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…is Reuven Rivlin. The former Knesset speaker and Likud party stalwart was elected yesterday. Dimi Reider, writing before the election, called Rivlin “the best president for the Left, for whom the Left will never vote”:

As a staunch right-winger, Rivlin is opposed to partition but is emphatically opposed to racism, coupling his opposition to a Palestinian state with support for offering Israeli citizenship to all Palestinians. While this is a stance being taken up by a number of right-wing politicians in recent years, Rivlin, as a democrat, goes one step further. When I interviewed him for Foreign Policy four years ago, for instance, he spoke nostalgically of a rotation-based executive espoused by Revisionist Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky  – and held up by Belfast as one possible inspiration for a future of power-sharing. It’s a far cry from nationalist self-determination, or from the one state advocated by Palestinians and the pro-Palestinian Left. But it still offers infinitely more room for maneuver than anything ever plausibly offered or actually given to Palestinians by the centrist two-state Left.

What I take from this is that the two-state solution is dead and the project for Greater Israel continues apace. At some point, the Palestinian Arabs who would end the existence of a Jewish-majority state will be expelled, as they were in 1948. It’s hard to see any other outcome from the logic of one unitary Jewish state across the entire area that Israel has now controlled for the majority of its existence.  “But Rivlin is more than his opposition to a two-state solution,” Raphael Ahren stresses:

During his two terms as Knesset Speaker, he wasn’t afraid to confront the right wing — for example by opposing legislation he deemed as discriminatory and undemocratic, which won him many friends even among Israeli left-wingers. MKs Ilan Gilon (Meretz) and Shelly Yachimovich (Labor) voted for Rivlin, as did all four MKs from the Arab-Israeli Ra’am-Ta’al faction.

“He has an opinion on the two-state solution, but he is not widely seen as an ultra-nationalist,” said Mitchell Barak, a pollster and political analyst. “He’s one of voices of reason in Likud; he’s not a hothead like Danny Danon.” The president-elect’s views on the peace process are not born of hatred for Arabs, as his voting record and his statements as Knesset speaker attest, and the Arabs and the world at large know that, he said.

Comparing Rivlin to his predecessor Shimon Peres, Jonathan Tobin argues that his election indicates how Israeli public opinion on the peace process has shifted:

Rivlin’s win is one more demonstration that the center of Israeli politics is well to the right of where Americans would like it to be. While liberals and others who deride Netanyahu think the views of the popular Peres represent what most Israelis think, the experience of the last 20 years of the peace process have created a new political alignment that means Rivlin’s opinions don’t place him outside of the mainstream.

This is disconcerting for those who would like to believe that Peres, the architect of Oslo process, speaks for Israel in a way that Netanyahu cannot. But even if most Israelis think a two-state solution would be ideal, they know that in the absence of a true peace partner it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

A little background on the Rivlins: The new president comes from a large and influential family who were among the first Jews to settle in Ottoman Palestine in the 19th century, making them, as Eetta Prince-Gibson calls them, “the closest thing to a Jewish aristocracy Israel has ever had”:

On their website (www.rivlinfamily.com), the clan claims to number today more than 50,000, of whom more than 35,000 are thought to live in Israel. The website lists some 195 people of note, including Yosef Yoel Rivlin, the author of the first Hebrew edition of the Koran (and father of Rueven Rivlin); Eliezer Rivlin, the deputy president of the Supreme Court of Israel from 2006 to 2012; Ranan R. Lurie, an American-Israeli political cartoonist and journalist; Rivka Michaeli, the doyenne of Israeli comedy; Sefi Rivlin, a wild-cat comedian and admired satirist, who died last year; Lilly Rivlin, an American feminist filmmaker and left-wing peace activist; Leora Rivlin, an award-winning actress, and Muki Tzur, from Kibbutz Ein Gev, a well-regarded historian of the period of the Second Aliyah.

It’s the first drone approved for commercial overland use!

The FAA gave BP permission to fly the UAV over Alaska yesterday. (What could possibly go wrong?) Adam Clark Estes describes the drone as “less like a hobbyist toy and more like what the military uses on the battlefield”:

In fact, AeroVironment’s Puma AE drone is one of the military’s favorite models. At nearly five feet long with a wingspan of nine feet, this is a sizable aircraft. … This makes good sense when you consider that the drone’s main duty will be patrolling BP’s oil pipelines in Alaska. AeroVironment’s five-year contract with BP also stipulates that the aircraft will do some 3D-mapping, wildlife monitoring, and the occasional search-and-rescue mission.

