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11 February 21
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RSN: Mort Rosenblum | "The Stupidity, It Burns"
Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
Rosenblum writes:
UCSON – Nothing says America like Super Bowl Sunday, the annual gladiator pageant of patriotic zeal, beloved by all but sports-scorning grinches and chickens with amputated wings. Pandemic and civil war be damned. As in old Rome, bread (at least pizza) and circuses prevail.
Last night was classic. Tampa Bay quarterback Tom Brady, at 43 the stuff of legends, skunked the 25-year-old Kansas City kid, Patrick Mahomes, who gamely threw passes despite an injured foot against an overpowering defense. The Buccaneers creamed the Chiefs, 31-9.
Big bruisers’ eyes moistened at the outset as a singer belted out that line in “America the Beautiful”: “… and crown thy good, with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.” The theme was unity, from Joe and Jill Biden’s opening words to the $11 million-a-minute commercials.
Bruce Springsteen, selling Jeeps with scenes of down-home America, spoke home truths: “Fear has never been the best of who we are, and as for freedom, it's not the property of just the fortunate few, it belongs to us all.… We need that connection. We need the middle.”
The Super Bowl celebrates that bedrock concept we learn as kids: sportsmanship. Referees enforce rules set in stone; cameras keep them honest. Cheaters – players or officials – are reviled and punished. All share a concrete reality, and no one gets to declare alternative facts.
Late in the game, a Tampa Bay player taunted a dejected opponent with two fingers shaping a “V.” Old-pro CBS announcers were horrified on air. Moments later, a referee dropped his flag: 15 yards lost for “unsportsmanlike conduct.”
But as the game recedes into record books with no lasting impact on America and the world, we face the most important trial in history. That fair play stuff is beyond hypocrisy. Off the field, perfidious politicians harp on that vital word, unity, to mask the exact opposite.
Paul Krugman summed up in a New York Times column what Biden – and the rest of us – are up against:
“Some, perhaps most, of the opposition he’ll face will come from people who are deeply corrupt. And even among Republicans acting in good faith he’ll have to contend with deep-seated cluelessness, the result of the intellectual bubble the right has lived in for many years.”
Along with gun nuts, QAnon crazies, and such arriviste deviants as Josh Hawley, we have two-term senator Ted Cruz, who covets the Oval Office. At Harvard Law School, Alan Dershowitz called him “off-the-charts brilliant,” and Cruz has argued nine cases before the Supreme Court.
Remember 2016? Trump told reporters that “Lyin’ Ted” slept around, suggested that his father helped kill John Kennedy, and tweeted a distorted picture of Cruz’s wife next to a pinup photo of Melania. Cruz blasted Trump as a pathological liar, a rat, and a crook unfit for office.
Now, lusting after another shot at the presidency, Cruz grovels like a beaten cocker spaniel. The election was confirmed all the way up to the nine referees on the Supreme Court. The sore loser’s mob stormed the Capitol to lynch the vice president. But hey.
Cruz smirked when Biden rejoined the Paris climate accords to confront humanity’s greatest challenge. “He’s more interested in the views of citizens of Paris,” he said, “than in the jobs of citizens of Pittsburgh.”
Krugman quoted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s reply: “Do you also believe the Geneva Convention was about the views of the citizens of Geneva?” And, referring to Cruz but also so many others in Congress, he added: “The stupidity. It burns.”
But Cruz is not stupid, only reprehensible, repugnant, and willing to say anything that appeals to the base that votes for faithless legislators and governors who allow that fringe at the top to amass fortunes, putting their own livelihoods, and lives, at increasing risk.
Kevin McCarthy must be stupid; there is no other explanation. He recently dismissed the threat of QAnon conspirators, saying, “Q-on, or whatever. I don’t even know what that is.” If that’s true, he’s too dumb for office. If not, how can the Republicans’ House leader be dumb enough to say that?
The list is long. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician who opposes Obamacare and champions fossil fuels, sniffed indignantly when asked on Meet the Press if he would vote to impeach Donald Trump. “I will consider the evidence as an impartial juror,” he said.
But he followed with a what-about soliloquy of bad faith. The Clinton trial required truckloads of evidence, he said, but Democrats offer only a video. Clinton’s charge involved a consensual act with an intern, with no one else present. We all heard Trump try to subvert the Georgia election, then instigate the worst insurrection since the 1860s.
