become ill, requiring over 20 surgeries. Her youngest daughter died, and she found herself raising several grandchildren in her 70s.
In need of money, she thought of selling the paperweights, only to find that auction houses were uninterested.
She then contacted NASA for help in finding a buyer for what she described as “2 rare Apollo 11 space artifacts.”
Her innocent email inquiry produced a wholly unanticipated result when it arrived in the NASA bureaucracy. It wound up not in the hands of some kindly space veteran but in the office of NASA’s Inspector General at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
There, an agent smelled a crime. Perhaps, he thought, she was trying to unload purloined government property, a crime.
The IG’s office launched an investigation, getting a “confidential source” to call Davis pretending to be a broker. He called himself “Jeff.”
Jeff pretended to have previously worked at NASA and promised to help her sell the paperweights.
The two exchanged seven phone calls, during which Davis expressed concern that NASA would confiscate the paperweights unless she could prove they were a gift. She explained, according to court documents, that she wanted “to do things legally” because she was “just not an illegal person.”
Jeff said he was a legal person too, but reminded her that the sale of a moon rock “can’t be done publicly.”
After the phone calls, Norman Conley, a criminal investigator in the IG’s office, obtained a warrant stating that Davis was “in possession of contraband.”
They then planned a sting operation on the 74-year-old woman.
Jeff arranged to meet with Davis on May 19, 2011, at a Denny’s Restaurant in Lake Elsinore, Calif., for purposes, she was led to believe, of finalizing the sale of the paperweights.
Davis went with her second husband, Paul Cilley.
Greeting Davis, who is 4-foot-11, were three armed federal agents, with three Riverside County Sheriff’s officials present but not visible, apparently as backup.
The court opinion described what happened next:
Davis placed the paperweights on the table. Jeff said he thought the heat shield was worth about $2,000. Shortly thereafter, Conley announced himself as a “special agent,” and another officer’s hand reached over Davis, grabbed her hand, and took the moon rock paperweight. Simultaneously, a different officer grabbed Cilley by the back of the neck and restrained him by holding his arm behind his back in a bent-over position. Then, an officer grabbed Davis by the arm, pulling her from the booth. At this time, Davis claims that she felt like she was beginning to lose control of her bladder. One of the officers took her purse … Four officers escorted them to the restaurant parking lot for questioning after patting them down to ensure that neither was armed.
She kept telling the officers she needed to use the bathroom. Undeterred, they continued walking her to the parking lot for interrogation, however, the court said. She then “urinated in her clothing.”
She was soaked in urine, visibly, the court said. Still, they continued interrogating her in the restaurant parking lot for between an hour and a half and two hours. They read her Miranda rights, ultimately allowed her to leave and referred the case to the U.S. attorney in Orlando.
There never was a crime, of course. She didn’t steal the artifacts. Ultimately, the investigation was closed when the prosecutor in Orlando declined to bring a case.
In 2013, Davis and Cilley sued the government and Conley, seeking damages for a violation of their constitutional rights. Conley claimed “qualified immunity” from the suit, legally available to federal agents unless they violate “clearly established” constitutional rights, in this case, Davis’s Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. A district court rejected the claim and he appealed.
A very small piece of moon rock taken from Davis during a sting operation. (U.S. District Court for the Central District of California via AP)
On Thursday, the appeals court ruled against him. He might be entitled to qualified immunity, had his actions been reasonable, wrote Chief Judge Sidney Thomas for the panel. But they weren’t.
“Conley knew that Davis was a slight, elderly woman … less than five feet tall,” Thomas wrote. He knew she lost control of her bladder and “was wearing visibly wet pants.” He knew she was unarmed and he knew she had “not concealed possession of the paperweights, but rather had reached out to NASA for help in selling” them. And he knew from the phone conversations that she wanted to sell the paperweights “in a legal manner.”
“Despite all of this knowledge, Conley did not inform Davis that her possession of the paperweights was illegal or ask her to surrender them to NASA. Instead, he organized a sting operation involving six armed officers to forcibly seize a lucite paperweight containing a moon rock the size of a rice grain from an elderly grandmother.
Conley “had no law enforcement interest in detaining Davis for two hours while she stood wearing urine-soaked pants in a restaurant’s parking lot during the lunch rush,” the court wrote.
The detention was “unreasonable … unreasonably prolonged and unnecessarily degrading.”
The future of Davis’s suit is uncertain. A federal court found against her in her separate suit against the government itself, according to the San Francisco Chronicle,
John Rubiner, an attorney for Conley, told 5KPIX in San Francisco that he was examining the ruling and had not decided what to do next. He said that a trial court considering her case against the government determined that Conley had asked Davis if she wished to use the bathroom to clean up and whether she wanted to speak with him at her home, but she declined.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the trial court dismissed the suit against the government on the grounds that Davis had given “free and voluntary” consent to the agent’s questioning in the parking lot and was not in custody while being questioned.
Davis’s lawyer, Peter Schlueter, told the Chronicle his client can sue for an abusive interrogation even if she was not in formal custody, however.
If there’s one thing I have learned over the years, it’s that there are always two sides to every story.
On April 9th, a very unfortunate incident played out on United Flight 3411, the video of which has since gone viral causing a mass social media uprising with an ‘off-with-their-heads’ mentality. I mean, across the board. Fire ’em all and let the gods sort it out later.
Look, I get it. When I first saw the video I was appalled too. To say that it was inflammatory would be putting it mildly. But it was also a situation that was escalated far beyond the boundaries of necessity.
If a federal law enforcement officer asks me to exit a plane, no matter how royally pissed off I am, I’m going to do it and then seek other means of legal reimbursement. True story.
Knowing what I know about airport security, I’m certainly not going to run back into a secured, federally restricted area at an airport flailing my arms and screaming like a banshee…because, you know, that just happens to be breaking a major federal Homeland Security law.
But that’s just me. Obviously.
The moment I made that particular ill-advised choice, I would become an immediate and imminent threat to the aircraft’s security. That’s kind of a big deal. I mean, come on, I once actually had to remove my infant son’s socks because they mimicked little baby sneakers. These guys mean business.
I didn’t like it. I thought it was just plain stupid, honestly. But instead of pitching a massive fit, refusing to comply, and bolting through the TSA checkpoint like an out-of-control toddler, I did the big girl thing–sucked it up, removed the offensive socks, and went on with my happy life, sans being tackled and dragged through the airport in handcuffs by a bunch of big men with guns.
