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Police are above the law: Cop suspected of driving drunk in fatal wrong-way crash still on payroll
The cop in question already had a drunk-driving conviction, but was still on the job and driving. Police really do not seem to be held accountable when they break the law. Tom Haydon reports for NJ.com:
More than two months after he crashed head-on into a tractor-trailer in Staten Island in a suspected drunk-driving accident that killed two people, Linden Officer Pedro Abad remains on the city payroll.
Abad, 27, had blood-alcohol level of .24 — three times the legal limit — at the time of the head-on crash, officials have said. He also has previously been charged with drunk driving after two separate accidents. He pleaded guilty to one of those incidents in 2013.
"This destroys the image of the police department for years," said Maria Haberfeld, a professor at John Jay College of of Criminal Justice and chair of the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at the college.
"It's incomprehensible to me that he's still on the force. It taints the whole department," she added. She has used reports about Abad in her police ethics class.
Linden police say they are still reviewing the case, and awaiting results of the New York investigation, and have not taken any disciplinary action. New York authorities have not filed any charges against anyone involved in the crash. . .
Posted in Law Enforcement
More GOP flim-flam on the sequestration deal
Kevin Drum points out who is trying to break the sequestration deal:
The LA Times reports today that we might be headed for another government shutdown. Big surprise. But these paragraphs are very peculiar:
President Obama has signaled his intention to bust, once and for all, the severe 2011 spending caps known as sequestration. He's vowed to reject any GOP-backed appropriation bills that increase government funding for the military without also boosting domestic programs important to Democrats such as Head Start for preschoolers.
The Republican-controlled Congress is also digging in. Since taking control in January, GOP leaders had promised to run Congress responsibly and prevent another shutdown like the one in 2013, but their spending proposals are defying the president's veto threat by bolstering defense accounts and leaving social-welfare programs to be slashed.
It's true that Obama has proposed doing away with the sequestration caps. But his budgets have routinely been described as DOA by Republican leaders, so his plans have never gotten so much as a hearing. What's happening right now is entirely different. Republicans are claiming they want to keep the sequestration deal, but they don't like the fact that back in 2011 they agreed it would cut domestic and military spending equally. Instead, Republicans now want to increase military spending and decrease domestic spending. They're doing this by putting the additional defense money into an "emergency war-spending account," which technically allows them to get around the sequester caps. Unsurprisingly, Obama's not buying it.
So how does this count as Obama planning to "bust" the sequestration caps? I don't get it. It sounds like Obama is willing to stick to the original deal if he has to, but he's quite naturally insisting that this means sticking to the entire deal. It's Republicans who are trying to renege. What am I missing here?
Posted in Congress, GOP, Government, Military, Obama administration
People wronged by the criminal justice system face a long road to compensation
The American criminal justice system is nothing to be proud of. Radley Balko reports in the Washington Post:
A couple weeks ago, Nathan Burney drew up a cartoon for The Watch that explained the concept of qualified immunity. This is the protection given to state employees, including police, from lawsuits alleging violations of constitutional rights. Before even getting in front of a jury, a plaintiff must not only show that his rights were violated, but that a reasonable person in the public employee's position should have known that the actions in question were in violation of the Constitution. It's a tough hurdle to overcome. And even then, the plaintiff could still fail to persuade a jury.
A couple recent appeals court decisions demonstrate just how difficult it can be for a victim to win compensation.
The first comes from Ferguson, Mo., where Henry Davis sued three police officers for allegedly beating him in a jail cell while he was compliant and subdued. While the evidence suggests that Davis was initially uncooperative, the appeals court ruling notes that testimony supports the contention that this wasn't the case when the officers began beating him. Davis was then charged with "property damage" for bleeding on the officers' uniforms.
That brings us to this amazing passage from an opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit:
The district court granted summary judgment dismissing these claims on a narrow ground. "Qualified immunity shields police officers from liability for civil damages where their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." . . . Noting that, until recently, some of our decisions suggested that an excessive force claim will not lie if the plaintiff suffered only "de minimis injuries," the court concluded that the police officers were entitled to qualified immunity because, "as unreasonable as it may sound, a reasonable officer could have believed that beating a subdued and compliant Mr. Davis while causing only a concussion, scalp laceration, and bruising with almost no permanent damage did not violate the Constitution.
The court overturned the district court judge's opinion. But it's remarkable that it would need to. Here are a few other things to keep in mind:
Davis is fortunate to have attorneys willing to appeal that decision.
He could still lose in front of a jury.
Even if he wins, the officers could appeal.
Even if he wins the appeal, the officers likely won't be paying a dime. Unless the jury specifically calls for punitive damages, the award will be paid for by the people of Ferguson.
The appeals court ruled against Davis's claim against the city of Ferguson, finding that the city is protected by sovereign immunity. To get past sovereign immunity, Davis would have to show that Ferguson police have demonstrated a pattern and practice of constitutional violations. (This incident happened in 2009.) Despite the numerous reports of precisely that, including one from the Department of Justice, Davis lost here. It seems doubtful that the DOJ report would have been released in time to be admitted into evidence. But this shows how tough it is to establish a pattern or practice of violations, even in jurisdictions where that's clearly the case.
The other case involves Benny Starks, about whom I wrote in my series on bite mark evidence. Starks spent 20 years in prison after he was convicted of the rape and assault of a 69-year-old woman in 1986. He was convicted primarily due to testimony from bite mark analysts Russell Schneider and Carl Hagstrom, testimony from blood serologist Sharon Thomas-Boyd, and an identification by the victim. (The victim initially described her assailant as clean-shaven and 18-19 years old. Starks at the time was 26, and had a mustache and beard.) Schneider and Hagstrom claimed to have found a bite mark on the victim that matched Starks's teeth "to a reasonable medical certainty." . . .
Continue reading. And do read the whole thing: The Starks case is an eye-opener into just how bad the US criminal justice system is.
Posted in Government, Law, Law Enforcement
Unintended consequences: Spain's Aggregation Tax Has Screwed Over the Media It Was Made to Protect
Kari Paul reports in Motherboard:
A law Spain passed in October 2014 charging online aggregators like Google News a fee for linked content has backfired, according to a new study.
The legislation, which went into effect January 1 of this year, requires aggregation sites to pay a fee to original publications when posting links or excerpts from them online. The law, which caused Google News to shut down in Spain, was pushed by the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies as a means to protect the print industry. But the study commissioned by the Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodical Publications (AEEPP) found it has been harmful to Spanish media at large,
"The negative impact on the online press sector is also very clear, since a very important channel to attract readers disappears, resulting in lower revenues from advertising," the study said.
The report found clear evidence news aggregators actually expand the market for original sources rather than diminish it. It also showed the law disproportionately hurt smaller publications that relied on Google News and similar aggregators for traffic.
In addition to Google News, other aggregators including Planeta Ludico, NiagaRank, InfoAliment, and Multifriki shut down for fear of legal and financial liability. Companies that don't pay the tax could face fines of up to €600,000 or $654,480.
The shutdown of these sites, particularly NiagaRank, was a blow to innovation in Spain, the report stated. . .
Posted in Business, Law, Media, Technology
Chiseled Face shave—and a note on how to learn to enjoy shaving
A very fine shave indeed today. I had ordered the Chiseled Face synthetic brush, standing next to the giant Stirling synthetic, and I received with it the pre-shave gel shown and the Trade Winds aftershave sample. So today is Chiseled Face all the way.
Habits can trap us. I had planned to apply the pre-shave gel to my beard in the shower and let it sit while I showered, but I did my usual shower and remembered it only as I washed my face at the sink. I did apply it, but of course did not give it really a fair chance. I've now put the bottle in the shower, and I'll be using it daily for a week in lieu of MR GLO, then back to MR GLO a week, and then another week of the gel. Then I'll report back. It has a pleasant fragrance and strikes me as more likely to work than a shave oil.
The Chiseled Face brush is extremely nice. It's a much better size for me than the Stirling, and the handle is quite nice: a different look and a really comfortable grip. And of course the angel-hair synthetic knot makes lather like nobody's business. Sherlock is a tip-top soap and I immediately got a very rich and fragrant lather, with "a warm tobacco based scent blended with toasted caramel, black pepper, moist dirt, and finished with a touch of leather, moss, mandarin, honey and rose." Extremely nice tallow-based soap.
Three passes with the RazoRock Baby Smooth razor which, though not a slant, regularly delivers an effortless BBS shave, and today was no different: no nicks, no burn, no worry—and totally smooth outcome. It also has a very nice feel in the handle, somehow feeling exceptionally rigid.