The problem is FMT, a new shortcut in our lexicon: Fear of Mean Tweets. Trump has been kicked off social media, sulking in silence down in Florida, and yet Republicans still cling desperately to his name, shamelessly seeking his benediction.
Hypocrisy was clear in an overwhelming vote to keep Liz Cheney as the Republican Senate caucus leader in spite of her stinging call for Trump’s impeachment. The reason is clear: balloting was in secret.
Watergate was a parking ticket compared to Trump’s high crimes. Richard Nixon resigned to keep a shred of dignity. Back them, Jonathan Schell noted in The New Yorker: “In a democracy, certain forms of truth do more than compel our minds’ assent; they compel us to act.”
That still applies to sports. When Tom Brady was accused of helping his team get to the big game in 2015 by deflating footballs to make them easier to catch, Deflategate cost $22 million over two years, and culprits were punished. Trump’s infractions are in a bigger league.
The Super Bowl trophy is named for Vince Lombardi, who once observed: “People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses or the problems of modern society.” And Sunday’s game was all about unity, diversity and looking large.
Amanda Gorman, the young black poet who lit up Biden’s inauguration, delivered a pre-game tribute to American heroes, off and on the field: “Let us walk with these warriors, charge on with these champions, and carry forth the call of our captains,” she intoned. “We celebrate them by acting with courage and compassion, by doing what is right and just, for while we honor them today, it is they who every day honor us.”
A wider world plays a different sort of football based on strategy, without gladiator gear or physical contact. In democracies and demagogies alike, leaders are focused on the Senate, not the Super Bowl. The trial will determine if they still recognize the America they knew.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Rudy Giuliani. (photo: Getty)
Trump DOJ Officials Sought to Block Search of Giuliani Records: Report
Zack Budryk, The Hill
Budryk writes: "The Trump Justice Department delayed a search warrant for Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's electronic records relating to Ukraine that had been sought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to a report by The New York Times."
Prosecutors were seeking the records in late 2020 as part of a probe into whether Giuliani illegally lobbied the White House on behalf of Ukrainians who sought damaging information on then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The Times reports that when they reached out to senior Justice officials in Washington, a necessary step in obtaining the communications, senior officials at Justice were concerned such action would be too close to the election.
The Justice Department typically seeks to avoid investigations steeped in politics close to an election. In 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was effectively reopening an investigation related to Hillary Clinton's emails as secretary of State just weeks before Election Day. Clinton, at the time the Democratic presidential nominee, has continued to blame Coney for her loss to former President Trump.
The New York prosecutors sought the warrant again after the 2020 election, but Trump political appointees again did not sign off on the warrant, citing the fact that Giuliani and Trump were still seeking to overturn the election results in multiple states.
The Times reported that career officials at the Justice Department were largely ready to sign off on the records.
Th blocking led to widespread frustration among the prosecutors, who were skeptical every politically sensitive investigation was being handled the same way after the election. Career Justice Department officials also felt there was enough reason to believe they would uncover evidence of a crime to obtain the warrant, according to the Times.
Senior officials ultimately decided to delay making a decision on the subpoena until after Biden was sworn-in as president. It is unknown whether the prosecutors have since obtained a warrant.
The investigation specifically involves Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who is currently under indictment in the U.S. People with knowledge of the situation told the Times that Firtash hired two attorneys with ties to Giuliani to lobby the Justice Department to avoid extraditing him, while Giuliani sought information on Biden and his son Hunter from Firtash.
Giuliani has not been directly accused of wrongdoing and brushed off reports Trump was considering pardoning him preemptively. However, as Trump’s presidency drew to a close he asked associates whether he should lobby for one, according to the Times, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The Hill has reached out to Giuliani for comment.
Timothy Blodgett, acting sergeant-at-arms, leads Congress members Jamie Raskin, David Cicilline, Diana DeGette, Joaquin Castro, Eric Swalwell, Ted Lieu, Stacey Plaskett, Madeline Dean and Joe Neguse to the Senate on 9 February. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
The Impeachment Managers Reflect a Diverse US - Unlike the Senators They Seek to Persuade
David Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "One side holds up a mirror to America in 2021. The other, not so much."