Because if you choose to take advantage of the services the airport provides, you play by their rules.
I know you’re all out there screaming that the ‘rules’ are unfair, but I am a pilot wife. I remember 9/11. Do you? I want my husband, the father of my children, to come home. I want you to get home. That law exists to protect my husband. And your wife. And your grandmother. And your child. And you. I, for one, am glad for the law.
I’m not here to dispute the facts of 3411 with you. I am not interested in getting into an argument of opinion with anyone. We’re all entitled to our own. I’m not arguing that what happened wasn’t completely terrible–it was, on multiple levels. But I am suggesting that the general public take another look at the situation, ask a few more questions, gather a few more facts, and then create a less hostile and more intellectually wrought opinion about what happened.
Because the media is giving you just enough information to keep you enraged–enough to keep their ratings up.
Things to consider:
1) “You can’t just kick a paying customer off the plane!” Psssst! It’s in the fine print. They can, indeed, do just that. And it’s not an airline specific rule, it’s a commercial aviation rule. Every ticket you purchase comes with a plethora of fine print–you know, the stuff we just click ‘next’ on without actually reading what we are agreeing to. Yeah, that. Well, it’s in there, and you checked the ‘I agree’ box when you purchased your ticket. You can read about it and oh-so-much-more here. Kind of makes you want to read all those tiny words on your next phone update before you click ‘I agree’, huh? You should. United did not break any law, and he agreed to the policy and possibility of involuntary bump when he bought his ticket. And so do you.
2) “Kicking a paying customer off an airplane!? I’m taking my business to Southwest!” Ummmm, okay. But just be sure you understand that every major airline, Southwest included, has a similar policy for involuntary bumping in a ‘must ride’ scenario. Don’t believe me? It’s called the contract of carriage. If you’re really bored, you can read Southwest’s here. Or Delta’s here. Believe me, it’s in there. This could have been any airline. In fact, it happens all the time. Most people just don’t wrestle the feds in the aisle.
3: “So what’s this ‘must ride’ nonsense anyway? They shouldn’t bump a paying customer for a free employee ride!” I’m afraid you’re going to have to take this up with the federal government, not United. And it’s actually pretty important to you as an airline traveler anyway. They were not ‘freeloading home’. That’s called non-rev and they have to wait in line behind your checkbook and often don’t make it home to their families if flights are booked (believe me, I know). No, this was a must fly, a positive space situation. In layman terms, it means that a crew must be flown to an airport to man a flight in order to avoid cancellation of said flight due to crew unavailability. This is a federal DOT regulation, not an airline one. The airlines are required to do so to avoid disruption of air traffic. In other words, if there are no willing volunteers and they need seats to get a crew somewhere to avoid disruption of aviation flow, they can, will, must by federal regulation bump people for the better good of the 1000’s. Why? Because one cancelled flight has a serious domino affect in the delicate, complicated world of connections and aviation law.
4: “It’s the airline’s fault for not planning better!” You obviously have no clue about the complexities of aviation travel and should do some research. There are about a million and one things that can cause a crew shortage including but not limited to weather, maintenance, weather, connecting fight delays, weather, FAA timeout regs, and did I mention weather? I wish I could control Mother Nature because I would be one filthy rich person. But I can’t. And neither can United. So they inconvenience one, or four, to keep hundreds on track. Do the math. And of course, if we were on the other endof this thing, we’d be tirading and blowing up the internet because United didn’t bump a passenger to make sure our flight didn’t get cancelled and left hundreds stranded. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t. We’re a fickle crowd, we social media folks.
5: They shouldn’t have picked the minority Chinese doctor! It’s racist.” That’s just silly. Though federal regulation demands they involuntarily bump to prevent interruption of flights when necessary, each airline does have the leniency to determine how they choose the bumped passengers. They did not play spin the bottle or walk down the aisle looking for the Asian guy. Use your heads, people! There is a computerized algorithm that takes into account price of ticket, how long ago it was purchased, whether or not they can get the passenger to their destination in a timely manner, etc. It wasn’t an ‘Asian thing.’ Stop, people. Just stop.
6: “United should go under for assaulting that passenger! Fire the entire crew!” Read the facts. United neeeever touched the passenger. In fact, by all witness accounts, the United flight crew remained calm and pleasant throughout the entire event, never laying hands on the passenger. They followed protocol as required by law. Once law enforcement became involved (also as required by federal protocol), United stepped out of the decision-making process. They had nothing to do with the rest. The passenger was forcibly removed by federal aviation security (the disturbing clip that everyone is talking about) after running back into the secured area after being escorted out once. Once he did that, like it or not, they (law enforcement) were under full discretion of the law to apply necessary force to remove the threat. I’m not saying it’s pretty, but the only one who actually broke a law was the passenger. There’s a reason for these laws–it’s called 9/11. We can’t have it both ways. But by all means, let’s berate and punish an entire flight crew–in fact thousands of pilots, FA’s, gate attendents, ground crew, etc.–because it makes us all feel a little better.
7: “You piece of **it!” I get that the passengers were upset, angry, maybe even confused. I get that you are too. After all, media is tossing you out chunks of bloody meat like you’re a pack of starving wolves. But I’m seriously disgusted that the poor must ride crew that had to take those seats after the unfortunate mess that unraveled were verbally abused and threatened. Can you imagine the very uncomfortable position they were in? Then they were demeaned, belittled, threatened. Along with many others all over the internet and airports today. They were and are men and women doing their jobs to feed their families. Just. Like. You. They didn’t have a choice. They didn’t ask for this. They didn’t assault anyone. They are not a corporation; they are individuals who need a job. They are my friends and maybe even my husband. There’s a very fine line between what you despise and becoming what you despise. Many of the comments and actions I have seen perpetrated against United employees cross it. Don’t become what you hate.
Like I said, I know you’re mad at United, but there’s much more to the story than hits the media fan.
I truly hope that this gives you something to chew on and gives you a smidgen more insight into the complexities of aviation. I’m not making excuses. I think there were bad decisions made on both sides. However, I am saying there are always two sides to every story. Make sure you consider them both.
Tailwinds.
***A correction to the previous article. Mr. Dao was indeed Vietmanese and not Chinese. That quote was verbatim from a comment off the internet. I apology profusely for the confusion.
