HIT & RUN BLOG

woodleywonderworks/flickrThe coverage of Obamacare in mainstream media has been atrocious.

David Harsanyi writes:

Since its passage, and in a way that is unlike any policy issue in modern American history, the press have rallied to the defense of Obamacare. From day one, there has been almost no light between the average liberal activist and average health care reporter.

Or the average "fact-checker," for that matter. "Fact-checking" has evolved from an occasionally useful medium to an exercise in revisionism and diversion. Take the Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler's recent article titled "President Trump's Mangled 'Facts' About Obamacare." Those who read the headline might assume it's just Trump doing what Trump does most of the time. Yet it turns out that all these supposedly "mangled" contentions about Obamacare are, at the very least, debatable assertions.

Kessler, for example, doesn't approve of Trump stating: "Americans were told that premiums would go down by $2,500 per year. And instead, their premiums went up to levels that nobody thought even possible." Other than the hyperbole ("nobody thought even possible") tacked on, this statement is substantively true.

Oran Viriyincy/Wikimedia CommonsWhen Sound Transit, the Seattle-area transportation agency, proposed a parking garage for its commuter rail station in Puyallup, it explicitly declared that the project would support the suburb's "community character" and minimize "adverse impacts to the natural and built environment." But now it wants to tear down the town's longstanding Fraternal Order of Eagles lodge, and it's petitioning the Pierce County Superior Court for the eminent domain power to seize the property.

Members and patrons of the club—a fixture in the community—were shocked at the news.

"This is very infuriating. The Eagles has been there way before Sound Transit was ever thought of," declared one commenter on the lodge's Facebook page.

"There are other places a park and ride can go. It not only displaces us but also disrupts the school and the buses," said another.

When Sound Transit started designing plans for its $60 million Puyallup Station Access Improvement Project, it produced six possible plans for expanding its parking capacity. Four of those alternatives did not involve taking any land from the lodge. One even offered the possibility of constructing an entire parking facility, holding the same number of cars, closer to the Puyallup Station, on land Sound Transit already owned, and for the same amount of money.

Nevertheless, Sound Transit declared the Eagles Lodge site its "preferred alternative."

Mariya Frost, a transportation policy analyst at the Washington Policy Center, says this is standard practice for Sound Transit.

"Sound transit often offers what looks like a lot of options, what looks like a lot of choices," Frost tells Reason. "Make no mistake—the 'preferred alternative' is the plan that they want and the plan that they will fight to get despite public input."

Sound Transit's light rail extension in Federal Way, for example, will displace 196 residents and 42 businesses, as well as cutting through what is currently an elementary school playground—all in a community where 91 percent of households have a car. The alternatives would have left the school untouched and displaced fewer residents.

Frost calls the Puyallup project a "pretty solid example of the abuse of eminent domain to the detriment of an entire community of people."

The lodge and the larger community seem to agree.

"We don't want it," Eagles secretary Jerry Miller told the Tacoma News Tribune last year, noting that the group had no mortgage at its present location and was not eager to sell. Another Eagle, Ellen Blakely, informed the paper that moving would impact the chapter's charity work: "If we have to move, we will have to put all our money into building a new home and won't be able to donate."

And the rest of the town? In 2016, when the $54 billion light rail extension was on the ballot, Puyallup soundly rejected it, with some precincts opposing it by margins of 20 percentage points or more. "Just because light rail plows through a certain city or there's a transit station in certain city, it doesn't mean a community receives value from that particular service," says Frost.

After three decades of trying, the environmental left is nowhere close to solving global warming. For reasonable people that would be time enough toTony Webster via Foter.com fundamentally rethink their strategy.

But not for this movement, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.

It keeps demanding ever more outrageous sacrifices on the part of its fellow humans, the latest being that they should have fewer children. But if the movement hasn't succeeded in forcing people to give up their cars and ACs, how in the name of Gaia will it ever get them to give up kids? It's whole approach is riddled with the collective action problem.