The nine Democratic prosecutors are men and women with multiple racial and religious identities, compared to a Republican caucus dominated by ageing white men
The nine Democratic prosecutors at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial are made up of men and women young and old with multiple racial and religious identities.
But each day in the Senate chamber they are trying to persuade a caucus of 50 Republicans still dominated by ageing white men.
The contrast is not obvious on television but striking to reporters in the press gallery who gaze down at the sea of faces – clad in masks because of the coronavirus pandemic – visible above wooden desks on a tiered semicircular platform.
The impeachment managers – all of whom are lawyers – from the House of Representatives are led by Jamie Raskin, who is of Jewish heritage, and include JoaquĆn Castro, who is Latino, Ted Lieu, who is Asian American, and Joe Neguse and Stacey Plaskett, who are African American.
Neguse, whose parents came to the US as refugees from Eritrea four decades ago, is the first African American member of Congress in Colorado’s history and, at 36, the youngest ever impeachment manager.
Plaskett is also making history as the first non-voting delegate to the House to be an impeachment manager. She represents the US Virgin Islands, a territory that does not have a vote in Congress, meaning that she was not permitted to vote for Trump’s impeachment on the House floor.
“Virgin Islanders are always looking for space to be part of this America and try to make it better, even without a vote,” Plaskett told the Associated Press. “I’m going to make sure that their voice and the voice of people from territories representing 4 million Americans – Puerto Rico and other places – are actually heard.”
The multiracial lineup of prosecutors is all the more resonant because they are detailing the actions of a mob that included white nationalist groups and flaunted regalia such as the flag of the Confederacy, which fought a civil war to preserve slavery.
And the rioters’ objective was to overturn an election that Trump lost specifically by nullifying votes cast by people of colour, most of which went to his opponent, Joe Biden.
Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Project, a group that campaigned for Trump’s defeat, said: “I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that the prosecution of Donald Trump and his white nationalist allies is being conducted by a very diverse group of Democrats encompassing gender, ethnicity and even religion.”
On Wednesday it fell to Plaskett to remind senators that when Trump was asked to condemn the Proud Boys and white supremacists, he said: “Stand back and stand by.” The group adopted that phrase as their official slogan and even created merchandise with it that they wore at his campaign rallies.
She also recounted how, on September 11, 2001, she was a member of staff at the Capitol and she might have been dead if the fourth hijacked jet that day had plunged into the Capitol, as it was believed to have been planned, instead of being taken down by heroic passengers and crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. She drew a line from that day to 6 January 2021.
“When I think of that and I think of these insurgents, these images, incited by our own president of the United States, attacking this Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election,” she said, enunciating each syllable, then pausing before adding, “our democracy, our republic.”
In those days Plaskett was a Republican and later worked in the Department of Justice in the administration of George W Bush, converting to become a Democrat in 2008, and winning a place in Congress in 2014.
She had studied in Washington DC, at Georgetown University as an undergraduate, then attended law school at American University, where Raskin was her law professor, which he noted in the Senate chamber on Wednesday was “a special point of pride” for him.
At the trial, the juxtaposition of Plaskett – the only Black woman in the chamber now that Senator Kamala Harris has departed for the vice-presidency – delivering this evidence was inescapably potent.
Bardella reflected: “When you’re talking about the Proud Boys being told to ‘stand back and stand by’, I think the articulation of that prosecution is made even more impactful and powerful when it’s being made by people of colour, by people who really represent symbolically the very thing that these people were protesting and trying to insurrect on January 6.
“It’s the very notion of people of colour in roles of power and prominence that white nationalists rebelled against. At the heart of all of this is the systematic effort by the Republican party to disenfranchise voters of colour and to disqualify legal votes cast by people of colour in this country. That is at the epicentre of this entire conflict.”
The impeachment managers have made a blistering start as they seek to demonstrate that Trump was “inciter-in-chief” of the deadly violence at the US Capitol. They have used the former president’s own rally speeches and tweets to show that he spent months pushing “the big lie” of a stolen election and urging his supporters to “fight like hell”.