United Airlines is already dealing with intense public backlash after a doctor was beaten, knocked out, and dragged off one of its plane for refusing to give up a seat he'd paid paid for because United wanted his seat for one of its employees. Now, the LA Times is reporting that another man, who'd purchased a full-fare first class ticket and was sitting is his seat on a United Flight, was threatened with handcuffs if he did't give up his seat for a "higher-priority" traveler.
Snip:
[Geoff Fearns] boarded the aircraft at Lihue Airport on the island of Kauai, took his seat and enjoyed a complimentary glass of orange juice while awaiting takeoff.
Then, as Fearns tells it, a United employee rushed onto the aircraft and informed him that he had to get off the plane.
...
“That’s when they told me they needed the seat for somebody more important who came at the last minute,” Fearns said. “They said they have a priority list and this other person was higher on the list than me.”
“I understand you might bump people because a flight is full,” Fearns said. “But they didn’t say anything at the gate. I was already in the seat. And now they were telling me I had no choice. They said they’d put me in cuffs if they had to.”
WASHINGTON - The Senate confirmed Neil Gorsuch to become the newest associate justice on the Supreme Court Friday, elevating Donald Trump's nominee following a corrosive partisan confrontation that could have lasting impacts for the Senate and the court.
Vice President Mike Pence was presiding as the Senate voted 54-45 in favor of Gorsuch, a 49-year-old veteran of the 10th U.
A Trump opponent, Carlos Jesus, left, argued with a Trump supporter, Kenneth Lane, at a rally in Brooklyn in February.
Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
When I write about people struggling with addictions or homelessness, liberals exude sympathy while conservatives respond with snarling hostility to losers who make “bad choices.”
When I write about voters who supported President Trump, it’s the reverse: Now it’s liberals who respond with venom, hoping that Trump voters suffer for their bad choice.
“I absolutely despise these people,” one woman tweeted at me after I interviewed Trump voters. “Truly the worst of humanity. To hell with every one of them.”
Maybe we all need a little more empathy?
I wrote my last column from Oklahoma, highlighting voters who had supported Trump and now find that he wants to cut programs that had helped them. One woman had recovered from a rape with the help of a women’s center that stands to lose funding, another said that she would sit home and die without a job program facing cutbacks, and so on. Yet every one of them was still behind Trump — and that infuriated my readers.
Another: “ALL Trump voters are racist and deplorable. They’ll never vote Democratic. We should never pander to the Trumpites. We’re not a party for racists.”
The torrent of venom was, to me, as misplaced as the support for Trump from struggling Oklahomans. I’m afraid that Trump’s craziness is proving infectious, making Democrats crazy with rage that actually impedes a progressive agenda.
One problem with the Democratic anger is that it stereotypes a vast and contradictory group of 63 million people. Sure, there were racists and misogynists in their ranks, but that doesn’t mean that every Trump voter was a white supremacist. While it wasn’t apparent from reading the column, one of the Trump voters I quoted was black, and another was Latino. Of course, millions of Trump voters were members of minorities or had previously voted for Barack Obama.
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“Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks,” Senator Bernie Sanders, who has emerged as a surprising defender of Trump voters, said the other day. “I don’t agree.”
The blunt truth is that if we care about a progressive agenda, we simply can’t write off 46 percent of the electorate. If there is to be movement on mass incarceration, on electoral reform, on women’s health, on child care, on inequality, on access to good education, on climate change, then progressives need to win more congressional and legislative seats around the country. To win over Trump voters isn’t normalizing extremism, but a strategy to combat it.
Right now, 68 percent of partisan legislative chambers in the states are held by Republicans. About 7 percent of America’s land mass is in Democratic landslide counties, and 59 percent is in Republican landslide counties.
I asked the people I interviewed in Oklahoma why they were sticking with Trump. There are many reasons working-class conservatives vote against their economic interests — abortion and gun issues count heavily for some — but another is the mockery of Democrats who deride them as ignorant bumpkins. The vilification of these voters is a gift to Trump.
Nothing I’ve written since the election has engendered more anger from people who usually agree with me than my periodic assertions that Trump voters are human, too. But I grew up in Trump country, in rural Oregon, and many of my childhood friends supported Trump. They’re not the hateful caricatures that some liberals expect, any more than New York liberals are the effete paper cutouts that my old friends assume.
Hatred for Trump voters also leaves the Democratic Party more removed from working-class pain. For people in their 50s, mortality rates for poorly educated whites have soared since 2000 and are now higher than for blacks at all education levels. Professors Angus Deaton and Anne Case of Princeton University say the reason is “deaths of despair” arising from suicide, drugs and alcohol.
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Democrats didn’t do enough do address this suffering, so Trump won working-class voters — because he at least faked empathy for struggling workers. He sold these voters a clunker, and now he’s already beginning to betray them. His assault on Obamacare would devastate many working-class families by reducing availability of treatment for substance abuse. As I see it, Trump rode to the White House on a distress that his policies will magnify.
So by all means stand up to Trump, point out that he’s a charlatan and resist his initiatives. But remember that social progress means winning over voters in flyover country, and that it’s difficult to recruit voters whom you’re simultaneously castigating as despicable, bigoted imbeciles.
In this season of new life, one newborn has caught the attention of state and federal officials - a four-week-old mountain lion kitten.
Researchers from the National Park Service, together with biologists from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said the female kitten, given the new name P-54, is the daughter of mountain lion P-23.
President Trump before a speech on Tuesday at a building trades union gathering in Washington.
Credit
Al Drago/The New York Times
One of the hard truths of human affairs is that diversity and democracy do not go easily together. In the Middle East today as in Europe’s not-so-distant past, the transition from authoritarianism to popular sovereignty seems to run through ethnic or religious purges. Worldwide, many of the models of successful democratic government are effectively ethno-states, built on past cleansings or partitions or splendid isolation. And in the West in recent years, both mass immigration and cultural fragmentation have brought authoritarian temptations back to life.
This pattern runs deep in our species’s history. A new paper from the economists Oded Galor and Marc Klemp finds a strong correlation between diversity and autocracy in pre-colonial societies, with a legacy that extends to today’s institutions as well. The authors suggest that authoritarianism emerges from both bottom-up and top-down pressures: A diverse society seeks strong central institutions for the sake of cohesion and productivity, and internal division, stratification and mistrust increase “the scope for domination” by powerful elites.
