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RIP Michael Hastings. Here's His Advice to Young Journalists.

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 4:46 PM PDT

Michael Hastings, a respected young journalist for Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed, was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles Tuesday, according to his boss, BuzzFeed Editor in Chief Ben Smith.

Hastings, who was 33, was perhaps most famous for "The Runaway General," his June 2010 Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of US forces in Afghanistan. President Barack Obama fired McChrystal after the publication of the article. Hastings expanded "The Runaway General" into a book, The Operators, that was published in January 2012 and became a New York Times bestseller.

Hastings first rose to prominence for his coverage of the Iraq war in Newsweek. His then-fiancée Andrea Parhamovich was killed in Iraq in 2007; he later wrote a book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, about his years in Iraq.

You can find Hastings' Rolling Stone archives here and his BuzzFeed stuff here, but his Newsweek writing is mostly not available online. Rolling Stone's obituary for him is here.

Hastings aided and mentored many other journalists during his all-too-short career. Last year, he posted his advice for aspiring journalists on Reddit. Here it is:

Okay, here's my advice to you (and young journalists in general):

1.) You basically have to be willing to devote your life to journalism if you want to break in. Treat it like it's medical school or law school.

2.) When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word "prose," or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.

3.) Be prepared to do a lot of things for free. This sucks, and it's unfair, and it gives rich kids an edge. But it's also the reality.

4.) When writing for a mass audience, put a fact in every sentence.

5.) Also, keep the stories simple and to the point, at least at first.

6.) You should have a blog and be following journalists you like on Twitter.

7.) If there's a publication you want to work for or write for, cold call the editors and/or email them. This can work.

8.) By the second sentence of a pitch, the entirety of the story should be explained. (In other words, if you can't come up with a rough headline for your story idea, it's going to be a challenge to get it published.)

9.) Mainly you really have to love writing and reporting. Like it's more important to you than anything else in your life--family, friends, social life, whatever.

10.) Learn to embrace rejection as part of the gig. Keep writing/pitching/reading.

Hastings is survived by his wife, Elise Jordan.

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Sen. Reid: "Poison Pill" Immigration Amendment Will Get a Vote

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 4:25 PM PDT

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has called an amendment floated by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) a "poison pill" that, if passed, could kill the immigration bill. Nevertheless, Reid will allow the controversial border security measure, which his fellow Gang of Eighter Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recently called "very reasonable," to come to a floor vote as early as Wednesday before he moves to end debate and bring the full bill to a vote.

Cornyn's amendment would require the implementation of four security measures before undocumented immigrants could be granted provisional legal status: complete surveillance of the southern border, a 90 percent apprehension success rate for people who cross the border illegally, a mandatory national E-Verify system, and an operational biometrics security system—typically fingerprint identification—at United States air and sea ports. The amendment is strongly opposed by Democrats, as well as some Republicans, who say it would be overly expensive and logistically difficult to implement, and would therefore effectively cripple the 13-year path to citizenship that is the centerpiece of the Senate bill.

"If [the Gang of Eight doesn't] take reasonable measures to deal with the border security concerns of the American people, I don't think we're going to get an immigration bill," Cornyn told reporters Tuesday afternoon. "So that itself will be a poison pill." Reid said Tuesday that he believed the bill, as currently written, already has enough votes to surmount a filibuster. However, the Gang of Eight wants the bill to pass with at least 70 votes to put pressure on the GOP-led House to take action.

The current Senate bill already requires round-the-clock surveillance of the southern border, a 90 percent apprehension rate within five years, and a mandatory E-Verify system. But those measures don't serve as triggers that would preclude undocumented immigrants from getting legal status before they are implemented. Republicans have clamored for triggers as part of a broader bipartisan compromise, although the conservative Heritage Foundation has come out strongly against Cornyn's amendment, calling it a "fig leaf" that still puts legal status first and foremost.

Earlier, Cornyn said that his immigration amendment held true to "Ronald Reagan's old adage: Trust but verify."

"Trust but Verify" is also the name of a Reagan-inspired amendment authored by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would require the Department of Homeland Security to provide annual reports to Congress to show that the border is "provably secure" before undocumented immigrants would be given provisional legal status. Paul's amendment is one of nine other amendments that will likely get a vote Wednesday. Both Cornyn and Paul have expressed some willingness to work toward a broader compromise, although many Democrats think Cornyn has been insincere.