This is a good thing. It’s no mystery that drones can do a lot of good by taking over jobs that humans can’t or won’t do. Patrolling potentially dangerous pipelines in Alaska’s deep wilderness certainly qualifies. The location also largely skirts around the privacy issue that the FAA’sstruggled to address in its ongoing process of writing the rules that will dictate how commercial drones will operate in the United States.

Jason Koebler argues that this isn’t the breakthrough it seems to be:

In fact, AeroVironment had already been flying commercial drone missions in the area. Today, the FAA simply ever-so-slightly expanded the area in which AeroVironment can use its drone. Last July, the company became the first ever to gain FAA approval to fly the drone over the North Slope of the Arctic for oil spill monitoring and ocean surveys. That’s why you’re seeing the claim that this is the first commercial drone approved to be flown over land.

But Megan Garber argues that the launch heralds a new era of civilian UAV use:

As Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx put it in a statement, “These surveys on Alaska’s North Slope are another important step toward broader commercial use of unmanned aircraft. The technology is quickly changing, and the opportunities are growing.”

And they’re growing because the government is fostering them. The Obama administration, The Verge points out, has considered offering a “streamlined” approval process for low-risk commercial use of drones (like farming, say, and filmmaking). It is also considering giving permissions to seven different aerial filmmaking companies that use drones in their photography. And in April, the FAA announced the certification of a site in North Dakota for testing the Draganflyer X4ES, a camera-equipped quadcopter. The site, the FAA pointed out at the time, will not only allow for the gathering of safety and maintenance data on the drones; it will also help the agency to develop rules for UAV operation.

Which is to say: The frontier is fading. In its place will be standards, regulations, and crowded skies.

Suzy Khimm summarizes Obama’s executive action on student debt:

Obama signed a memorandum on Monday that would allow more Americans to limit their student loan payments at 10 percent of their income. The action will expand on Obama’s “Pay as You Earn” program, which first launched in October 2011, making it available to those who took out student loans before October 2007. Those who opt into the program will have their student loan payments set according to a sliding scale based on income. The remaining balance is forgiven after 20 years; those working in public service have any remaining balance forgiven after 10 years.

The original “Pay as You Earn” program was only available to those who took out loans after October 2007 and continued to borrow after October 2011. The White House estimates that the program’s expansion will offer student debt relief to an estimated 5 million Americans.

But Derek Thompson believes the plan won’t fix the college-cost crisis:

The pay-as-you-earn plan is appropriate and targeted. It carries relatively few downsides, and it will help some students get on with their post-graduate lives. But we shouldn’t expect it to “fix” much now, because the existing program hasn’t “fixed” much already. Libby Nelson reports that just a tiny fraction of eligible borrowers are currently using Pay As You Earn. This is like giving somebody with a broken leg a half-off coupon for crutches – a perfectly decent ameliorative option that only works if the injured party chooses to use it.

Jana Kasperkevic concurs, arguing that “at the heart of the problem are the increasing tuition costs that often lead students to take on more and more debt”:

Consider this: as tuition at public four-year college increased by 250 percent, family incomes increased by just 16 percent. The increase in tuition last year amounted to a 2.9 percent increase for in-state students at four-year public college and a 3.8 percent increase for student at private colleges.

There are reasons for this increase, such as decreased funding from the government. According to CNN, US states have cut college funding by a total of $15.2 billion between 2007 and 2012. That’s a 17.4-percent drop in funding. During that time, the number of students increased by 12 percent. … Until US government tackles the issue of increasing cost of tuition and the fact that for majority of Americans going to college means taking on some kind of debt, the overall burden of student debt is only bound to increase

The editors at Bloomberg aren’t thrilled with the news either:

[T]he share of students who default, now at one in seven – its highest level in two decades. By that light, expanding access to income-based repayment is a good idea, as far as it goes. A more efficient idea, proposed by Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida earlier this year, would automatically enroll borrowers in those plans, rather than leaving students to wade through the details on their own. Otherwise, the students who most need those programs may not be the ones who know enough to sign up for them.