A good amount of Trade Winds aftershave—-another great fragrance: "ocean, ozone, cucumber and a touch of mint backed up by a base of old spice."
Altogether a great shave. Chiseled Face Groomatorium in my experience offers first-rate products.
Now about the enjoyment I experienced. Although I do know some do not derive any enjoyment from shaving—I certainly did not, when I was shaving with canned foam and cartridge razors, which was totally a chore—I have the strong impression that most who shave with a DE and true lather do in fact enjoy their shaves, but yesterday I fell into an interesting discussion with a man who does not derive any enjoyment from traditional shaving and moreover thinks that those who do are "silly" (his word), and indeed thinks that I am a very silly person. He did explain that this is not a value judgment, by which I presume he means he would be happy to also be silly but simply has not learned how to enjoy a shave.
(There was a brief confusion in which he mistakenly thought I was saying that one could force enjoyment, which is indeed a silly notion (in the common sense of "silly," not the special sense in which he uses it), but with that misconception corrected the discussion continued and I wrote a brief note about how to learn to enjoy a shave and thus achieve silliness (in his sense of the word). I thought it might be of interest. And I think it's interesting that some are anhedonic with respect to music and to food, so being anhedonic to shaving is not so surprising.
Israeli adopts forced-feeding torture in order keep Palestinians imprisoned indefinitely without charge
A very ugly scene: Israeli locks up people indefinitely with no charges filed, and if they go on hunger strike in protest, Israel will adopt forced-feeding despite medical personnel stating that this is torture. Israel justifies the torture by pointing out that the US has adopted torture, including forced-feeding, which the US continues to do at Guantánamo. The US: an exemplar of the acceptability of torture—not to mention imprisoning people without charge: cf. the 16-year-old boy locked up in solitary at Riker's Island for three years, and finally simply released without going to trial. (The boy later committed suicide.)
Joel Greenberg reports for McClatchy:
Israel's parliament passed a controversial law Thursday authorizing the force-feeding of hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners, drawing swift condemnation from the country's medical association, which called the practice torture.
The government-backed bill was introduced in response to cases in which Palestinian prisoners have gone on prolonged hunger strikes to protest jail conditions and their detention without trial, sometimes winning early release.
The legislation, passed 46-40 in the 120-member Knesset, authorizes a district court judge to approve force-feeding of a prisoner who in the opinion of a doctor is in imminent danger of death or severe and irreversible disability.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year cited force-feeding at the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay detention camp to bolster the government's case for the practice, in which liquid nourishment is pumped in tubes run through prisoners' noses into their stomachs.
Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who sponsored the bill, said after it passed that "hunger strikes by imprisoned terrorists have become a tool for attempts to pressure the state of Israel."
"We must not reach a situation in which a prisoner who poses a public threat will be freed because the state did not have the ability to save him from death and is compelled to release him," Erdan said.
Khader Adnan, a Palestinian prisoner who had been on a hunger strike for 55 days to protest his detention without charges, was released this month by the Israeli authorities because of fears that his possible death could trigger widespread unrest.
Israel holds more than 5,600 Palestinians in its jails, 391 of them without charges or trial, according to the Israel Prison Service.
Dr. Leonid Eideleman, chairman of the Israeli Medical Association, called passage of the force-feeding bill "a black day in the annals of Israeli legislation." He said his group would instruct doctors not to cooperate with the procedure.
"Force-feeding is torture, doctors must not participate in torture, and Israeli doctors will not participate in torture," Eidelman said, adding that his group would challenge the law in the Israeli Supreme Court. . .
Posted in Government, Mideast Conflict, Torture
Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an "Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery"
Jon Scharz reports at The Intercept:
Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally-syndicated radio show The Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an "oligarchy" in which "unlimited political bribery" has created "a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors." Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, "look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves."
Carter was responding to a question from Hartmann about recent Supreme Court decisions on campaign financing like Citizens United.
HARTMANN: Our Supreme Court has now said, "unlimited money in politics." It seems like a violation of principles of democracy … your thoughts on that?
CARTER: It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congressmembers. So now we've just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election's over … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody's who's already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an avid contributor than somebody's who's just a challenger.
I've added Carter's statement to this list of politicians acknowledging that money controls politics. Please let me know if you have other good examples.
(Thanks to Sam Sacks for pointing this out.)
Posted in Business, Election, Government, Politics
A very nice column on Latin teachers
Full disclosure: The Younger Daughter (TYD) teaches Latin and Classical Greek. The New Yorker column is by Ian Frazier:
Joshua Katz, professor of classics at Princeton (dark suit, high forehead, merry eyes behind Santa Claus glasses), lectured to a group of eighteen New York City high-school Latin teachers on a recent morning in a room at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, on East Eighty-fourth Street, and revved their brains to almost redline speed. These teachers could easily handle it. They sat and listened and asked pertinent questions like the students whom teachers hope to have. Sam Swope, the white-maned president of the Academy for Teachers, made a welcoming speech telling them how outstanding they were. The academy regularly rewards the best city-area K-12 teachers with high-powered daylong enrichment gatherings like this one.
Subject of lecture: The Proto-Indo-European roots of the Latin language. Professor Katz loves a blackboard, but will settle for a whiteboard in a pinch. As he talked, he tossed a blue felt-tipped marker from hand to hand. On the smooth white, his rapidly sketched blue lines veered, with occasional squeaks, this way and that—from modern English, which we understand, to Shakespearean English, which we pretend to understand but kind of don't, to Chaucerian English, which we don't pretend to understand, and then to Old English. The lines then went from German to Middle High German (close relative of Yiddish), to Old High German, connected somehow to East Germanic Gothic, to West Germanic, to Dutch and Frisian, and onward to North Germanic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic. Languages and facts flew like sparks from a grindstone and skidded bluely onto the board.
A few swipes of a cloth, and many centuries of Northern European language evolution disappeared. Then, "LATIN," he wrote, near the bottom of the board. The Latin that Latin teachers teach is the classic form that prevailed in Rome for about three hundred years—from 100 B.C. to 200 A.D. Professor Katz sketched lines connecting it to Old Latin, then to Older Latin, then to Very Old Latin, which dates to about the eighth century B.C. Very Old Latin is as far from Cicero and Julius Caesar as Chaucer's English is from us, said Professor Katz. Passing mention was made of Plautus Livius Andronicus, who created the first Latin literature by translating Homer from the Greek, in 240 B.C.; of the familial connection between Latin and Gujarati and other languages of India but not between Latin and Hebrew; and of the word experts at NASA who have tried to find ways in which humans may communicate with space aliens, should that ever become necessary.
To illustrate the morphological nature of Very Old Latin, Professor Katz handed out photocopies of a drawing of a gold pin called the Fibula Praenestina, which dates from the sixth to the eighth centuries B.C. The pin had been used, possibly, as a fastener for a garment. On the pin's shaft were marks that were apparently letters but looked like what you might scratch on a lawn tool so that you could reclaim it after lending it to your neighbor. "If those are letters, what do we want them to say?" Professor Katz asked. "It's unlikely they say something like 'I'm with Stupid'—right?" By Socratic questioning, he led the teachers to discern Latinate forms in the letters. To do that, the inscription had to be read from right to left, the usual direction for Very Old Latin. "And what, by the way, is the word for writing that goes in one direction, gets to the end, turns, and then goes back in the other direction? Our favorite Greek adverb? Comes from the words meaning 'as the ox plows'?" asked Professor Katz. All eighteen teachers answered, as one, "Boustrophedon!" He repeated the word, happily, because it is fun to say. Accent on the last syllable: "Bou-stroph-e-DON!"
Another key to translating the Fibula Praenestina's inscription was making the intuitive leap that it had been written in the voice of the pin itself—that is, like "I'm with Stupid," it is in the first person. Thus the words on the pin read . . .
Posted in Education
Sale today on fresh sockeye salmon fillets
So I'm going again with this recipe. I got three 1-lb fillets, so cut in half that's six packets. The key is that they are terrific left over: just put the cooked salmon in its packet in the refrigerator, and you have a quick lunch that is stunningly good. Two will do for our dinner tonight, other four for lunches to come.
My process: oil on foil, salmon, salt, pepper, tomatoes, basil, more oil, close packet.
They in the fridge now awaiting the 500ºF oven.