But it remains extremely unlikely that they will get the 17 Republican senators they need for a conviction. The trial is likely to be another case study in how far apart the two major parties have grown. Despite some notable gains among voters of colour last year, Republicans have only one Black senator: Tim Scott of South Carolina.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said: “The diversity on the Democratic side is reflective of America: more inclusive, more diversity of thought. My grandmother used to say, the GOP [Grand Old Party] has built their castle on sinking sand. Their entire existence has been centred around white male privilege and lack of accountability for white men of means.
“So the visual on their side shows it is not reflective of America, only a particularly elite class in America. The second distinction is the argument. Trump’s defence team haven’t even met the standard of mediocrity, in my opinion. They have been absolutely awful. I do think that’s indicative that white men have literally never had to fully defend themselves.”
U.S. Marshals in Houston. (photo: Shane T. McCoy/U.S. Marshals)
US Marshals Act Like Local Police, but With More Violence and Less Accountability
Simone Weichselbaum and Sachi McClendon, The Marshall Project and Uriel J. Garcia, USA TODAY
Excerpt: "Detective Michael Pezzelle spent his last seven years on a suburban police force here amassing a body count. He was involved in shootings that wounded two people and killed five, including a teenage girl who died when he fired into a car she was riding in."
U.S. Marshals Service teams have killed an average of 22 suspects and bystanders each year.
Pezzelle faced no public consequences. He retired in 2018 and at age 47 started to collect a pension of $62,220 a year. Today, he trains police officers around the country to follow the kind of advice he shared on Instagram: “Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
His record of five shooting incidents would raise alarms in many police departments; studies have found that only a quarter of officers reported ever firing their weapons, and just 5% of those who did were involved in more than one shooting.
But Pezzelle, who declined to comment, wasn’t just a regular cop with the police department in Mesa, Arizona. During most of the years in question, he was assigned to task forces run by the U.S. Marshals Service, an arm of the federal Justice Department. The marshals describe their job as hunting down the most dangerous criminals in the country. Tommy Lee Jones amplified that image, playing a heroic marshal in two Hollywood action films, “The Fugitive” and “U.S. Marshals.”
In recent years, however, marshals have been acting like local police — only with more violence and less accountability, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project and the USA TODAY Network.
In cities and towns across the country, the Marshals Service has set up task forces largely staffed by local law enforcement officers who get deputized as federal agents. About two-thirds of the agency’s arrests since 2014 were of people wanted on local warrants, not federal ones, according to our analysis of federal data.
Though many police departments have come under public scrutiny for shootings, marshals and their task forces have not — even though they are more likely to use their guns.
The Justice Department has refused to release the kind of information about marshal-involved shootings that major police departments make public. So our reporters used news articles, court documents and police records to compile data on shootings involving the Marshals Service and its task forces from Jan. 1, 2015, to Sept. 10, 2020.
We found that at least 177 people were shot by a marshal, task force member or local cop helping in a marshals arrest; 124 people, mostly suspects and a handful of bystanders, died of their injuries. In addition, seven died by suicide after being shot.
On average, from 2015 to late 2020, marshals shot 31 people a year, killing 22 of them. By comparison, Houston police reported shooting an average of 19 people a year, killing eight. Philadelphia officers shot an average of nine people a year, killing three. Both departments employ roughly 6,000 officers, about the same number who serve in the Marshals Service and on its task forces.
One reason for the high level of violence: The Marshals Service’s rules are looser than those of many major police departments. Marshals are not required to try to de-escalate situations or exhaust other remedies before using lethal force. And marshals are allowed to fire into cars. Though body cameras have become routine in major police departments, marshals do not wear them.
“They are still policing like the way people policed in the 1990s –– and we have moved so far beyond that,” said Kevin Hall, assistant chief of police in Tucson, Arizona. He said his department pulled out of a Marshals Service task force last year because of concerns about risky tactics and the lack of accountability.
Marshals and task force members are even harder to hold accountable than average cops if something goes wrong. No marshal has ever been prosecuted after a shooting, the agency says. Task force members weren’t prosecuted either during the period we examined, according to the Justice Department. Local district attorneys don’t have the legal power to prosecute federal agents, including police officers serving as task force members; the Justice Department can shield them from litigation.
The marshals say they do vital work in dangerous circumstances.
“Given the nature of the criminals we pursue, and the specificity of our mission, there is a higher chance for violence than experienced by the ‘normal cop on the beat,’” said Nikki Credic-Barrett, an agency spokeswoman. “The U.S marshals have one of the most dangerous jobs in law enforcement.”
