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VIDEO: Elizabeth Warren Opposes Obama's Nominee for Trade Representative

Erika Eichelberger — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 21:23:32 +0000

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked her colleagues Wednesday to oppose Michael Froman, President Barack Obama's pick for US Trade Representative, charging that he is not committed to giving the American public information about a sweeping trade deal now being negotiated between the US and 11 other countries.

The massive free trade agreement, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, would affect everything from intellectual property rights, to product safety standards, to financial regulations. Many lawmakers criticized the previous trade representative, Ron Kirk, for the secrecy surrounding the deal; certain members of Congress can see the proposed text of the deal, but the public cannot. Warren has called on the office of the US Trade Representative to release the full text of the TPP deal to the public. But in a floor speech Wednesday, she said Froman has made clear he would not release the text of the deal and is not interested in making the negotiations more transparent:

I asked the President's nominee to be Trade Representative—Michael Froman—three questions: First, would he commit to releasing the composite bracketed text [the full text of the TPP as it currently stands]? Or second, if not, would he commit to releasing just a scrubbed version of the bracketed text that made anonymous which country proposed which provision...

Third, I asked Mr. Froman if he would provide more transparency behind what information is made [available] to the trade office's outside advisors. Currently, there are about 600 outside advisors that have access to sensitive information, and the roster includes a wide diversity of industry representatives and some labor and NGO representatives too. But there is no transparency around who gets what information and whether they all see the same things, and I think that's a real problem.

Mr. Froman's response was clear: No, no, no.

Warren has raised concerns that Wall Street is trying to weaken financial regulations through the TPP. Rep. Darrell Issa (D-Calif.) is worried that the deal could imperil an open internet. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) says the trade agreement could move jobs overseas. The TPP is not final yet, so no one can say for sure what will be in it. But Warren says the American public deserves to be a part of the discussion.

"The American people have the right to know more about the negotiations that will have dramatic impact on the future of the American economy," Warren said. "I believe in transparency and democracy, and I think the U.S. Trade Representative should too." A vote is expected Wednesday afternoon.

Ron Paul's Immigration Conspiracy Theory

Gavin Aronsen — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:48:29 +0000

On Wednesday, Ron Paul continued his push against immigration reform with an email promoting a conspiratorial video released in May by the Campaign for Liberty, the former Texas congressman's 501(c)(4) non-profit. In the video, Paul warns, without evidence, that "it's only a matter of time before 'ID scans' will be required to travel, attend public events, or even make routine purchases." Paul also claims that the Senate's bipartisan Gang of Eight immigration bill is a sneaky collaboration with President Barack Obama to create "by far the worst National ID scheme the statists have come up with yet."

The video was first posted to YouTube in May, and Paul's anti-immigration views are no secret. But the new email is notable given that Ron Paul's son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), has said he could support the Senate bill if it includes an amendment addressing Republican concerns about border security. Rand Paul has said repeatedly that he supports immigration reform, but has expressed concerns about a national ID system and wants the bill to include triggers that would restrict immigrants' path to citizenship if certain border security goals aren't met. But he hasn't echoed his father's most conspiratorial claims.

"Not only does this bill increase federal spending," the elder Paul says in the video, "it mandates every American carry a National ID card with their photo and creates a new federal database containing biometric information on every American, such as fingerprints and retinal scans. The card would be required for all US workers regardless of place of birth, making it illegal for anyone to hold a job in the United States who doesn't obtain an ID card."

That's not true. In reality, the Senate bill explicitly prohibits a national ID card. Some privacy advocates have argued the bill would create a de facto national ID system by requiring mandatory electronic employment checks against a federal database containing some biometric information, such as fingerprints and photographs. Ron Paul goes much further than the privacy groups, though, arguing, "This is exactly the type of battle that often decides whether a country remains free or continues down a slide to tyranny."