There are ways to overcome it and avert planetary catastrophe. But that'll require the greens to give up the blame game and think of global warming more like a meteor strike: An event humanity didn't cause but from which it has to be saved.

Fillmore Photography/flickrCurrently, the pharmaceutical market is anything but free. Could that change?

Marc Joffe writes:

In the rollout of their "Better Deal" program this week, Democrats identified high prescription drug prices as a major challenge facing America and proposed new regulations to rein them in.

Their diagnosis is spot on, but their prescription is backwards. The way to roll back pharmaceutical prices is to deregulate and rely on market forces. But for that to happen, both Democrats and Republicans will have to resist the pharmaceutical lobby, which benefits from the status quo and is very generous with its donations.

In 2015, spending on prescription drugs totaled $325 billion, or roughly $1,000 for every person in the U.S. according to federal data. Pharmaceutical spending rose by 9 percent from 2014 to 2015, far outstripping the growth of the GDP.

Drugs in the U.S. often cost more than twice as much as they do in other developed countries. A 28-day supply of Humira costs a whopping $2669 on average here, according to the International Federation of Health Plans. The same supply costs $822 in Switzerland, $1253 in Spain, and $1362 in the United Kingdom.

• CSPAN/TwitterThe bid to pass a "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act failed late last night, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins, John McCain, and Lisa Murkowski joining Democrats in voting no.
• "I'm not Steve Bannon, I'm not trying to suck my own cock. I'm not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I'm here to serve the country," Anthony Scaramucci, White House communications director, told reporter Ryan Lizza.
• The U.S. is pulling its diplomats from the Venezuelan capital amid increasing protests and violence.
• Commercial real estate prices in America are far over their 2007 housing-bubble peak.
• Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders were the only two U.S. senators to vote against a bill imposing increasing sanctions on Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
• Did God really smite all of the ancient Canaanites? Science says maybe not.

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Like Wonder Woman, Atomic Blonde feels like a solid beginning. The movie's spectacular violence begins to wear a bit toward the end, and its lead character—British Cold War spy Lorraine Broughton, played by Charlize Theron—is a little too enigmatic even for a straight pulp exercise such as this. (Broughton's permafrost reserve makes James Bond—another MI6 operative—seem chatty by comparison.) But you can imagine a number of interesting ways in which this spy-vs.-spy world might open up, and you can imagine the fun it could be to follow along in future installments.

The picture's strong echoes of the John Wick films are not coincidental. Director David Leitch, a veteran stunt specialist on various Bourne and Matrix movies, co-directed the first Wick film (with his production partner and fellow stunt master Chad Stahelski), and he is a man whose mission in life may be to stamp out dull moments and wussy dialogue. The movie kicks off with a nifty bit of automotive action and then turns into a display of some of the most impressive bone-cracking you're likely to have seen since…well, since the last John Wick movie, writes Kurt Loder in his latest review.

Chip Bok - Creators Syndicate

Lawcain / DreamstimeLansing, Michigan, City Council President Patricia Spitzley refused to allow Charli Collison, 9, to speak during public comments on construction in a local park, later telling the media children shouldn't be allowed to speak. Following public outcry, Spitzley apologized.

John Greim John Greim Photography/NewscomIn normal times, when Congress passes legislation, the two chambers are required to approve identical versions of a bill before it can go to the president's desk. It's one of the fundamental rules underpinning our bicameral legislative structure, where House and Senate are equal in importance and the consent of both is required to make law.

This isn't to suggest the process is clean and neat. This isn't Schoolhouse Rock. There are all sorts of political calculations that go into the legislative process and shape the outcome of lawmaking.

Sometimes, when the two chambers can't agree, a bill goes into a conference committee to iron out the differences and settle on a version both chambers can pass. Because, again, both chambers must agree on a bill's language before it gets to the president.

