The Nazis as students of America’s worst racial atrocities →

Fascinating look at how brutal, extreme racist laws in the US at the turn of last century (in many instances unlike anything else in the rest of the world at the time) were used as examples and legal precedent by Hitler and the Nazis in order to justify their own crimes. Jim Crow and the Holocaust are not equally horrific, but it's just as morally suspect to ignore the atrocities the US committed in the past, or the effects those have had since.

When Adolf Hitler seized control of Germany in 1933, one of his priorities was to create a legal framework for his vision of an anti-Semitic state. Thus began a meticulous Nazi research project on race-based lawmaking aimed at erasing the rights of Germany’s Jews.
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As they drafted their own laws to exclude German Jews from public and civic life, Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States suppressed nonwhite immigrants and consigned minorities to second-class citizenship. In private hearings, they discussed how the U.S. model for white supremacy in the Jim Crow South could be transposed to Germany and inflicted on the Jews.
The Nazis were keenly influenced by America’s laws forbidding interracial marriage. Dozens of states not only banned black-white unions but subjected violators to lengthy jail sentences. The harsh criminalization of mixed-race marriages in America set an example for the Nazis as they created their Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade German Jews from marrying non-Jews, invalidated existing mixed marriages and sent offenders to prison labor camps...

Just What The Middle East Needs — $110 Billion More In Weapons →

This weekend, President Trump will unveil a proposed mammoth arms sale to Saudi Arabia. The pro-Gulf foreign policy establishment in the United States and the Middle East will cheer it as an investment in a new security arrangement for our Sunni partners in the Middle East to combat extremism and fight against Iranian expansion. It was negotiated by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who has zero experience in foreign relations generally, or Saudi arms sales specifically. It appears the Trump administration is counting on the country with the worst human rights record in the region to enforce peace and security in the Middle East.
The arms sale is a terrible idea, and I want you to know why.
First, let’s look at what’s going to happen with these weapons. Piled on top of this enormous arms lot are precision-guided munitions that President Obama would not sell the Saudis. That’s not because the Obama folks didn’t like selling weapons to the Saudis — Obama sold more weapons and gear to Saudi Arabia in eight years than all other previous administrations combined. No, Obama withheld precision-guided munitions because the Saudis were using U.S.-provided munitions to repeatedly target civilian and humanitarian sites in their bombing campaign inside Yemen, despite regular protests from the United States. Thousands of civilians inside Yemen have been killed during the civil war, many by the Saudi-led coalition, and today, the country is on the brink of famine in part because the Saudis have intentionally destroyed transit hubs and key bridges, and blocked the delivery of humanitarian aid into Yemen. As we speak, millions of Yemenis are being radicalized against the country they blame for the civilian deaths: the United States. By selling the Saudis these precision-guided weapons more — not fewer — civilians will be killed because it is Saudi Arabia’s strategy to starve Yemenis to death to increase their own leverage at the negotiating table. They couldn’t do this without the weapons we are selling them...

More Than 300,000 Children Are Migrating Alone Worldwide →

Authorities have documented more than 300,000 children migrating alone worldwide over a two-year period, marking a dramatic escalation of a trend that has forced many young refugees into slavery and prostitution, the U.N. children's agency said Wednesday.

Opinion | Trump is totally delusional about what’s happening to him right now →

Trump's management style in a nutshell:

Trump unleashed two tweets Thursday morning responding to the news of the appointment, which was made by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein after days of deafening criticism. Trump claimed: “With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel [sic, or perhaps more appropriately, sick] appointed!” He then added: “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”
Separately, The Post reports that Trump is raging at his staff for failing to mitigate his “stumbles.” Why? Because “Trump largely thinks that his recent mishaps are not substantive but simply errors of branding and public relations, according to people close to him and the White House.”
But, despite Trump’s suggestion that he is being victimized by a witch hunt, and that a more adept PR strategy could minimize the damage, this is a situation entirely of Trump’s own making. And each of Trump’s actions leading up to this moment are rooted deep in Trump’s autocratic and authoritarian impulses; his total contempt for basic institutional processes; and his tendency, when his sense of grievance strikes, to slip into a delusional belief that he can overwhelm the institutional independence of his persecutors the way he might steamroll someone in a business deal...