Posted in Food, Low carb, Recipes
The FBI Built a Database That Can Catch Rapists — Almost Nobody Uses It
Christian Miller reports in ProPublica:
More than 30 years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a revolutionary computer system in a bomb shelter two floors beneath the cafeteria of its national academy. Dubbed the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP, it was a database designed to help catch the nation's most violent offenders by linking together unsolved crimes. A serial rapist wielding a favorite knife in one attack might be identified when he used the same knife elsewhere. The system was rooted in the belief that some criminals' methods were unique enough to serve as a kind of behavioral DNA — allowing identification based on how a person acted, rather than their genetic make-up.
Equally as important was the idea that local law enforcement agencies needed a way to better communicate with each other. Savvy killers had attacked in different jurisdictions to exploit gaping holes in police cooperation. ViCAP's "implementation could mean the prevention of countless murders and the prompt apprehension of violent criminals," the late Sen. Arlen Specter wrote in a letter to the Justice Department endorsing the program's creation.
In the years since ViCAP was first conceived, data-mining has grown vastly more sophisticated, and computing power has become cheaper and more readily available. Corporations can link the food you purchase, the clothes you buy, and the websites you browse. The FBI can parse your emails, cellphone records and airline itineraries. In a world where everything is measured, data is ubiquitous — from the number of pieces of candy that a Marine hands out on patrol in Kandahar, to your heart rate as you walk up the stairs at work.
That's what's striking about ViCAP today: the paucity of information it contains. Only about 1,400 police agencies in the U.S., out of roughly 18,000, participate in the system. The database receives reports from far less than 1 percent of the violent crimes committed annually. It's not even clear how many crimes the database has helped solve. The FBI does not release any figures. A review in the 1990s found it had linked only 33 crimes in 12 years.
Canadian authorities built on the original ViCAP framework to develop a modern and sophisticated system capable of identifying patterns and linking crimes. It has proven particularly successful at analyzing sexual-assault cases. But three decades and an estimated $30 million later, the FBI's system remains stuck in the past, the John Henry of data mining. ViCAP was supposed to revolutionize American law enforcement. That revolution never came.
Few law enforcement officials dispute the potential of a system like ViCAP to help solve crimes. But the FBI has never delivered on its promise. In an agency with an $8.2 billion yearly budget, ViCAP receives around $800,000 a year to keep the system going. The ViCAP program has a staff of 12. Travel and training have been cut back in recent years. Last year, the program provided analytical assistance to local cops just 220 times. As a result, the program has done little to close the gap that prompted Congress to create it. Police agencies still don't talk to each other on many occasions. Killers and rapists continue to escape arrest by exploiting that weakness. "The need is vital," said Ritchie Martinez, the former president of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts. "But ViCAP is not filling it."
Local cops say the system is confusing and cumbersome. Entering a single case into the database can take an hour and hits — where an unsolved crime is connected to a prior incident — are rare. False positives are common. Many also said the FBI does little to teach cops how to use the system. Training has dropped from a high of about 5,500 officers in 2012 to 1,200 last year.
"We don't really use ViCAP," said Jeff Jensen, a criminal analyst for the Phoenix Police Department with 15 years of experience. "It really is quite a chore."
The FBI has contributed to the confusion by misrepresenting the system. On its website, the FBI says cases in its database are "continually compared" for matches as new cases are entered. But in an interview, program officials said that does not happen. "We have plans for that in the future," said Nathan Graham, a crime analyst for the program. The agency said it would update the information on its website.
The agency's indifference to the database is particularly noteworthy at a time when emerging research suggests that such a tool could be especially useful in rape investigations.
For years, politicians and women's advocates have focused on testing the DNA evidence in rape kits, which are administered to sexual assault victims after an attack. Such evidence can be compared against a nationwide database of DNA samples to find possible suspects. Backlogs at police departments across the country have left tens of thousands of kits untested.
But DNA is collected in only about half of rape cases, according to recent studies. A nationwide clearinghouse of the unique behaviors, methods, or marks of rapists could help solve those cases lacking genetic evidence, criminal experts said. Other research has shown that rapists are far more likely than killers to be serial offenders. Different studies have found that between one-fourth to two-thirds of rapists have committed multiple sexual assaults. Only about 1 percent of murderers are considered serial killers.
Studies have questioned the assumptions behind behavioral analysis tools like ViCAP. Violent criminals don't always commit attacks the same way and different analysts can have remarkably different interpretations on whether crimes are linked. And a system that looks for criminal suspects on the basis of how a person acts is bound to raise alarms about Orwellian overreach. But many cops say any help is welcome in the difficult task of solving crimes like rape. A recent investigation by ProPublica and The New Orleans Advocate found that police in four states repeatedly missed chances to arrest the former NFL football star and convicted serial rapist Darren Sharper after failing to contact each other. "We're always looking for tools," said Joanne Archambault, the director of End Violence Against Women International, one of the leading police training organizations for the investigation of sexual assaults. "I just don't think ViCAP was ever promoted enough as being one of them."
The U.S. need only look north for an example of how such a system can play an important role in solving crimes. Not long after ViCAP was developed in the United States, Canadian law enforcement officials used it as a model to build their own tool, known as the Violent Criminal Linkage Analysis System, or ViCLAS. Today, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police maintains a database containing more than 500,000 criminal case profiles. The agency credits it with linking together some 7,000 unsolved crimes since 1995 – though not all of those linkages resulted in an arrest. If the FBI collected information as consistently as the Mounties, its database would contain more than 4.4 million cases, based on the greater U.S. population.
Instead, the FBI has about 89,000 cases on file.
Over the years, Canada has poured funding and staff into its program, resulting in a powerful analytical tool, said Sgt. Tony Lawlor, a senior ViCLAS analyst. One critical difference: . . .
Continue reading. It's a lengthy article.
More and more it seems as though the FBI is simply not very good at its job. It's unclear whether the cause is incompetence or the fact that they don't care.
Posted in Government, Law Enforcement, Technology
Sen. Lindsay Graham is running a pro-war campaign and his biggest contributors are military contractors
"You have to spend money to make money": I imagine a lot of military contractors are saying this as they give checked to Sen. Graham's campaign, counting on his promises to increase defense spending and go to war in more places. Lee Fang reports in The Intercept:
The Super PAC supporting the presidential campaign of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., raised $2.9 million through the end of June, a significant portion of which came from defense contractors that stand to gain from Graham's advocacy for greater military intervention around the world and increased defense spending.
As Graham tours the early primary states, he tells voters that he is running to boost U.S. defense spending. "My goal is to make sure the next president of the United States, the next generation of war fighters have the capability and capacity to do the job required to keep us free," Graham said in South Carolina earlier this year.
Graham's Super PAC, called "Security is Strength," received $500,000 from billionaire Ron Perelman, whose company MacAndrews & Forbes owns AM General, the manufacturer of Humvees and other products for the military. In December of last year, AM General won a $245.6 million contract with the Army. . .
And of course the money buys votes. Jon Schwarz in The Intercept has a very interesting piece on politicians who admit that the money they receive shapes their votes:
One of the most embarrassing aspects of U.S. politics is politicians who deny that money has any impact on what they do. For instance, Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania's notoriously fracking-friendly former governor, got $1.7 million from oil and gas companies but assured voters that "The contributions don't affect my decisions." If you're trying to get people to vote for you, you can't tell them that what they want doesn't matter.
This pose is also popular with a certain prominent breed of pundits, who love to tell us "Don't Follow the Money" (New York Times columnist David Brooks), or "Money does not buy elections" (Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner on public radio's Marketplace), or "Money won't buy you votes" (Yale Law School professor Peter H. Schuck in the Los Angeles Times).
Meanwhile, 85 percent of Americans say we need to either "completely rebuild" or make "fundamental changes" to the campaign finance system. Just 13 percent think "only minor changes are necessary," less than the 18 percent of Americans who believe they've been in the presence of a ghost.
So we've decided that it would be useful to collect examples of actual politicians acknowledging the glaringly obvious reality. Here's a start; I'm sure there must be many others, so if you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments or email me. I'd also love to speak directly to current or former politicians who have an opinion about it.
• "You have to go where the money is. Now where the money is, there's almost always implicitly some string attached. … It's awful hard to take a whole lot of money from a group you know has a particular position then you conclude they're wrong [and] vote no." — Vice President Joe Biden in 2015.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)
Photo: Ethan Miler/Getty Images
• "Lobbyists and career politicians today make up what I call the Washington Cartel. … [They] on a daily basis are conspiring against the American people. … [C]areer politicians' ears and wallets are open to the highest bidder." — Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in 2015.