CBO Report: Immigration Reform Would Reduce the Federal Deficit

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 3:33 PM PDT

The Congressional Budget Office has scored the Senate's immigration reform bill, and the news is pretty good for deficit hawks. According to CBO estimates, the bill would:

  • Increase federal direct spending by $262 billion over the 2014–2023 period. Most of those outlays would be for increases in refundable tax credits stemming from the larger U.S. population under the bill and in spending on health care programs....
  • Increase federal revenues by $459 billion over the 2014–2023 period. That increase would stem largely from additional collections of income and payroll taxes....
  • Decrease federal budget deficits through the changes in direct spending and revenues just discussed by $197 billion over the 2014–2023 period.

Compared to its baseline estimates, CBO also projects that if the immigration bill is passed, GDP will increase a bit over the next decade; wages will go down a bit but then rise in the decade after that; capital investment will rise; and the productivity of labor and of capital will go up. All of these effects are fairly small, however. Economically, a pretty reasonable takeaway is that immigration reform would probably have a positive effect, but not a large one.

Soros-Backed Super-PAC to New York Pols: Pass Reform or We're Taking You Down

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 3:13 PM PDT
The New York State Capitol in Albany.

The deadline draws closer by the hour. In New York, the band of good-government reformers, labor unions, enviros, community organizers, religious leaders, and more have until Thursday night, when the current legislative session ends, to press state lawmakers to pass legislation combating political corruption and kickstarting a public financing program for statewide elections. Standing in their way: The odd coalition of breakaway Democrats and Republicans who control the state Senate and who are blocking the public financing bill, which passed the state Assembly earlier this year and is backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Friends of Democracy, the super-PAC run by political operatives Jonathan Soros and David Donnelly, is one of the most aggressive backers of public financing in New York State. Soros, the son of liberal financier and mega-donor George Soros, and Donnelly see New York as the front line in the post-Citizens United battle against big-money politics. In an interview on Tuesday, Donnelly had a cut-and-dry message for the independent Democrats, who broke away from the traditional Democratic caucus to form a new leadership coalition, and the Republican legislators who are denying a vote on public financing: Support reform, or we'll fight to replace you.

Donnelly says public financing should be a no-brainer for independent Democrats and Republicans given the public support for the issue. According to a recent Siena College poll (PDF), 61 percent of New Yorkers say they support statewide public financing. Indeed, in five Siena polls dating back to August 2012, a majority of New Yorkers backed a public financing program. The way it's proposed, a statewide public financing program would match each dollar of donations up to $175 with $6 in state money. The goal is to nudge political candidates into courting lots of less-wealthy donors instead of a few very wealthy ones.

"It's pretty painfully clear that if this leadership structure, the [Independent Democratic Conference] and Republicans together, doesn't produce on behalf of the citizens of the state a public financing law that addresses corruption, there needs to be a leadership structure that will do that," Donnelly says. "That means electing people who will lead the Senate in a way that moves that legislation. It's not so much of a threat as the reality of what we're going to have to do."

Donnelly declined to say which state senators Friends of Democracy would target. (Nor would he say how much Friends of Democracy has spent so far on New York's public financing fight.) "I'm not about one senator or not about [independent Democratic senators] Diane Savino or Jeff Klein or any of these other Republican senators," he says. "I'm agnostic about how we go about doing it. It's a numbers game; we need to take out those numbers."

Donnelly says he still holds out hope that the state Senate will pass a public financing bill before heading home for the summer. But if the state Senate fails, Friends of Democracy won't walk away from the issue. In addition to targeting anti-reform senators, Donnelly explains, the super-PAC will continue pushing for a bill in the legislature, possibly during a special session or when lawmakers return later this year to work on a state budget. "If the senators can do it under the current leadership, great. Do it by Thursday, do it in a special session, during the budget session, great," he says. "We're not going away."

A Longer Look at Medical Inflation

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 2:53 PM PDT

Eric Morath of the Wall Street Journal reports today that "U.S. health-care costs fell in May for the first time in almost four decades, the latest evidence that government policies and an expansion in generic drugs are constraining prices."

Maybe. But I'd like to push back on this once again. The chart on the right shows real medical inflation—that is, medical inflation above and beyond overall inflation. As you can see, over the past 30 years it's been on a noisy but fairly steady downward path. Each peak is lower than the previous one, and the same is true of each trough. If anything, though, this trend has slowed a bit over the past decade. It's still on a downward slope, but it strikes me as unlikely that government policies have had an awful lot to do with this.

