Obstructing The Investigation

Just wait till BK sees this

Thank goodness the FBI can do more than one investigation at a time. 

I've been talking about these guys for months.

 

 

By smiley 73guy on Tuesday, May 30, 2017 – 09:05 am

Damn.

 

Still cant believe the Awan brothers arent in jail. 

I wonder what they have on the DNC.

 

 

Brought this up in May. Good to see.

Also, just mentioned these clowns on another thread.

First off, Canova is a wackjob conspiracy nut: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-reg-tim-canova-theories-201...

DWS is no saint and I'm glad she was forced out at the DNC, but Canova is not a reliable source here, at all.

Also, why is it that conservatives go absolutely berserk when there are potential issues with Democrats, but when we find out that Trump's most senior campaign staff LITERALLY MET WITH THE RUSSIANS TO GET DIRT ON HILLARY, not a peep. Hmm...

SHORTLY after winning election as governor of California in 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger watched leaders from the state legislature stage a spittle-flecked, chair-toppling fight in his office. “I don’t know if the drama was meant for me because I was new,” he recalls in an interview, miming open-mouthed astonishment. A bigger shock came hours later. Two of the combatants, one a Republican, the other a Democrat, telephoned him from a bar. Sure, we fight about things in the daytime, the pair told the governor, a Republican who won as an action-man outsider in a Democratic state. But with night falling the party bosses wanted Mr Schwarzenegger to know their shared view of his proposal to have electoral districts drawn by an independent panel, rather than by politicians. A “horrible” idea that would cost incumbent members their seats, they growled. “Just kill this,” he remembers hearing.

It took Mr Schwarzenegger and allies several attempts to outwit California’s political establishment, but in 2008 and 2010 voters passed ballot propositions that handed the power to draw districts for the state legislature and for Congress to an independent body with no partisan majority, and including such folk as farmers and business-owners. In 2010 Californians also approved a “top-two primary” system, under which all voters—rather than party stalwarts—may pick candidates for state and federal districts, with the highest-scoring pair proceeding to the general election, even if they are from the same party. The explicit aim is to give candidates an incentive to woo broad coalitions that cross party lines, rather than merely fire up hard-core partisans.

Six years after leaving the governorship Mr Schwarzenegger could be forgiven for shunning politics. His offices in Santa Monica, a few blocks from the gym where he maintains his hewn-oak physique, would make a cosy retreat: there are film posters and body-building awards, framed photographs of him with Pope Francis and sundry presidents, works of art by Andy Warhol and others, and many movie props, including a life-sized crocodile beneath his pool table. He cut a lonely figure in the 2016 election, as an environmentally conscious, socially liberal, pro-immigration Republican. He backed Governor John Kasich of Ohio, the lone moderate in the Republican presidential primary. He has publicly chided President Donald Trump over climate change.

Instead of hiding, Mr Schwarzenegger is in the thick of a nationwide campaign against gerrymandering—when parties draw electoral districts to give their side an unfair advantage. The cause has momentum behind it. There are campaigns to put redistricting reform on the ballot in Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, and lawsuits are in progress from North Carolina to Maryland (where Democrats are accused of outrageous gerrymandering). Mr Schwarzenegger has committed to match donations to a fund that will help Common Cause, an open-government group, participate in a case at the Supreme Court challenging maps drawn by Wisconsin Republicans. The Wisconsin case will see reformers citing a new tool, the “efficiency gap”, intended to give courts an objective way to spot gerrymandering. To simplify, the measure counts wasted votes cast for each party, in hopelessly hostile or inefficiently super-safe districts, and identifies states where one party receives many more such votes (as in Wisconsin).

Mr Schwarzenegger has recorded a short video explaining what he concedes is the “very dry” subject of gerrymandering. In it, the actor compares the respective popularity of Congress, cockroaches and herpes, while noting that “the former Soviet Politburo had more turnover” than pre-reform California, which between 2002 and 2010 held 265 congressional races, of which just one saw a seat change its party control. His arguments are reinforced by film clips in which he variously looks startled, resolute or blows things up. The video has been viewed 25m times.

Political professionals can be a bit sniffy about gerrymandering’s importance as an explanation for government dysfunction. They note the way that Americans of like mind increasingly flock together, with the result that even when districts are drawn to respect county or community boundaries, Democrats will be packed into cities, while Republicans dominate rural areas. In states which have adopted non-partisan districting, such as California and Arizona, seats still rarely change hands.

The former Terminator can hold his own with wonkish sceptics. The Schwarzenegger Institute at the University of Southern California, founded to promote “post-partisanship”, commissioned studies that found that after the 2012 election California’s state legislators had more moderate voting records, while its candidates are unusually responsive to supporters of a rival party.

Time for a workout

Mr Schwarzenegger does not deny self-sorting effects: of course Californian districts become more liberal near the ocean, he says. But they are still home to some conservatives, just as some liberals live inland, and previously such voters were not counted. Strikingly, his main concern is not Democrats or Republicans “getting the shaft” in this or that state. His interest is in boosting political performance everywhere. Uncompetitive districts make legislators less effective, he says: to be precise, he compares politicians in gerrymandered seats to “overweight” people who should “go to the fucking gym”. As a governor he saw ultra-safe legislators in thrall to activists who controlled their re-selection as candidates, long before they faced general elections. He became convinced that if districts held just 10-15% more voters from the opposing party, incumbents’ calculations would change.

Gerrymandering is a 200-year-old “screw-up”, notes Mr Schwarzenegger, and must be fixed patiently, state-by-state. He remembers when bodybuilders were thought stupid or narcissistic, or to be “suffering from some complex”. Now hotels on every continent have gyms with weights. Make the right case for competition, fitness and performance, and minds can be changed

Two guys walk into a bar and call up Arnold Schwarzenegger......

Is there where we Google things and paste them?