Julian Assange: WikiLeaks Preparing More Disclosures

Dana Liebelson — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:19:51 +0000

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has spent the last year holed up inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London seeking asylum from Swedish and American authorities, held a press call today to discuss former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and the charges leveled against Bradley Manning, who is currently on trial for allegedly leaking thousands of diplomatic cables and other classified documents to WikiLeaks. On the call, Assange said that his organization is continuing to consider documents for release and gave new details about his contact with Snowden.

"Wikileaks is always in the process of preparing its next publication," Assange told Mother Jones. "We [have] pending publications, but as a matter of policy, we can't discuss them." The organization's releases have been sporadic since Assange took refuge in the embassy last June. Its last big document dump was in April of this year, when it disclosed diplomatic cables from the 1970s.

Assange, who is Australian, spoke from inside the embassy, where he is staying until he has assurance that British authorities won't extradite him. He is wanted by Sweden for questioning in relation to allegations that he sexually assaulted two women, but even if that investigation is dropped, he says that he won't leave the building because he fears the United States will extradite him in connection with the leak of the cables and other secret documents. He is currently under investigation by the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and his lawyer has said it's likely the Justice Department has already prepared a sealed indictment against Assange. "My primary concern is dealing with the US case," Assange said.

The WikiLeaks founder again expressed his support for Snowden, who is facing extradition worries of his own in Hong Kong. He said that WikiLeaks is in touch with Snowden's legal team to help him potentially gain asylum in Iceland, but did not provide detail on whether he had personal contact with Snowden. When Mother Jones asked Assange whether Wikileaks had any contact with Snowden before he made his first disclosures to the press, Assange said, "We never discuss issues potentially related to sourcing." (Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, who broke Snowden's disclosures, told BuzzFeed that “I’m not aware that WikiLeaks has any substantive involvement at all with Snowden, though I know they’ve previously offered to help.")

Although Assange acknowledged that he is hindered in doing WikiLeaks work because he cannot personally meet with sources, he said that if US authorities are attempting "place me in a position where I cannot investigate national security, that's a clear failure. Because there is nothing else to do but work."

Shortly after the call wrapped up, the WikiLeaks' Twitter account sent a widely criticized tweet suggesting that the tragic death yesterday of journalist Michael Hastings "has a very serious non-public complication" and noted the group would "have more details later."

Is Obama About to Get Serious on Climate Change?

Kevin Drum — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 19:14:18 +0000

Several people have suggested that President Obama will make climate change a key initiative of his second term. I've never really believed that, but today the New York Times reports that it might be for real:

President Obama is preparing a major policy push on climate change, including, for the first time, limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants, as well as expanded renewable energy development on public lands and an accelerated effort on energy efficiency in buildings and equipment, senior officials said Wednesday

Heather Zichal, the White House coordinator for energy and climate change [...] suggested in her remarks that a central part of the administration’s approach to dealing with climate change would be to use the authority given to the Environmental Protection Agency to address climate-altering pollutants from power plants under the Clean Air Act. She said none of the initiatives being considered by the administration required legislative action or new financing from Congress.

The EPA can actually do a fair amount if it decides to. And Republicans know it: it's one of the reasons they've held up the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head up the EPA. This announcement is likely to turn up the heat in that battle another notch or two.

The Chutzpah, It Just Keeps Coming

Kevin Drum — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:22:52 +0000

Chutzpah awards are really getting hard to hand out these days. I just gave Darrell Issa one, but now I see that Sen. Jeff Sessions provided this explanation yesterday of why he opposes immigration reform even though the CBO says it would be good for the economy:

This increased GDP will be at the expense of poor and working-class Americans. The benefit will go to the business owners while the wages of U.S. workers—which should be growing—will instead decline

Um....since when has Jeff Sessions had a problem with benefits flowing to business owners? And since when has he demonstrated even the slightest concern with the fortunes of the poor? Since never. But I guess people can evolve on these things, so maybe we're now seeing a new, more compassionate Jeff Sessions. Maybe.

Ezra Klein has more details if you can stomach them.