Here in the United States we like to think of ourselves as exceptions to this rule — and, notwithstanding the fate of the Indian tribes and the legacy of chattel slavery, we have been more successful at combining republican self-government with racial and religious diversity.
But at the same time we aren’t exactly governing ourselves via New England town meeting anymore. As America has become larger, more diverse and lately more fragmented, power has grown ever more centralized in Washington, and the face of that central government, the presidency, has accrued more and more authority. The caudillo-from-Queens style of Donald Trump is unique to the man himself, but it’s also an outgrowth of trends that go back generations. We still have republican forms in place, but we also have a kind of elected emperor who presides over our enduring color lines, our not-always-melted immigrants, our increasing mistrustful sects and tribes and classes.
The European Union doesn’t have so singular a leader, but its ruling class is in a similar situation — they’re the custodians of a diverse imperium, trying to preside over Greeks and Germans, Scandinavians and Sicilians, Christian natives and Muslim immigrants, while wielding powers that are at least one remove from democratic accountability.
This means that in understanding the challenge facing Western leadership, it’s worth pondering the ways in which the world’s authoritarian regimes interact with ethnic and religious diversity — exploiting it, managing it, or both.
In one common pattern, authoritarian rule evolves as a way for a majority or plurality group to hold power against the claims of diverse minorities, and to impose a kind of uniformity on weaker ethnic or religious groups. The Erdogan regime in Turkey and the Saudi monarchy’s Sunni authoritarianism offer obvious examples; so does the Han-Chinese chauvinism of the Chinese Politburo, the Orthodox-Christian Russian nationalism of Putin, and many more.
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In another pattern, an authoritarian leader — sometimes from a minority group himself — casts himself as a protector of diversity, promising to shield minorities who would be threatened should a majoritarian populism take power. This is the pattern of the Assad family’s rule in Syria, which has drawn support from its own Alawite sect as well as Syrian Christians and others fearful of what Sunni rule might mean for them. The Egyptian military regime, likewise, promises to protect urbanites and Coptic Christians from the Islamist order that democracy might usher in.
These patterns have echoes in our own imperial — er, presidential politics. The coalition that Barack Obama built across two presidential elections united minority constituencies with the upper-class intelligentsia and promised to champion their diverse interests against the remains of the country’s white Christian heartland core. The Trump reaction was more Erdoganian or Putinesque, promising to protect a once-dominant majority, to restore its privileges and reverse its sense of cultural decline.
In Europe, meanwhile, the European Union often seems to be run for the benefit of Germans at the center and ethnic minorities at the periphery, favoring separatists and immigrants over old national majorities. The present populist surge is, in its turn, an attempt to establish a different dynamic between the Continent’s diverse factions, in which Germany has less power, more immigrants are turned away, and the old nations reassert themselves as centers of influence once more.
Neither continent is poised for a real slide into autocracy — I think! But on both, paradoxically, the cause of liberal order might be better served by leaders who took a slightly more imperial perspective — not in the sense of imposing policy at sword point, but in the sense of realizing that their societies are so diverse as to require a more disinterested kind of vision from their rulers.
Such a disinterested ruler — a good emperor, let’s call him — would see a crucial part of his role as reassurance, recognizing that in a diverse, fragmented and distrustful landscape, any governing coalition is going to look dangerous to those who aren’t included in it. If he comes from a historically dominant group and speaks on their behalf, he needs to go out of his way to address the anxieties of minorities and newcomers. If he’s building a coalition of minority groups, he needs to reassure the former majority that the country of the future still has a place for them. Whatever the basis of his power, he needs to be constantly attuned to the ways that diversity, difference and distrust can make political conflict seem far more existential than it should.
Our last two chief executives recognized that they needed to make efforts along these lines, but with exceptions — George W. Bush after Sept. 11, Obama in his 2008 campaign — they were not particularly successful. In Obama’s case, his White House failed to grasp the feeling of abandonment and crisis in the white heartland, and the extent to which that feeling was creating a new identity-based voting bloc. He failed to grasp, too, how threatening the regulatory state’s enforcement of liberal sexual norms was to religious conservatives, how much it made them feel like strangers in their own country.
From that alienation and fear came Trump, who is barely even trying to reach out and reassure, to make his nationalism seem larger than just white identity politics, to make the groups who feel afraid of his administration sense that he has their anxieties in mind. There might be a form of nationalism that helps bind a diverse society together, but Trump’s seems more likely to bind a “real American” ex-majority in opposition to every other race and faith and group.
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His eventual successor, liberal or conservative, should not seek to learn from Assad or Erdogan or Putin. But he (or she) might learn something from an earlier age’s custodians of diverse, fragmented societies — from monarchies like that of the Austrian Hapsburgs, in particular, that worked to contain and balance religious and ethnic divisions, to prevent disintegration and forestall totalitarianism, and might have succeeded longer absent the folly of 1914.
If we’re going to have an imperial presidency, we should want a president who thinks less like a party leader and more like a good emperor — who doesn’t just divide and conquer, but who tries to make all his empire’s many peoples feel like they’re safe and recognized and home.
"But these efforts, while damaging to the environment in some cases, don’t seem to have led to long-term, universal reductions in environmental quality"
This sounds like another way of saying that, even with the EPA doing as much as it can under a sympathetic administration, political (and technological?) restrains prevent it from doing very much that has significant effect on the problem.
But if Trump really does have an ax to grind with the EPA, he’s not the first world leader to sit down at that whetstone. Politicians in the United States and Russia have taken steps, at various points, to curb the power of their countries’ centralized environmental regulatory agencies, roll back national environmental protections or cut the funding necessary for regulatory enforcement. But these efforts, while damaging to the environment in some cases, don’t seem to have led to long-term, universal reductions in environmental quality. Instead, experts say, the results have mainly come in the form of slower progress on environmental protections and the exacerbation of regional differences as local governments respond to changes in federal policy.
First off, a caveat: This is a difficult thing to study. Seemingly straightforward reviews of historical facts have come up with contradictory results. This is partly because although the policy changes are national, the results are often highly variable by region. At the same time, there is more than one way for a government to go war against its own environmental protection system — and the specific tactics used seem to affect the outcome. Finally, attempts at analysis are further complicated by both the difficulty of teasing apart causation and correlation and the general shortage of examples to study.