All your friends are doing it

Science and technology

Gene drives

Resistance is inevitable

A promising tool for dealing with pests and pathogens runs into an old enemy

IT IS life’s lottery, blessing some and cursing others in equal number: the chance of a sexually reproducing organism’s offspring inheriting a particular version of a gene from a particular parent is 50%. Usually. But there are exceptions. Gene drives are stretches of DNA that change those odds to favour one parent’s version of a gene over the other’s. That version will thus tend to spread through a population. If the odds are stacked sufficiently in its favour it can do so fast and, within a few generations, become the only version of the gene in question that remains in circulation.

Researchers realised, soon after the discovery of gene drives half a century ago, that they might be forged into tools for eradicating diseases and pests. For example, a drive promulgating a genetic variant that made mosquitoes unable to host the parasite that causes malaria could be used to help eliminate the disease. If the propagating variant made female mosquitoes sterile, it might provide a means to eliminate the troublesome insects themselves.

Engineering gene drives to do humanity’s bidding in this way proved, however, devilishly difficult. The idea therefore languished until 2015, when Valentino Gantz and Ethan Bier of the University of California, San Diego, used CRISPR-Cas9, a recently discovered gene-editing tool, to make a gene drive that could be inserted anywhere in a target genome that they chose.

Those findings sparked concerns about the effects gene-drive-carrying organisms could have if they were ever to be released into the world. For example, a gene drive that somehow hopped from a target species into the genomes of other animals might wipe them out before anything could be done about it. A study published in PLOS Genetics, by Philipp Messer of Cornell University and his colleagues suggests, however, that those who would deploy gene drives against scourges such as malaria face a more immediate hurdle: such drives simply may not work. Just as insects and pathogens evolve resistance to new pesticides and antibiotics, so gene drives, too, may provoke resistance—and may do so far faster than many suspected.

Life finds a way

In nature, elements of the CRISPR-Cas9 system help bacteria to ward off viral infections. Some viruses replicate themselves by inserting their DNA into the genomes of their hosts. This hijacks a cell’s protein-making machinery, causing it to turn out components for new viruses. CRISPR-Cas9 selectively excises such foreign DNA, eliminating the invaders.

The excision mechanism consists of two molecules: an enzyme (Cas9) derived from a bacterium called Streptococcus pyogenes, and a piece of RNA, a chemical akin to DNA that is made up of similar genetic letters. This “guide” RNA will stick only to a section of DNA with a letter-sequence complementary to its own. The enzyme is bound to the guide RNA. The guide RNA is bound to the DNA. Hence the enzyme recognises the DNA it has to cut, and snips it at the correct location. By inserting the gene for Cas9 into an organism, together with genetic material that instructs a cell to produce the correct guide RNA, biologists can therefore use CRISPR-Cas9 to sever a genome at a specific point.

They can then insert at that point whatever payload of other genes they might like—to modify mosquitoes so they cannot transmit diseases, say—knowing that the cell’s DNA-repair mechanisms will subsequently kick in to repair the incision around the newly inserted genes.

Handily, the system works in any organism, not just the bacteria in which Cas9 is found naturally. To use it as a gene drive, all that is required is to include in the payload the genes for the CRISPR-Cas9 system itself, and to ensure that some copies get inserted into an organism’s germ cells—those that develop into sperm or eggs. This will mean that the gene drive is passed on to all of that organism’s offspring.

CRISPR-Cas9 gene drives have, though, a significant drawback. When the drive cuts the genome but fails, for some reason, to insert itself into the incision, the cell instead inserts new genetic letters to replace those cut away by the enzyme before it rejoins the severed DNA strands. This process often changes the letter sequence at the site. That means the guide RNA can no longer recognise it. And that, in turn, means the organism (and its progeny) are now resistant to the drive.

Dr Messer wanted to understand this process. To do so, he and his colleagues observed the effects of introducing a CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive they had developed into fruitflies—insects commonly used in genetic studies.

Their drive’s payload was a gene that encodes red fluorescent protein, a substance normally found in a species of sea anemone. By further genetic tweaking, the researchers arranged for this protein to be expressed, in particular, in the insects’ eyes. They thus knew that flies with fluorescent eyes carried their gene drive. Also, the guide RNA they selected meant the drive inserted this payload into the middle of a gene named “yellow”, thus disrupting that gene’s action. Flies which inherit a defective version of “yellow” have yellow bodies, rather than black ones.

After experiments with thousands of flies, Dr Messer and his team found that the gene drive successfully inserted itself into the insects’ DNA about half the time, producing flies with fluorescent eyes and yellow bodies. The other half of the insects nearly all had yellow bodies, but did not have fluorescent eyes. That indicated CRISPR-Cas9 had cut the DNA in the right place, thus disrupting the function of “yellow”, but had failed to insert itself into the incision. Sequencing the genomes of these flies confirmed that in virtually all cases the consequence was a mutation that rendered the flies (and would have rendered any offspring) resistant to the gene drive.

Red signal

The team then repeated their experiments with fruitfly lines from five continents. They found that the proportion of flies becoming resistant to the drive varied from about 60% down to 4%. Differences in resistance to the drive were not caused by any initial differences in the target sequence. That did not vary between the five lines. They must therefore have stemmed from other (as yet unknown) genetic differences between the flies. This is a worry because it suggests that even if a drive works well in laboratory animals, it may fail in the wild when it encounters populations with higher resistance. Getting to the bottom of what is causing some lines to be more resistant than others will be an important step towards the development of gene drives that can spread traits through a species, Dr Messer reckons.

Two further modifications of CRISPR-Cas9 gene drives may help. The first is to equip them with several guide RNAs, allowing Cas9 to cut chromosomes at more than one place. An organism would have to develop resistant DNA sequences at all of these to become fully immune to the drive. Dr Messer and his colleagues have made such a drive, containing two guide RNAs, and have found that it did indeed lower the proportion of flies that developed resistance—though estimates made with computer models suggest this is still not enough for the drive to reach more than about half the population.