In Between Controversies Real and False, Obama Tackles the Biggest Issue Ever

David Corn — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:17:39 +0000

The news cycle can be a silly place. The Republicans in recent months have sucked up a lot of oxygen with a phony scandal (Benghazi) and a trumped-up scandal (the IRS's improper targeting of tea party groups for scrutiny). The White House has been pinned down by some of this, while also contending with a very real and front-page debate over NSA surveillance prompted by leaks regarding two of its super-secret programs. Yet one matter that is perhaps more important than all of this and that is in the news for the moment registers much lower on the media Richter scale: trying to prevent humans from blowing up the one planet they have.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced a new guidance for US nuclear weapons policies, and it's a big deal. It follows Obama's 2009 Prague speech, in which he declared the long-term goal of zeroing out nuclear weapons. According to a White House fact sheet, the new guidance "narrows U.S. nuclear strategy to focus on only those objectives and missions that are necessary for deterrence in the 21^st century" and "directs DOD to strengthen non-nuclear capabilities and reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks." The fact sheet notes, "the guidance takes further steps toward reducing the role of nuclear weapons in our security strategy." In non-wonk terms that means the US military will alter its planning that might entail the use of a nuclear weapon. And Obama's new guidance declares that it would be reasonable to cut the level of strategic nuclear weapons by a third, beyond the lower levels Obama negotiated with the Russians for the New START treaty. Obama announced this proposed reduction in a Berlin speech.

All of this is receiving some news coverage today, but it won't draw a smidgeon of the attention the assorted quasi-scandals do. Yet the effort to lower the possibility of a nuclear war is one of the most noble and significant endeavors for a president. (Addressing climate change ranks high, too.) Still, not since the early 1980s, when literally millions of Americans took to the street to protest President Ronald Reagan's nuclear policies, has this been a hot political subject. It may be that the notion of a nuclear conflagration is too overwhelming to consider on a routine basis. Certainly, it's more fun to fret about a stolen (or not stolen) Super Bowl ring.

Arms controllers did hail Obama's actions. The Ploughshares Fund noted that the president "has finally replaced the nuclear guidance issued in 2002 by President George W. Bush with new policies that will reduce the roles, numbers and alert rates of nuclear weapons in US national security strategy." (The United States currently maintains 7000 nuclear weapons in its arsenal.) And the Union of Concerned Scientists applauded Obama's nuclear policy reform and urged him to go further, noting the United States "can maintain a robust deterrent with less than a 1,000 nuclear weapons—including strategic and tactical, deployed and stored—independent of Russia’s arsenal. Maintaining more weapons than needed undercuts U.S. security and wastes taxpayer dollars." Hawks, inevitably, will denounce Obama's attempt to reduce the United States' warehouse of nukes and to decrease the significance of nuclear weapons in contingency planning. Yet it's unlikely that a robust debate will erupt to equal the fuss over, say, Michelle Obama's latest hair style. But for anyone who is serious about divining crucial national security differences between Obama and his predecessors, Obama's new nuclear posture is significant and worthy of much notice.

Darrell Issa Wins Yet Another Chutzpah Award

Kevin Drum — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:19:13 +0000

Rep. Darrell Issa says he is "deeply disappointed" that Rep. Elijah Cummings went ahead and released the full transcript of a House Oversight Committee interview with an IRS screening manager that Issa wanted to keep under wraps. Then this:

His own previous release of excerpts from this very same transcript undermines his claims that the Committee is somehow trying to keep some specific revelation from public view.

I'm not even sure what to call this. Chutzpah? Something else? Basically, Issa released a few highly misleading excerpts from the interview and repeatedly refused to release the whole thing. So Cummings released some excerpts on his own, and somehow this is supposed to be evidence that Issa wasn't trying to hide anything? Say what? I'll bet Nixon was sorry he didn't think of that defense.