• "When you start to connect the actual access to money, and the access involves law enforcement officials, you have clearly crossed a line. What is going on is shocking, terrible." – James E. Tierney, former attorney general of Maine, in 2014.
• "Allowing people and corporate interest groups and others to spend an unlimited amount of unidentified money has enabled certain individuals to swing any and all elections, whether they are congressional, federal, local, state … Unfortunately and rarely are these people having goals which are in line with those of the general public. History well shows that there is a very selfish game that's going on and that our government has largely been put up for sale." –John Dingell, 29-term Democratic congressman from Michigan, in 2014 just before he retired.
• "When some think tank comes up with the legislation and tells you not to fool with it, why are you even a legislator anymore? You just sit there and take votes and you're kind of a feudal serf for folks with a lot of money." — Dale Schultz, 32-year Republican state legislator in Wisconsin and former state Senate Majority Leader, in 2013 before retiring rather than face a primary challenger backed by Americans for Prosperity. . .
Continue reading. The list continues.
Posted in Business, Congress, Election, Military
Obama Administration: Using strong encryption can be punished as terrorism
The Obama administration does not look good in this report by Lee Fang in The Intercept:
The Obama administration's central strategy against strong encryption seems to be waging war on the companies that are providing and popularizing it: most notably Apple and Google.
The intimidation campaign got a boost Thursday when a blog that frequently promotes the interests of the national security establishment raised the prospect of Apple being found liable for providing material support to a terrorist.
Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of the LawFare blog, suggested that Apple could in fact face that liability if it continued to provide encryption services to a suspected terrorist. He noted that the post was in response to an idea raised by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., in a hearing earlier this month.
"In the facts we considered," wrote Wittes and his co-author, Harvard law student Zoe Bedell, "a court might — believe it or not — consider Apple as having violated the criminal prohibition against material support for terrorism."
FBI Director James Comey and others have said that end-to-end encryption makes law enforcement harder because service providers don't have access to the actual communications, and therefore cannot turn them over when served with a warrant.
Wittes and Bedell argue that Apple's decision to "move aggressively to implement end-to-end encrypted systems, and indeed to boast about them" after being "publicly and repeatedly warned by law enforcement at the very highest levels that ISIS is recruiting Americans" — in part through the use of encrypted messaging apps — could make the company liable if "an ISIS recruit uses exactly this pattern to kill some Americans."
The blog compares Apple's actions to a bank sending money to a charity supporting Hamas — knowing that it was a listed foreign terrorist organization.
"The question ultimately turns on whether Apple's conduct in providing encryption services could, under any circumstances, be construed as material support," Wittes and Bedell write. The answer, they say, "may be unnerving to executives at Apple."
One way to avoid such liability, Wittes and Bedell argue, would be to end encrypted services to suspected terrorists. But, they acknowledge, "Cutting off service may be the last thing investigators want, as it would tip off the suspect that his activity has been noticed."
In a hearing on July 8 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Justice Department officials insisted that companies need to be able to provide them with unencrypted, clear access to people's communications if presented with a warrant.
The problem is that eliminating end-to-end encryption or providing law enforcement with some sort of special key would also create opportunities for hackers.
Within minutes of the Lawfare post going up, privacy advocates and technologists expressed outrage: Chris Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, called it a continuation in Wittes' "brain-dead jihad against encryption," while Jake Laperruque, a fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, wrote that Wittes' post "equates selling a phone that's secure from hackers with giving money to terrorists."
If Apple and Google were to cave under the pressure of being likened to terrorist-helpers, and stop making end-to-end encryption, that could be the start of a "slippery slope" that ends the mainstream availability of strong encryption, said Amie Stepanovich, U.S policy manager for Access.
But even so, strong encryption will always exist, whether produced by small companies or foreign outlets. Terrorists can take their business elsewhere, while normal Americans will be left without a user-friendly, easily accessible way of protecting of their communications. "These tools are available and the government can't get to all of them," says Stepanovich. . .
Posted in Business, Government, Law, Obama administration, Technology, Terrorism
Hackers Identify Weak Link in Thousands of Industrial Control Systems
Security apparently was not an issue or a consideration when many modern systems were designed and developed, and that now promises to be a serious problem. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports in Motherboard:
When we think about cyberattacks against infrastructure, thanks to hyperbolic andunrealistic Hollywood flicks, we think of exploding nuclear plants or blacked out cities. But in reality, hackers could cause much more damage with subtler attacks, even without targeting critical infrastructure.
For example, a hacker might change the chemical composition of a popular medication drug during its preparation stage at a pharmaceutical plant—without anyone noticing—and kill thousands of people, according to Robert Lee, a security researcher and a PhD candidate researching cyber security at King's College in London.
While that's an unlikely, worst case kind of scenario, it's theoretically possible because the backbone networks supporting thousands of industrial control systems around the world, think of water and electricity distribution facilities, automated bridges, oil rigs, and different types of factories, all have a common weak link: their network switches.
These switches, which tunnel data around in several industrial processes, are often overlooked when thinking about potential cyberattacks against infrastructure. But they are a critical point of failure.
"If you own the network switch you don't have to even go after other devices," Lee told Motherboard in a phone interview. "An adversary that can get on the switch and own the switch, can own everything on that network and do anything they'd like with it."
As it turns out, popular network switches made by Siemens, GE, Garrettcom and Opengear, have flaws that make them easy to hack, according to new research by Colin Cassidy, Eireann Leverett, and Lee himself. The three plan to show their findings at the security and hacking conferences Black Hat and Def Con in Las Vegas next week.
If malicious hackers can break into a switch, for example by phishing someone who's on the same network, then the hackers can steal data, manipulate it, or just study the industrial process to learn how to sabotage it at a later stage, Cassidy, a security consultant for IOActive, told Motherboard.
At that point, pretty much everything is possible, depending on what's the system these switches help control, Cassidy said.
In an electrical substation, for example, a hacker could . . .
Posted in Business, Technology, Terrorism
Pro-life, clearly defined
Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B.:
"I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is."
More about Sister Chittister in this Daily Kos post.
Posted in GOP, Medical
WSJ's Bret Stephens Secretly Plot With "Pro-Israel" Evangelical Group Against Iran Deal
Glenn Greenwald reports in The Intercept:
The fanatical Israel-devoted group Christians United for Israel, which calls itself "the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States with over two million members," yesterday held an off-the-record call to formulate strategies for defeating the pending nuclear deal with Iran. The star of the show was The Wall Street Journal's long-time foreign-affairs columnist and deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens, who spoke for roughly 30 minutes. A recording of this call was provided to The Intercept and is posted here.
Stephens, who previously served as editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post from 2002 to 2004 (where he anointed Paul Wolfowitz "Man of the (Jewish) Year"), is essentially a standard-issue neocon and warmonger, which is why his mentality is worth hearing. He begins the strategy call with an attempt to sound rational and sober, but becomes increasingly unhinged and hysterical as he progresses. Here, for instance, is Stephens' message that he believes should be delivered to wavering members of Congress:
Someone should say, "this is going to be like your vote for the Iraq War. This is going to come back to haunt you. Mark my words, it will come back to haunt you. Because as Iran cheats, as Iran becomes more powerful, and Iran will be both of those things, you will be held to account. This vote will be a stain. You will have to walk away from it at some point or another. You will have to explain it. And some of you may in fact lose your seats because of your vote for this deal. You'll certainly lose a lot of financial support from some of your previous supporters."
[listen to this clip here]
First, note the bizarre equation of support for the war in Iraq with support for a peace deal with Iran. Second, since when do neocons like Stephens talk about the Iraq War as something shameful, as a "stain" on one's legacy? Stephens was a vehement advocate for the attack on Iraq, as was the paper for which he works, and never once suggested that he was wrong to do so. Third, yet again we find journalists at newspapers claiming the pretense of objectivity who are in fact full-on activists: here, to the point of colluding with a right-wing group to sink the Iran Deal – there's nothing wrong with that on its own terms, other than the conceit that journalism is distinct from activism.
If the Iran deal is defeated in the U.S., what's the alternative? The relatively honest neocons admit, as Norm Podhoretz did today in Stephens' paper, that the alternative is the one they really seek: full-on war with Iran. Here is Stephens' attempt to answer to that question: . . .
Posted in GOP, Mideast Conflict
Medicare turns 50: A look back at Ronald Reagan's predictions
Turns out that Ronald Reagan was very far off the mark. Jon Schwarz reports in The Intercept:
Fifty years ago today, on July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill creating Medicare.