Fugitives are likely to carry guns and resist arrest, current and former marshals said. They argue that the agency’s shooting count is low considering that it captures about 90,000 people a year, according to five years of federal data.
“Do the math,” said Jason Wojdylo, a chief inspector with the Marshals Service and vice-president of the Federal Managers Association, an advocacy organization for government employees. “We are on the front lines every day in an environment that’s intense.”
Five marshals and task force members were killed between 2015 and 2020 while trying to make an arrest, our data shows, including one who died from friendly fire. Twenty-one were shot and injured; six of these cases involved law enforcement officers accidentally shooting one another. Houston says one of its officers was shot and killed in that time frame; two Philadelphia officers died in shootings.
Unlike the FBI, the Marshals Service does not send a team to investigate its shootings, relying mainly on local agencies to do the job. It outsources the work to avoid conflicts of interest, a Marshals Service spokesperson said, adding that agency officials review shooting reports to recommend changes to policies and training.
“It is pretty remarkable that the feds aren’t policing their own,” said Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Justice Department who has investigated several major police agencies. Use of deadly force, he noted, “is a burning national issue right now."
Marshals have helped capture some of the nation’s most wanted cop killers and drug lords. But we found that the agency focuses a lot of firepower on low-level suspects. About half of the shootings we reviewed involved people accused of crimes that did not involve serious physical injuries, including drug possession, running away from a halfway house or, in one case, hitting a store worker while shoplifting.
Since our data was collected, there have been several shootings involving marshals as shooters or victims. In one high-profile case in December 2020, a member of a marshals task force in Columbus, Ohio, shot Casey Goodson Jr. in the back. He wasn’t a target of the task force, but the officer said he confronted Goodson for waiving a gun while driving. The family of the 23-year-old man said he was shot on the doorstep while holding a bag of sandwiches.
A lawyer for Goodson’s family said the Marshals Service and local officials had been playing “a game of hot potato when it comes to liability” for Goodson’s death at the hands of a sheriff’s deputy working as a task force member.
“Who is responsible for ensuring that he doesn’t hurt anyone else in the future?” asked the lawyer, Sarah Gelsomino. “The Marshals won’t take responsibility for his actions.”
The agency spokeswoman declined to comment. The sheriff’s department did not respond to requests for comment.
Federal resources, local task forces
The U.S. Marshals Service dates back to 1789, when Congress created it to protect federal judges and carry out their orders. By the late 20th century, the marshals’ reach had expanded to chasing prison escapees and other federal fugitives. In 1981, the agency launched its first fugitive task force with police in Miami to catch people charged with state and local crimes.
In 2000, Congress authorized a permanent network of task forces; today, at least 64 full-time teams of marshals work with local police.
The agency has about 3,600 marshals and says there are more than 2,400 local officers on task forces all over the country. The main requirement for joining a task force is five years of experience in law enforcement. Officers whose departments are investigating them for misconduct can join a task force as long as “a written explanation regarding the circumstances” is submitted to the Marshals Service, an agency spokesperson said.
Many police departments welcome the task forces, which bring with them federal funds for overtime pay, access to high-tech equipment, and the jurisdiction to chase suspects across state lines. But task force members don’t always get specialized training in apprehending fugitives. That decision is left up to regional supervisors.
A third of the shootings in our database occurred in small towns and cities with fewer than 50,000 residents.
“With the marshals we get resources,” said Charles Kimble, chief of the police department in Killeen, Texas, home to the Fort Hood Army base. “We get resources that help us with crime and finding bad people who need to be removed from our communities and are wreaking havoc.”
During the Trump administration, at least five big city police departments, including Atlanta and Albuquerque, dropped out of Marshals Service task forces, complaining about the lack of transparency and local oversight. In October, pressure from police chiefs prompted the Justice Department to start allowing local task force members to wear body cameras.
Lax standards, scant accountability
One of the big differences between marshals and regular police officers is when and how they can use force. Marshals are authorized to kill someone who poses an “imminent danger.” That’s a laxer standard than those recently adopted by California and New Jersey, where taking someone’s life is supposed to be a last resort.