In normal times, when the Senate announces "we are going to pass this bill," and the House responds by saying "we would also like to pass that bill, exactly as it is," all the lawmakers who voted "aye" on that bill should be happy about the outcome.

These, of course, are not normal times.

And so we were treated to the spectacle of Senate Republican leaders Thursday asking a bizarre favor of their House GOP counterparts: an explicit promise NOT to pass the health care bill slated for a final vote in the Senate sometime in the next two days.

Here's how Burgess Everett, one of Politico's congressional reporters, put it on Twitter:

At GOP lunch, convo focused on whether they can be assured House won't pass skinny, will conference. Senate doesn't want it to become law.

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) July 27, 2017

Later in the day, Sen. Ron Johnson would specifically ask for "the assurance that whatever we pass tonight will go to conference." In other words, promise that the bill poised for passage on Thursday night will be rejected by the House.

GOP Sen. Ron Johnson: The skinny bill "doesn't even come close to honoring our promise of repealing Obamacare" https://t.co/l2zkICQm90

— CNN (@CNN) July 27, 2017

How did we end up here? After attempts on Tuesday and Wednesday to pass vastly different versions of the Better Care Reconcilliation Act failed, it appears Senate Republican leaders want to go to a conference committee to settle on a final version of the health care bill. To get there, the Senate is prepared to vote on a so-called "skinny repeal" bill Thursday night or Friday.

The bill would repeal some of the Affordable Care Act's taxes and would dump the individual mandate and employer mandate that, respectively, require all Americans to carry health insurance and require all business with more than 50 employees to offer employer-based plans. The bill would maintain several other aspects of Obamacare, including the expansion of Medicaid eligibility. (At least, that's what is widely assumed will be included in the bill, though the actual text of the bill won't be clarified until after a long series of Senate floor votes on Thursday evening.)

It doesn't really satisfy anyone but has a chance of passing merely because senators know it would be worse to pass nothing, and because the reconciliation process being used to by-pass the Senate's 60-vote threshold has a time limit attached to it.

In other words, the Senate wants to pass a bill to avoid the embarrassment of not passing a bill. But under no circumstances does the Senate want that bill to become law.

There are four possible outcomes here.

1. The Senate could fail to pass the bill, at which point health care reform is dead, for now.
2. The Senate could pass the "skinny repeal" bill and the House could pass the same language, sending it to Trump (This is what the Senate leaders are apparently trying to prevent).
3. The Senate could pass the "skinny repeal" bill, followed by the House rejecting it. A conference committee develops a new bill, but one or both chambers fail to pass the conference report, at which point health care reform is dead (for now).
4. The Senate could pass the "skinny repeal" bill, followed by the House rejecting it. A conference committee develops a new bill, both chambers pass that new version and it goes to Trump. This is what Senate Republican leaders are trying to steer towards.

Even as a libertarian who usually takes comfort in disagreements between the chambers of Congress—usually nothing good comes of agreement—I have mixed feelings about all this. There's not a terrific limited government, free market solution in play, but the "skinny repeal" bill might not turn out to be a terrible compromise, even though it leaves in place the budget-busting Medicaid expansion and some of Obamacare's regulations. It's not great, but it's not awful either. Maybe the Senate will pass it and the House will pull a fast one, pass it too, and call it a day.

But if the Senate leaders get their way and pass this bill, the House rejects it, and something else gets hammered out in a conference committee, there's a chance it will be a better product (and a chance it gets worse).

The House Freedom Caucus, the closest thing Congress has to a libertarian voting bloc, will have an outsized influence on what the conference committee crafts. That's why liberal groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are warning that the "skinny repeal" bill is a Trojan horse that will be turned into a more robust repeal bill by the potential future conference committee.

Political considerations aside, the way this bill is being passed should concern everyone. Individual senators can bemoan the erosion of political norms and loss of "normal order"—as John McCain did on Tuesday, just as the Senate was about to tip over the edge into the health care abyss—but by passing a major piece of legislation in such haphazard and unconventional manner, they are contributing to that very problem.