Two years before Medicare's enactment, only 54 percent of Americans 65 and over had insurance that covered hospital expenses, and private insurance companies regularly terminated coverage for older "customers" who'd become too expensive. The elderly faced not just their bodies breaking down, but the simultaneous terror of financial ruin.
Within three years of Medicare's creation, 96 percent of people 65 and over had hospital insurance, and it could never be cancelled. It's hard to overstate how large a boon Medicare has been for the whole country.
But it's worth remembering that this gigantic step forward in Americans' quality of life was rabidly opposed by — among many others — Ronald Reagan. In 1961, Reagan, then known just as an actor, now the ultimate iconic Republican, was hired by the American Medical Association to record an LP record called "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine."
And it was completely nuts. Here are some of the highlights; a complete transcript ishere.
"Back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program."
This is the very beginning of Reagan's recording, and, appropriately enough, is completely made up. Norman Thomas never said this.
"One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine."
Medicine has never anywhere in history been a method of imposing communism (what Reagan means by "statism or socialism"). Communism was established in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba via armed revolution, not national health care.
"From [Medicare] it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school where he will go or what he will do for a living."
Yes, I well remember when I received my orders to report to the Patrice Lumumba Pod to begin my career as People's Blogpost Writer 9784B.
"Write those letters now [to Congress] and call your friends and them to write … If you don't do this and I don't do this, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."
Audio at the link.
Posted in GOP, Government, Healthcare
Hillary Clinton is just too wedded to Wall Street
See this report by David Dayen:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren publicly challenged presidential candidates two weeks ago to support a bill intended to limit the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street.
The Financial Services Conflict of Interest Act would prohibit government officials from accepting "golden parachutes" from their former employers for entering public service.
Within days, Democratic candidate Martin O'Malley endorsed the legislation, and Sen. Bernie Sanders became a co-sponsor. But presumed Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has not said where she stands.
One possible explanation for Clinton's lack of interest in banning golden parachutes is that she tolerated them when she ran the State Department — for two of her top aides. Robert Hormats and Thomas Nides previously worked as executives for financial firms Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, respectively. Both received benefits tied to their Wall Street employment contracts for entering public service.
Hormats, who served as undersecretary for economics, energy and agricultural affairs from 2009 to 2013, was a managing director for Goldman Sachs for over 25 years. As he wrote in his 2009 letter to the Office of Government Ethics, "Before I assume the duties of the position of Under Secretary, Goldman Sachs will accelerate and pay out my restricted stock units, pursuant to written company policy." Those unvested restricted stock units, which would have been forfeited had Hormats left Goldman for another Wall Street firm, are valued at between $250,000 and $500,000 on Hormats' disclosure form.
Nides, a six-figure bundler in Clinton's past and present presidential campaigns, worked for Fannie Mae, Credit Suisse and as a top executive at Morgan Stanley from 2005 to 2010. He became deputy secretary of state for management and resources in January 2011, replacing Jack Lew, who had himself received a golden parachute from Citigroup for entering government service. Nides received a payout on Morgan Stanley restricted stock units worth between $5 million and $25 million, according to his financial disclosure. His Morgan Stanley compensation plan "allows for acceleration of payout … if employee is required to divest of interest in order to comply with federal, state or local government conflict of interest requirements."
Nides and Hormats are not alone in what has become a depressingly standard practicein recent years. But Clinton's unusual control over staffing at the State Department makes her directly responsible for these particular golden parachutes, at a time when she wants to gain control over staffing of the entire executive branch.
"I would say these are textbook examples," said Michael Smallberg of the Project on Government Oversight, which has closely followed this issue. "I would raise concerns on how these payments affect the officials' views, not only toward their former employers but the industry more broadly." . . .
Posted in Business, Democrats, Election, Government
Greek Peach and Easy Street
Very fine shave today. The Omega boar brush show worked up a fine lather easily from Tim's Greek Peach shaving: fragrant, thick, and luxurious.
Three passes with the iKon DLC slant shown (the handle is the SE handle), consciously using light pressure, was quite comfortable and left a BBS result.
A good splash of Chiseled Face's Easy Street aftershave, and I'm reading for the day. I must say I like both the ingredients and the fragrance of Easy Street, which he describes as follows:
A bracing aftershave splash with just a touch of menthol that is perfect for all occasions.
Great for both men and women who want a great everyday casual scent containing notes of green tea, citrus, bergamot, rose, nutmeg, and ginger with hints of musk and woods to round it out.
Ingredients: Alcohol, Witch Hazel, Aloe Vera Juice, Calendula, Sodium Lactate, Menthol, Vitamin B5 Pro, Astaxanthin
I'm sure fragrance is another ingedient. Great stuff.
New Leak Confirms the Secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Is a Horrorshow
Jordan Pearson reports at Motherboard:
At a luxury hotel in Maui, representatives from the 12 countries participating in the highly controversial and secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal are negotiatingbehind closed doors. Thanks to a secret letter from a 2013 meeting, released today by WikiLeaks, we now have a clearer idea of what they're discussing.
Unsurprisingly, based on what we know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, so far, the letter is mostly about limiting the power of government in favour of private commercial development.
The TPP is a massive free trade deal that is set to impact everything from the cost of medicine in Australia, to milk production in Canada, to internet governance the world over. The letter was drafted for a ministerial meeting of the TPP countries in early December, 2013, and seeks guidance on key topics relating to the negotiations. Namely, how state-owned enterprises (SOEs) should be treated under the trade deal.
According to the letter, "the majority of TPP countries" support obligations for these companies—which can include public utilities, telecommunication providers, mining companies, and state-run investment firms—that "go beyond existing obligations" laid out in existing free trade agreements and by the World Trade Organization.
Such agreed-upon obligations would require SOEs to "act on the basis of commercial considerations," the letter states, and governments should regulate both state-owned businesses and private enterprises with impartiality. State-owned businesses would also not be allowed to discriminate against private companies when purchasing or selling goods, the letter suggests.
"SOEs are almost always state-owned because they have functions other than those that are merely commercial," Jane Kelsey, a law professor at the University of Auckland, wrote in an analysis that accompanied the document, "such as guaranteed access to important services, or because social, cultural, development and commercial functions are inextricably intertwined." . . .
Posted in Business, Government, Obama administration
What sharpening a pencil can lead to
Story—and more examples—here.


text:
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Illinois Tech Magazine
About Illinois Tech Magazine
More than 40 years after its founding, Illinois Tech's Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions continues to provide guidance and leadership in education and research.
Michael Davis, Illinois Tech professor of philosophy, considers today's super-sized America before answering the question: Does our country need ethics guidance now more than ever before?
"We live within an enormously complicated system—there are 300 million of us whereas in 1900 there were 75 million. Corporations are much bigger and divided up in ways that are different than they used to be. Products are more sophisticated. And much of what we do now is invisible," he explains, sharing an anecdote about his first job hand-developing photographs, nearly five decades ago. "Most of what I used to do is now inside this, along with the camera itself," he adds, pointing to his smart phone. "Most of what makes this such a valuable thing is in the minds of the people who laid out the design. If you have so much invisible quality, you're really more dependent upon people than you used to be. And if we are, then their ethics is more important."
Equally invisible to the average person and perhaps less accessible than the concept of a smart phone's capabilities is genetic editing via CRISPR technology, a method that cuts and replaces DNA at precise locations in a cell. In August a study was published in the journal Nature by a team of researchers from the United States, China, and South Korea who corrected the mutated gene behind the disease hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in human embryos. This scientific breakthrough raised numerous ethical concerns on the already controversial subject of human genetic engineering. The ethical implications of such emerging technologies comprise an area in which the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions (CSEP) at Illinois Tech and faculty associates are working to establish ethical guidelines.
Bioethicist Elisabeth Hildt heads the center, which has been a touchstone for many in the ethics community-at-large since its establishment in 1976. Former head of the Research Group on Neuroethics/Neurophilosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany), Hildt says that CSEP's Ethics Code Collection, which Librarian and Information Researcher Kelly Laas compiled from some 1,500 organizations, is an especially valuable resource for today's ethical challenges. It is the largest database of individual codes of ethics and guidelines in the world.
