The Making of an American Terrorist →

How we describe these events, and how we characterize those who commit them matters. There seems to be a double-standard.

After the shootings, much of the media’s early reporting on Dear emphasized that he had no formal connection to anti-abortion groups or other right-wing activists. The New York Times called him a “gentle loner who occasionally unleashed violent acts towards neighbors and women he knew.” Buzzfeed described him as a “loner” who “never smiled.” Because he was white and American and acted alone, Dear did not fit the accepted definition of a terrorist: He was depicted simply as a crazy person, someone whose actions could not be anticipated or prevented. His violence, in short, was spurred by mental illness, not political ideology.
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When Muslim Americans commit acts of terrorism, we hold ISIS and Hezbollah and “radical Islam” accountable for their actions, even if they are mentally unstable, and even if there is no direct connection between them and the groups that inspired them. We call these terrorists “self-radicalized.” It is how we see Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013; and Omar Mateen, who went on a murderous rampage at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando last June; and Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who killed 86 people and injured 434 at a celebration in Nice on Bastille Day. They did not go to a terrorist training camp, or join an organized cell, or attend an anti-Western madrassa. They learned to hate from a network of web sites and magazines and videotapes. Their madrassa was the media.
“That’s the way many terrorists today are radicalized now,” says Paul Gill, a professor of security and crime science at University College London. “They are not formally recruited or trained. Today’s terrorists go online and find the ideology that fits their personal grievance and passively consume the propaganda.”
Dear became radicalized in precisely the same way. But because the media he listened to advocated war in the name of a Christian god, and argued for an ideology considered “conservative,” he is portrayed as no one’s responsibility. In fact, as I learned from hours of speaking with Dear, the narratives he learned from Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones and Bill O’Reilly and countless far-right web sites meshed perfectly with his paranoid delusions, misogynist beliefs, and violent fantasies. The right-wing media didn’t just tell him what he wanted to hear. They brought authority and detail to a world he was convinced was tormenting him. They were his shelter and his inspiration, his only real community.

Stein's Recount Stunt Proves U.S. Has No Way To Verify National Elections

The details coming out of the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania recounts are stunning. If they're what's normal, the United States has made election verification impossible (if not actually illegal!). This isn't good. Democratic elections only work when we, the people, can trust them. One way of trusting the system is knowing that we can always just count people's paper ballots again, by hand, with multiple people (preferably from each of the campaigns involved) watching. Without that, various forms of fraud are much more possible (and therefore likely).

There needs to be a process and fund for recounts, at the state and/or federal level. What the Stein-campaign's-funded recount proves is that states are not prepared for a recount, either logistically or legally. For all we know, as unlikely as it may be, there could have been systematic tampering in a few key locations, which, if investigated, could mean one or more of those states went to Clinton instead of Trump. Since we can't (reasonably) prove otherwise, trust in the democratic process drops, and all elections are more suspect going forward.

The Electoral College Should Do What It Wants →

Even in the unlikely event that anti-Trump activists were able to round up the 37 electors required to deny Trump a winning 270 vote threshold, that would merely throw the election to the House of Representatives, which will be controlled by Republicans, who would likely install Trump anyhow. They would become more directly accountable for their decision to enable Trump in the first place, and Trump’s administration would rightly be further tainted. But he would become president.
Should a House controlled by the same party as the person who won 270-plus electoral votes worth of states be unable to install that person into the presidency, it would be a history-making event, but it would also be evidence on its face that the “winner” was too great a threat to our system of government to be allowed to take office. His own party would have rejected him. This is impossible to imagine happening in an environment where his Republican vice president, the Republican Speaker of the House and the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the country support Trump.
To the extent that what’s under consideration would be the greatest show of Electoral College rebelliousness in U.S. history, it would be unprecedented. But the assumption that it would be corrosive to norms doesn’t follow from there. Unprecedented use of constitutional powers can firm up important norms, and in this case it would serve as a reminder to future presidential candidates: Yes, you might be able to win by violating all of the courtesies and standards our political system takes for granted, but even if you do, your presidency will run its course under a cloud. Impeachment is an important power until such time as it turns into a routine partisan cudgel. This is no different.

Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste →

An extensive look at the lack of auditing inside the Pentagon...

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.
The study was produced last year by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants from McKinsey and Company. Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.
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In a confidential August 2014 memo, McKinsey noted that while the Defense Department was “the world’s largest corporate enterprise,” it had never “rigorously measured” the “cost-effectiveness, speed, agility or quality” of its business operations.
Nor did the Pentagon have even a remotely accurate idea of what it was paying for those operations, which McKinsey divided into five categories: human resources; health-care management; supply chain and logistics; acquisition and procurement; and financial-flow management.
McKinsey hazarded a guess: anywhere between $75 billion and $100 billion a year, or between 15 and 20 percent of the Pentagon’s annual expenses. “No one REALLY knows,” the memo added.
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But the McKinsey consultants had also collected data that exposed how the military services themselves were spending princely sums to hire hordes of defense contractors.
For example, the Army employed 199,661 full-time contractors, according to a confidential McKinsey report obtained by The Post. That alone exceeded the combined civil workforce for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development.
The average cost to the Army for each contractor that year: $189,188, including salary, benefits and other expenses.
The Navy was not much better. It had 197,093 contractors on its payroll. On average, each cost $170,865.
In comparison, the Air Force had 122,470 contractors. Each cost, on average, $186,142.