Vaping360A new study, based on data from a large survey of current and former smokers in the United States, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that electronic cigarettes are helping Americans move from the first group to the second. The study, reported this month in the BMJ, finds that quit attempt and smoking cessation rates both increased significantly during the period when e-cigarette sales took off. Furthermore, these changes were entirely attributable to increased quitting among e-cigarette users, who were more likely to try and more likely to succeed than smokers who did not vape.

The researchers, led by University of California at San Diego public health professor Shu-Hong Zhu, found that 45.9 percent of smokers reported quit attempts in the 2014-15 Current Population Survey, up from 41.4 percent in 2010-11. The percentage who stopped smoking for at least three months also rose, from 4.5 percent to 5.6 percent. "This is the first time in almost a quarter of a century that the smoking cessation rate in the US has increased at the population level," Zhu and his colleagues write. "The 1.1 percentage point increase in cessation rate...might appear small, but it represents approximately 350 000 additional US smokers who quit in 2014-15."

What happened during this period that might account for the change? Zhu et al. note that e-cigarette use in the U.S. "became noticeable around 2010 and increased dramatically by 2014."

That correlation is reinforced by the researchers' subgroup analysis of the 2014-15 data, which found that 65 percent of smokers who had used e-cigarettes in the previous year had tried quitting, compared to 40 percent of the other smokers. "Numerically speaking," the authors say, "it was this e-cigarette user subgroup that raised the overall quit attempt rate for 2014-15, and thus the rate was statistically significantly higher than in all previous survey years."

Vapers also had a higher cessation rate than nonvapers in 2014-15: 8.2 percent vs. 4.8 percent. "Again," Zhu et al. write, "the 2014-15 survey had a noticeably higher overall cessation rate because the e-cigarette user subgroup had a higher cessation rate than those who did not report e-cigarette use in the past year."

Since this is an observational study rather than a randomized, controlled experiment, alternative explanations are possible. But the researchers persuasively argue that neither the 2009 increase in the federal tobacco tax nor the TIPS From Former Smokers ad campaign that began in 2012 can adequately explain the increase in smoking cessation, especially in light of the stark subgroup differences. The impact of the tax hike was relatively small and short-lived, Zhu et al. say, while it is hard to see why the anti-smoking ads would have had an impact only on smokers "who happened to use e-cigarettes in 2014-15."

Still, smokers who try vaping may differ from those who do not in ways that make them more likely to quit. "Given that the e-cigarette user subgroup was the only group that had statistically significantly higher rates in 2014-15," Zhu et al. say, "it is tempting to attribute the increase in the overall smoking cessation rate in 2014-15 solely to e-cigarette use. However, e-cigarette use itself could be an indicator of motivation to quit smoking, which would predict a higher quit rate. Thus, attributing the full 73% relative difference to e-cigarettes is likely an overestimate of their effect."

These results nevertheless should allay fears that e-cigarettes might somehow make smoking more common than it would otherwise be. To the contrary, the vaping alternative seems to be accelerating the downward trend in the smoking rate, which in this survey fell from 21 percent in 2001-02 to less than 14 percent in 2014-15. Any regulatory policy that makes e-cigarettes less accessible or less appealing to smokers, such as the onerous rules unveiled by the Food and Drug Administration last year, is apt to have the opposite effect, with potentially deadly consequences.

"We found that e-cigarette use was associated with an increased smoking cessation rate at the level of subgroup analysis and at the overall population level," Zhu et al. conclude. "It is remarkable, considering that this is the kind of data pattern that has been predicted but not observed at the population level for cessation medication, such as nicotine replacement therapy and varenicline....These findings need to be weighed carefully in regulatory policy making and in the planning of tobacco control interventions."

