Year: 2013

Rubio warned yesterday that, if Congress doesn’t pass immigration reform, Obama may legalize millions of undocumented immigrants by executive order. Catherine Thompson explains:

”I have been saying for more than a year that I believe that this president will be tempted,” Rubio said. ”If nothing happens in Congress, he will be tempted to issue an executive order, like he did for the DREAM Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen.”

“We won’t get any E-Verify, we won’t get any border security, but he’ll legalize them,” he continued.

Drum thinks Rubio’s comment is “interesting for what it says about how Rubio views his tea party base”:

Basically, he’s given up on reasoning with them. Instead, he figures the only way to win them over is to appeal to their paranoid belief in Obama the tyrant, the man who’s unilaterally ruining America by running roughshod over Congress with his dictatorial executive order powers. Reason might not work, but perhaps they hate and fear Obama even more than 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Benjy Sarlin believes that Rubio’s gambit could backfire:

Many Republicans say they’re concerned about the security components of a bill because they fear Obama or a future Democratic president will find some legal rationale to delay or derail their implementation. Democratic and Republican supporters of the bill insist that they can find ways to prevent that from happening, either by specifying a clear set of security measures or by tying legalization to ironclad border metrics. But Rubio’s claim could feed perceptions on the right that Obama can’t be trusted to enforce the law and thus will ignore even the toughest border deal.

In a review of Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation, Scott McLemee defines the genre of Noizu:

The term is a neologism in Japanglish (cf. Franglais) referring to the underground movement or milieu devoted to producing — and enduring – squalls of atonal electronic sound blasted at incredibly high volume. Noizu stands in relation to hardcore punk or extreme heavy metal band something like the roar of a jet engine does to chamber music. Connoisseurs call the sound “harsh,” at least when they are praising a performance or recording.

The “noisician” works with a set of electronic boxes that distort, echo, or clip the frequencies of a sound; they are sometimes connected to one another according to a plan, and sometimes by chance. “Outputs go back into inputs,” [author David] Novak writes, “effects are looped together, and circuits are turned in on themselves. Sounds are transformed, saturated with distortion, and overloaded to the point that any original source becomes unrecognizable.” By the end of the performance, “the circuit is overturned, the gear is wrecked, and the network is destroyed.”

The point is to create, in Novak’s words, “the biggest, loudest, and most intense invocation of sonic immediacy imaginable” — sometimes blasting the audience into “a state of hypnosis, dreaming sleep, or trance.” …[T]he question of whether Noizu is a category of music is a question of taste and, even more, of definition – including self-definition, since there are people in the Noizu scene who insist that it is an experience utterly distinct from music.

(Video: Noizu artist Merzbow)

The speech Hillary Clinton gave on Monday focused on voting rights:

Nate Cohn sees the political logic of the speech:

Clinton only lost in 2008 because her weakness among progressive activists was paired with Obama’s showing among black and young voters, who combined to assemble a non-traditional Democratic primary coalition.

If she wants to wrap up the nomination quickly, she need to win over these Obama ’08 constituencies. To do that, Clinton doesn’t want to just seem like she’s checking the boxes of the Democratic platform. She wants to be seen as a champion of the causes that animate the different corners of the Democratic primary electorate. If she’s not, someone else could be. At the very least, Clinton doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of a big faction of the party, like she was on Iraq.

Last night’s speech sounded like a first step toward being a champion of a relatively new liberal cause: voting rights. The Clinton folks have to be happy that an issue like this is enflaming the base. It allows Clinton to hit her two relative vulnerabilities among non-white voters and on the left, and there aren’t too many general election downside risks to siding with voting rights. Perhaps as a result, Clinton was pretty unequivocal about her position. If the Clinton folks are smart, they’ll return to this issue with some regularity.

For what it’s worth, I tend to think this is the right call for Clinton – but as Cohn notes, one with limited potential.

After Obama, I suspect the Democrats will likely pick someone less prudent, cautious and leading-from-behind. They’ll want a clearer liberal who leads from out-front, as the broader culture shifts left. Hillary is not a natural pick for that role – so she’s shrewd to start nailing down those constituencies early. But it’s on national security that she’ll really have to prove she’s not a McCainiac. Alex MacGillis predicts the battles over voter suppression and voter fraud will stretch long into the future:

[T]he voting wars didn’t start with Obama and they won’t end with him. Leave aside the obvious big-picture history going back to Jim Crow and the Voting Rights Act; the modern era of the voting battles started back when Obama was but a humble state senator having trouble getting a rental car at the 2000 Democratic convention. They were an outgrowth of that year’s election, which laid bare just how much voting rules could matter at the margin. Democrats took the election as a lesson to be more vigilant against things like the voting rolls purge that eliminated countless eligible Floridians from the rolls; many Republicans drew the opposite lesson, to do everything possible to crimp turnout among likely Democratic voters, to keep states like Florida from ever being so close again.

