White House insists James Clapper will not lead NSA surveillance review
By Ewen MacAskill
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The White House has moved to dampen controversy over the role of the director of national intelligence James Clapper in a panel reviewing NSA surveillance, insisting that he would neither lead it nor choose the members.
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"The panel members are being selected by the White House, in consultation with the intelligence community," national security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.
The DNI had to be involved for administrative reasons, because the panel would need security clearance and access to classified material, she added.
After the White House and the Pentagon released their statements saying Clapper had been asked by Obama to "establish" the panel and report its findings, media outlets reported this to mean Clapper heading the panel and choosing the members.
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Medical Discount Plan In Nevada Skips Insurers
By Pauline Bartolone
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Health care and government groups in Reno came to Rice for help in figuring out a way to get care for the uninsured. She says she told them that the key stakeholders — including doctors, hospitals, government officials and financiers, as well as patients — would need to take some responsibility to make the discount plan work.
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"Our rules are very strict for our members," she says. There's a swift and straightforward penalty for any member who doesn't pay a medical bill, or who is a no-show at a medical appointment more than once without calling to cancel. "I kick them out of this network," Rice says, "and they can't ever come back."
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The negotiated fees that network members are charged must be paid upfront and can add up — particularly for people with chronic or expensive conditions like cancer. Some network members have to raise money through bake sales or other charity events to pay their bills.
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Starting next year, two-thirds of the Access to Healthcare members will probably gain traditional insurance coverage because the new federal health law requires them to have it. Some members will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay for it, Rice says, and the network is partnering with St. Mary's Health Plans to offer them policies that comply with the Affordable Care Act.
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Our Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis Wasn't Great, But it Wasn't That Bad Either
By Kevin Drum
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Yesterday Paul Krugman suggested that the neoclassical synthesis in economics—"the idea that we can use monetary and fiscal policy to make the world safe for laissez-faire everywhere else"—has failed its biggest real-world test: guiding us safely out of the financial collapse of 2007-08. It's not that printing money and running big deficits don't work. Krugman thinks they do. But the events of the past few years have shown that it's politically impossible to keep them going long enough to truly do the job of rescuing an economy in crisis. Central banks chicken out when their balance sheets get too scary looking, and national legislatures chicken out when deficits get too scary looking. It's obvious that national leaders simply aren't courageous enough to keep up the therapy long enough to cure the patient.
. . . Politically, as Krugman says, we lost our nerve before we finished the job. Nonetheless, it was a helluva lot more than we did in response to the Great Depression, and as Avent's chart on the right illustrates, it shows up in the economic data. The financial crisis of 2007-08 was as bad as the crisis of 1929-32—maybe worse, in fact—but the subsequent course of the economy has been way better and the aggregate amount of human misery has been way less. Avent looks at the long term:
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Our shift to deficit hysteria in 2010, a mere six months into the recovery, was unprecedented in recent history. Government spending has kept increasing for years in the aftermath of every other recent recession, and only in this one has it actually decreased in real terms. This was the result of tea party know-nothingism, and the entirely unnecessary human immiseration it caused is an endless source of shame—or should be, anyway. So it's easy to see why Krugman feels the way he does. But the tea party won't last forever, and in any case, even they weren't able to prevent us from acting rationally enough to stave off the worst. Economic progress may be slow, but it's not nonexistent.
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Undercover agents infiltrate anti-Keystone protests
By John Upton
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Earth Island Journal profiles the infiltration of peaceful Keystone protest groups by police and investigators — and in so doing paints a troubling picture of a government security force working in league with TransCanada:
On the morning of March 22 activists had planned to block the gates at the company’s strategic oil reserves in Cushing, Oklahoma as part of the larger protest movement against TransCanada’s tar sands pipeline. But when they showed up in the early morning hours and began unloading equipment from their vehicles they were confronted by police officers. Stefan Warner, an organizer with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, says some of the vehicles en route to the protest site were pulled over even before they had reached Cushing. He estimates that roughly 50 people would have participated— either risking arrest or providing support. The act of nonviolent civil disobedience, weeks in the planning, was called off.
. . . According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, investigators from the Bryan County Sherriff’s Department had been spying on a Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance training camp that took place from March 18 to March 22 and which brought together local landowners, Indigenous communities, and environmental groups opposed to the pipeline. …
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The new documents also provide an interesting glimpse into the revolving door between state law enforcement agencies and the private sector, especially in areas where fracking and pipeline construction have become big business. One of the individuals providing information to the Texas Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division is currently the Security Manager at Anadarko Petroleum, one of the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. In 2011, at a natural gas industry stakeholder relations conference, a spokesperson for Anadarko compared the anti-drilling movement to an “insurgency” and suggested that attendees download the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual.
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First 100 pages of Aaron Swartz's Secret Service files
By Cory Doctorow
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After a long wrangle, and no thanks to MIT, the Secret Service has begun to honor the court order that requires it to release Aaron Swartz's files. The first 100 pages -- albeit heavily redacted -- were just released. Kevin Poulsen, the Wired reporter who filed the Freedom of Information Act request that liberated the files, has posted some preliminary analysis of them. The Feds were particularly interested in the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto," a document Aaron helped to write in 2008. The manifesto -- and subsequent statements by Aaron -- make the case that access to scientific and scholarly knowledge is a human right. The full Aaron Swartz files run 14,500 pages, according to the Secret Service's own estimate.
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The heavily redacted documents released today confirm earlier reports that the Secret Service was interested in a “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” that Swartz and others had penned in 2008. In May 2011, a Secret Service agent and a detective from the Cambridge police department interviewed a friend of Swartz and inquired specifically about the political statement. The friend noted that Swartz and his coauthors “believe that the open access movement is a human rights issue.”
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California law protects rights of transgender students
By (BBC)
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California has become the first US state to enshrine rights for transgender schoolchildren.
A new law requires public schools to allow pupils from kindergarten to the 12th grade to access male or female toilets according to their preference.
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Massachusetts and Connecticut have state-wide policies granting the same protections, but California is the first to put them into law.
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Supporters of bill AB1266, which gives transgender schoolchildren the right to "participate in sex-segregated programs, activities and facilities", argued that it would help reduce bullying and discrimination.
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Giving up coffee to balance the books: how many lattes to financial freedom?
By Helaine Olen
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. . . A decade after Elizabeth Warren first revealed that the leading cause of bankruptcies was medical spending, Americans continue to discuss our financial woes as though we only have to give up a few habits to solve our checkbook woes.
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Where did the money go? Consider your own circumstances, and you're likely to see the most common increases in spending. During the same period of time, we spent almost 20% more on housing and 32% more on healthcare, which includes a more than 100% rise in the cost of health insurance and 41% of pharmaceuticals. Education? An astonishing 60% increase. Gas went up by 23% and auto insurance by 29%.
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Doing the math shows that I would have to give up 520 iced caffeine drinks a month to pay my health insurance bill, and I still would not cover all my family's medical expenses. As University of California-Irvine law school professor Katherine Porter told me in my book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry: "You can't latte yourself to bankruptcy. The bladder won't stand for it."
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So why does the latte meme, though a fallacy, persist? Cohen told me he believes the myth of the fiscally promiscuous American appeals on both sides of the political spectrum. On the right, it lands squarely in the camp of personal responsibility – the idea that we are fully masters (or mistresses) of our fate. At the same time, fictions about our supposed free-spending ways also fits into a long-running leftist critique of the consumerist society – the idea that somehow our spending on luxuries is morally wrong.
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