“Actual cases of deregulation are rare,” wrote Arthur Mol, an environmental scientist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands. He said in an email that, while President Ronald Reagan’s administration was marked by a rhetoric of deregulation, it didn’t really eliminate many active regulations. To a certain extent, that seems to parallel what’s happening now under Trump. While headlines talk about this new executive order “rolling back” President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the reality is that the Obama plan hadn’t yet gone into effect anyway. Similarly, Mol wrote that during the Reagan years, “What we have seen is a stagnation in environmental regulation during an era when many environmental laws and regulation were still being constructed. So it really felt as a set back on the environment, but it was rather a stalemate position.”
That’s not to say that the Reagan administration, especially in the first couple years of his first term, didn’t create a lot of upheaval for the EPA. In his first months in office, Reagan cut the EPA budget and the budget for renewable energy development. He also put the agency under the administration of Anne Gorsuch (later Burford), who believed that the EPA was too big and that it put too many limitations on business. She was administrator for just 22 months from 1981 to 1983, but during that time, the agency’s employment numbers were cut by 22 percent, and its research and development budget fell by 45 percent. Federal-level enforcement of environmental regulation plummeted, too — by 1982, EPA enforcement had fallen 73 percent from 1977 levels. At the beginning of 1982, the states were responsible for about 64 percent of the enforcement of air-quality standards related to factory emissions. By the end of the year, the share of state responsibility had risen to 90 percent.
But there’s not much evidence that Reagan and Gorsuch actually harmed the environment. The pattern of defunding federal environmental protection and decentralizing enforcement shifted at least somewhat after Gorsuch was found in contempt of Congress in December 1982 and was eventually replaced by the EPA’s founding administrator, William Ruckelshaus, who reversed some of her policies and, in general, took a different approach to the agency, said William Andreen, a law professor at the University of Alabama who studies how the creation of the EPA changed environmental outcomes in the United States. Andreen agreed with the assessment that regulations weren’t eliminated during the Gorsuch years. And, given the specific changes made and the fact that most people want clean air and water, he said we shouldn’t be terribly surprised that it’s tough to find a clear signal of major, widespread environmental degradation resulting from her tenure.
This also helps explain why teasing apart correlation and causation on this kind of question is so difficult, said David Millimet, professor of economics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. What you’re really asking is this: How would the world be different today if the only variable you changed was whether or not Anne Gorsuch led the EPA for a couple years in the early ’80s? “Can we ever really figure that out?” he said. “No, not really.”
But Millimet and others have tried, using statistical analysis to account for a variety of variables that Reagan and Gorsuch had no control over. The researchers’ methods vary, which is why their results do, too. In 2003, Millimet published a study on the effects of Reagan administration policies that shifted the job of enforcing environmental regulations to the states. He found that, by the mid-1980s, states were pushing each other toward improved environmental outcomes in a sort of intergovernmental game of one-upmanship. An earlier study, from 2000, didn’t come up with that result but did conclude that this decentralization of enforcement didn’t make environmental outcomes worse than they otherwise would have been. On the other hand, just because Reagan and Gorsuch don’t seem to have stopped the long-term movement toward environmental protection doesn’t mean that decentralization will always have no effect. For instance, a 2006 study of state-level surface-mining regulations found that states can, at least sometimes, push each other into a race to the bottom on environmental protection and that this effect seems to hinge on what each state sees its frenemy states — similar states that it competes with economically — doing.
That finding is particularly interesting in light of what happened when Russia turned its version of the EPA into a subdivision of a different agency that is more focused on industrial development of natural resources. The environmental regulator lost most of its power and independence, said D.J. Peterson, an analyst who has published academic research on the topic and advises corporations on international politics and economics. That reorganization took place in 2000, and outside observers are still trying to sort out the impacts. But one effect researchers have noted is that the mantle of environmental protection might have shifted to regional governments, which didn’t diminish its quality significantly — at least not in regions that were relatively well-off and where the economy was not particularly dependent on industries that might want regulatory concessions.
The research on Russia squares with what we know from U.S. polling, which shows that wealthier states tend to have higher levels of support for strong environmental regulation — which the Trump administration alluded to in a press briefing on the new executive order, when a senior official said a strong economy was the best way to protect the environment — and that states with strong ties to the oil and gas industry tend to have lower levels of support. It’s easy to see, then, how California and West Virginia could end up with different environmental futures in a hypothetical world where the EPA didn’t exist.
That possibility makes a lot of sense to Millimet. “We refer to this as heterogeneity,” he said. “The big picture in all of economics is this general realization that not everybody responds to policy change in the same way.” In fact, he said, this is kind of the flip side of one of the philosophical arguments in favor of decentralization — that it allows policy to respond to local preferences. If decentralization can do that, it can also probably produce a situation where one state’s environment remains relatively well-protected while another’s slowly becomes more polluted.
Overall, we probably shouldn’t expect the new executive order to devastate the environment or stop environmental protection in its tracks. The analysis of an economic consulting firm suggests that the order will just further delay the already-slow process of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in this country. Under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the Rhodium Group expected U.S. emissions to be 21 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, The Washington Post noted. Without the plan, the company would expect U.S.emissions to be 14 percent below 2005 levels instead. It’s impossible to know exactly how much the Trump administration — and other legislators empowered by the White House’s deregulatory attitude — will affect the country’s environmental health. History certainly suggests that it’s a lot easier to talk about deregulation than it is to do it. That said, failing to centralize greenhouse-gas-reduction efforts at the federal level could lead to a two-tiered system where richer states end up with lower-emissions energy sources — and that difference can mean big disparities in public health, given that burning coal is associated with a whole range of health problems, not just climate change. In the end, an executive order that is supposed to be good news for coal country could be bad for it instead.
President Donald Trump, ignoring former Veep Joe Biden’s advice to “grow up” and “stop tweeting,” this morning tweeted, of the man he fired three weeks into his gig as national security adviser:
Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2017
The tweet came the day after the White House decided not to comment on the Flynn…
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fact checkers thrived during last year's campaign season, with many candidates spewing lies at consistently high rates. Under the reality-based President Hillary Clinton, however, fact checkers have found themselves with nothing to do. Facing pay cuts and mass layoffs, they recently decided to unionize.
The American Fact Checkers Association (AFCA) held its first press conference on Thursday afternoon. Representing fact checkers from MSNBC, CNN, Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fox News -- along with the entire staff of Politifact -- the union demands that media organizations allow journalists to continue reporting on failed presidential candidate Donald Trump.