The second approach is to put the drive into the middle of a gene that, unlike “yellow”, an organism needs to survive. This might be expected to disrupt the gene and kill the organism. But if the inserted DNA has, at one end, a replica of the part of the disrupted gene that has been displaced by the insertion, this can meld seamlessly with its counterpart in the animal, preserving the gene’s function and Cas9’s ability to recognise it. If the join is not seamless, though, the gene will fail and the animal will die. Mutant genes resistant to the drive will thus be unable to spread.

At least two groups, one based at Imperial College, in London, and the other at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are working on drives aimed at essential genes in mosquitoes and which use multiple guide RNAs. If they succeed, they will breathe new life into the field. As Dr Messer observes, “it is difficult to cheat evolution.” Whether it is impossible to do so remains to be seen.

T r u m p ’ s   L i e s

Many Americans have become accustomed to President Trump’s lies. But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them. So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office. Updated July 21: The president is still lying, so we've added to this list, and provided links to the facts in each case.

By DAVID LEONHARDT and STUART A. THOMPSON UPDATED July 21, 2017

Jump to story below

Jan. 21 “I wasn't a fan of Iraq. I didn't want to go into Iraq.” (He was for an invasion before he was against it.)  Jan. 21 “A reporter for Time magazine — and I have been on their cover 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.” (Trump was on the cover 11 times and Nixon appeared 55 times.)  Jan. 23 “Between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote.” (There's no evidence of illegal voting.)  Jan. 25 “Now, the audience was the biggest ever. But this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive.” (Official aerial photos show Obama's 2009 inauguration was much more heavily attended.)  Jan. 25 “Take a look at the Pew reports (which show voter fraud.)” (The report never mentioned voter fraud.)  Jan. 25 “You had millions of people that now aren't insured anymore.” (The real number is less than 1 million, according to the Urban Institute.)  Jan. 25 “So, look, when President Obama was there two weeks ago making a speech, very nice speech. Two people were shot and killed during his speech. You can't have that.” (There were no gun homicide victims in Chicago that day.)  Jan. 26 “We've taken in tens of thousands of people. We know nothing about them. They can say they vet them. They didn't vet them. They have no papers. How can you vet somebody when you don't know anything about them and you have no papers? How do you vet them? You can't.” (Vetting lasts up to two years.)  Jan. 26 “I cut off hundreds of millions of dollars off one particular plane, hundreds of millions of dollars in a short period of time. It wasn't like I spent, like, weeks, hours, less than hours, and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. And the plane's going to be better.” (Most of the cuts were already planned.)  Jan. 28 “The coverage about me in the @nytimes and the @washingtonpost has been so false and angry that the Times actually apologized to its dwindling subscribers and readers.” (It never apologized.)  Jan. 29 “The Cuban-Americans, I got 84 percent of that vote.” (There is no support for this.)  Jan. 30 “Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning. Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage.” (At least 746 people were detained and processed, and the Delta outage happened two days later.)  Feb. 3 “Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters are proving the point of the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” (There is no evidence of paid protesters.)  Feb. 4 “After being forced to apologize for its bad and inaccurate coverage of me after winning the election, the FAKE NEWS @nytimes is still lost!” (It never apologized.)  Feb. 5 “We had 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers and all we did was vet those people very, very carefully.” (About 60,000 people were affected.)  Feb. 6 “I have already saved more than $700 million when I got involved in the negotiation on the F-35.” (Much of the price drop was projected before Trump took office.)  Feb. 6 “It's gotten to a point where it is not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.” (Terrorism has been reported on, often in detail.)  Feb. 6 “The failing @nytimes was forced to apologize to its subscribers for the poor reporting it did on my election win. Now they are worse!” (It didn't apologize.)  Feb. 6 “And the previous administration allowed it to happen because we shouldn't have been in Iraq, but we shouldn't have gotten out the way we got out. It created a vacuum, ISIS was formed.” (The group’s origins date to 2004.)  Feb. 7 “And yet the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years, right? Did you know that? Forty-seven years.” (It was higher in the 1980s and '90s.)  Feb. 7 “I saved more than $600 million. I got involved in negotiation on a fighter jet, the F-35.” (The Defense Department projected this price drop before Trump took office.)  Feb. 9 “Chris Cuomo, in his interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave ‘service’ in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!” (It was part of Cuomo's first question.)  Feb. 9 “Sen. Richard Blumenthal now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?” (The Gorsuch comments were later corroborated.)  Feb. 10 “I don’t know about it. I haven’t seen it. What report is that?” (Trump knew about Flynn's actions for weeks.)  Feb. 12 “Just leaving Florida. Big crowds of enthusiastic supporters lining the road that the FAKE NEWS media refuses to mention. Very dishonest!” (The media did cover it.)  Feb. 16 “We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before so that's the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.” (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won bigger margins in the Electoral College.)  Feb. 16 “That’s the other thing that was wrong with the travel ban. You had Delta with a massive problem with their computer system at the airports.” (Delta's problems happened two days later.)  Feb. 16 “Walmart announced it will create 10,000 jobs in the United States just this year because of our various plans and initiatives.” (The jobs are a result of its investment plans announced in October 2016.)  Feb. 16 “When WikiLeaks, which I had nothing to do with, comes out and happens to give, they’re not giving classified information.” (Not always. They have released classified information in the past.)  Feb. 16 “We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban. But we had a bad court. Got a bad decision.” (The rollout was chaotic.)  Feb. 16 “They’re giving stuff — what was said at an office about Hillary cheating on the debates. Which, by the way, nobody mentions. Nobody mentions that Hillary received the questions to the debates.” (It was widely covered.)  Feb. 18 “And there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing.” (Refugees receive multiple background checks, taking up to two years.)  Feb. 18 “You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” (Trump implied there was a terror attack in Sweden, but there was no such attack.)  Feb. 24 “By the way, you folks are in here — this place is packed, there are lines that go back six blocks.” (There was no evidence of long lines.)  