"Ethics codes and guidelines offer a huge opportunity to shape technology development, not just to recommend individual or company behavior. They can help to provide direction on whether or not humans should be cloned or on the use of CRISPR and similar technologies, where modifications can be made to the genetic endowment of an organism," says Hildt. "What does it mean to have something implanted in your brain? Is there a way to manipulate people through it? What do people think about having different types of technology in their bodies? Do we really want this?"
Shortly after her arrival on campus in 2014, Hildt and postdoctoral student Geoff Holtzman began a two-year project funded by the Swiss Cogito Foundation that examined the ways that neuroscience and ethics intersect. Last year they organized the symposium "Does Neuroscience Have Normative Implications?" drawing experts from around the country. And earlier this year, The Human Sciences after the Decade of the Brain, a book that Hildt co-edited, was published.
"We've been gratified that the center's approach has been recognized as one of the best practices in ethics education."
—Kelly Laas
Engineering, genetic or otherwise, has been a mainstay of the Ethics Center, in particular since 1987, when the late Vivian Weil came on board as director. An Illinois Tech philosophy faculty member for more than 40 years, Weil, along with Davis and Robert Ladenson, emeritus faculty associate, initiated a CSEP landmark program that many colleges and universities around the country have copied: Ethics Across the Curriculum.
"One thing that made the center work is that we focused on issues that the university was very much interested in, like engineering ethics," Davis, CSEP senior fellow, explains. "The reason we did Ethics Across the Curriculum was that a couple of mechanical engineering faculty wanted to integrate ethics into their classes. We had nothing that was suitable for them so we spent a year developing materials they could use."
Initially taught to Illinois Tech faculty, the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded curriculum was soon offered to faculty from other institutions who spent two weeks during the summer on Mies Campus learning how to integrate ethics into their technical courses. Davis says that each participant came away with either a case study, module, or lesson plan to use in the classroom as well as to share with their fellow faculty. Before it concluded in 2016, the program was incorporated into ethics teaching by domestic and international schools alike.
Laas says that a partial list of these schools would include Purdue University, the Colorado School of Mines, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Laas, who has done drop-in ethics instruction for Lewis College of Human Sciences, Armour College of Engineering, and the College of Science, says that the center's goal has always been to have the faculty commit to teaching ethics.
"Although dedicated ethics courses are offered at the university (engineering ethics, architectural ethics, and business ethics), the center prefers a true integration into most any course within any discipline," she says. "Also, the NSF is no longer offering funding for stand-alone ethics courses; it believes that people need to look at the culture of institutions and the culture of labs, and integrate ethics into the research being done. We've been gratified that the center's approach has been recognized as one of the best practices in ethics education."
[Left to right] Elisabeth Hildt, director of Illinois Tech's Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, and Kelly Laas, CSEP librarian and information researcher
Photo: Scott Benbrook
Illustrations: Brucie Rosch
Laas and Hildt, along with Illinois Tech Clinical Associate Professor of Innovation Christine Miller and Eric Brey, University of Texas at San Antonio professor and chair of biomedical engineering, are collaborating on an NSF-funded project to further refine ethics education within the university and, over time, to initiate a change in ethical behavior within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments and laboratories at Illinois Tech and beyond. The team's "Building a Culture of Responsible Research and Practice in STEM" project aims to develop guidelines for identifying ethical problems and navigating the decision-making process within a STEM department or lab. Select doctoral students in biology, physics, biomedical engineering, and electrochemical engineering are conducting interviews with undergraduates, peers, and staff to determine areas of ethical concern and to develop laboratory-specific ethical guidelines.
"It's often not that easy to teach ethics in an efficient way, so we began thinking of new approaches such as teaching out of the classroom and directly within the context of the research lab, where people are confronted by ethics issues," explains Hildt, adding that the ethics center team spent the summer conducting information-gathering surveys. "The students will use ethics codes from their fields, many collected by the center, as potential resources. In most cases, there's not much information regarding labs. Once guideline drafts are completed, the students will share them with faculty, staff, and colleagues within their respective departments."
Brey says the hope is that by leading much of the project, the students will learn to develop and nurture a mindset, rather than just try to manage situations of inappropriate behavior after the fact.
"Ethical issues can include how faculty should interact with students and mentor them and how researchers can make decisions about understanding their data and promoting their data in a way that is responsible, that can best inform people, and that doesn't direct people in the wrong way," says Brey. "How confident do we need to be? No one person can know everything."
Illinois Tech students also have two extracurricular opportunities to explore ethics topics. The ethics club, QED: The Ethical Debaters, meets weekly over lunch during the academic year to debate ethics issues in the news. The annual Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, held annually since its inception at Illinois Tech in 1993, is a nationwide competition that features two teams of three to five undergraduates who answer questions on a wide variety of ethics issues and debate their responses with the opposing team. A panel of judges determines the winning team using detailed evaluation criteria.
Reno Fera-Ducatt Waswil (PHYS '17), who teaches high school students SAT test-taking strategies for The Princeton Review, was a member of the regional 2016–17 Ethics Bowl team and former QED president. He reflects on how his experiences served to make him a more effective decision-maker today.
"There are three main areas I can point to in which involvement in QED and the Ethics Bowl has helped me—in recognizing the patterns of complex ethical issues; in making concrete conclusions based on the population of information and evidence available; and in justifying these considerate analyses and conclusions publicly and being able to respond to an array of critique on them," he says, adding that his ethics experiences have helped him to make a wide range of lifestyle improvements from refining his job interviewing techniques to relating better to his audience when making presentations to even developing empathetic characters as an aspiring creative writer.
Attorney Gretchen A. Winter, executive director of the Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Business, says that while the Ethics Bowl has given many students the chance to discuss ethical issues in a variety of contexts, it is only one facet of a center that she made her first stop when seeking ethics resources and guidance on ethics center design and management after being named to her current position.
"The center's leadership in defining and sharing ways to apply professional ethics standards in a wide range of circumstances has been a valuable source of guidance to faculty, students, and practitioners," she says. "The Ethics Center has been at the cutting edge of professional ethics since Vivian Weil took the helm many years ago. Under Elisabeth's direction the leadership and guidance continues—and the community of academically based ethics centers continues to grow."
From Issue:
© 2017 Illinois Institute of Technology


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Home » Sponsors » Genomics: Clinical Implementation » CMS 2018 PAMA Pricing Cut for Lab Tests Deeper Than Prior Estimate; Advanced Dx Lab Tests Fare Well
CMS 2018 PAMA Pricing Cut for Lab Tests Deeper Than Prior Estimate; Advanced Dx Lab Tests Fare Well
Turna Ray
This article was updated on Sept. 25.
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' initial prices for clinical lab tests issued under the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA) would save the government payor around $670 million, shaving nearly 10 percent off the $7 billion that it pays annually for lab tests.
The agency released the draft rates late Friday.
CMS previously estimated that using a market-based system stipulated under PAMA would save $390 million in the first year of 2018, and $3.93 billion over a decade. The deeper proposed cuts, slated to go into effect in January, didn't sit well with the American Clinical Laboratory Association. Industry players have a month to comment on the draft prices and make their case to CMS for any changes before final prices are released in November.
"If these draft rates were finalized, the impact would be devastating," said ACLA President Julie Khani. "We fear the impact on laboratories serving the most vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries, laboratories serving rural areas, and those with high Medicare volumes would be the most severely impacted."
She added that the association is working to halt the finalization and implementation of these "flawed and inaccurate" rates.
PAMA, signed into law in 2014, establishes a market-based pricing system for lab tests where Medicare payment for a test equals the weighted median of private payor rates. In implementing a process for collecting the information needed to establish pricing, CMS said only "applicable labs" could report test payment rates and volumes from private payors.
However, CMS' initial definition of "applicable labs" largely excluded hospital labs from reporting data, which ACLA contested, arguing that PAMA's intent is to establish market-based pricing, and leaving out a portion of the lab market wouldn't achieve that intent. When issuing its final rule for implementing PAMA, CMS tweaked its "applicable lab" definition to include certain hospital outreach labs, which some industry observers saw as a potential positive since these labs receive higher payment rates, compared larger commercial labs.
In a document detailing the data that CMS considered in taking its initial crack at pricing lab tests, the agency said that close to 2,000 "applicable laboratories" submitted around 5 million records. Most of the reported test volume, 90 percent, came from 658 independent labs. Other entities submitting data included 1,106 physician office labs, 21 hospital labs, and 157 other kinds of labs. They each reported 7.5 percent, 1.0 percent, and 1.4 percent of the test volume, respectively, to CMS as it devised the PAMA rates.