Heather Mac Donald defends stop-and-frisk’s racial disparities:

[T]hough whites and Asians commit less than 1 percent of violent crime in the 88th Precinct and less than 6 percent of all crime, according to [Judge] Scheindlin 40 percent of all stops should be of whites and Asians, to match their representation in the local population.

Never mind that the suspect descriptions that [Officer Edgar Gonzalez of Brooklyn’s 88th Precinct] was working off of gave blacks and Hispanics as robbery, burglary and shooting suspects. To avoid an accusation of racial profiling, he should have stopped whites and Asians for crimes committed — according to their victims — exclusively by blacks and Hispanics.

That helps us focus on the real issue here: to what extent is the disproportionate racial imbalance in “stop-and-frisk” a legitimate by-product of fighting crime? What metric do you judge it by? The proportion of criminals who are black and Hispanic? The proportion of innocent people who are black and Hispanic? Or some more complex metric? Dylan Matthews complicates Mac Donald’s argument:

The Bloomberg administration says that it’s focusing stops on areas with lots of crime. But [Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia Law School] found that even if you control for the crime rate, the racial makeup of a precinct is a good predictor of the number of stops.

“The percent Black population and the percent Hispanic population predict higher numbers of stops, controlling for the local crime rate and the social and economic characteristics of the precinct,” Fagan’s report explains. “The crime rate is significant as well, so the identification of the race effects suggests that racial composition has a marginal influence on stops, over and above the unique contributions of crime.”

Cassidy adds:

Fagan’s analysis also showed that blacks and Hispanics, once they had been stopped, were more likely to be subjected to the use of force, even though the probability of the stop resulting in further action—like an arrest, or a summons—was actually lower in cases involving minorities than in those involving whites.

That, to me, gets at another core question: how on earth do the human beings tasked with this job not fall into racial profiling and not get hardened in ways that mean more cop violence in minority neighborhoods? You don’t have to believe cops are racist to see that stop-and-frisk by its very nature will often lead to abuse, unless countered by almost super-human virtue. The test for me is whether black and Hispanic citizens who live in high crime neighborhoods believe the trade-off is worth it. And the answer to that is mixed:

Black voters disapprove of stop and frisk 69 – 25 percent while approval is 57 – 37 percent among white voters and 53 – 45 percent among Hispanic voters, the independent Quinnipiac University poll finds …  A decrease in police use of stop and frisk would not lead to an increase in gun violence, voters say 50 – 41 percent, again with significant racial division. Black voters say 63 – 28 percent the reductions would not lead to more crime. White voters believe it would 49 – 39 percent and Hispanic voters agree 52 – 46 percent.

Robert VerBruggen offers another point:

[I]f police are targeting minorities for stop-and-frisk above and beyond their likelihood of being involved in a crime, we might expect searches of minorities to be less likely to uncover concrete evidence of criminal activity. We do see this to some extent: Whites were carrying weapons 1.9 percent of the time; the number for blacks was 1.1, Hispanics, 1.3. For “contraband other than weapons,” the numbers are 2.3 percent for whites, 1.8 percent for blacks, and 1.7 percent for Hispanics.

However, Mayor Bloomberg has said he’s specifically targeting guns, and on that front the trend runs in the opposite direction: 0.16 percent of stopped blacks were carrying guns, as compared with 0.07 percent of whites and 0.09 percent of Hispanics.

Weak. If whites are more likely to be carrying contraband and weapons, the disparity in gun-carrying does not seem to me to be enough to justify the huge racial imbalance in overall stop-and-frisk. And the experience of feeling racially profiled routinely by cops – whatever the actual motivation – is a huge social and constitutional issue. No minority group should feel as if the law is designed to target them because of their race. That cost is real – in political, social and human terms. And the huge escalation of stop-and-frisk in the last decade – long after the biggest drops in crime – suggests we are veering toward something close to a police state in some areas.

Time to recalibrate – as the polling for race for mayor seems to indicate.

(Chart from Mother Jones)