How the Impeachment Process Works →

FYI

The Constitution permits Congress to remove presidents before their term is up if enough lawmakers vote to say that they committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Only three presidents have been subjected to impeachment proceedings. Two were impeached but acquitted and stayed in office: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 and 1999. A third, Richard M. Nixon in 1974, resigned to avoid being impeached...

First, the House of Representatives votes on one or more articles of impeachment. If at least one gets a majority vote, the president is impeached — which essentially means being indicted. (In both the Nixon and the Clinton cases, the House Judiciary Committee considered the matter first.)
Next, the proceedings move to the Senate, which holds a trial overseen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
A team of lawmakers from the House, known as managers, play the role of prosecutors. The president has defense lawyers, and the Senate serves as the jury.
If at least two-thirds of the senators find the president guilty, he is removed, and the vice president takes over as president.

Major Breakthrough On Capitol Hill: Government May Stop Making Drugs Expensive →

We will spend over $440 billion this year for drugs that would likely sell for less than $80 billion in a free market. The difference of $360 billion is almost 2.0 percent of GDP, coming to almost $2,800 a year per family.
Patent monopolies on drugs lead to the sort of waste and corruption that economists predict when the government artificially inflates the price of a product. In the case of prescription drugs these problems are especially serious since the gap between the protected price and free market price is so huge.
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The list of offenses by the pharmaceutical industry is lengthy: payoffs to doctors to push their drugs in articles and lectures, payoffs to generic drug companies to keep competitors out of the market, payments to politicians to make patents stronger and longer both domestically and in international trade deals.
This is why the provision in the Senate bill to have the government start picking up the tab directly is so important. While the government already does spend more than $32 billion a year on basic research through the National Institutes of Health, the Senate bill would support payments to gain direct control over the end product either by buying out the patent or paying for the clinical testing and bringing the drug through the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process.
In both cases, new drugs could be sold as generics. No one would have to worry about mortgaging their house to pay for a loved one’s cancer treatment, drugs would be cheap.
In addition, by making drugs available at free market prices the bill would largely eliminate the incentive to lie. The test results would be fully public so doctors and researchers could determine which drugs were most effective in specific cases, without the corrupting influence of corporate money. And, research would likely proceed more quickly since findings would be quickly available to the community of researchers, rather than being closely guarded secrets from which drug companies hoped to profit.
Realistically, this bill has almost no chance of passing in a Republican-controlled Congress. Nonetheless, it is an enormous victory for clear-thinking over inertia. Democrats are embracing a way in which the market can be used to better people’s health and reduce inequality.
It is the Republicans who support big government in the form of patent monopolies. And their goal is to make the rich even richer.

Congress Removes FCC Privacy Protections on Your Internet Usage →

Think about all of the websites you visit every day. Now imagine if the likes of Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon collected all of your browsing history and sold it on to the highest bidder. That's what will probably happen if Congress has its way.
This week, lawmakers voted to allow Internet service providers to violate your privacy for their own profit. Not only have they voted to repeal a rule that protects your privacy, they are also trying to make it illegal for the Federal Communications Commission to enact other rules to protect your privacy online.
That this is not provoking greater outcry illustrates how much we've ceded any willingness to shape our technological future to for-profit companies and are allowing them to do it for us.
There are a lot of reasons to be worried about this. Because your Internet service provider controls your connection to the Internet, it is in a position to see everything you do on the Internet. Unlike a search engine or social networking platform or news site, you can't easily switch to a competitor. And there's not a lot of competition in the market, either. If you have a choice between two high-speed providers in the US, consider yourself lucky.
What can telecom companies do with this newly granted power to spy on everything you're doing? Of course they can sell your data to marketers -- and the inevitable criminals and foreign governments who also line up to buy it. But they can do more creepy things as well.
They can snoop through your traffic and insert their own ads. They can deploy systems that remove encryption so they can better eavesdrop. They can redirect your searches to other sites. They can install surveillance software on your computers and phones. None of these are hypothetical.
They're all things Internet service providers have done before, and they are some of the reasons the FCC tried to protect your privacy in the first place. And now they'll be able to do all of these things in secret, without your knowledge or consent...
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When markets work well, different companies compete on price and features, and society collectively rewards better products by purchasing them. This mechanism fails if there is no competition, or if rival companies choose not to compete on a particular feature. It fails when customers are unable to switch to competitors. And it fails when what companies do remains secret.