Feb. 24 “ICE came and endorsed me.” (Only its union did.)  Feb. 24 “Obamacare covers very few people — and remember, deduct from the number all of the people that had great health care that they loved that was taken away from them — it was taken away from them.” (Obamacare increased coverage by a net of about 20 million.)  Feb. 27 “Since Obamacare went into effect, nearly half of the insurers are stopped and have stopped from participating in the Obamacare exchanges.” (Many fewer pulled out.)  Feb. 27 “On one plane, on a small order of one plane, I saved $725 million. And I would say I devoted about, if I added it up, all those calls, probably about an hour. So I think that might be my highest and best use.” (Much of the price cut was already projected.)  Feb. 28 “And now, based on our very strong and frank discussions, they are beginning to do just that.” (NATO countries agreed to meet defense spending requirements in 2014.)  Feb. 28 “The E.P.A.’s regulators were putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands.” (There's no evidence that the Waters of the United States rule caused severe job losses.)  Feb. 28 “We have begun to drain the swamp of government corruption by imposing a five-year ban on lobbying by executive branch officials.” (They can't lobby their former agency but can still become lobbyists.)  March 3 “It is so pathetic that the Dems have still not approved my full Cabinet.” (Paperwork for the last two candidates was still not submitted to the Senate.)  March 4 “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” (There's no evidence of a wiretap.)  March 4 “How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” (There's no evidence of a wiretap.)  March 7 “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!” (113 of them were released by President George W. Bush.)  March 13 “I saved a lot of money on those jets, didn't I? Did I do a good job? More than $725 million on them.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)  March 13 “First of all, it covers very few people.” (About 20 million people gained insurance under Obamacare.)  March 15 “On the airplanes, I saved $725 million. Probably took me a half an hour if you added up all of the times.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)  March 17 “I was in Tennessee — I was just telling the folks — and half of the state has no insurance company, and the other half is going to lose the insurance company.” (There's at least one insurer in every Tennessee county.)  March 20 “With just one negotiation on one set of airplanes, I saved the taxpayers of our country over $700 million.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)  March 21 “To save taxpayer dollars, I’ve already begun negotiating better contracts for the federal government — saving over $700 million on just one set of airplanes of which there are many sets.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)  March 22 “I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems.” (Riots in Sweden broke out two days later and there were no deaths.)  March 22 “NATO, obsolete, because it doesn’t cover terrorism. They fixed that.” (It has fought terrorism since the 1980s.)  March 22 “Well, now, if you take a look at the votes, when I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong — in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly and/or illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people.” (There's no evidence of widespread voter fraud.)  March 29 “Remember when the failing @nytimes apologized to its subscribers, right after the election, because their coverage was so wrong. Now worse!” (It didn't apologize.)  March 31 “We have a lot of plants going up now in Michigan that were never going to be there if I — if I didn’t win this election, those plants would never even think about going back. They were gone.” (These investments were already planned.)  April 2 “And I was totally opposed to the war in the Middle East which I think finally has been proven, people tried very hard to say I wasn’t but you’ve seen that it is now improving.” (He was for an invasion before he was against it.)  April 2 “Now, my last tweet — you know, the one that you are talking about, perhaps — was the one about being, in quotes, wiretapped, meaning surveilled. Guess what, it is turning out to be true.” (There is still no evidence.)  April 5 “You have many states coming up where they’re going to have no insurance company. O.K.? It’s already happened in Tennessee. It’s happening in Kentucky. Tennessee only has half coverage. Half the state is gone. They left.” (Every marketplace region in Tennessee had at least one insurer.)  April 6 “If you look at the kind of cost-cutting we’ve been able to achieve with the military and at the same time ordering vast amounts of equipment — saved hundreds of millions of dollars on airplanes, and really billions, because if you take that out over a period of years it’s many billions of dollars — I think we’ve had a tremendous success.” (Much of the price cuts were already projected.)  April 11 “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late. I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve.” (He knew Steve Bannon since 2011.)  April 12 “You can't do it faster, because they're obstructing. They're obstructionists. So I have people — hundreds of people that we're trying to get through. I mean you have — you see the backlog. We can't get them through.” (At this point, he had not nominated anyone for hundreds of positions.)  April 12 “The New York Times said the word wiretapped in the headline of the first edition. Then they took it out of there fast when they realized.” (There were separate headlines for print and web, but neither were altered.)  April 12 “The secretary general and I had a productive discussion about what more NATO can do in the fight against terrorism. I complained about that a long time ago and they made a change, and now they do fight terrorism.” (NATO has been engaged in counterterrorism efforts since the 1980s.)  April 12 “Mosul was supposed to last for a week and now they’ve been fighting it for many months and so many more people died.” (The campaign was expected to take months.)  April 16 “Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!” (There's no evidence of paid protesters.)  April 18 “The fake media goes, ‘Donald Trump changed his stance on China.’ I haven’t changed my stance.” (He did.)  April 21 “On 90 planes I saved $725 million. It's actually a little bit more than that, but it's $725 million.” (Much of the price cuts were already projected.)  April 21 “When WikiLeaks came out ... never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it.” (He criticized it as early as 2010.)  April 27 “I want to help our miners while the Democrats are blocking their healthcare.” (The bill to extend health benefits for certain coal miners was introduced by a Democrat and was co-sponsored by mostly Democrats.)  April 28 “The trade deficit with Mexico is close to $70 billion, even with Canada it’s $17 billion trade deficit with Canada.” (The U.S. had an $8.1 billion trade surplus, not deficit, with Canada in 2016.)  April 28 “She's running against someone who's going to raise your taxes to the sky, destroy your health care, and he's for open borders — lots of crime.” (Those are not Jon Ossoff's positions.)  