CMS performed a simulation to gauge whether including more independent, physician office, and hospital labs would have significantly impacted rates, and concluded that it wouldn't have made much difference. According to CMS, based on information collected from applicable labs, payment for lab tests would decrease by 21.9 percent in 2018, compared to the national limitation amount it paid for lab tests during 2017. According to the simulations it performed, allowing more labs to report would have decreased payments by around 20 percent.
However, from ACLA's point of view, the simulation only further proved that CMS' approach isn't inclusive of the entire lab market. Khani pointed out that CMS considered the impact of including more hospital labs by multiplying by 10 the 21 applicable labs that reported pricing. This means CMS included 210 hospital labs in its simulation, but according to the HHS Office of Inspector General there are approximately 7,000 hospital labs in the US.
"The CMS models do not address the exclusion of data from hospitals from the calculation of PAMA rates," Khani said. "ACLA is continuing to evaluate the draft rates and other information provided by CMS, and will provide comments and analysis to CMS, as well as to Congress."
Draft pricing
Piper Jaffray analyst William Quirk wrote in a note to investors that preliminary prices suggest that PAMA's impact on the two largest reference labs appears – Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America – to be "worse than [Wall] Street expectations," with Medicare revenue declining by approximately 8 percent in the first three years. "Specifically, we believe the Street was targeting Medicare revenue down [around] 6 percent in 2018, but then flat in 2019/2020," Quirk wrote.
Quest issued a statement echoing ACLA's concerns that CMS' draft payment rates are not market-based and that they should not be finalized. "Hospitals and physician office labs comprise half of Medicare clinical lab fee schedule volume and lab spending, but only accounted for 8.5 percent of the reported lab volume used by CMS to calculate the rates," Quest CEO Steve Rusckowski, who is also on ACLA's board of directors, said in a statement.
Based on a review of the draft rates so far, Khani said ACLA has "greater confidence" in the preliminary pricing CMS has issued for sole-source lab tests, because the lack of market representation isn't an issue in that category.
The broader impact on the molecular diagnostics market will likely be more varied. "These tests are offered by independent laboratories, as well as hospitals, academic medical centers and other providers," Khani said. "ACLA's concerns with the prohibition of significant sectors of the laboratory market from reporting, as well as data accuracy and integrity, are inclusive of these [molecular] tests."
For example, Myriad Genetics myRisk Hereditary Cancer test (based on CPT codes 81211 and 81213), received an initial price of $2,949, up from $2,781 in 2017, while its Vectra DA rheumatoid arthritis test (CPT code 81490) also saw a pricing bump to $841, compared to $591.
However, CMS' proposed pricing could be 10 percent lower for Invitae's hereditary cancer panel (CPT code 81432), which is currently being paid at $931 and got a 2018 PAMA price of $838. Under PAMA, the most test prices can be cut from 2018 to 2020 is 10 percent, and then by 15 percent from 2021 to 2023.
Exact Sciences' Cologuard (CPT code 81528) saw a slight dip from $512 to $509. Noninvasive prenatal testing (CPT code 81420) is currently paid at $802 and its proposed reimbursement was reduced to $759, which market analysts, nonetheless, saw as a positive for NIPT providers such as Illumina and Natera.
"For the AMA's genomic sequencing procedure codes, or GSP codes, the results are a mixed bag," Medicare expert Bruce Quinn said. He pointed out, for example, the price for a gene panel for disorders impacting the Ashkenazi Jewish community (CPT code 81412) shot up from $602 this year to $2,449.
On the other hand, based on private payor rates, panel testing for Lynch syndrome (CPT code 81435) would fall from $802 to $38, "which bears no relation at all to the cost of testing or market prices," Quinn said. "Lynch syndrome testing is a common test, and it appears that in 2016, almost no labs were billing the panel code and they were billing individual gene codes instead." Because 2018 pricing can't be cut by more than 10 percent, compared to what CMS paid in 2017, the agency proposed $722 for this code.
Pricing for next-generation sequencing panels that test between five and 50 genes (CPT code 81445) remained stable at $602, relatively flat to $598 reimbursed in 2017, and a panel including more than 50 genes (CPT code 81455) wasn't previously priced but now has a price of $2,920.
PAMA created a new category of assays, called advanced diagnostic laboratory tests (ADLTs), which CMS has defined as tests developed and offered by a single lab that use a unique algorithm to analyze multiple DNA, RNA, or protein markers, and which provide new clinical diagnostic information that can't be obtained by any other test. Each test will be identified by codes unique to them, but the ADLT definition is controversial among industry players. Test developers are awaiting further clarification from CMS regarding the requirement that ADLTs must provide new clinical diagnostic information.
"Most ADLT codes came out well, because sole source labs have tight control of contracting and pricing," Quinn said. This can be seen in the prices Genomic Health reported from private payors for the Oncotype DX breast cancer recurrence test (CPT code 81519), he noted, where the 25th to 75th percentile of rates ranged from $3,713 to $4,153.
Based on the weighted median of all reported rates, Genomic Health would see a price increase for its breast cancer recurrence test, from $3,443 to $3,873, but would receive a few dollars less for its colon cancer test (CPT code 81525), which went from $3,126 to $3,116.
On the other hand, Nanostring's Prosigna (CPT code 0008M), which is another test marketed for gauging breast cancer recurrence and is US Food and Drug Administration-cleared, falls from $3,443 to $900 based on private payor rates. "Prosigna is not a sole-source test, so it might have been billed by labs with varying competence to negotiate with payors," Quinn said. With a 10 percent cut, CMS proposed pricing for this code comes to $3,099.
In the ADLT category, Veracyte's Afirma Gene Expression Classifier (CPT code 81545), for distinguishing which thyroid nodules are benign and which are suspicious of cancer, had a price increase from $3,222 to $3,600, while CareDx's AlloMap test for gauging cardiac transplant rejection risk (CPT code 81595) increased from $2,841 to $3,240.
In addition to releasing draft pricing, CMS also published a raw data file of rates submitted by "applicable labs," which Quinn said, "will be a huge window into the scope and scale and pricing" of several hundred codes for genetic tests by commercial payors. "The raw data published by CMS shows some incredible price ranges," Quinn said. "For example, for BRCA sequencing (CPT code 81211), the new median price is $2,395, but the raw data shows dozens of payments were made at over $30,000."
For 58 HCPCS codes, CMS received no private payor rates or volumes during the data-reporting period, but decided to still post preliminary pricing for these codes using gapfill and crosswalk methods. The Advisory Panel of Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory Tests will hold a meeting on Sept. 25 to discuss these codes.
PAMA represents a seismic shift in the way lab tests are priced, and many lab industry players found it challenging to report the data needed to establish a market-based pricing system.
"The exclusion of such large parts of the laboratory market seems to have been exacerbated by issues of data accuracy and integrity," Khani said. "The retroactive data reporting period and other factors caused many labs to raise concerns with the data they submitted, expressing concerns that patient cost sharing may not have been included, and other issues." And while CMS removed data from its calculation of the weighted median when the rate seemed too high, Khani noted that in cases where data submitted seemed too low, it was included.
CMS listened to industry concerns by extending the data collection deadline by a few months to May 30, and by delaying implementation of PAMA by one year. PAMA pricing was initially slated to go into effect this year, but is now set to go live on Jan. 1, 2018, which CMS appears to be sticking to.
"While an additional delay in [clinical lab fee schedule] rebasing would likely be perceived as a positive by industry, we still believe it would increase the odds that Congress would enact an across-the-board cut to the CLFS to pay for some other bill like reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program," Eric Assaraf, director of Cowen Washington Research Group, wrote in an analyst note. "SCHIP is a must-pass bill slated for Oct. 1, that realistically needs to be done by the end of the year."
CMS is seeking public comments on its draft payment rates until Oct. 23, and intends to publish final rates in November. The segment of the lab community that largely fared well in the PAMA pricing process, makers of single-source, multianalyte algorithm-based assays, or ADLTs, support this timeline.
But after seeing the draft rates, ACLA is working with other stakeholders to "aggressively" halt their finalization and implementation. The association will provide comments to CMS, work with policy experts on the Hill, and relay its concerns to HHS and others in the administration. ACLA is also "considering our legal options," according to Khani.
"This is the highest priority for ACLA," she said. "We will pursue all options to ensure that PAMA is implemented in accordance with congressional intent and in a manner that protects Medicare beneficiary access to a broad range of providers for laboratory services."
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text:
Comedy vs. Donald Trump: The Great, Hilarious Battle For America
Without Jon Stewart, comedians are fighting a losing battle against America's greatest clown.