While we're on the subject, though, I pulled a muscle last night reading the full transcript of this interview. (Seriously. It still hurts.) And for what it's worth, it really doesn't prove that there was no White House involvement in targeting tea party groups. The interviewee was a low-level manager of a screening group that does initial sorting into "buckets" of 75,000 applications per year. He made it clear that applications get only a cursory review in his group; that tea party applications were grouped together mostly for the sake of consistency; and that after three days his folks never see these applications again. He did state that he had no reason to think the White House was involved in the higher-level review of tea-party applications, but it was clear that he really had no way of knowing. It was way above his pay grade.

None of this is to say the White House was involved. There's never been any evidence of that, and based on what we know it's vanishingly unlikely. Republicans are just blowing smoke on this. Nonetheless, this particular transcript doesn't really tell us anything aside from the fact that a low-ranking manager was unaware of any political influence. But he probably wouldn't be even if there was.

Most Americans Still OK With NSA Spying Programs

Kevin Drum — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:34:29 +0000

Here's the latest polling on the NSA surveillance program:

Most Americans in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll support telephone and internet surveillance by the National Security Administration, but two-thirds also favor congressional hearings on the subject — indicating broad interest in more information about these activities.

The public by 58-39 percent supports the NSA collecting “extensive records of phone calls, as well as internet data related to specific investigations, to try to identify possible terrorist threats.” Support for the program is far higher among Democrats and liberals than among Republicans and strong conservatives, reversing Bush-era political divisions on issues of privacy vs. security.

It's now been two weeks since the original Guardian story, and several recent polls have produced similar results. For now, then, I think we can say that we have a pretty good idea of what the public thinks. They favor surveillance by about a 2:1 margin, and now that Obama is president that margin is much higher among Democrats than Republicans.

On interesting tidbit about this: on most issues these days, opinion among independents is closer to Democrats than to Republicans. On this one, just the opposite is true: Independents are aligned almost perfectly with the newly Foxified and skeptical Republicans. Politically speaking, this should be unsettling news for Democrats.

Angela Merkel Reveals Plot #5 Broken Up By NSA Surveillance

Kevin Drum — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:06:17 +0000

Today, disclosures about NSA surveillance programs leapfrogged the Atlantic to Germany:

“We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information, not just in the United States but in some cases here in Germany,” Mr. Obama said during the news conference. “So lives have been saved.”

He did not provide any details. But Mrs. Merkel, who acknowledged that Germany has received “very important information” from the United States, cited the so-called “Sauerland cell” as an example of such anti-terrorism intelligence cooperation.

Hmmm. So I guess the Sauerland cell is example #5 of terrorist plots broken up via NSA surveillance. This dates back to 2006, though. Of the 50 plots that Obama mentioned today (following Gen. Alexander's testimony on Tuesday), I wonder how many of them have been broken up recently?

Less Lead Means Fewer Kids in Prison

Kevin Drum — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:53:42 +0000

Brad Plumer reports that the incarceration rate for youths has plummeted 32 percent over the past decade:

Some of the drop has been driven by the general decline in crime and arrests across the country. But not all. Importantly, another chunk of the drop is due to the fact that nine states — including California, New York and Texas — have been experimenting with new policies to keep kids who commit minor offenses out of jail.

....Take California. Since 2007, the state began to close some of its detention facilities to save money. At the same time, the legislature outlawed confinement for kids who had only committed minor, non-violent offenses. And the state poured some of the savings into alternative programs (which can include drug treatment, home monitoring, or mental-health services).

This is good news. And loyal readers know one of the reasons, right? Our old friend lead. If lead is partially responsible for crime rates, then what you'd expect to see when lead density goes down is (a) a drop in crime, (b) followed a bit later by a drop in youth incarceration, (c) followed by a drop in adult incarceration. And that's exactly the pattern we've seen. Violent crime peaked in 1991 and then started dropping. Youth incarceration rates peaked and started dropping about a decade later. And now, a decade after that, adult incarceration rates are peaking and will almost certainly fall steadily in the near future.

If kids are fundamentally less violent than they used to be, there are fewer to lock up. And the ones who are locked up can often be held in different kinds of facilities. Eventually this will run its course as youth crime rates bottom out, but it probably has another decade or so to go. That's pretty good news.