• Michael Nigro/Sipa USA/NewscomMaking it clear that President Donald Trump's tweets technically don't count as policy changes, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of staff sent out a memo to military leaders telling them there will be no changes to the current policy on how transgender troops are to be treated.
• The head of the Boy Scouts is apologizing for the political rhetoric Trump brought up in his speech at their National Jamboree. Frankly, it's never too early for children to learn that politicians are the worst.
• Officials are investigating Mississippi police officers who fatally shot a man over the weekend after serving a search warrant at the wrong address.
• Vladimir Putin says the sanctions bill against Russia currently under consideration by Congress is "illegal under international law."
• Here's the latest on what's in the "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act. It includes the individual mandate repeal and defunds Planned Parenthood for one year. It does not repeal ACA's medical device tax.
• One person died and seven were injured when a ride at the Ohio State Fair broke apart during operations. All the rides at the fair are now closed for inspections.

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The Party of Trump is determined to leave no aspect of immigration policy unmolested. It has gone along with President Trump's travel ban, temporaryOxfam via Foter suspension of the refugee program, and harsh deportation regime. It has proposed cuts in legal immigration. As if all that was not enough, it's now also assaulting America's asylum program, notes Cato Institute's David Bier. The Asylum Reform and Border Protection Act that it is currently considering would put such an impossible evidentiary burden before foreigners fleeing persecution that few will be able to meet it.

In effect, he notes, the bill harkens to pre-World War II days when fleeing Jews were sent back to Nazi Germany to face death camps.

Jeff Sessions is on the ropes with Donald Trump. Good.

The president is pissed because Sessions recused himself from the investigation of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election. But here are a baker's dozen of reasons to hate the attorney general, including his obsession with restarting the war on pot, his call to jack up mandatory minimums, and his support for civil asset forfeiture. Then there's his lack of interest in due process, willingness to subvert state's rights when they conflict with his desired outcome, and desire to lengthen prison terms for non-violent criminals. Also, he might be some kind of statist elf.

During Sessions' confirmation hearings, Democrats claimed the former Alabama senator was unfit for office because he was a racist, charges that were never really substantiated. But Sessions' voting record and policy agenda are more than enough to disqualify him from being the nation's top law enforcement officer.

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Vchalup/DreamstimeShoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biology specialist at Oregon Health and Science University, has used the CRISPR technique to edit the DNA of a large number of one-cell human embryos, MIT Technology Review reports. This is the first known American attempt to create genetically modified human embryos.

Chinese researchers have been working on that for a while. A bioethical firestorm erupted in 2015 when researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University announced that they had tried to use CRISPR to correct the genes for the blood disease beta-thalassemia in 86 human embryos. This proof-of-concept study was not particularly successful. Those gene-edited embryos could never have become babies, since they contained three sets of chromosomes—a result of being double-fertilized. Nevertheless, in high bioethical dudgeon, the editors at Nature denounced the research as "dangerous and ethically unacceptable."

Earlier this year, a team of Chinese researchers at Guangzhou Medical University succeeded at using CRISPR to edit the genes of some normal human embryos. Interestingly, Chinese researchers have found it difficult to get the genetic changes in every cell of the embryos that they seek edit.

Mitalipov has long been pioneer in embryo research. His lab was the first to successfully clone primate embryos in 2007, and in 2013 his team created the first patient-specific human embryonic stem cells from cloning.

The new genome-editing results have not yet been published in a scientific journal, but Technology Review reports that Mitalipov and his team have been far more successful than the Chinese researchers at making sure the CRISPR edits are on-target and take hold in every cell in the embryos.

If the technique proves to be safe, such gene-edited embryos would develop into people who would no longer pass down their familial genetic afflictions to subsequent generations. Naturally, this breakthrough has aroused the fear of designer babies in some timorous bioethicists. In February, fortunately, a panel of 22 scientists and other experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences issued a report stating that "heritable germline genome editing trials must be approached with caution, but caution does not mean that they must be prohibited."