April 28 “The F-35 fighter jet program — it was way over budget. I’ve saved $725 million plus, just by getting involved in the negotiation.” (Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)  April 29 “As you know, I've been a big critic of China, and I've been talking about currency manipulation for a long time. But I have to tell you that during the election, number one, they stopped.” (China stopped years ago.)  April 29 “I've already saved more than $725 million on a simple order of F-35 planes. I got involved in the negotiation.” (Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)  April 29 “We're also getting NATO countries to finally step up and contribute their fair share. They've begun to increase their contributions by billions of dollars, but we are not going to be satisfied until everyone pays what they owe.” (The deal was struck in 2014.)  April 29 “When they talk about currency manipulation, and I did say I would call China, if they were, a currency manipulator, early in my tenure. And then I get there. Number one, they — as soon as I got elected, they stopped.” (China stopped in 2014.)  April 29 “I was negotiating to reduce the price of the big fighter jet contract, the F-35, which was totally out of control. I will save billions and billions and billions of dollars.” (Most of the cuts were planned before Trump.)  April 29 “I think our side's been proven very strongly. And everybody's talking about it.” (There's still no evidence Trump's phones were tapped.)  May 1 “Well, we are protecting pre-existing conditions. And it'll be every good — bit as good on pre-existing conditions as Obamacare.” (The bill weakens protections for people with pre-existing conditions.)  May 1 “The F-35 fighter jet — I saved — I got involved in the negotiation. It's 2,500 jets. I negotiated for 90 planes, lot 10. I got $725 million off the price.” (Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)  May 1 “First of all, since I started running, they haven't increased their — you know, they have not manipulated their currency. I think that was out of respect to me and the campaign.” (China stopped years ago.)  May 2 “I love buying those planes at a reduced price. I have been really — I have cut billions — I have to tell you this, and they can check, right, Martha? I have cut billions and billions of dollars off plane contracts sitting here.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)  May 4 “Number two, they’re actually not a currency [manipulator]. You know, since I’ve been talking about currency manipulation with respect to them and other countries, they stopped.” (China stopped years ago.)  May 4 “We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world.” (We're not.)  May 4 “Nobody cares about my tax return except for the reporters.” (Polls show most Americans do care.)  May 8 “You know we’ve gotten billions of dollars more in NATO than we’re getting. All because of me.” (The deal was struck in 2014.)  May 8 “But when I did his show, which by the way was very highly rated. It was high — highest rating. The highest rating he’s ever had.” (Colbert's Late Show debut had nearly two million more viewers.)  May 8 “Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows — there is ‘no evidence’ of collusion w/ Russia and Trump.” (Clapper only said he wasn't aware of an investigation.)  May 12 “Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election.” (The F.B.I. was investigating before the election.)  May 12 “When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?” (Clapper said he wouldn't have been told of an investigation into collusion.)  May 13 “I'm cutting the price of airplanes with Lockheed.” (The cost cuts were planned before he became president.)  May 26 “Just arrived in Italy for the G7. Trip has been very successful. We made and saved the USA many billions of dollars and millions of jobs.” (He's referencing an arms deal that's not enacted and other apparent deals that weren't announced on the trip.)  June 1 “China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020.” (The agreement doesn’t allow or disallow building coal plants.)  June 1 “I’ve just returned from a trip overseas where we concluded nearly $350 billion of military and economic development for the United States, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.” (Trump’s figures are inflated and premature.)  June 4 “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’” (The mayor was specifically talking about the enlarged police presence on the streets.)  June 5 “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.” (Trump signed this version of the travel ban, not the Justice Department.)  June 20 “Well, the Special Elections are over and those that want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN are 5 and O!” (Republicans have won four special elections this year, while a Democrat won one.)  June 21 “They all say it's 'nonbinding.' Like hell it's nonbinding.” (The Paris climate agreement is nonbinding — and Trump said so in his speech announcing the withdrawal.)  June 21 “Right now, we are one of the highest-taxed nations in the world.” (We're not.)  June 21 “You have a gang called MS-13. ... We are moving them out of the country by the thousands, by the thousands.” (The real number of gang members deported is smaller.)  June 21 “Your insurance companies have all fled the state of Iowa.” (They haven't.)  June 21 “If [farmers] have a puddle in the middle of their field ... it's considered a lake and you can't touch it. ... We got rid of that one, too, O.K.?” (The Obama environmental rule to limit pollution in the country’s waters explicitly excludes puddles.)  June 21 “Gary Cohn just paid $200 million in tax in order to take this job, by the way.” (Cohn sold Goldman Sachs stock worth $220 million.)  June 21 “We’re 5 and 0.” (Republicans have won four special elections this year, while a Democrat won one.)  June 21 “Last week a brand-new coal mine just opened in the state of Pennsylvania, first time in decades, decades.” (Another coal mine opened in 2014.)  June 22 “Former Homeland Security Advisor Jeh Johnson is latest top intelligence official to state there was no grand scheme between Trump & Russia.” (Johnson, who had a different title, didn't say that.)  June 23 “We are 5 and 0 ... in these special elections.” (Republicans have won four special elections this year, while a Democrat won one.)  June 27 “Ratings way down!” (CNN's ratings were at a five-year high at the time.)  June 28 “Democrats purposely misstated Medicaid under new Senate bill — actually goes up.” (Senate bill would have cut the program deeply.)  June 29 “General Kelly and his whole group — they’ve gotten rid of 6,000 so far.” (The real number of MS-13 gang members who have been deported is smaller.)  July 6 “As a result of this insistence, billions of dollars more have begun to pour into NATO.” (NATO countries agreed to meet defense spending requirements in 2014.)  July 17 “We’ve signed more bills — and I’m talking about through the legislature — than any president, ever.” (Clinton, Carter, Truman, and F.D.R. had signed more at the same point.)  July 19 “Um, the Russian investigation — it’s not an investigation, it’s not on me — you know, they’re looking at a lot of things.” (It is.)  July 19 “I heard that Harry Truman was first, and then we beat him. These are approved by Congress. These are not just executive orders.” (Presidents Clinton, Carter, Truman, and F.D.R. each had signed more legislation than Trump at the same point in their terms.)  July 19 “But the F.B.I. person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting.” (He reports directly to the attorney general.)

