Month: June 2012

A test program in San Francisco is offering panhandlers payment in exchange for socializing shelter dogs and promising to not solicit money:

Three kinds of dogs, [Rebecca Katz, director of Animal Care and Control] said, will be targeted for the effort: fearful ones that need more socialization time than shelter staff and volunteers can give them; "rowdy" ones that need to learn basic manners,  and puppies that cannot be adopted until they are old enough to spay or neuter. 

The Week rounds up details on the program. Heather Knight reports that a "similar program could be coming to the San Francisco county jails, too":

Rebecca Katz, director of Animal Care and Control, has been pushing the sheriff’s office to replicate a partnership between the Peninsula Humane Society and the San Mateo County Sheriff called Transitioning Animals into Loving Situation (yep, that’s TAILS). Does every program like this have to come with a cheesy acronym?

In San Mateo, jail inmates foster dogs deemed not adoptable because of behavior problems, and it’s apparently helped the inmates and the pups. Katz said former Sheriff Michael Hennessey was never wild about the idea, but that interim Sheriff Vicki Hennessy has been receptive. She and some staff members toured TAILS just recently.

(Photo by Flickr user Allspice1)

Richmond, Virgina, 6.35 pm

Frum rails against Obama's new immigration policy:

The decision to grant residency and work rights to young illegal aliens who meet certain conditions is an amnesty in all but name. A conditional amnesty, yes, but amnesty. The trouble with amnesty has always been the incentive effects. It's possible that amnesty may be a necessary final stage in immigration reform, but to put amnesty in place before effective enforcement measures are in place—and before authorities are certain that as many illegals as possible have voluntarily repatriated—is to invite another wave of illegal migration just as soon as business conditions improve. That may not seem on the verge of happening soon, but it will happen.

The word "amnesty" suggests that these children did something wrong, other than grow up. That's what makes this different. Alex Nowrasteh, who supports freer immigration, worries that the new policy won't amount to much:

[B]efore we get too thrilled about the prospects of this sorely needed temporary liberalization, we should remember that hardly anything changed the last time the Obama administration used its prosecutorial discretion to review deportation cases. His administration promised to wade through backlogged cases and close those where the unauthorized immigrants had strong American family ties and no criminal records. Since that policy went into effect in November 2011, DHS officials have reviewed more than 411,000 cases and less than 2 percent of them were closed.

Nate Cohn considers the political consequences:

McCain had a moderate reputation on immigration issues, even if he abandoned comprehensive reform in pursuit of the GOP nomination. Romney’s stances on immigration are even less palatable to Latino voters, and it’s unclear whether most Latino voters are aware yet of Romney’s most controversial stances. Most polls suggest there are more undecided Latino voters than other racial/ethnic groups, and Romney is generally polling below McCain’s eventual standing among Latino voters. If Obama won an outsized share of undecided Latino voters, he could perform better among Latinos than he did in 2008, even if that seems unlikely given the economic circumstances.

Harry Enten is skeptical:

We … know that single issues like marijuana usually don't move people who didn't vote before to go out and vote now. Ballot initiatives in presidential years only raise turnout by 0.7%. The age group of 18-29 year-olds, who are 2.5 times more likely to use cannabis, were not a larger percentage of the California electorate in 2010 compared to the previous midterm election, despite a legalize marijuana proposition being on the ballot. Voters also said that the proposition was not the reason they came out and voted.

Richard Florida visualizes the geography of abortion:

Nearly nine in 10 (87 percent) of U.S. counties, home to more than one-third of women of reproductive age, lacked any abortion providers, according to a 2011 study. Nearly all non-metropolitan counties (97 percent), and roughly seven in 10 metropolitan counties lacked a provider. There are 26 states where 90 percent of counties lack an abortion provider.

Kay Steiger sighs:

States are continuing to pass more and more hurdles to abortion access, resulting in a situation in which women with means find abortion annoying and women without means find abortion impossible.

Take states which are increasingly creating multi-visit requirements for abortions. Such requirements are much more burdensome on women who work hourly jobs with inflexible leave policies. Each visit to the clinic requires finding child care, a replacement worker, a time off request from her boss, and transit. For poor women, these are not insignificant hurdles.