Marshals focus more on making arrests than on investigating crimes. Current and former marshals said fugitives are often on the run and can’t be found at the address listed on an arrest warrant. Rather than trying to get warrants to search additional homes, marshals prefer to capture their targets in public, a practice that can put bystanders in harm’s way.
A quarter of the shooting cases we compiled involved marshals or task force members firing into cars, a tactic many police departments no longer consider acceptable.
“You create this enormous danger by shooting at somebody who is driving a car down the road,” said Jonathan M. Smith, who oversaw civil rights investigations into police departments for the Obama Justice Department. Over the past decade, the agency told police in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago to stop firing at vehicles.
Last month, the Major City Chiefs Association recommended policing reforms that included encouraging officers to jump out of the way of a moving vehicle rather than firing at it.
Marshals do the opposite, our analysis found. Many vehicle shootings occur after task force members in unmarked cars box-in suspects, a procedure the agency calls vehicle containment.
Critics say vehicle containment creates unnecessary risks. And some former deputies say the agency relies too much on this tactic rather than trying to de-escalate encounters when suspects are in cars.
“The best thing that an officer or marshal can do is to seek cover, then try to talk the guy out and defuse the situation,” said Craig Caine, a retired marshal who supervised members of the New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force.
It was during a vehicle containment that Pezzelle, the Mesa detective working as a task force member, fatally shot 17-year-old Sariah Lane in the head, according to police records.
On April 20, 2017, Lane and her boyfriend got a ride from Brandon PequeƱo to go grocery shopping, according to police records. They piled into a Toyota Corolla, with Lane in the backseat and PequeƱo driving.
According to a lawsuit filed by her family, Lane didn’t know that PequeƱo was wanted for violating his probation. Task force members believed he had attacked an ex-girlfriend and was armed with a gun and a knife.
In a parking lot, a Dodge Ram with no police markings reversed into the Corolla, police reports say. Within seconds, more unmarked vehicles arrived. The Corolla was boxed in. Lane ducked.
Task force members started firing because, they said, PequeƱo was reaching for something in the console. “That’s when I fire the rounds, when I believe he’s going to start shooting at the detectives,” Pezzelle told local police investigators.
There was no gun in the vehicle, though officers found a knife.
Lane was hit in the back of the head; a ballistics report showed that the hollow-point bullet came from Pezzelle’s gun. She died the next day. Her family’s lawsuit contends that officers ignored risks to Lane and her boyfriend and should have waited until PequeƱo was alone to arrest him.
“The only people to blame is our police who are supposed to protect us,” Lane’s sister, Naomi JoAnn PeƱa, said in an interview.
Pezzelle and his lawyer declined to comment. But in court filings, lawyers for the task force members said they “used only reasonable and necessary force,” and were entitled to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects government workers doing their jobs. No trial date has been set.
The Mesa Police Department wouldn’t say whether it ever disciplined Pezzelle. But police there rarely face consequences for using excessive force. A 2018 investigation by the Arizona Republic found that Mesa police investigators substantiated excessive force claims in just three of 158 internal investigations since 2014. Our data showed that marshals and task force members in Arizona shot suspects or bystanders more often than in any other state.
Civil rights lawsuits like Lane family’s against marshals and task force members aren’t common; we found them in only 13 of the 177 shootings in our database. None has so far resulted in a payout.
Federal prosecutions are also rare, and face a high bar. Officers could be convicted only if they “willfully” deprived someone of their civil rights, said Rachel Harmon who served as a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Being reckless is not enough.
“You have to intend to use too much force,” Harmon said.
'The hunting of man'
Local law enforcement agencies often turn to retired officers like Pezzelle to teach new recruits about the ins-and-outs of the job, including how to arrest armed fugitives.
Pezzelle now contracts with an Arizona company, ZetX, teaching officers how to catch fugitives by tracking their cell phones. Sy Ray, ZetX’s owner, said Pezzelle’s classes are about keeping cops safe.
“My perspective is he is a great guy,” Ray wrote in an email. “On the other hand, If I brutally killed someone, had a warrant for my arrest, and didn’t want to be held responsible for my actions — I would not like him, not one bit.”
Pezzelle also has his own consulting business, Five Eight Group. Until our reporters inquired about it, the company’s website and social media accounts boasted about his shooting record and plugged coming classes.