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html

Please post links to sources of copied material.

^ Ha!

Dead Dead.

Nice

All my articles are from the economist 

just for future reference 

United States

Origin of the specious

Trump memes

A dive into the primordial swamp that bred a tweet by Donald Trump

On the morning of July 2nd, Donald Trump tweeted a video showing himself wrestling a man with a CNN logo for a head to the ground and pummelling him. “#FraudNewsCNN #FNN,” added the president. Mr Trump, a septuagenarian not known for his technical skills, almost certainly did not make the video himself. A user on Reddit, a social-discussion website, going by the moniker of “HanAssholeSolo”, swiftly took credit. The Economist has downloaded and trudged through 1.5m posts made since January 1st 2016 on the forum Mr AssholeSolo frequented, which is a cesspit of bigotry and hatred (“500,000 dead Muslims is a good start”, he wrote in one post). The president, known to be fond of adulation, could find plenty of it here. Some users refer to him as “God emperor”, a phrase that appears more than 6,000 times in post titles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21724861-dive-primordial-sw...

 

United States

Lexington

Teenage grit

A changing summer job market, seen from Reagan’s boyhood home

THE first time that Ronald Reagan appeared on a newspaper front page was as a teenage lifeguard, hailed for saving a drowning man from a fast-flowing river. The future president was not yet “Ronnie”, America’s reassuring, twinkling, optimist-in-chief. He was still “Dutch”, to use his childhood nickname: a slim, bespectacled youth, serious to the point of priggishness. A biographer, Garry Wills, unearthed a high school yearbook in which Reagan scolded swimmers he pulled from the cool, treacherous Rock River, near his boyhood home of Dixon, Illinois. “A big hippopotamus with a sandwich in each hand, and some firewater tanked away,” Reagan wrote of one. Each summer from 1927 to 1932 the teenager would rise early to collect a 300lb block of ice and hamburger supplies before driving in his employer’s van to the river, working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The post offered responsibility, money for college and stability in a childhood blighted by frequent moves, brushes with financial ruin and his father’s drinking. There was glory, too: in all he saved 77 lives. A picture of the Rock River hung in Reagan’s Oval Office.

Strikingly often, self-made Americans have stories to share about teenage jobs, involving alarm clocks clanging before dawn, aching muscles, stern bosses and soul-fortifying hours of boredom. In 1978, a record year in the annals of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, 72% of all teenagers were employed in July, the peak month for youthful ice-cream scooping, shelf-stacking and burger-flipping. But for two decades the traditional summer job has been in decline, with 43% of teens working in July 2016.

Lexington decided to head to Dixon to ask why. This being an anxious and litigious age, Reagan’s river beach is closed now. But the YMCA that trained him in lifesaving (and where he paraded as a drum major) still hires lifeguards. This summer finds one of them, Lexi Nelson, 18, between high school and community college, where she will study dental hygiene. Perhaps a quarter of her friends are working this season. The rest have mixed views of her job, which can start at five in the morning. “When I get up early they bash on it,” Miss Nelson reports, “but most of the time they’re jealous of the money.” Lifeguarding in an indoor pool is not the most exciting job, she concedes, but that teaches patience.

The story of the vanishing job is not a simple one. Ask teenagers, their employers and the mayor of Dixon—a business-owner who hires teenagers each summer at a pair of sandwich shops and a frozen yogurt store—and they point to two main causes: well-meaning adults and a changing economy.

Reagan’s stirring example is still taught in Dixon, a trim, conservative town, with an equestrian statue of the president on its riverfront and loudspeakers on lamp-posts that play the Carpenters and other easy-listening classics. But many parents discourage teens from working, it is widely agreed. Parents instead tell their children to study, take summer courses, volunteer or practise for sports that might help them compete for college places.

Local keepers of the Reagan flame see a town still filled with opportunities for self-advancement. Patrick Gorman, director of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home, a museum that preserves a house rented by the president’s family in Dixon, is confident that anyone who wants a job can find one, even if it might be “detasseling” corn—picking pollen tassels from growing corn cobs, an arduous summer task traditionally reserved for the young, involving cold mornings, baking middays and scratches from corn leaves. Mr Gorman easily found six teenagers to volunteer as museum guides: “Good kids migrate to good kids,” he beams.

Not all teenagers have the same needs. The three lifeguards interviewed at the YMCA are either college-bound or plan to be, and part-time work suits them. Bosses at the “Y” note that youngsters with only a high-school education typically have a different goal: landing a full-time job with health insurance and benefits.

Liandro Arellano Jr., Dixon’s mayor, argues that teenage job prospects have been complicated by well-intentioned politicians raising the state-wide minimum wage to $8.25 an hour. For that pay it is both tempting and possible to hire college students or older workers with a proven job record, references and the ability to turn up on time, says Mr Arellano, a Republican. The youngest workers, below 18, earn $7.75 but need more training, and those aged 15 need work permits and cannot touch slicers or big bread knives. Larger economic forces have buffeted Dixon, too. After the credit crunch of 2008, a flood of laid-off factory workers and experienced adults wanted to work for Mr Arellano. With unemployment rates now below 5% in Dixon, applicants for entry-level jobs are getting younger again. Teenagers can be fine summer helpers, he says—“They’re very excited about their first job”—though keeping them off smartphones is “a constant battle”.

Buy that teenager an alarm clock

Nationwide, affluent white teenagers have historically been much more likely to take summer jobs than lower-income, non-white youths. Family connections help, and it is easier to find work at a golf course or tennis club than amid inner-city blight. Though big cities like Chicago, 100 miles from Dixon, have government-run schemes that prod employers to offer summer work, demand exceeds supply: last year 77,000 Chicago youths applied for 31,000 summer jobs or internships. For all that, some of Mr Arellano’s worst staff have been youngsters who do not need the money or want a job reference: they are the ones who quit without warning to go on a family holiday. Well-off parents are not always “super-supportive”, he sighs.

Some parents may question the value of manual work in an age of high-tech change. But an elite education counts for little without self-discipline and resilience. Drudgery can teach humility: when hauling boxes, a brain full of algebra matters less than a teen’s muscles. At best, it can breach the social barriers that harm democracy. Summer jobs are called all-American for a reason.

