Kashana Cauley/NY Times:
ESPN Is Terrified of Jemele Hill’s Honesty on Racism
Let’s be clear: The N.F.L. players who refuse to stand for the anthem aren’t protesting the flag or the anthem; they’re objecting to the obscenely high number of unarmed black people brutalized and killed by police officers in the United States. When Jerry Jones says that players can’t be “disrespectful,” what he’s really saying is that black people are not supposed to complain that we are routinely killed by the police, even when unarmed. We are supposed to embrace the idea that our lives should not be valued, because floating the opinion that maybe we shouldn’t be killed for no reason might offend advertisers.
It’s also hard to reconcile ESPN’s decision to suspend Jemele Hill for not quite calling for a boycott with the outspokenness that ESPN prizes in anchors who are not black women, who say things much more offensive and only get a slap on the wrist.
Suspending Jemele Hill is the sort of desperate move ESPN undoubtedly hopes might attract more viewers, much like the network’s sudden decision not to allow an Asian-American broadcaster named Robert Lee to call a college-football game last August. ESPN’s subscriber base dropped to 87 million households in September from a high of 100.1 million in 2011, and the network has laid off more than 100 people this year in addition to 300 workers in October 2015.
Dylan Scott/Vox:
Trump’s executive order to undermine Obamacare, explained
How association health plans and short-term insurance could damage the health care
The effect won’t be immediate: Administration officials said they didn’t expect any new regulations to be implemented before the end of the year. But Trump’s order does present a long-term risk to the ACA.
“The clear intent of the executive order is to create a parallel insurance market exempt from many of the consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act,” Larry Levitt at the Kaiser Family Foundation told me. “This has the potential to siphon off healthy people with skinnier benefits and cheaper premiums, leaving behind a sicker pool of people under ACA plans.”
Sam Baker/Axios:
The fix: Congress can solve this. University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley, an expert on this issue, told me that if Congress appropriates the money for these subsidies, they would begin flowing again immediately. The problem is, Republicans aren't in the mood to do that without some big concessions from Democrats — and the Senate bipartisan talks aren't anywhere close to a deal.
The executive order: It's short. It's vague. It leaves critical questions unanswered. But it does tell us where this administration wants to take the health care system — what it wants insurance, and insurance markets, to look like. It tells us Trump will at least try to get there on his own. And that alone tell us a lot.
Be smart: Insurance can cover a lot and cost a lot, or cover less and cost less. The ACA said insurance should be reasonably comprehensive and accessible to people who need it, even if that meant healthier people had to pay more. That foundational view of insurance is what Trump's order would attempt to reverse.
Natasha Bertrand/Business Insider:
"If Facebook has no reason to think that it should retain the data (subpoena, court order), then it can make choices about what appears on its platform," said Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, where she teaches and writes about information privacy.
Citron said Facebook and other private tech companies have in the past argued, successfully, that they have free-speech interests and enjoy immunity from liability for the content posted by their users — immunity that extends to their ability to remove it if it violates their terms of service.
Albert Gidari, the director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said it's likely that Facebook has kept copies of "anything at issue as part of its preservation obligation" in light of special counsel Robert Mueller's search warrant and the House and Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas.
Gidari said that because there hasn't been any allegation against Facebook itself, the company has no obligation, absent a court order, to maintain information "that later may be evidence."
But the question becomes more complicated when considering the ethical obligations of a company whose tools were exploited by a foreign adversary to try to influence a US election.
Washington Examiner:
Nikita Khrushchev's granddaughter: Trump uses 'fake news' like Stalin used 'enemies of the people'
The granddaughter of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned Wednesday that President Trump's remark about TV stations losing their licenses is authoritarian and compared his use of the term "fake news" to the dictator Joseph Stalin.
"Here, President Trump defined 'fake news' the way Joseph Stalin defined 'enemies of the people': if they offer a slightest objection to his rule they must be wrong. And they must be silenced," New School international affairs professor Nina Khrushcheva told the Washington Examiner.
Included as a note that conservative press is not monolithic and not always on Trump’s side.
Dan Drezner/WaPo:
We need to talk about Luke Skywalker, frustrated mentor
The conventional interpretation of the Star Wars saga is that it is a tale about fathers and sons. I am increasingly of the mind that it is a saga about poor mentoring. Think about it: Obi-Wan fails Anakin, Palpatine fails Anakin, Obi-Wan lies to Luke (don’t give me that “different point of view” crap), Yoda fails to get Luke to stay in Dagobah to complete his training, and Luke fails Kylo Ren. This is an appalling track record, and it bodes ill for Rey. In the seven films that have been released, we only witness one example of competent mentoring: Qui-Gon’s tutoring of Obi-Wan. And even that was cut short.
I can only hope that Luke learns the ways of Jack Donaghy and does not give up on the crucial task of mentoring younger Jedi. Otherwise, I would find Luke’s failure to contribute social capital to his field of Jedi studies to be … disturbing.
WaPo:
Wealthy conservative donors and influential Republican lawmakers say they increasingly fear a historic backlash at the ballot box next year if the GOP effort to pass a sweeping rewrite of the nation’s tax laws falls short in the coming months.
At a two-day midtown Manhattan summit of the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers’ powerful donor network, GOP patrons, senators and strategists spoke in cataclysmic terms about the price they expect to pay in the midterm elections if their tax reform effort does not win passage.
They voiced concerns a demoralized Republican base would stay home, financiers would stop writing campaign donation checks to incumbents and the congressional majorities the party has built in the House and Senate could evaporate overnight.
To head that off, the same Republicans said they are waging an intense, multi-front effort in and outside of Congress and the White House to shepherd the endeavor to the finish line.
The weird thing is how unpopular what the GOP is pushing really is. The donors want it, not the voters.