Another idea worth pursuing is effectively removing the possibility of default altogether, by having a borrower’s employer automatically deduct those income-based repayments from borrowers’ paychecks and send the money to the Internal Revenue Service. That’s what Republican Representative Tom Petri of Wisconsin has proposed, modeled on systems in the U.K. and elsewhere.

Libby Nelson notes that Congress “could take other steps to make it less likely that students need to take out loans in the first place” – but almost certainly won’t:

A decade ago, two House Republicans, including now-Speaker John Boehner, proposed cutting off financial aid at colleges that increase tuition too rapidly. Colleges strongly opposed the specter of federal price controls; Democrats refused to get on board; and the idea went nowhere. When President Obama proposed an updated version of the same idea, suggesting that Congress should some federal financial aid to reward colleges that offer good value and punish colleges that don’t, even Democrats left the idea out of their budget proposals.

That leaves student loans as the remaining tool in Congress’s college affordability toolbox. Unlike grants, they’re a moneymaker for the federal government under current accounting rules. And they’re less thorny politically because the vast majority of student loans already come from the Education Department. There aren’t other interests – like banks and colleges – to be taken into account when changing policy. Student loans aren’t the only lever Congress has over higher education policy. They’re just by far the easiest one to pull, and so lawmakers return to it again and again.

But Cardiff Garcia notes that a half-measure could be better than none:

[W]hat can be said with more confidence is that higher student loan debt has a deleterious effect on the lives of the people who have it. From [Wenli Li of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s] paper:

Researchers have found evidence that high debt burdens make students less likely to choose lower-paying careers such as teaching. Jesse Rothstein and Cecilia Rouse study a “natural experiment” generated by a change in financial aid policy by a highly selective university. The university introduced a “no loans” policy, in which it replaced the loan component of financial aid awards with grants. Interestingly, they find that debt causes graduates to choose jobs with substantially higher salaries, such as those in finance and consulting, and reduces the probability that students choose low-paid “public interest” jobs such as grade-school teacher or social worker. …

And from Brookings:

Dew (2008) finds a negative correlation between reduced marital satisfaction and student loan debt, positing that increased stress related to consumer debt—including student loans—could diminish marital satisfaction. About 14 percent of borrowers surveyed in 2002 reported delaying marriage due to student loan debt, up from 9 percent 15 years earlier. Over the same period, the share of borrowers who reported that they delayed having children due to student loans jumped from 12 percent to 21 percent (Baum and O’Malley 2003).

Meanwhile, Kelly Field observes that “the biggest beneficiaries of the change are likely to be graduate- and professional-school alumni with large debt balances and low-paying public-service careers”:

Consider, for example, a public defender who graduated from a private law school in 2012 with $125,000 in debt (the average that year) and has an adjusted gross income of $55,000. He could reduce his payment from $469 a month under income-based repayment to $312 under Pay as You Earn, according to the repayment estimator, and have more than $175,000 in debt forgiven, compared with less than $49,000 under income-based repayment. Ultimately, he would pay back more than $150,000 less than he would in an income-based plan.

In his column last Friday on what he sees as the dangers of progressivism in universities, George Will provoked widespread outrage by expressing skepticism in statistics about campus rape and mocking the Obama administration’s response to the crisis. The line that seemed to really set people off was his allegation that campus progressivism seeks to “make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,” which in turn makes “victims proliferate”. In fairness to Will, he wasn’t specifically referring to sexual assault here, and the line has since been widely quoted out of context. But Twitter wasn’t about to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Marcotte covers the backlash:

Sexual assault victims were so outraged at being told they exaggerated their experiences to get some unnamed “privileges” that they took to Twitter to explain how un-fun it actually is to come out about your rape.

Wagatwe Wanjuki kicked it off with a tweet reading, “Where’s my survivor privilege? Was expelled & have $10,000s of private student loans used to attend school that didn’t care I was raped.” The hashtag #SurvivorPrivilege swiftly emerged, with survivors explaining, one tweet at a time, as the various ways your life can go to hell after you survive a sexual assault.