The NAS report did recommend against trying to use CRISPR to edit in enhanced traits into human embryos at this time. It is true that researchers are for the time being much better at identifying broken genes and figuring out what is needed to fix them, but someday it will be possible to edit in enhanced traits too. As I once asked, "What horrors would such designer babies face? Longer, healthier, smarter, and perhaps even happier lives? It is hard to see any ethical problem with that."

Jared Kushner PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Kleponis/dpa/picture-alliance/NewscomSenior White House Advisor Jared Kushner met earlier this month with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss federal sentencing reform. But we should not get our hopes too high, the Wall Street Journal's Beth Reinhard warns, because Kushner has yet to convince Attorney General Jeff Sessions of, well, anything.

Meanwhile, on the Congressional side, Sen. Grassley has announced his priorities for the remainder of 2017. If confirming a new attorney general is not one of them, I doubt sentencing reform is either:

Everybody in D.C. Shld b warned that the agenda for the judiciary Comm is set for rest of 2017. Judges first subcabinet 2nd / AG no way

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) July 27, 2017

Reinhard quotes an unnamed source (is there any other kind?) as saying Kushner is "quietly listening to all sides, including outside groups, to understand what's possible and to ultimately be able to make a recommendation to the president."

This certainly sounds reasonable. Federal sentencing law is complex, there are numerous stakeholders to appease, and while Kushner may know something about federal sentencing due to his father's incarceration, he has never herded cats at this level.

But let me save him some time: Neither the House nor Senate will vote on a bill shortening federal drug sentences while your father-in-law is giving speeches about apocryphal Mexican drug dealers who capture young American girls and "slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die"; your father-in-law will not stop saying those things because he likes when people scream lustily after he speaks; and the Attorney General of the United States will sabotage whatever you come up with, because he can and because he wants to.

Kushner needn't take my word for it.

At the tail end of 2015, the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, passed the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act over the objections of Republican Sens. Ted Cruz, Orrin Hatch, Jeff Sessions, David Vitter, and David Perdue. Grassley had long been opposed to sentencing reform of any kind. That he came around, and at a time when Republicans held the Senate, appeared to be cause for optimism.

"The goal is not to get unanimous support," Sen. John Cornyn told Politico in early 2016, regarding Cruz's abandonment of his civil libertarian positions on criminal justice. "The goal would be to get enough bipartisan consensus so that we could do something important and something [President Obama] wants to do, something that Republicans and Democrats want to do. I don't know why, if that's actually the case, why we can't actually do it."

Why couldn't they actually do it? Obama wanted to do sentencing reform. He wanted to do it so badly he launched a clemency initiative to shorten the sentences of (mostly) crack-cocaine offenders who'd been convicted before the passage of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act. (Congress could've made the FSA retroactive, but didn't and still hasn't.)

The Democrats on the Judiciary Committee also wanted to do sentencing reform. Grassley and Cornyn wanted to do sentencing reform, if only to get a growing chorus of conservative activists and lobbyists to leave them alone about it. Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee wanted to do sentencing reform because they actually care about sentencing reform.

And yet, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to bring the bill before the full Senate in late 2015 or early 2016. Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid did the same when a Democratic-led judiciary committee passed an even better sentencing reform bill in January 2014. And this was under a president who would've signed just about any bipartisan piece of criminal justice legislation that came across his desk.

I don't question Kushner's intentions or committment, because having a family member do time fundamentally changes the way a person views incarceration. But I do worry that his "SWAT team" approach to government reform could lead to troubling compromises for the sake of a legislative victory.

If Kushner has not heard from the police unions and the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys (NAAUSA), he soon will. I hope he also gets the opinion of Heritage Action, Koch Industries, the Charles Koch Institute, Families Against Mandatory Minimums (where I worked from 2013 to 2015), Right on Crime, and Americans for Tax Reform--all of whom advocated sentencing reform from the center-right during the politically tumultuous days of the Obama administration.