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21724850-it-striking-how-of...

United States

Donald Trump junior and his e-mails

Very high level and sensitive

WASHINGTON, DC

This Russia scandal is different, but it probably will not result in prosecutions

“THE Crown prosecutor of Russia...offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump.” So wrote Rob Goldstone, a British tabloid-journalist-turned-publicist, in an e-mail to Donald Trump junior, son of the then presidential candidate, on June 3rd 2016. “Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” replied Donald junior, 20 minutes later.

The following day brought another exchange. “Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow,” wrote Mr Goldstone, who knew the younger Mr Trump from the Miss Universe contest, which the Trump family used to own. “How about 3 at our offices? Thanks rob appreciate you helping set it up,” came the reply. The meeting with the Russian lawyer duly took place on June 9th in Trump Tower in New York. Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager at the time, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and now senior adviser in the White House, went along too. Both at first forgot to mention the meeting, which was uncovered by the New York Times, on their respective legal disclosures.

The rolling scandal over Russian interference in last year’s presidential election is made from so many fragments that the whole is hard to see. Before Mr Trump was a candidate, Russian investors and customers played an important part in rescuing his property businesses from financial difficulty. Then, in the judgment of the then director of national intelligence, whose job it is to co-ordinate the many different intelligence agencies, the Russian government intervened in the election to help Mr Trump and damage Mrs Clinton.

Adjusting the antenna

That judgment was repeated this May by a new director of national intelligence. It is not clear whether the Kremlin actually wanted Mr Trump to win, or just wanted to sow mistrust and discord (if so, an aim it has accomplished). Last, before taking office Mr Trump talked in admiring terms about Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, terms that were considerably more friendly than those he used about America’s allies, such as Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. At the beginning of his presidency, Mr Trump and his advisers dreamed of a grand bargain with Russia, lifting sanctions in exchange for help fighting Islamic State and containing China, though such a deal was never struck. These stories are unusual, but they do not necessarily amount to wrongdoing on the part of Mr Trump or his campaign.

This one is different. Whether the “very high level and sensitive” information was forthcoming—and Donald junior says it was not—he intended to work with someone presented to him as a representative of the Russians, and who was offering to incriminate Mrs Clinton. The information appears to have been second-hand stuff about donations to the Clinton Foundation. “I don’t think my sirens went [off] or my antenna went up at this time because it wasn’t the issue that it’s been made out to be over the last nine months, ten months,” the president’s son told Fox News on July 11th, by way of explanation.

For those not in the beauty-pageant or property businesses, Russia certainly was an issue in the summer of 2016. By that time American government sanctions had been in place for two years, following Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Individual members of the Russian government had been singled out for sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, an attempt to hold accountable those involved in the murder of a Russian whistleblower. A proposed meeting with a “Russian government attorney” to discuss sharing information should have prompted Donald junior to call the FBI. Instead, he listened and seems to have been mildly disappointed by the grade of dirt on offer. “It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” he told Fox News.

The White House has repeatedly denied that people from the campaign met representatives of the Russian government, a line that was already proved wrong after meetings with Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, came to light. “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” Donald junior told the New York Times in March. “But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.”

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the “government” lawyer who met the Trump campaign, was not in fact working directly for the Russian government. Power in Russia is not a command-and-control system, with Mr Putin at the top issuing orders to everyone beneath him, though. It is more like a network, in which people pursue private interests which overlap with those of the state. Ms Veselnitskaya also defended the family of a former government minister accused of money laundering by the United States attorney for Manhattan, a charge that came from evidence supplied by Magnitsky. Mr Putin was defiant over the outcome of the Magnitsky case, in which a lawyer who was beaten to death in prison was posthumously charged with tax fraud. He awarded medals to some of the officials who worked on it. Ms Veselnitskaya seems to have lobbied the Trump campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act.

If this all seems like evidence of an attempt at collusion with a hostile foreign power, the legal position is less straightforward. The Logan Act prohibits citizens from working against the government’s foreign policy, but nobody has been prosecuted under it since it was passed in 1799 and Donald junior is unlikely to break that streak. The portions of the constitution that deal with treason talk about aiding the enemy in a time of war, which he was not doing either. Next, campaign-finance law. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 bans “contributions”, “donations” and “expenditures” from foreigners. The way it is written suggests that it means financial contributions rather than, say, electronic files. Some lawyers think the phrasing may be ambiguous enough to bring a lawsuit, but that opinion is not universal. That leaves the rest of the criminal law. If there is evidence that people working on the campaign asked for, or knowingly received, stolen e-mails, then they would be conspirators in a straightforward theft. Yet there is no evidence of this, and putting such a request in such a way as to leave a paper trail would be mind-numbingly stupid.

Politically, too, the reckoning may never arrive. The president has so often dismissed as fake news any suggestions that the Russian government was trying to help his campaign that his supporters tend to view the verdicts of the CIA and FBI on the matter as media inventions. Before Mr Trump’s election, Republicans were more likely to see Russia as an adversary than Democrats were, according to polling by Pew. In the months since, their positions have flipped. It would be nice to think that Americans could agree that political campaigns ought not to work with foreign governments who imprison and beat up their domestic political opponents. Nice, but probably unrealistic.

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21725014-how-they-differ-ot...

I can find some good stuff. 

United States

Not treating addiction

What would Hippocrates do?

Why so few people addicted to opioids receive medical treatment

In the pink

ON A sweltering morning, a motley crowd queues at the BAART Beverly clinic near downtown Los Angeles to receive methadone treatment for their heroin and prescription-opioid addictions. An older Latino man in a car-dealership uniform checks his Apple watch while a clinic worker measures his dose of pink liquid methadone into a plastic cup. He gulps the medicine down as one might take a tequila shot. As she leaves the clinic, a thin blue-haired woman wearing a sailor’s cap gushes to another patient about how taking methadone has allowed her to kick her heroin habit and save money. “I have a cellphone now. Do you have a cellphone?”