It also sold $25 T-shirts with the company’s logo on the front. On the back is what the website described as “a motto to live by for armed professionals,” written by Ernest Hemingway in 1936:
“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
A new study finds that higher copays for prescription drugs leads to patients cutting back on medications and, eventually, higher mortality rates. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty)
Charging Patients Just $10 More for Medications Leads to More Deaths
Dylan Scott, Vox
Scott writes: "It turns out $10 can be a matter of life and death, according to a new study on how patients respond to higher health care costs."
The economic argument for eliminating out-of-pocket costs, in one new study.
Researchers at Harvard University and the University of California Berkeley examined what happened when Medicare beneficiaries faced an increase in their out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs. They found that a 34 percent increase (a $10.40 increase per drug) led to a significant decrease in patients filling their prescriptions — and, eventually, a 33 percent increase in mortality.
The rise in deaths resulted from people indiscriminately cutting back on medications when they had to pay more for them, including drugs for heart disease, hypertension, asthma, and diabetes.
“We find that small increases in cost cause patients to cut back on drugs with large benefits, ultimately causing their death,” the authors — Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack, and Ziad Obermeyer — wrote. “Cutbacks are widespread, but most striking are those seen in patients with the greatest treatable health risks, in whom they are likely to be particularly destructive.”
It is difficult to come up with a study design that directly measures the effect of health insurance on health outcomes. These researchers overcame that problem by tracking the prescription benefits for people newly enrolling in Medicare when they turn 65. People with birthdays earlier in the year would be more likely to face higher out-of-pocket costs than people with birthdays later in the year, given the way Medicare’s benefits are designed. By comparing the data between the different age groups, using as a baseline an estimate of how much the patients would have been expected to spend without any cost-sharing, the researchers were able to isolate the effect of cost-sharing on the use of prescription drugs and mortality rates for patients.
This finding challenges an important assumption embedded in American health care policy. In the 1970s and ’80s, the RAND Health Insurance Experiment concluded that small copays encouraged patients to use fewer health care services without leading to worse health outcomes. That helped establish a new economic argument for insurers to ask their customers to put more “skin in the game”: it would encourage more efficient use of health care services with no downside.
But that premise presumed people would be rational. For example, if they are being asked to pay more money for prescription drugs, they would cut back on less-valuable medications first. The Harvard/Cal study didn’t detect any such rationality. When costs went up, people just stopped filling their prescriptions for statins — high-value drugs that are effective in preventing heart attacks.
The researchers explained it like this: The way patients behaved when faced with higher out-of-pocket costs would suggest that they placed very little value on their lives. They literally stopped taking high-value drugs because of the price.
“I never thought we would get a mortality effect of this size,” Chandra told me. “We never thought people would be cutting back on life-saving drugs to this degree.”
If patients can’t make good value judgments, the economic argument for cost-sharing starts to crumble, and it starts to seem like eliminating cost-sharing — increasing the likelihood patients will continue to take the medications they need to stay alive — would be a cheap way to “buy” people more health. As the researchers wrote, “improving the design of prescription drug insurance offers policy makers the opportunity to purchase large gains in health at extremely low cost per life-year.”
Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all single-payer plan eliminated cost-sharing. That’s one way to do it. Chandra said that, alternatively, the government could create new regulations to put a limit on cost-sharing for the large employer plans that cover most working Americans. He said Medicaid is really the model; the 70 million poor Americans enrolled in the program generally have no out-of-pocket obligations.
Eliminating out-of-pocket costs would come with a price: Insurers would likely charge higher premiums to offset the loss of the copays and coinsurance that currently reduce their direct costs. But if the goal is better health outcomes, that is arguably a price worth paying.
“If we care about the sick more than the healthy, then we should be willing to raise premiums to reduce cost-sharing,” Chandra said. “I think a lot of American health care is catastrophic coverage to the healthy, which is fine. That’s valuable. But it’s not as valuable as first-dollar coverage for the sick.”
Media personnel in Yangon. (photo: Ar Kar/The Myanmar Times)
Myanmar: Media Workers Join Disobedience Movement, Stage Rallies in Government Capital
Min Wathan, Myanmar Times
Wathan writes: "Media personnel in Yangon pledged their support for the civilian-elected government on February 11 by joining the Civil Disobedience Movement as a sign of protest against military rule."