Meanwhile, the only abortion clinic in Mississippi may be forced to close due to new regulations.

War criminal John Yoo hyperventilates about Obama's immigration reform:

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

Jennifer Rubin piles on, absurdly claiming that

This is a much bigger deal than immigration. It is bigger than one election. It is about whether we’re going to have the rule of law or the rule of Obama, and whether Congress can be bypassed whenever the president doesn’t get what he wants.

Meanwhile, back on Earth:

For decades the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), followed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has used deferred action to provide limited relief to foreign nationals who do not qualify for other immigration benefits that are typically available to individuals in exigent circumstances.

Upon creation of the DHS in 2003, the power to grant deferred action was formally delegated to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), as well as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The PDF is here. More to the point:

The Bush Administration Formally Delegated The Power To Grant Deferred Action To DHS Agencies In 2003.

And those with deferred action can work in the meantime. There's nothing lawless about this – just a spectacular political coup, which the Romneyites are trying to spin away. But remember what they're actually trying to do: to change the subject from what Obama did, and to deter questions asking if Romney would repeal it.

Romney must be forced to answer that question by the press.

Or are they going to live by Palin rules again?

Ben Smith surveys a new biography by David Maraniss that debunks much of the myth-making in Dreams From My Father:

Obama’s conservative critics have, since the beginnings of his time on the national scene, taken the self-portrait [of Dreams] at face value, and sought to deepen it to portray him as a leftist and a foreigner. … [But] Maraniss finds that Obama’s young life was basically conventional, his personal struggles prosaic and later exaggerated. He finds that race, central to Obama’s later thought and included in the subtitle of his memoir, wasn’t a central factor in his Hawaii youth or the existential struggles of his young adulthood. And he concludes that attempts, which Obama encouraged in his memoir, to view him through the prism of race "can lead to a misinterpretation" of the sense of "outsiderness" that Maraniss puts at the core of Obama’s identity and ambition.

(Photo via Buzzfeed, which rounded up 28 more photos of young Barry)

They cost way too much. Fareed wants pension reform:

The system as it is evolving is highly regressive. Current workers will have their salaries cut, their numbers thinned and their benefits slashed, all to maintain relatively comfortable benefits for retirees, who are on average richer than the people who are being asked to make these sacrifices. Current residents will watch their services dwindle, so that retirees–again, who are richer on average than they are–can have guaranteed generous cost-of-living increases year after year.

Chart by Matthew Mitchell, who comments:

The graph shows that, after 60 years, the private economy is 5 times its 1950 size. But state and local governments are spending almost 13 times as much as they did in 1950. "This is like a household whose income has grown five-fold over a period of time," Mitchell reports. "That's great news. But, unfortunately, their spending habits have grown 13-fold. This divergence is unsustainable."

Elizabeth McNichol, on the other hand, makes public employee compensation look much cheaper.

It's increasingly clear that his foreign policy will be, as Bill Clinton put it, the old neocon stuff on steroids. Here, for example, is his view that a war against Iran need have no Congressional authorization:

I can assure you if I'm President, the Iranians will have no question but that I would be willing to take military action, if necessary, to prevent them from becoming a nuclear threat to the world. I– I don't believe at this stage, therefore, if I'm President, that we need to have war powers approval or a special authorization for military force. The President has that capacity now.

Remember that this was Cheney's position vis-a-vis Iraq. Bush over-ruled him. Romney is to the neocon right of George W. Bush in foreign affairs. Then this:

We cannot survive a course of action [that] would include a nuclear Iran.

Survive? So how did we survive a contained nuclear Soviet Union and a contained nuclear Communist China? And yet this comparatively puny, creaking, theo-fascist regime threatens America's very survival? Well: no one can say we haven't been warned.

You want a return to Cheneyism in foreign policy? You know what to do.

(Photo: Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney presents Vice President Dick Cheney with a Red Sox jersey at a GOP fundraiser May 21, 2002 in Boston, MA. Vice President Cheney was in town to endorse Mitt Romney's Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign. By Douglas McFadd/Getty Images)