An increase in overdoses from prescription and illicit opioids, such as heroin and fentanyl, means that deaths caused by drugs exceed those from car accidents and firearms. Methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone are the three medicines that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat opioid addiction. First synthesised in Germany and introduced after the second world war to treat pain, methadone was widely used in America after the Vietnam war, to treat soldiers who returned home addicted to heroin. Methadone is doled out in daily doses. Patients who consistently show up for daily treatment, attend counselling sessions and test negative for drug use are sometimes given larger doses of the medicine to take home.

Unlike methadone, which is dispensed in specialised clinics, any doctor with authorisation to do so can distribute buprenorphine. Whereas fewer studies have been conducted on naltrexone, experiments have proved buprenorphine and methadone to be effective at reducing hospital visits, curbing criminal behaviour and lowering mortality. A study by a Harvard Medical School doctor, published in 2015, showed that three-and-a-half years after treatment, only 10% of patients treated with buprenorphine met diagnostic criteria for opioid dependency.

Yet, even as the opioids kill someone nearly every 15 minutes, the share of opioid and heroin addicts who receive medical treatments remains small. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), among those admitted and discharged for opioid-use disorders in 2015, only 35% of people received medication as part of their treatment. This represents an increase on the years from 2011 to 2015, when only 23% received medication. But it still means the majority of opioid and heroin addicts are not receiving treatments that have been proved effective.

Several things account for this. One is money. Without insurance, the medicines used to manage opioid addiction can be expensive. A year’s course of buprenorphine can run to about $4,000-5,000, according to BupPractice.com, an educational website funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Methadone generally costs between $2,600 and $5,200 a year.

For those on Medicaid, the cost burden is lower. At the BAART clinic, both methadone and counselling are fully covered by Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid scheme. According to a June report from the Urban Institute, a think-tank, Medicaid spending on buprenorphine, naltrexone and naloxone, an opioid-blocker commonly used to reverse overdoses, increased by 136% between 2010 and 2016, but demand for such medicines still outstrips supply, says Lisa Clemans-Cope, one of the study’s authors. A recent report from Blue Cross Blue Shield, a private insurer, showed that whereas diagnoses of opioid-use disorders nearly quintupled between 2011 and 2016, medical treatment grew by only 65% in the same period. This is unfortunate: a paper published in 2015 in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment suggests that treating people with methadone and buprenorphine results in $153-223 less spending on health care per month than treating addicts without these medicines does. Addicts are less than half as likely to relapse when treated with methadone or buprenorphine than if they receive treatment without medication.

Another barrier is regulation. Doctors must apply and take an eight-hour training course to administer buprenorphine. That may not serve as much of a deterrent in itself, but even after fulfilling such requirements doctors are limited to 30, 100 or 275 buprenorphine prescriptions per month depending on their experience level. “It makes no sense,” says Molly Rutherford, a family doctor and addiction specialist in Crestwood, Kentucky. “I can write 1,000 prescriptions a day for Percocet and oxycodone [two widely abused opioid painkillers] if I want, but I can’t treat more than 275 patients a month for opioid addiction.”

Studies on the behaviour of doctors allowed to prescribe buprenorphine suggest other factors may be even more powerful deterrents than bureaucracy. Bradley Stein, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, recently found that even those doctors cleared to prescribe buprenorphine often seem reluctant to do so. One reason is that the drug is supposed to be combined with psychotherapy. In places where psychotherapy services are not readily available, doctors may be wary of prescribing it. Doctors may also think that their patients do not want to come into the waiting room and sit next to someone with an opioid-use disorder, says Mr Stein.

Swapping addictions

Such fears may not be misplaced. Up the block from the BAART clinic, the patron of a Mexican bodega complains that the clinic’s patients take up the whole pavement when they are waiting for treatment, making it hard for children to get to the elementary school round the corner. Once, she says angrily, a patient used her shop to sell their dose of methadone to someone else.

Given that the opioid epidemic sprang from abuse of prescription medicines, concern about abuse of medication for addicts is warranted. Buprenorphine are methadone are opioids themselves. The drugs limit cravings and withdrawal symptoms associated with opioid addiction (heroin addicts, by contrast, require ever-greater doses of the drug). But they are addictive. Naltrexone, by contrast, is an opioid antagonist, or blocker. Some addicts continue treatment for years or even decades. Methadone clinics are often referred to as “maintenance” facilities. Isaac (not his real name) has attended the BAART clinic for ten years to keep his old heroin habit at bay. He has a seven-year-old daughter now, and doesn’t want to risk relapsing.

Critics complain that when addicts give up heroin or prescription painkillers for methadone or buprenorphine they are just trading one addiction for another. But that is, in a way, the point. These drugs are still considerably safer than illicit opioids such as heroin and fentanyl, an increasingly common synthetic opioid that is 50 times as strong as heroin and sold mixed with it, or in pills that look like painkillers. The choice on offer here may not be between addiction and no addiction, so much as between addiction that proves fatal and addiction that does not. Even if they never get off the medication, people who take methadone or buprenorphine can hold down jobs and be decent parents.

Yet rather than increasing the use of such treatments, the health-care legislation before Congress would probably curb medical treatment for opioid addiction. A study published in April by researchers at the University of Kentucky found that the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, more widely known as Obamacare, and the accompanying expansion of Medicaid was associated with a 70% increase in buprenorphine prescriptions covered by Medicaid. One estimate suggests that the law resulted in coverage for an extra 220,000 addicts. The Republican health-care proposals promise to greatly reduce funding for Medicaid. After Republican senators from states that have been especially hard-hit by the opioid epidemic, such as Ohio and West Virginia, expressed concerns about such cuts, the authors of the Senate bill agreed to add $45bn for states to spend on treating opioid addiction over the next decade. But a calculation by Richard Frank, an economist at Harvard Medical School, suggests the amount needed is at least four times that.

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21725023-combination-fundin...