1. Why is Rick Santorum allowed to have an active role in politics after he failed his campaign to become the president? As Frazer in the comments to my previous post noted, the new rule is that failed candidates should exit and be silent. Well, at least some failed candidates. But Santorum seems to have written a lot of the Graham-Cassidy bill. I eagerly await all those articles about how he should exit stage right.
2. Jimmy Kimmel is a comedian who has been vocal against the Republican push to kill Obamacare dead (dead!), to replace it with something-or-other which would look like income redistribution upward and a lot of prematurely dead people. The conservative critique of his role consists of asserting that he is a comedian, not an expert on health insurance. An example:
We should be open to the possibility that Kimmel has deep and hidden reservoirs of knowledge on risk-adjustment programs, the Medicaid expansion, or per capita caps. After all, Kimmel has, in the words of CNN, become the “conscience of the health care fight.” It’s not hard to see why: Kimmel has a moving family story to tell, a huge audience, and an unmistakable gift for the big screen. His infant son Billy has a heart condition that required surgery soon after birth and, like any father, Kimmel takes his son’s well-being seriously.
But his genuinely scary experience represents the sum total of his health-care education, as far as one can tell.My reaction to that was hollow laughter. That's because far too many politicians working on these repeals of ACA don't sound like they know anything about the theory of insurance, as it applies to health care, or about the market failures in health care (which make the so-called "free" markets in health care mostly impossible). Yet we are expected to take those politicians seriously. At least Kimmel makes people laugh.
3. Betsy deVos has reversed the Obama administration guidelines about sexual assault investigations on college campuses:
The rules, a sharp break from the Obama administration’s directives, will now permit colleges and universities to raise their evidence requirements to a “clear and convincing standard” of proof. The Obama administration had demanded colleges use a lower “preponderance of evidence” standard.These changed directives have many consequences. One important one is to ask how many cases each investigative systems might get right.
Because almost all evidence about rape or sexual assault will be partial (absent videotaping or very public crimes), any investigative system can find someone guilty when that person is actually innocent, and any investigative system can find someone innocent when that person is actually guilty.
Those two findings are failures of the system, and resemble the false positives (innocent person found guilty) and false negatives (guilty person found innocent) of medical screening tests. The desirable findings are the other two: When an innocent person is judged to be innocent (true negative) and when a guilty person is judged to be guilty (true positive).
Moving the required level of evidence from "preponderance of evidence" to "clear and convincing standard" is likely to increase false negatives and decrease false positives: More rapists will go unpunished, but fewer innocent men will be unfairly sentenced.
Is this a good outcome? That might depend on whom you ask. But for a factual answer we would need to get good data on how common false positives and false negatives are.
Some men's rights organizations* argue that false positives in the form of false rape accusations are exceedingly common, whatever well-done studies demonstrate, and the consequences of being falsely sentenced are obviously horrible.
At the same time, the fact that false negatives can also have terrible consequences should be taken into account. For example, serial rapists are more likely to be able to continue raping if colleges require stronger standards of proof for each case brought to their attention. And if the required proof levels were raised extremely high, very few victims of sexual assault would be willing to contact the authorities in the first place.
There are no easy solutions to the problems I've sketched out above. Still, we should be aware of the impact changing the required levels of proof will have, and not only for the accused.
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* It does appear as if they have had deVos's ear:
The change, the latest in a widespread rollback of Obama-era rules by the Trump administration, had been long sought by advocates of accused students, mostly men, who had complained that campus judicial processes had become heavily biased in favor of women accusers.
More here.