"So what if Trump's not president?" questioned Tom Potter, a fact checker at Politico who worries about imminent termination. "He still tweets false information all the time! Someone needs to report on his Twitter feed!"
Media outlets united to publish a collective response. In a statement released halfway through the union's press conference, they argue that fact-checking is a dying profession, but that they will allow a small number of promising fact checkers to transition to other positions within the industry.
"We cannot keep reporting on a dishonest, failed presidential candidate just to keep our fact checkers employed," explained Martin Baron, Editor of The Washington Post. "That would do a disservice to our readers, who are quite frankly sick of reading about Donald Trump."
Meanwhile, editors of right wing propaganda sources like Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, and The Washington Free Beacon announced they would be happy to hire fact checkers for the current administration. Frustrated at their candidate's landslide loss, their reporters continue to deny climate change, misinterpret the Second Amendment, and lie about the effects of vaccines.
ATLANTA — As Republicans in Washington grapple with altering the Affordable Care Act, they have proceeded in a direction that will do little to curb the cost of health care in America.
Instead, they are pushing a bill that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, might save the government money, but will end coverage for 24 million people (though several million of those would be willingly giving up coverage the law now requires them to have). If it passes, Republicans will not only own the nation’s health care problems for years, but they will also have violated more than six years of promises.
Since 2010, Republicans have pledged to repeal — not fix, not tinker with, but abolish — Obamacare. In 2016, that was a centerpiece of Donald Trump’s campaign. Republicans ran advertisements noting they had voted 70 or more times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and they would do it as soon as they had control of Congress and the White House.
Voters gave them just that. And now Republicans, who had used the word “repeal” like a meditation chant, act like the proverbial dog that caught the car. The plan they all liked in 2015 — one that would have ended the law’s mandates, subsidies and Medicaid expansion — would not pass today. Yes, Republicans, you really did once author a plan to credibly repeal Obamacare, unlike what you are considering now.
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Paul Ryan used visual aids at his press conference last week explaining the Republican healthcare proposal.
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Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
Of course, Republicans are acting this way in large part because of President Trump’s voters. Despite all the hard talk about repealing Obamacare, Mr. Trump’s voters supported a man who promised a government-run health care plan that would provide universal coverage. In other words, he promised more than Obamacare. For that matter, Mr. Trump promised more government involvement in health care than Hillary Clinton did. It is not hard to see why Republicans think they can get away with breaking their promises. Their own party’s presidential nominee promised more than what President Obama offered and claimed he could pay for it all without raising taxes.
Mr. Trump’s voters want Obamacare, but they want Mr. Trump’s gold-plated branding on it. They claim to hate Obamacare, but data show a good number of Mr. Trump’s voters are actually using the Affordable Care Act. Just don’t tell them that the Affordable Care Act is Obamacare. They like the former and hate the latter.
The 2016 election was, though it pains me to say, a defeat for conservatism. Both parties were willing to gravitate toward candidates who promised a strong federal government that could deliver a panacea without worrying about costs. Mr. Trump promised to be a strong man stamping out waste, fraud and abuse while putting Americans first. His voters are smart enough to understand that his programs will cost money. They just do not seem any more concerned than Republican leaders in Washington about budget costs. They all make a great show of caring in public, but it is just show.
So Democrats and Republicans are fighting over who gets to expand government for which voters and by how much. The Republicans, who claim to be the party of fiscal discipline, want to spend money, but at a slower pace than the Democrats and without raising taxes. It did not have to be this way. The Republicans did not have to embrace the Democrats’ presuppositions in creating Obamacare.
Despite the name “Affordable Care Act,” the Democrats were far more focused on expanding coverage and ensuring every American could get insurance than they were on making coverage affordable. When Republicans decided to amend Obamacare, they too focused on the numbers covered.
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If Republicans stopped worrying about how many people had access to a government-managed health care program and started focusing on reducing costs, they could potentially increase the number of people covered. Doing so would necessitate scaling back the government’s involvement in health care, reducing insurance mandates, unleashing free-market competition among insurance providers and allowing consumer choice in selecting plans.
Increasing competition and choice would lower prices for all kinds of insurance. Lower prices would free up corporate dollars for other things like innovation and jobs. Lower prices would also make it far more affordable for Americans to buy their own insurance than wait for government to subsidize it.
For conservatives like me, however, it appears the train has left the station. Democrats and many Republicans are invested in the idea of involving government in our basic health care choices. The Republicans are even keeping President Obama’s individual mandate, though in repackaged form.
Americans are increasingly cynical about politics. Watching Republicans campaign for years on repealing Obamacare only to see the effort collapse will just increase that cynicism. But the reverse is true, too. Watching many Americans demand repeal, while voting for a man who promised a government-run, universal coverage solution, only increases politicians’ cynicism about the American voter. The voters know the politicians will break their promises once elected. The politicians know the voters will let them get away with it as long as the spoils of victory are divvied up.
Every parent who has taught a child to ride a bicycle knows the importance of training wheels for keeping the bicycle upright until the child masters balancing. “Training wheels” are also vitally important when launching a new health insurance market, as are longer-term stabilizers.
Congress established the Medicare Part D program in 2003, creating for the first time a freestanding outpatient prescription drug insurance product, something the private sector had never offered before. To ensure this product’s viability, Congress enacted stabilizing measures—a generous reinsurance program to cover high-cost cases, a risk corridor program to share risks with insurers, a risk adjustment program to compensate insurers for the riskiness of the population they covered, and a fallback program for the federal government to assume the risk of providing coverage for service areas where no private carriers stepped forward.
The Part D program is generally regarded as a success, with dynamic insurer participation and competition, reasonable premiums, and strong enrollment. Nevertheless, the training wheels—reinsurance, risk corridors, risk adjustment, and the possibility of fallback coverage—remain in place 11 years after the program launched, with the reinsurance program in particular supporting its continued viability.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) called forth a new private insurance product just as Part D did. The ACA asked insurers to offer an individual insurance product to all comers, forgoing health status underwriting and covering a set of essential health benefits with defined actuarial value limits and without preexisting condition exclusions. Recognizing the risk that insurers took in creating such a product, legislators offered a number of stabilizers.