The Secret Message in This Rand Paul Pic

Tim Murphy — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:35:06 +0000

The New Republic's profile of Sen. Rand Paul is well worth a look—and so is the remarkable cover photograph, which captures the Kentucky lawmaker crossing his fingers:

The New Republic

The amazing photo set off a round of accusations that the image had been Photoshopped to make Paul look bad. But the picture, by the esteemed photographer Platon, wasn't doctored. Nor, as TNR senior editor Noam Scheiber points out, did Platon ask Paul to pose in this fashion. It wasn't until Platon was reviewing his photographs after their shoot that he noticed the money shot.

So why was Paul crossing his fingers? As some internet commenters have observed, there may be deeper significance to this "good luck" hand gesture. The crossed fingers have traditionally been used by POWs trotted out for propaganda purposes to indicate that the subject is participating under duress. Perhaps Paul was embracing the role he's carved out in Washington from Day One—that of a conservative freedom fighter deep in enemy territory.

The hidden messages may not stop there. Paul's choice of neck tie may also be sending a signal. As Matthew Schmitz, the deputy editor of the conservative religious magazine First Things, notes on Twitter, the libertarian-leaning lawmaker appears to be wearing a floral tie from a London-based company: Liberty.

Liberty London

Paul's office didn't respond to an inquiry about whether he was photographed under duress, or about whether the symbolism of his attire was intentional.

The World Food Prize, Brought to You by Monsanto

Alex Park — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:35:05 +0000

Update: earlier today, the 2013 World Food Prize was awarded to three scientists: Marc Van Monatgu from Belgium, Mary-Dell Chilton of the US and Robert T. Fraley, also of the US. A statement on the announcement from the World Food Prize Foundation can be found here.

Today Secretary of State John Kerry will announce the recipient of the quarter-million-dollar World Food Prize. Sometimes called "the Nobel Prize of food," the award has been handed out yearly since 1987 to "outstanding individuals who have made vital contributions to improving the quality, quantity or availability of food throughout the world," according to the website of its namesake foundation. Past winners have included agricultural scientists and presidents of developing nations who have made strides toward growing more food in their countries.

This is the 10th year that the State Department has hosted the World Food Prize's announcement ceremony; according to a Department press release, the event is intended to showcase "the administration's dedication to improving lives; counteracting suffering; and focusing on the role that science, technology and policy play in reducing hunger and under-nutrition." But while the US government's involvement might suggest that the prize is a neutral barometer of agricultural excellence, funders of the foundation which backs it have a vested interest in promoting industrialized farming around the world. In fact, many of the World Food Prize's major donors are among the biggest names in agribusiness today.

Out of 125 donors who contributed more than $500 between fiscal years 2009 and 2011 (the years for which the foundation's tax records are most readily available), 26 were either agribusiness or charities directly affiliated with agribusiness. Together, donations from these companies amounted to more than 28 percent of funds raised for that period, a Mother Jones analysis has found. The combined support of ADM, Cargill, Monsanto, and General Mills alone for this period came to more than a half million dollars.

Powerful, policy-driving charities are also among the prize's top backers. The Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, whose mutual efforts launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006—made combined donations worth $1.93 million between 2009 and 2011.

The World Food Prize's connections to the US government also run deep. In 2004, Congress declared October 16 of that year (already known as World Food Day) "World Food Prize Day." Four years later, the US Department of Agriculture and the World Prize Foundation formalized their relationship, allowing the two organizations to "consult regularly together," according to Kenneth Quinn, a former US ambassador to Cambodia and the Foundation's president.

In recent years, many World Food Prize recipients have been champions of exactly the kind of industrial-scale agriculture that is the livelihood of the award's corporate backers. In a New York Times op-ed from 2009, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, the prize's 2001 laureate, blasted critics of industrial agriculture, writing that "[m]isguided, anti-science ideology and failure by governments to prioritize agricultural and rural development in developing countries brought us the food crisis."