Thirty-six staff and personnel from the Myanmar Press Council, Myanmar Digital News, Daily Mirror and Myanmar Alin daily newspaper staged rallies at approximately 10.30am in front of the state press building on Thein Phyu Road.
This was in addition to 34 media personnel who had already been protesting as part of the movement in Nay Pyi Taw.
“We have been participating in the demonstrations against the military seizing power since February 8. Many more are joining us,” said U Ye Khaung Nyunt, an editor from Myanmar’s News and Periodicals Enterprise.
“We know what justice and injustice is. We are civil servants and we earn by virtue of the public. We want a democratically elected government. We want to refrain from doing what the public dislikes. We serve the public. This is our determination,’’ he said. - Translated
A refrigerator plant in Xingfu, Shandong Province, in 2018. (photo: Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times)
The 'Environmental Crime of the Century' Solved
Nathanael Johnson, Grist
Johnson writes: "In 2016, sensors began picking up an illegal gas billowing into the atmosphere from eastern China. The gas, CFC-11, was banned in 2010 under the Montreal Protocol - the international treaty to eliminate substances that wreck the Earth's protective ozone layer."
CFC-11 also warms Earth with 5,000 times the intensity of carbon dioxide. Years of efforts to protect the ozone layer might be reversed if the emissions continued, experts warned. An undercover investigation pinpointed the source of the emissions, and governments pressed the Chinese government to crack down.
Now, a pair of papers published Wednesday in the journal Nature show that the emissions rising from eastern China have fallen enough to put the ozone layer on course for recovery. It’s an early test case for international agreements policing illegal emissions, and could become a precedent for cracking down on other greenhouse gases.
“If we had been asleep at the wheel, and not in a position to tell the world something was wrong, it could have been a real problem,” said Stephen Montzka, an author of one of the papers and part of a team at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration that monitors greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting chemicals. And when Montzka says “a real problem” it’s an understatement: Without the protection of the ozone layer, the sun that warms our skins and feeds our crops becomes a blowtorch of blistering radiation. “If the ozone layer were to go away, life on earth wouldn’t be sustainable in the form we know it today,” Montzka said.
NOAA and the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment, an international group of researchers, operate a global network of sensors, sniffing the air from remote islands and mountaintops to detect changes in the atmosphere. Ever since the 1990s, when the Montreal Protocol started phasing out chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-destroying chemicals, CFC-11 had been steadily falling out of the atmosphere, until 2012, when the decline of CFC-11 concentrations slowed to a crawl. Scientists scrambled to figure out what was happening, poring over the data from the network of sensors. Two island-based sniffers, one off the southern coast of Korea and one of the southern coast of Japan, had registered a suspicious increase in the gas. It looked as if it was blowing out of a region in China where factories produce insulating foam — one of CFC-11’s main uses before it was banned. But the sensors drawing in chemicals off the breeze could only provide a general sense of where it was coming from.
“We aren’t pointing at a factory, we are pointing at a region,” said Luke Western, an author of one of the papers who studies atmospheric gases at the University of Bristol.
Still, it was enough to trigger an investigation by the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency, based in Washington D.C. It sent undercover agents into the region to discreetly ask factory managers what kinds of substances they were using to manufacture their foams.
“The people our investigative teams spoke to were quite blasĆ©,” said Avipsa Mahapatra, the organization’s climate campaign lead. “They knew CFC-11 was illegal, but its use was the norm for factories in that part of China.”
The reaction was swift. The countries that signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 take it seriously, Montzka said. They send experts to meet twice a year, every year, to review progress and negotiate changes. So when scientists reported something was wrong, they were ready.
“Not a lot of oxygen was wasted in negotiating the numbers or asking if it was a real problem,” Mahapatra said. “We saw unprecedented enforcement actions in China.”
And these new studies suggest the crackdown is working. Mahapatra cheers the success, but urges vigilance. “This was one of the largest environmental crimes of the century. China only recovered small amounts of gas — is the rest stockpiled somewhere? How was this being produced? Where were the gases coming from? We haven’t seen an answer to those questions,” she said.
It’s crucial that the world figures out how to effectively monitor and stop illegal emissions to protect the ozone layer and, eventually, the climate, Montzka said. Someday, these same techniques could be used to spot an illicit coal plant and lead to a raid that shuts it down.
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