For a somewhat more pessimistic view, take a look at the chart below, which goes back 60 years. Aside from the noise, what you mainly see is a spike in the 1980s, followed by a reversion to the long-term average of about 1.5 percent. In other words, it's possible that we overreacted to what turned out to be a fairly short-lived swell from about 1983 to 1993 and are now overreacting to the fact that we've returned to our long-term average. If this view is accurate, it means that medical inflation has been outrunning overall inflation by about 1.5 percentage points ever since the 1950s, and, roughly speaking, that's still the case. There's been a bit of a slowdown over the past decade, but only a bit.

Illinois' New Fracking Regulations Might Not Be So Tough After All

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 2:23 PM PDT
Michael G McKinne /Shutterstock

Monday afternoon Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed what the Associated Press touted as the "nation's toughest fracking regulations," creating a framework to manage hydraulic fracturing, in which chemicals are piped into rock at high pressure to release stored-up natural gas. But the new regulatory effort, which sharply divided the state’s environmental community and inspired fervor in the southern counties where drilling is most likely to take place, looks more like a tactical concession than an environmental victory.

The law, which was crafted through six months of stakeholder negotiations between the state, select environmental groups, and representatives from the oil and gas industry, includes stringent rules meant to increase public transparency, more closely monitor environmental impact, and provide avenues for recourse in case something goes wrong. But amid biting criticism from activists and advocacy groups that were excluded from the negotiations, environmental organizations involved in the process have argued that although they believe the law was a necessary foothold in the effort to control what seemed to be an inevitable boom in fracking in Illinois, this is by no means the end of the fight.

"It bothers me that the bill is being presented as a model for other states," says Ann Alexander, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council who was part of the negotiations. "It represents a floor. Yes it's strong; no, it's not adequate." What new law does provide is a baseline for measuring the actual impact of fracking and a mechanism for pushing back if something does go wrong, explains Jenny Cassel, a lawyer with the Environmental Law & Policy Center, another group that was involved in the negotiations.

Critics have attacked the law as regulatory window dressing. "These rules are arbitrary compromises based on negotiations with industry," says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a professor at Ithaca College and a vocal anti-fracking activist who led the charge against the bill. "They guarantee neither public health nor environmental integrity."

Fracking was already legal in Illinois, although there was no fracking-specific regulation on the books, and industry interest has been growing, creating a sense that fracking was unavoidable. Illinois sits atop the New Albany shale play, an area projected to hold 3.79 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. Drilling leases have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of counties and residents by way of fees and leases, and according to an AP investigation of state records, high-volume fracking had already begun. After it became clear the regulatory bill would become law, major drilling operations were started in Wayne County, some four and a half hours south of Chicago.

A full moratorium on fracking failed in the Illinois legislature last year, and representatives from the coalition of environmental groups that negotiated the new law have argued that compromise was better than nothing. But Steingraber believes that the lack of regulation wasn't a reason to give ground. "The industry was waiting for the rules of the road before it came in," she says. "This bill is a green light. It's a starting gun."

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House Committee Conducts Lovefest With NSA Chief

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 1:48 PM PDT

The House Intelligence Committee held a hearing today about the NSA's covert surveillance programs, and to demonstrate just how tough-minded they planned to be, here's what they called it:

How Disclosed N.S.A. Programs Protect Americans, and Why Disclosure Aids Our Adversaries

Fair and balanced! NSA's director testified that domestic surveillance had helped prevent over 50 "potential terrorist events":

In addition, the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sean Joyce, listed two newly disclosed cases that have now been declassified in an effort to respond to the leaking of classified information about surveillance by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor.

Mr. Joyce described a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange by a Kansas City man, whom the agency was able to identify because he was in contact with “an extremist” in Yemen who was under surveillance. Mr. Joyce also talked about a San Diego man who planned to send financial support to a terrorist group in Somalia, and who was identified because the N.S.A. flagged his phone number as suspicious through its database of all domestic phone call logs, which was brought to light by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures.

The Kansas City man is Khalid Ouazzani, who, as part of a plea bargain in 2010, admitted that he sent money to Al Qaeda. He was never charged with planning any attacks inside the United States, and the NYSE bombing was described as "nascent plotting," so it's hard to know just how serious this was. Still, at least Ouazzani actually did something. The San Diego man merely planned to send money.