The next year, Jo Luck and Pedro Sanchez, who won the prize in 2010 and 2002, respectively, began serving on a policy advisory committee for DuPont. In 2011, the ex-Ghanaian president John Kufuor was awarded the prize for implementing "major economic and educational policies that increased the quality and quantity of food to Ghanaians." Kufuor's leadership also saw consolidation of the agriculture industry and increased investment from US agribusiness.

So why would the US government want to align itself with the World Food Prize? Several reasons: Ever since the 2007-08 food price spike that saw riots in cities throughout the developing world, the Obama administration has been ramping up agricultural development as both a means of third-world poverty alleviation and a business opportunity for Americans.

By the end of 2012, through a program called Feed the Future, the US government had disbursed more than $1 billion of $3.7 billion Congress had dedicated to "food security" initiatives in developing countries. But from its conception, Feed the Future wasn't just intended to help the world's poor. As Obama himself put it in May 2012 at the official unveiling of a related initiative, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, the idea behind this massive investment in agriculture abroad was to make poor countries—especially countries in Africa—more attractive to foreign agribusiness. African governments would "take the lead," he said, "by making tough reforms and attracting investment."

Yet as my colleague Tom Philpott has noted many times, considerable research has found that exporting America's agricultural practices to the third world may neither be the best investment in their resources, nor the path to food security.

MAP: Border Security Spending Is Often Wasted

Gavin Aronsen — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:35:05 +0000

As the Senate immigration bill enters its second week of floor negotiations and the House begins marking up its bill, much of the debate will center on how border security can be further expanded and better enforced. That means more deal-making. It also means a lot of money—the current bill already calls for $4.5 billion in additional border security, with few specifics on how, exactly, it will be managed. That's consistent with the billions of dollars in federal money that states have already spent since 2003, when the Department of Homeland Security began doling out grants for border security efforts. The money's also been spent in a variety of other ways, largely due to scant oversight.

In a 2010 report in the Boston Review, journalist Tom Barry revealed how Texas Gov. Rick Perry has supplemented DHS funds with millions more from the state Legislature and from the Justice Department, which provided aid for law enforcement agencies through President Obama's stimulus package. As a result, border counties, many of them sparsely populated and otherwise struggling economically, have received millions of dollars to amp up security with federal funds. But local law enforcement officials have had other ideas for the money, too, like padding their wallets with overtime cash, doing deals with drug traffickers, and raising irrational fears about Al Qaeda and even Chinese soldiers south of the border.

Similar stories have played out in other border states. In 2009, the Arizona Daily Star published the results of a seven-month investigation into Operation Stonegarden, a DHS Federal Emergency Management Agency program that provides millions of dollars in grants to border states throughout the United States, criticizing the program for its "little tracking of how the money is spent, no clear objective, and no benchmarks for success." The Star explained that the program gives states an increasing amount of money each two-year grant cycle based on the assumption that it has been improving security—but, as the paper noted, "the agency can't prove that because it didn't establish a standard of success."

The immigration reform bill in the Senate doesn't provide a lot of clarity with that: It would simply give DHS six months to unveil a plan to surveil the entire southwest border that ensures a "90 percent effectiveness rate" in stopping illegal crossings. If those goals aren't met in five years, a commission would be formed. All of that means more money on a border security program that critics, pointing to recent drops in immigration, say is already adequately funded.

Below, you can hover over the map points for a few examples of waste and abuse associated with federal border security funds.

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

Nick Baumann — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:46:54 +0000

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; Smith's, which is a particularly gutting read, 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.

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

Gavin Aronsen — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:25:10 +0000

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

Kevin Drum — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:33:50 +0000

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

Andy Kroll — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:13:11 +0000

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

Kevin Drum — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:53:09 +0000

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

Thomas Stackpole — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:23:28 +0000

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."

House Committee Conducts Lovefest With NSA Chief

Kevin Drum — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:48:21 +0000

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

Dana Liebelson — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:45:49 +0000

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

Erika Eichelberger — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:03:10 +0000

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?