The psychological toll of enduring sexual assault was a major theme. Sexual assault survivors recounted having flashbacks and panic attacks, feeling like “damaged goods”, and living in fear of having it happen again. The elusive nature of justice was another major issue, with women telling hair-raising stories of their attackers getting away with sexual assault and everyone pretending it didn’t happen.

But perhaps the saddest survivor “privilege” is the one that often gets talked about the least: How frequently survivors find coming out about being assaulted means losing your entire support system, as people get mad at you for making them have to think about it. Or even just because they start to think that being around you is a bummer.

But even if Will didn’t mean to say that being a victim of sexual assault confers privilege, his views on the issue are still at odds with reality. Alyssa examines his contention that sexual assault can’t be as prevalent as progressives say it is:

As I wrote last week, most studies that balance the perspectives of survivors and law enforcement suggest that there is a false reporting rate of between two and eight percent. So why does the idea of the false report persist? Daniel Kahan, the Elizabeth K. Dollar Professor of Law at Yale Law School, who has written extensively on the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning,” that the way we weigh evidence is influenced by strong goals, needs and worldviews, studied the cultural norms that affected views of acquaintance and date rape cases. He found that attachment to traditional gender roles played a significant role in driving skepticism that survivors actually meant it when they said no to sex.

James Hamblin points out that the epidemic Will refuses to believe in is starting to become more visible:

According to a report today from the U.S. Department of Education, the number of sexual assaults reported on college campuses increased by 50 percent between 2001 and 2011—from 2,200 to 3,300 cases. That’s actually more heartening than disconcerting, in that it’s unlikely that sexual assault increased by that much; rather, more victims are coming forward. They come forward when they don’t feel they’ll be blamed for being raped, dismissed as drunken sluts, and when there are appropriate outlets for reporting and justice.

But it’s still underreported and underpunished, thus condoned. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 18 percent of American women report having experienced rape at some point in their lives. The way sexual assault is defined in the media is critical to shifting culture from blaming victims to blaming aggressors. “Victims proliferate” when aggressors proliferate, or when victims were there all along.

Katie McDonough notices that Will never quite gets to the point:

If men like Will really do believe that most sexual assaults are a byproduct of the “ambiguities of hookup culture,” why aren’t they writing smug editorials about affirmative consent? If the actual crisis is that young men are being falsely accused of rape at an alarming rate (they are not), then wouldn’t some legitimate action be required? But instead we just get Will’s ridiculous column. It seems that even Will doesn’t take his own ideas that seriously.

Linker bluntly calls the column “outrageously stupid, transparently absurd — the kind of tossed-off, back-of-the-napkin theorizing one would expect of a guy who spends a little too much time in the make-up chair at Fox News.” Maria LaMagna psychoanalyzes Will:

[H]e appears to have succumbed to what in many college curriculums is known as the “just-world fallacy,” by which one assumes that real-world consequences, including tragedy, are solely a product of just deserts. In fairness to Will, we all do it. We prefer to believe we live in a fair world, one where bad things only happen to bad people who deserve them. When tragedy strikes someone, we reassure ourselves by thinking, “That could never happen to me, or anyone I care about.” The colloquial term for this magical thinking is “blame the victim.”

Amy Davidson determines that Will’s column is not ultimately about sexual assault or even women:

The true target of his column is “progressivism,” which he seems to regard as an engine for the mysterious elevation of people whom he doesn’t feel should call themselves victims. In that, his column is of a piece with a general conservative complaint (one also heard in some recent Supreme Court decisions).

Emily Badger summarizes yesterday’s big education news:

A Superior Court judge in Los Angeles on Tuesday struck down state laws in California governing teacher tenure, ruling against teachers unions in a sweeping decision that’s expected to upend how teachers are hired and fired in the state – and possibly far beyond it.

The case, Vergara v. California, will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court and could set off similar legal challenges in other states. Brought on behalf of nine public-school students in the state, the case challenged a set of laws, including one that gives teachers in California tenure as early as 18 months into their careers. Another requires layoffs on a last-in/first-out basis that excludes consideration of teacher quality.

Students Matter, a Silicon Valley-based group that brought the suit, argued that these policies make it hard to fire “grossly ineffective” teachers and to retain high-quality junior ones, and that low-income minority students disproportionately suffer as bad teachers are shuttled into their classrooms.