Secrets In Plain View: Obamacare Is Working →

Most people would consider it pretty bad luck if they had three inches of rain dumped on their city in a 24-hour period. That is, unless they had just missed being hit by a hurricane. That analogy captures how we should feel about Obamacare.
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This isn’t idle speculation. In 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projected that health care spending would take up 19.3 percent of GDP in 2016. The most recent projections show health care costing 18.1 percent of GDP this year.
That sounds really nerdy, but the difference between these two projections amounts to more than $220 billion in savings this year. That comes to $690 per person in savings or $2,750 for an average family of four. This is real money to most people.
One reason that the slowing in health care costs is not widely recognized is that most people are not studying the projections. While just about everyone living in a coastal city will know about the forecast of a hurricane strike, few people spend their time studying health care cost projections. This means that when spending slows sharply, as it has in the last seven years, most people don’t recognize the slowdown. They just know that health care costs more than it used to. This is the case of people getting hit by three inches of rain and not recognizing that they just missed a hurricane...

3D-Printed Guns Hit the Courts →

As three-dimensional printers have become widely available in electronics and appliance stores, they have begun to raise hard legal and regulatory issues related to firearms. The laws that govern firearms were not written with 3D printers in mind, and it remains to be seen how widely available self-made firearms will be treated by our firearm regulatory rules.
In September, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit grappled for the first time with this question. The three-judge panel rejected a preliminary injunction request that would have temporarily halted the State Department’s efforts to control the uploading of 3D-printable firearm files onto the web under Export Control regulations. Earlier this month, the plaintiffs in that case filed a petition for an en banc hearing, which is still under consideration. In the meantime, this post will review the court’s decision rejecting a preliminary injunction, consider its implications for the case, and attempt to place the ruling in the larger context of 3D printed firearm regulation...
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Typically, making one’s own firearm means starting with what is called an “80% receiver” or “unfinished receiver”—receivers being the component of the gun that the 1968 Gun Control Act deems to be a firearm, separate from other parts like the barrel or magazine. An “80% receiver” is a piece of metal that looks like a receiver, but requires some work before it could be considered a firearm (some examples of unfinished receivers are available here). Using drills, jigs, and other tools, craftsmen can lawfully turn these pieces of metal into un-serialized, untraceable firearms. But this takes a kind of skill and specialized labor that has so far prevented such firearms from being widely distributed.

3-D printers dramatically alter the significance of the exception of the 1968 Act. Now, anyone with the right computer files and a 3-D printer can make his or her own anonymous firearm.  The impact of this innovation extends beyond the United States, since any file uploaded to the internet can be downloaded anywhere in the world—including by terrorists or criminals and in countries with strict gun regulations.

The Migrant Kidnapping Epidemic Next Door →

Crimes against Central American migrants in Mexico—including kidnapping, rape, and murder—are one of the most systematically underreported large scale human rights violations in the Western Hemisphere. Most casual observers know that the journey is dangerous, but the extent of the dangers, the sheer number of victims, and the close ties to organized criminal groups are harder to see.
One reason that crimes against Central American migrants go unnoticed is that assigning real numbers to the scope of the problem is nearly impossible. Central American migrants are a shadow population moving through Mexico. We don’t even know with certainty how many Central Americans are on the move every year, although back of the envelope calculations suggest the figure is well over 400,000. This past year, around two-thirds of these migrants were families or unaccompanied children.
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Similar to Daniela and her family, most migrants don’t report crimes—since they don't trust the local police or fear being deported—making it hard to get a sense of problem’s true scope. But the few numbers that we have on kidnapping boggle the mind. A 2011 report from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission reported knowledge of 198 mass kidnappings that included 9,758 victims over just a six-month period from September 2008 to February 2009. A second report noted 214 kidnappings from April to September 2010 that included 11,333 migrants. And these are just those kidnappings that the Commission was able to document.
Add this up, and it starts to become a pretty lucrative side-business for groups like the Zetas that also control human trafficking routes. Migration officials and business leaders estimate that these cartels or cartelitos (little cartels) are raking in somewhere between $100 and $250 million a year from kidnapping migrants.

Ending Trump's Conflict of Interest Problem in Three Easy Steps →

Another aspect of Trump's seriousness as the nation's number one public servant is what he plans to do to avoid his businesses interfering with governing.

Many of us have been raising the issue that Donald Trump is apparently prepared to defy well-established precedent and continue to maintain his business empire even as he serves as president. For the last fifty years presidents have put their assets in a blind trust so that there would not be a question as to whether they were working to fatten their own pockets or for what they considered the good of the country. This also prevents the most blatant forms of bribery by those seeking to curry the president's favor. 
It is hard to see any reason that Donald Trump should not be held to the same rules, as argued by Jeff Hauser at CEPR's Revolving Door Project. But some have made the argument that, given his extensive holdings, it would be almost impossible to sell them off in the two months remaining until he takes office. This means that he could not avoid the problem of making decisions that will have a direct impact on his business interests.
Actually it is not hard to find a way around this problem:...