Photo illustration by Christopher Wright
Anthony Atamanuik is running low on bronzer. There's about a half hour until he takes to the podium on stage at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City, and his face is currently a natural, healthy shade of human skin. His wig is a disaster—resembling a small dead rodent in between him and the vanity mirror preserved with hairspray. He begins with the "raccoon eyes," applying a light foundation in circles around his eyes. Then the color for that tanning bed-induced glow: "It's really not orange, it's bronzer," he says, smearing the makeup across his face with noticeably normal sized hands. "I always think, 'Is this not bronze enough?' Then I go on stage, and I'm like, 'Oh yeah, that's more than enough.'" A few wrinkle lines with a pen, a little bit of rose on the cheeks, some furious brushing of the wig, some crumpled up papers in his suit for that lumpy body look. He looks in the mirror, squints and purses his lips: He is now Donald Trump.
In a few minutes he'll be standing in front of a packed UCB crowd ranting about China, insulting minorities in the audience, degrading women, and giving a hilarious, and discomfortingly accurate, portrayal of a Donald Trump speech. Atamanuik started doing his impression at regular shows at UCB in September, he says, "thinking I would do it for a couple of months and [Trump] would drop out. I had never really considered that I would be doing it this long." Since he began, the act has evolved with Trump—he's added violent security guards, insane platform promises, Chris Christie, and widespread popularity. He's started touring the country debating friend and fellow comedian James Adomian, whose Bernie Sanders impression only rivals Larry David's (but he actually transforms himself into the Democratic socialist with a pitch-perfect voice and messy wig). Their performance earned them a spot on CNN (for real) and two comedy specials on Fusion, the first of which premieres tonight. But Atamanuik's critically acclaimed show is just one hair in the dumpster of stray wigs that is a new era of Donald Trump-focused comedy. No late-night show or stand-up routine is complete without a Trump reference. Trump, who's been a fixture on Saturday Night Live for 10 months, himself hosted the show in October. One would assume there has never been a better time to be a Donald Trump impersonator, but it's the exact opposite. Wether you're a political satirist, a comedian, a writer, or some guy in a bar, it's never been harder to land a Donald Trump joke.
In the early months of Donald Trump's campaign, the jokes came easy. The skin, the hair, the ego, the reality show, the tiny hands—the gags wrote themselves, and they were funny. Then, as the campaign continued along, writers and comedians found themselves having to dig for fresh material. And Trump wasn't making it any easier. Seemingly writing his own SNL sketch, Trump would come up with the material before the comedians, most notably defending the size of his own penis during a nationally televised Republican debate.
"It's really tough. It's extremely difficult," says Mike Drucker, a writer for The Tonight Show who has been writing and performing comedy for 11 years. "And that's one of the things that a lot of us have been struggling with. Because in a way we're like, this guy likes talking about his dick. How do you make fun of that?"
On stage at UCB, Atamanuik stands behind the podium as Donald Trump talking about his sick friend. He's referencing this "sick friend" that the real Trump keeps mentioning during interviews—a detail that the media has missed, but which Atamanuik picked up on during exhaustive hours of watching the candidate's speeches. The joke turns this "sick friend" into an allegory for America, with the country being a sick child and Trump being a parent with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (where said parent gains attention for himself by exaggerating their child's illness). This joke, connecting a passing Trump rhetorical phrase to a mental health problem, clearly isn't your surface-level Trump bit.
"It's almost like you have to get to know his campaign intimately well so you can find every detail to latch onto," Drucker says. "It's like you're climbing a mountain, and he keeps pouring oil on the mountain. And you're like, 'I just need something that isn't funny just because he did it.'"
On February 29, after months of ignoring the business mogul turned populist Republican candidate, John Oliver—the leading political comedian in a post-Jon Stewart landscape—finally launched his all-out assault on Trump. This wasn't a simple joke about his appearance; it was an exhaustively researched, nearly 22-minute takedown of the man's finances, his rhetoric, and his branding. It's an example of the insane lengths comedians need to push themselves to bring down the man who, at the end of the day, has turned into a parody of himself. "In a weird way, as Trump gets more ridiculous and more flamboyantly performative, comedy is well suited to be more serious than the political candidate," says Jason Zinoman, a columnist who covers comedy for The New York Times.
Another strategy Atamanuik uses is not solely relying on what the candidate says—but on what he could say. "The only reason that I can calculate that [the Trump impression] has had this uptick in success is because the things I say could really come out of his mouth," Atamanuik says. "I also like to take the things that he's saying to their logical end. It's the difference between having respect for the person you're portraying and empathy." As is the problem in the comedy world, Atamanuik is convinced Trump is stealing his material. "I've been ahead of the guy by about a month on everything. I said he'd lose the Iowa caucuses in October. I started joking that we need to start using nukes two months ago. I said the phrase "Let's waterboard them" before he did."
The Changing Comedy Landscape
The last year has seen a drastic change in the late-night comedy landscape: Stephen Colbert has ended The Colbert Report, moving on to replace David Letterman as host of The Late Show, and Jon Stewart retired as host of The Daily Show, handing the reins over to Trevor Noah. Meanwhile, the leading voices in late-night political commentary—Samantha Bee and John Oliver—are hosting weekly shows rather than weeknight programs. "It's sort of unfortunate that this gigantic target showed up at the same time as there was this great transition in political comedy," Zinoman said. "The place that we've counted on most for topical political commentary, which is The Daily Show, I would say has been sub-par in skewering Trump." The gaping hole, critics and comedians say, is in the nightly coverage of mainstream media—once Stewart's main focus.
The Bill O'Reilly interviews, the feuds with Megyn Kelly and Fox News—Stewart would have cut down all of it. He would have shamed the media for its billions of dollars of free coverage. "I think it's sad that that voice is missing," Atamanuik said. "He would have spoken to the complacency of the media. Where he lives best is where the media is basically propping up Donald Trump. He would have had Trump on and just eviscerated him."
But this is also a different election in terms of comedic material. Whereas in the past two elections writers have had clear good guys and bad guys, things are a little more complex this time. "We're in this weird world where Fox News is fighting with the lead Republican, and Democrats are fighting with each other over supporting the idealistic candidate versus the realistic candidate," Drucker said. "Back in 2008, both sides had clear heroes—which made it very easy to make fun of both sides."
Can Great Comedy Skewer a Great Comedian?
Possibly the most unsettling thing about Atamanuik's largely improvised performance is how accurately it captures Trump's presence during one of his infamous rallies. Atamanuik, like Trump, can say anything he wants at the microphone. He knows he has all the power. He knows the people are on his side. He's looking for a reaction. Both men are great performers—and great comedians. "If he was an alt-comic, Donald Trump would be a funny guy," Atamanuik says. "And you could argue that his rallies are sort of semi-improvised stand-up routines. He's an open mic'er who somehow made it to the top." Trump, unlike any of his fellow candidates, is an objectively great comedian. He has a sense of timing on stage. He even figured out how to tell a dick joke without cursing, as Zinoman points out—something comedians have been trying to do since television's early days.
That's precisely what makes him such a difficult target—few people can outperform Donald Trump. But writers and comedians think they're chipping away at his gilded exterior. Atamanuik says he's had couples come up to him after shows and say they've changed their minds about supporting Trump, and he's received letters from people who watched his impressions on YouTube. Drucker thinks that by showing supporters that Trump is not one of the common man—by, for example, pointing out that little $1 million loan the candidate received from his father—it's possible to destroy his allure. Zinoman says Trump's resilience has humbled modern comedy, and in many ways challenged it to work harder. "I think the only way to defeat Trump is through old-fashioned politics, not comedy," he says. "If you're coming at him with comedy or any type of show business, you're probably going to lose."
During a particularly brutal moment of Atamanuik's performance at UCB, a young woman took the microphone to ask Trump a question. Before she could finish her question, Atamanuik had already condescended her Trump-style with, "You're a pretty little thing," and then mocked her voice. On stage, Atamanuik's Trump was clearly pleased with his own quick wit, basking in the laughter from the audience. After the show, as the audience files out, Atamanuik, now just Atamanuik, finds the same woman before she exits. "I'm sorry I made fun of your voice," he tells the young woman, shaking her hand. It was all part of the act.
Matt Miller Culture Editor Matt is the Culture Editor at Esquire where he covers music, movies, books, and TV—with an emphasis on all things Star Wars, Marvel, and Game of Thrones.
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