Unlike service providers like Google and Facebook, telecom companies are infrastructure that requires government involvement and regulation. The practical impossibility of consumers learning the extent of surveillance by their Internet service providers, combined with the difficulty of switching them, means that the decision about whether to be spied on should be with the consumer and not a telecom giant. That this new bill reverses that is both wrong and harmful.

Reactions to the Republicans' Proposed Tweaks to the ACA ("Obamacare")

I'm still looking for a comprehensive review, but with such an important piece of legislation, it feels necessary to give some kind of analysis, even if it's preliminary. Before that, though, one thing screams for attention: I don't think I've ever seen a bill that's as hated by everyone. I have yet to see a single mostly-positive review of the proposed bill, from anyone across the political spectrum. This bill's far from a "compromise", where people may be unhappy about a few particulars but willing to live with it overall.

As for its effects, some seem quite likely with even a quick analysis:

Millions Risk Losing Health Insurance in Republican Plan, Analysts Say, Abby Goodnough, Reed Abelson, NYT

Millions of people who get private health coverage through the Affordable Care Act would be at risk of losing it under the replacement legislation proposed by House Republicans, analysts said Tuesday, with Americans in their 50s and 60s especially likely to find coverage unaffordable.

Starting in 2020, the plan would do away with the current system of providing premium subsidies based on people’s income and the cost of insurance where they live. Instead, it would provide tax credits of $2,000 to $4,000 per year based on their age.

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Other people likely to be hurt under the new plan are those in areas where the cost of coverage is high. Subsidies are now pegged to the cost of a plan within a specific market, but the tax credits in the Republican plan are the same whether you live in Alaska or Minnesota...

The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve, Ezra Klein, Vox

4. Adverse selection seems like a huge problem in this plan. The individual mandate is gone, healthy people can buy coverage at any time with only a 30 percent penalty, and eliminating actuarial values makes it simpler for insurers to pull the young and healthy away from older and sick. Death spirals seem very likely in weak markets. Republicans will fully own those death spirals.
5. The plan is strikingly regressive compared to the Affordable Care Act. Cynthia Cox estimates that a 40-year-old making 160 percent of the poverty line would get $4,143 in subsidies under the ACA, but only $3,000 under the GOP plan. By contrast, a 40-year-old making $75,000 would get nothing under the ACA, but $3,000 under the GOP plan.

And a more in-depth analysis (details on the method for estimating cost in the article): Analysis: GOP plan to cost Obamacare enrollees $1,542 more a year, David Cutler, Vox

We’re presenting an analysis here of the net financial impact of the Republican bill on premiums, after tax credits, plus cost-sharing. We estimate that the bill would increase costs for the average enrollee by $1,542, for the year, if the bill were in effect today. In 2020, the bill would increase costs for the average enrollee by $2,409.
We provide the figure for 2020 because that’s when the Republican tax credits would go into effect; we provide a figure for this year so that readers can get a sense of how the plan might affect their situation were it implemented today. Importantly, the gap between costs under the ACA and under the Republican bill would grow over time.
In general, the impact of the Republican bill would be particularly severe for older individuals, ages 55 to 64. Their costs would increase by $5,269 if the bill went into effect today and by $6,971 in 2020. Individuals with income below 250 percent of the federal poverty line would see their costs increase by $2,945 today and by $4,061 in 2020.