For the first three years of the new program, insurers would be offered reinsurance for high-cost cases. A temporary risk corridor program committed the federal government to share large losses (and large profits) with insurers for the first three years. A permanent risk adjustment program would spread the risk of covering high-cost populations among insurers, while an individual responsibility penalty would drive—and a premium tax credit program would lure—healthy consumers into the market, helping to ensure long-term stability. Although a “public option” was vigorously debated during the lead-up to the enactment of the ACA, no federal fallback was created as a backstop.
The ACA’s stabilizers have not proven entirely satisfactory. The risk corridor program was essentially defunded when Congress limited the amount to be paid out to the amount collected from insurers, the reinsurance program phased out too quickly, and the individual responsibility penalty has arguably proven insufficient. While insurer participation was relatively strong and premium increases modest for the first three years of the marketplaces, a number of insurers failed or left the marketplaces for 2017, while other insurers raised their premiums sharply.
The American Health Care Act (AHCA), introduced into the House on March 6, depends on, and assumes the existence of, a vigorous individual market for health care. And yet it removes the prime stabilizer of the ACA, the individual mandate. It offers instead a continuous coverage requirement that imposes a 30 percent premium surcharge for 12 months on individuals who have a gap in coverage of 63 or more days during the previous year. This should encourage healthy people to maintain continuous coverage, but the 30 percent penalty is unlikely to discourage individuals who really need high-cost care and will not offset the cost of that care. It may primarily prove a barrier to participation by low-income individuals who occasionally must decide between insurance premiums and car repairs or rental payments. Moreover, the individual mandate penalty is repealed retroactively to 2016, but the continuous coverage requirement goes into effect in 2019, leaving a gap in market stabilizers at a critical time.
AHCA’s primary market stabilization initiative offers the states $100 billion over nine years to support high-risk pools, reinsurance programs, or other market stabilization efforts, beginning in 2018. States that do not propose their own projects will receive the funds for individual market reinsurance. But states can also use the funds to provide cost-sharing assistance for low-income enrollees or to pay for provision of care, and states are only eligible if they provide matching funds. The funds are likely far too little to stabilize individual insurance markets, even if states spend the money wisely.
Republican proposals to increase the age-rating ratio from 1-to-3 to 1-to-5—allowing insurers to charge older people as much as five times what they charge younger people—should make the market more attractive for younger people, as will age-adjusted tax credits that are much more generous for younger people. But the tax credit structure will discourage enrollment by some healthy as well as unhealthy older people. Since tax credits are not geographically adjusted, they will discourage enrollment in high-cost areas, including many areas with few insurers.
In the coming days insurers will decide whether individual insurance markets appear sufficiently balanced to risk returning for 2018. The ACA’s training wheels are largely gone, and wobbles are apparent. It is not obvious that Congress is offering the stability insurers will demand to return or to stay in the market for the long term.
Kelly, a widely respected political science professor at Pusan National University in South Korea, was providing his expert opinion on camera, from what appeared to be his home office, when his young children came barreling into the room.
“I would argue that this is a triumph of democracy,” Kelly said via Skype. “Scandals happen all the time. The question is how do democracies respond to those scandals?”
Cue a dancing toddler in pigtails and a bright yellow sweater.
“And what will it mean for the wider region — I think one of your children has just walked in,” BBC presenter James Menendez said, before resuming the exchange and asking: “Do you think relations with the North may change?”
Then, an infant in a walker opened the door and, with a small thrust, rolled into the room — followed by a seemingly frantic woman who tried to collect them.
Kelly, keeping his eyes straight ahead and holding back the toddler with one hand, launched into his response: “I would be surprised if they do. The — pardon me. My apologies. Sorry.”
The woman scooped up the children and hustled them out of the room.
Kelly then closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath.
“South Korea's policy choices on North Korea have been severely limited in the last six months to a year,” he continued, as his children cried out from another room.
Kelly is a well-known analyst on Korean matters who has provided expert opinion for a number of media outlets, including The Washington Post.
He has also written for Foreign Affairs and the Economist, among other publications.
Kelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But after the interview, he responded on Twitter to a producer asking to use the video clip, asking: “Is this kinda thing that goes ‘viral’ and gets weird?”
“Too late I suspect,” replied Henry Williams, with the Wall Street Journal.
Kelly has been criticized by some for his reaction to the interruption.
But others called it “magical TV,” “one of the funniest things I've seen” and “TV gold.”
Asked about the episode, a BBC spokesman told The Post: “We're really grateful to professor Kelly for his professionalism. This just goes to show that live broadcasting isn't always child's play.”
Graphic doesn't show up in TOR share, but worth the click-through to see it.
Enforcement of the individual mandate requiring coverage
30 percent surcharge on premiums that insurers would be able to impose on consumers who purchase a new plan after letting their previous coverage lapse — a strategy to encourage people to remain insured
Employer mandate on larger companies to offer affordable coverage
Income-based premium subsidies to lower- and moderate-income consumers would end as of 2020.
Age- and income-based refundable tax credits
The new legislation would break people into five age groups, each receiving a different amount in tax credits to purchase health insurance:
Age Tax credit
20 – 29: $2,000
30 – 39: $2,500
40 – 49: $3,000
50 – 59: $3,500
60 and older: $4,000
These credits begin to phase out for individuals making more than $75,000 and joint filers making over $150,000. Other restrictions include:
For each $1,000 in additional income above the limits, a person would be entitled to $100 less in credit.
Credits would be limited to a maximum $14,000 per family.
Credits could be used for any health plan allowed in a state, including ones providing only catastrophic coverage.
Credits could not be used to buy health plans that cover abortion.
Insurers can charge older customers up to three times what they charge younger customers.
Insurers would be able to charge older customers up to five times what they charge younger customers.
Individuals can contribute up to $3,400 and families up to $6,750 to pre-tax health savings accounts.
Starting in 2018, individuals could contribute up to $6,550 and families could contribute up to $13,100 to pre-tax health savings accounts.
Cost-sharing subsidies, which were provided to insurers to help their ACA customers cover deductibles and co-payments (ending in 2020)
States would receive $100 billion over 10 years through a new Patient and State Stability Fund for safety-net needs and possible “high-risk pools” for consumers with expensive medical conditions.
Medicaid as an entitlement program with open-ended, matching federal funds for anyone who qualifies
Medicaid would be funded by giving states a per-capita amount based on how much each state was spending for the fiscal year that ended in September.
Under Obamacare, 31 states broadened their Medicaid programs to cover people making up to 138 percent of poverty-level income.