Kevin Drum — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:54:31 +0000

"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.

Wall Street Banks Still Engaged in Pre-Crash Shenanigans

Nick Baumann — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:30:30 +0000

Financial reformers cheered this week's news that Wall Street banks were unable to find buyers for a certain type of risky financial product—called a synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligation, or synthetic CDO. But if you think the big banks have given up on slicing and dicing crappy loans and semi-magically turning them into higher-rated, supposedly safer securities, think again. There's still plenty of that happening.

CDOs are types of derivatives—financial products with values derived from underlying variables. With many CDOs, the underlying variable in question is the stream of payments from a group of bundled loans. Synthetic CDOs, the products that the banks were unable to sell, are different from standard CDOs in a key way. This is complicated, so bear with me: Instead of being based on streams of payments from loans, their value is instead based on payments from insurance policies on those loans.

Here's a simplified explanation of what's happening in a synthetic CDO. To make a synthetic CDO, someone—let's call this Person A—has to have taken out what is essentially an insurance policy (called a credit default swap) against the possibility that a grouping of loans will default. Person A is betting that those loans will default. If they do, Person A gets paid; until then, he or she has to make premium payments. To make a synthetic CDO, a bank mashes together the premium payment streams from a bunch of these insurance policies. Generally, banks don't hold on to these products. Instead, they sell them to investors. For simplicity, we'll assume Person B buys the entire synthetic CDO. (In reality, it's broken up into several pieces, which are usually sold to different investors.) Person B is betting that the loans won't default and that Person A will have to keep making premium payments.

Here's the problem. Person A has a huge advantage in this transaction because he's picking the loans he wants to bet against. He can cherry pick the crappiest pile of loans and bet only against them. Person B, the person who owns the synthetic CDO, is taking the other side of that bet. Person B is not simply buying a pile of loans. He's betting on a group of loans that Person A has already bet are going to turn out to be worthless. And that's why the Person Bs of the world are now so wary: they realize that the Person As might know something they don't.

The good news is that the banks haven't been able to find anyone to take the synthetic CDO bet quite yet. But synthetic CDOs, while perhaps the most notorious of the products involved in the financial crisis, weren't the only problem. One of the big underlying issues that led to the crisis was that slicing and dicing loans and selling them off in chunks made them appear less risky to ratings agencies and investors than they actually were. But banks still do that slicing and dicing all the time. Taking the payment streams from a bunch of loans and mashing them together into a standard CDO is still big business for the banks, and there are plenty of buyers. So far in 2013, $38 billion worth of CLOs—CDOs based on business loans—have been sold in the US. That's up from $15.6 billion in the same period last year, according to numbers from the Royal Bank of Scotland cited in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. Maybe this time the borrowers of the underlying loans are more likely to pay them back, or the ratings agencies have done a better job of assessing how risky each CDO is. Wanna bet?

Republican Congressman Opposes Abortion Partly Because Male Fetuses Play With Their Genitals

Asawin Suebsaeng — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:24:01 +0000

Well, okay then.

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) US Congress

On Monday night, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) contended that HR 1797—a bill the House is debating on Tuesday that would outlaw almost all abortions 20 weeks post fertilization—didn't go far enough. Burgess, an Ob/Gyn by trade and all-around tea partier, argued passionately in favor of banning abortions at an earlier stage in pregnancy. Here's a snippet of what he said, via RH Reality Check:

There's no question in my mind...that a baby at 20 weeks after conception can feel pain...I thought the date was far too late...Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they're a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. They feel pleasure. Why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?

("Well, this is a subject that I do know something about," Burgess also asserted.)

Top medical experts in the US and UK dispute the Republicans' claim of fetal pain prior to the third trimester—the talking point at the heart of the proposed ban. But the part that caught the internet's attention was Burgess' odd "masturbating fetuses" logic. I've reached out to Rep. Burgess' office regarding his statements but I have not yet received a response.