So far, the government's examples of terrorist plots prevented by the NSA's surveillance programs have been pretty thin. Aside from these two, they've also taken credit for stopping David Headley and Najibullah Zazi. But Headley scouted locations for the 2008 Mumbai bombing, which was successful. So no points there, though NSA might have prevented Headley from doing further damage. As for Zazi, he was indeed planning suicide bombings on the New York subway, but it's unclear just how instrumental NSA surveillance really was in catching him.

None of this is to say that NSA's claims are false or that their surveillance programs are ineffective. But most of their claims are unverified, and the few they've made public appear to have been exaggerated. So take this all with a grain of salt.

5 New Revelations About NSA Surveillance

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 12:45 PM PDT
Department of Defense

In the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks, National Security Agency and Justice Department officials testified today before the House intelligence committee about the government's controversial surveillance programs. Here are the five most interesting revelations to emerge from the hearing:

1. Surveillance has contributed to thwarting more than 50 terror plots since 9/11, according to the NSA.
NSA Director Keith Alexander testified that NSA surveillance has played a role in preventing more than 50 terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001. FBI deputy director Sean Joyce provided an outline of four of those cases:

  • The 2009 arrest of Najibullah Zazi for plotting to bomb the New York City subway system came after the NSA intercepted an email in which he discussed perfecting a bomb recipe. The agency executed search warrants with New York Police Department and found bomb-making components. (Serious questions have been raised about whether the FBI actually needed NSA surveillance in order to obtain this information, since the FBI wouldn't have had trouble getting a warrant to monitor the email account of a terrorist suspect.)
  • Using its authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the NSA discovered Khalid Ouzzani's nascent plans to bomb the New York Stock Exchange. Ouzzani pleaded guilty in 2010 to providing support to Al Qaeda. 
  • NSA surveillance derailed David Headley's 2009 plan to bomb the offices of a Danish newspaper. At the time, he was considered a suspect in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. He later confessed to conducting surveillance for the Mumbai attacks.
  • Joyce only provided vague details about a fourth plot: After 9/11, the NSA monitored an individual who had indirect contact with a known foreign terrorist organization overseas. Doing so, he said, allowed the FBI to reopen an investigation and disrupt terrorist activity.

2. The NSA doesn't need court approval each time it searches Americans' phone records.
NSA Deputy Director John Inglis said that 22 NSA officials are authorized to approve requests to query an agency database that contains the cellphone metadata of American citizens. (Metadata includes the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls, the date and time the calls took place, and their duration.) Deputy AG Cole also said that all queries of this database must be documented and can be subject to audits. Cole also said that the the NSA does not have to get separate Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) approval for each query; instead, the agency merely has to file a monthly report with the court on how many times the database was queried, and how many of those searches targeted the phone records of Americans.

3. 10 NSA officials have permission to give information about US citizens to the FBI
There are 10 NSA officials—including Inglis and Alexander—involved in determining whether information collected about US citizens can be provided to the FBI. It can only be shared if there's independent evidence that the target has connections to a terrorist organization. Inglis said that if the information is found to be irrelevant, it must be destroyed. If the NSA mistakenly targets an American citizen, it must report this to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

4. Other countries are less transparent than the US, officials say.
Cole said that the FISA Amendments Act provides more due process than is afforded to citizens of European countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. Alexander added that "virtually all" countries have laws that compel telecommunications firms to turn over information on suspects.

5) Fewer than 300 phone numbers were targeted in 2012.
NSA officials say that even though the agency has access to Americans' phone records, it investigated fewer than 300 phone numbers connected to US citizens in 2012. The officials did not provide any detail on the number of email addresses targeted.

Study: Poor People More Likely to Get a Job If They Work for Free First

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 11:03 AM PDT
iluistrator/Shutterstock

The current share of the American population with a job is still far below what it was before the recession, stagnating at a level not seen since the 1980s. And the jobs that have been regained since 2008 have overwhelmingly been low-wage. But now there's good news for unskilled unemployed people who are interested in getting one of those low-wage jobs—working for free can help them eventually land a paid gig.

A new study to be released Tuesday by a federal agency called the Corporation for National and Community Service found that jobless Americans can increase their chances of finding work by 27 percent if they volunteer first. People without a high school diploma and people in rural areas can increase their chances by more than 50 percent, the Washington Post reports.