Under the GOP plans, the states would continue getting enhanced federal funding until 2020. After that, the government would keep paying 90 percent for beneficiaries already on the rolls as long as they remain eligible.
After 2020, new beneficiaries would be funded at a lower level.
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Insurers would still be banned from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions.
Dependents would still be able to stay on parents’ insurance plans until age 26.
Caps on annual or lifetime coverage would still be banned.
Insurers would still have to cover certain categories of specified benefits first covered by the ACA.
Planned Parenthood is eligible for Medicaid reimbursements or federal family-planning grants (but federal money cannot fund abortions)
Planned Parenthood would face a one-year funding freeze
More stories
Many analysts doubt whether the plans Republicans put forward would have provided coverage that was adequate or available to enough people.
More Americans are insured than ever before. But the political consequences for both sides may not have been worth it.
Middlebury College students turn their backs to author Charles Murray during his lecture last week in Middlebury, Vt. (Lisa Rathke/Associated Press)
Political scientist Charles Murray’s account of his frightening experience at Middlebury College last week reminds me of stories told by the Little Rock Nine about the shouting, shoving mob they faced during their effort to desegregate Little Rock Central High in 1957. This comparison will aggravate many who, like me, hold up the Little Rock Nine as moral heroes.
Murray, best known as co-author of the “The Bell Curve,” has written extensively about racial disparities in the mean (or average) of IQ distributions within groups, and I am a critic of his work. Yet last week he won my admiration for how he, along with his hosts, displayed courage in the face of violent campus protests.
As the day of his lecture drew near, word of anticipated protests built. The college administration commendably developed a plan to make sure the event would go forward, even in the face of protests. It prepared a video studio from which, if necessary, Murray could live-stream his remarks to the audience that wished to hear them. During the event, Murray and his faculty host, Professor Allison Stanger, accompanied by the college’s vice president for communications, Bill Burger, were obliged to retreat to that studio.
The foursome of Murray, Stanger, Burger and Middlebury President Laurie L. Patton, alongside two security guards, are also to be commended for their fortitude. They came out to meet a full house in a 400-seat auditorium, where according to Murray half of the audience appeared to be protesters. After the event, Murray, Stanger and Burger, along with the guards, had to make their way on foot, and then by car, through groups that were physically attacking them in order to keep a date for dinner with students.
Democracies and academies have, historically, risen together. Ancient Athens, where formal democracy first flowered, was also where, after the injustice of the execution of Socrates, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum nonetheless bloomed. When the democracy succumbed to the geopolitical dominance of the Macedonian Alexander the Great, the cities’ new leaders shrank the size of the voting citizenry and once again sought the expulsion of philosophers.
In the young American republic, many in the founding generation recognized the importance of education to a democratic citizenry. The remarkable network of liberal arts colleges such as Middlebury, now scattered throughout the country and most densely in the Northeast, reflects that generation’s expectation that sacred groves of higher learning can improve and anchor a healthy democratic culture. Abraham Lincoln renewed that national commitment when he signed the 1862 Morrill Act, which gave us the land-grant public universities throughout the country.
But what does it take to preserve those sacred groves? How can colleges and universities meet their responsibility to nourish the intellectual life of a democracy generally? In a democracy, where freedom of association and speech are core rights and should be rigorously defended, the ethics of protesting should be defined by a commitment to embody in the protest itself the very norms that sustain democracies.
Democracies are necessarily contentious but can survive only if they can channel contestation into peaceful forms of behavior. Hence the importance of the first rule of protest — that it be nonviolent.
Second, protest on a college campus should have the goal of making a college the best it can be. The supreme academic aspiration is to defeat bad arguments with better ones. Rather than shouting down Murray, the protesters should have read his work and figured out how to critique it. There’s lots of room for that. I have many disagreements with how scholarship that focuses on the question of IQ, as Murray’s often does, organizes even its core concepts — for instance, its overemphasis on the mean within a distribution, a weakness that Plato pointed out about a related set of views millennia ago when he challenged ancient Greek assumptions that male intelligence was superior to female intelligence. Imagine how powerful a protest would be when one after another protester calmly and civilly puts a question to the speaker that reveals the holes in his argument.
Finally, to protect the sacred groves of academe, and the wellsprings of contentious but peaceful and intellectually rigorous debate in a democracy, those of us committed to the academy should step up to defend our campuses as places where two things are both true: Free speech is protected, and members of a campus community recognize their responsibility to prove themselves trustworthy to one another.
Proving ourselves trustworthy means that it is wrong to fling insults and to swear at one another, even in cases where those things don’t add up to a legally prohibited threat or harassment. It also means that it is better to pursue argument with the other side than disdainful mockery of its views and to argue on the merits rather than make ad hominem attacks. This goes for both left and right.
Our civic culture is badly debilitated. Colleges and universities need to replenish their capacity to defend the intellectual life of democracies. The Little Rock Nine were heroes for embodying in their own behavior the best of democratic aspirations as they tried, simply, to go to school. At Middlebury last week, Murray and his hosts were also trying, simply, to keep school open. In this moment, they, too, were heroes.
Turbo-geeks of London! BAHFest London tickets are about 40% sold. We usually sell 70% of tickets in the last week, so this one will definitely sell out. Book now, or dwell in sorrow.
On the one hand, I enjoyed this book. On the other, for such an important and fascinating character as Fermi, I couldn’t help but think this book was a bit of small beer. I would’ve happily enjoyed a book three times its length. Relatedly, I would’ve liked fewer asides about the general aspects of the Manhattan Project.
This was a solid pop science book on how diseases spread, and what we’re doing (or not doing!) to stop them. The book is structured according to human behaviors vis-a-vis diseases, and also uses cholera as a particular case of a disease with which to weave together the general complexity of epidemiology. I found the overall book a bit disjointed, though many individual parts were quite enjoyable. That said, overall I would’ve liked a bit more depth, especially in the sections concerned with policy.
These DeLisle books are just delightful. They’re light and fun, but you really get a feel for his experiences going to work in other countries. This one was less funny than the North Korea one, but as a comic I think it was better. He does such a good job of capturing the feeling of loneliness and isolation he experienced. In part this is accomplished by developing a set of silent images for different people and places in the city. These images recur over the course of a book that is sometimes funny and sometimes sad, but either way serves very well to convey his experience as a guy who doesn’t speak Chinese going to work in a city with few English speakers. Highly recommended.
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