Alexander Nazaryan cheers the ruling:

[Judge Rolf M.] Treu vividly depicted the dreary state of affairs I witnessed as a public school teacher: tenure is awarded for no reason other than seniority, as if merely showing up every day were an incredible feat of pedagogy. It is so expensive to remove a teacher (perhaps as much as $450,000 in California), that most school districts don’t even bother, instead shuffling the lemons to a dropout factory where no one will notice their baleful presence.

And it perpetuates the noxious practice known as last-in-first-out, which privileges seniority above all other attributes, so that when reductions in the teaching force occur, they mandatorily target the most junior teachers, regardless of how good those teachers may be. As it happens, the youngest teachers often teach at the most challenging schools, so that the inane LIFO rule (I couldn’t think of a less appealing acronym if I tried) further destabilizes the very institutions that crave stability.

Meanwhile, Ravitch is predictably pissed:

This is a big win for the Billionaire Boys Club. Name a state that has no due process rights for teachers and excellent public schools. One?

Yglesias considers the politics at stake:

Teachers unions, obviously, think Treu got it wrong. And they will have many liberals allies who regard the anti-tenure movement as thinly veiled union-busting. What’s more, even though conservatives will largely cheer this policy outcome, the legal logic isn’t one conservatives normally embrace.

Treu is essentially advancing a disparate impact theory, holding that a policy that has no discriminatory intent is nonetheless unconstitutional because its negative consequences fall much more heavily on minority kids than on white ones. Typically this is a left-wing theory of how anti-discrimination policy should work that conservatives view very skeptically. The particular politics of public education have scrambled the normal ideological alignment somewhat in this case.

Chait elaborates:

What makes the California lawsuit fascinating is that it employs a classic liberal legal strategy. The plaintiffs show (1) current tenure rules make it nearly impossible for schools to fire chronically ineffective teachers, (2) having a chronically ineffective teacher imposes irreparable harm on a child in the form of lost wages, and (3) chronically ineffective teachers are disproportionately concentrated in schools with high numbers of minorities students. The third point turns the case into an equal protection violation.

Eric Posner is skeptical:

I do not believe that this case will be affirmed on appeal; or if it is, I believe that it will be distinguished away to oblivion. Courts have had nothing but trouble trying to enforce “social rights” like the right to an education where those rights exist (in states like California, and in many foreign countries), and generally give up. …

[I]f, as the court says, these rules discriminate against low-income and minority students because school authorities funnel the grossly incompetent teachers whom they can’t fire to the weakest schools, isn’t the proper remedy to forbid this behavior directly? The court is never very clear whether it is enforcing a right to education (meaning a right not to be taught by a grossly incompetent teacher) or a right not to be discriminated against (a right not to be taught by a grossly incompetent teacher because you are a minority or are poor).

But Dana Goldstein argues that even if the ruling stands, it may not be a boon for students:

For high-poverty schools, hiring is at least as big of a challenge as firing, and the Vergara decision does nothing to make it easier for the most struggling schools to attract or retain the best teacher candidates.

From 2009 to 2011, the federal government offered 1,500 effective teachers in 10 major cities – including Los Angeles – a $20,000 bonus to transfer to an open job at a higher poverty school with lower test scores. In the world of public education, $20,000 is a major financial incentive. All these teachers were already employed by urban districts with diverse student populations; they weren’t scared of working with poor, non-white children. Yet less than a quarter of the eligible teachers chose to apply for the bonuses. Most did not want to teach in the schools that were the most deeply segregated by race and class and faced major pressure to raise test scores. …

The lesson here is that California’s tenure policies may be insensible, but they aren’t the only, or even the primary, driver of the teacher-quality gap between the state’s middle-class and low-income schools. The larger problem is that too few of the best teachers are willing to work long-term in the country’s most racially isolated and poorest neighborhoods.

Zooming out, Stephen Sawchuk notes that the ruling comes amid “a contentious national debate about teacher quality and teachers’ unions”:

Nationally, some 16 states have taken steps to tie tenure-granting to teacher performance; seven return teachers with weak evaluations to probationary status. Florida and Kansas have both eliminated either the continuing employment or due process associated with tenure; North Carolina did, too, but that move was recently declared unconstitutional.