Volunteering is useful for people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, Christopher Spera, the lead author of the study, explained to the Post, because they don't have the same opportunities as better-off Americans: "Folks with lower levels of education tend not to have the networks and social capital enjoyed by folks with higher levels of education," he says. Here's the Post on how volunteering can help:

The report builds on other research that has found that volunteering helps people learn skills, be presented with leadership opportunities, enhance their résumés and—perhaps most crucially—develop a network of contacts that can help them find work...

The link between volunteering and reducing joblessness was endorsed by former labor secretary Hilda L. Solis, who last year issued a guidance to state workforce agencies emphasizing that volunteering may be one strategy that can help put the unemployed—particularly the 4.4 million Americans who have been out of work for more than six months—back to work.

"In a complex 21st-century economy that demands new skills of American workers, volunteerism is not a substitute for job training," Solis said. "But it can be an important complement."

Now we know that poor, less-educated people can benefit from unpaid work in the same way that their more well-heeled, highly-educated counterparts can. After all, unpaid internships have exploded in recent years; over half of the class of 2012 had an internship during college, and half of those were unpaid. The only difference is that when poor people work for free, their parents probably won't be able to help them get by.

Is John Boehner Bluffing on Immigration Reform?

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 10:54 AM PDT

"I can't seem to persuade @ed_kilgore or @kdrum that Boehner may let immig reform pass w/mostly Ds," Greg Sargent tweets today. That's....sort of true. Here's Greg's latest in a series of blog posts making his case. It's a reponse to John Boehner's latest ironclad promise that he will never, ever, let immigration reform come to the House floor unless a majority of Republicans are convinced that it properly addresses border security:

There’s some interesting sleight of hand here. Note that Boehner seems more focused on enforcement and border security than on citizenship. The Speaker is claiming that if a majority of House Republicans thinks the emerging proposal isn’t tough enough on border security, then the House won’t vote on it. But the real Rubicon House Republicans must cross is the path to citizenship. What happens if a majority of House Republicans can’t support the path to citizenship, no matter how tough the border security elements are made? In that scenario, if Boehner holds to his vow, the House wouldn’t vote on anything that includes citizenship, right?....But the pressure on him to allow a vote will be very intense, from powerful GOP stakeholders such as the business community and wide swaths of the consulting/strategist establishment.

....I’m with Jonathan Bernstein: This all turns on whether enough Republicans privately want comprehensive reform to pass for the good of the party, even if they are not prepared to vote for it. If so, Boehner will let it go to the floor. Even if it must pass with mostly Dems. Don’t buy all the tough talk. Boehner himself doesn’t know how this is going to end.

This all relies on having a correct read of the internal machinations of the Republican caucus, and I won't even pretend to have any real insight into that. But just for scorekeeping purposes, here's the Cliff Notes version of Greg's argument:

  • The Republican establishment wants immigration reform to pass. The business community wants it because they'd rather have cheap legal labor than cheap illegal labor, and the smarter GOP eminences want it because they think—possibly correctly—that they can't win the presidency in 2016 if Hispanics keep voting overwhelmingly against them. And they really want to win back the presidency in 2016.
  • But the base of the party is dead set against immigration reform. They'll only accept it if (a) the border and citizenship requirements are tough, and (b) they believe that Republicans have fought hard to wring every last concession out of Democrats. They'll bolt at the first sign that they're being sold out.
  • Given that, Boehner (and Marco Rubio) have to sound relentlessly tough just to give the bill a chance.
  • But even if all this happens, lots of Republicans still won't be willing to risk the wrath of the tea-party base by voting in favor. Instead, they'd rather denounce the bill in public, while privately telling Boehner to bring it to the floor and get the damn thing over with. Let Democrats pass it with the help of just enough Republicans in safe seats that it seems plausibly bipartisan, thus salvaging the Hispanic vote. 

For this to work, of course, everyone has to sound genuinely outraged by the bill all the way to the bitter end. Their private acquiescences have to remain completely buried.

So do I buy this? I'm just not sure. It certainly sounds logical, but let's face it: logic is not a strong suit of the contemporary House Republican caucus. And I wonder just how many House leaders are truly convinced that the party is doomed without the Hispanic vote anyway? I have a sense that a lot of them are in the process of convincing themselves that this is just a bunch of elite Beltway hooey. Plus, I'm always sort of generally skeptical of these kinds of 11-dimensional chess arguments. Most politicians just aren't that devious.

But I guess we'll find out soon enough.