Tag: Premium

Amy Howe explains today’s 7-1 SCOTUS ruling:

Today a broad majority of the Court reinforced that affirmative action must be strictly reviewed, but it did not outlaw those programs.  In an opinion that required only thirteen pages, the Court explained that a university’s use of race must meet a test known as “strict scrutiny.”  Under this test, a university’s use of affirmative action will be constitutional only if it is “narrowly tailored.”  The Court in Fisher took pains to make clear exactly what this means:  courts can no longer simply rubber-stamp a university’s determination that it needs to use affirmative action to have a diverse student body.  Instead, courts themselves will need to confirm that the use of race is “necessary” – that is, that there is no other realistic alternative that does not use race that would also create a diverse student body.  Because the lower court had not done so, the Court sent the case back for it to determine whether the university could make this showing.

Lyle Denniston believes that the ruling has created “a strong new incentive for opponents of ‘affirmative action’ in college admissions to test virtually every such program; indeed, in some ways, the tone of the opinion would seem to invite such further testing.” Noah Feldman compares Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, to Sandra Day O’Connor:

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor started [the countdown clock on race-based college admissions] in 2003, when she wrote for the court that she expected such policies might be necessary (and therefore constitutional) until 2028. … The upshot of the Fisher holding is that if Kennedy does want to strike down affirmative action, he wants to do it gradually, stepwise, over several more years of litigation. That is exactly what O’Connor wanted with her highly unusual 25-year clock. Kennedy tends to prefer principles to such explicit pragmatic compromise. But here, with the chance to make headlines by striking down affirmative action, he acted like O’Connor.

That gives us a clue for what Kennedy might do in the two same-sex marriage cases that still loom.

If he is foisting gradualism on conservatives who want to end affirmative action, he may be preparing to foist gradualism on liberals who want full marriage rights for gay people right now. That would require Kennedy to eschew some of his grandly principled holdings in earlier fundamental rights cases — but it would further consolidate his position as the most powerful justice since, well, Sandra Day O’Connor.

Jeffrey Rosen is in the same ballpark:

The decision is a tribute to the moderation of Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts, who defied expectations and insisted on a narrow rather than a broad opinion. Unlike Justice Clarence Thomas, who would have overturned the Grutter case, and cases stretching back to the Bakke decision in 1978, which hold that educational diversity is a compelling interest for universities to pursue, Kennedy and the six conservative and liberal justices who joined him continued to accept Grutter as good law. That is a hugely significant act of judicial restraint, especially since most commentators expected the Court to go the other way.

David Corn writes that this “was a bad day for Justice Clarence Thomas”:

As he notes in a concurring opinion (that reads like a dissent), he wanted the court to “hold that a State’s use of race in higher education admissions is categorically prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause.” Thomas’ decision was longer than that of the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. He compared the arguments in favor of affirmative action to those used to support segregation in years bygone, calling them “virtually identical” to the contentions the court rejected to undo segregation. He declared, “The use of race has little to do with the alleged educational benefits of diversity.” And he went as far as you would expect, noting that “Slaveholders argued that slavery was a ‘positive good’ that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life.”

Yes, Thomas compared the justification of affirmative action to the justification for slavery. And he asserted that affirmative action harms white and Asian American students denied admission but actually causes more harm to those admitted under such programs: “Blacks and Hispanics admitted to the University as a result of racial discrimination are, on average, far less prepared than their white and Asian classmates.”

And Eric Posner examines Ginsberg’s dissent:

The lawyers for Abigail Fisher, the white applicant to UT Austin who brought today’s case, did not challenge an important element of the University of Texas’ admissions system, which is that the university will accept the top 10 percent of the class of each high school in Texas. This rule sounds race-neutral, but as Ginsburg notes in her dissent, it was just a disguised form of affirmative action, based on the background fact that Texas schools are highly segregated. The top 10 percent of an all-black school in a poor school district will be more poorly qualified for higher education than the 10–20 percent tier of an all-white school in a wealthy district, yet it’s the first group that automatically gets to go the University of Texas. This is a crude way to engage in affirmative action, and if the court bans explicit racial classifications while permitting this kind of disguise, which universities will rush to embrace, then it’s hard to see how the law will advance the meritocratic ideal embraced by opponents of affirmative action.

Ben Smith asks journalists to stop debating Snowden’s character. But, with news that the leaker is now in Moscow and apparently seeking asylum in Ecuador, Moynihan pushes back, arguing that Snowden’s shelter under authoritarian regimes makes his character fair game:

[Y]es, it is necessary to point out that, from Moscow, Snowden looks to be relocating, after a possible stop in Havana, to Ecuador, a country classified by Freedom House as “partially free,” with an “unfree” press. As we debate protecting journalists like Glenn Greenwald from the scurrilous attacks of both his fellow journalists, and politicians, it’s also worth noting that the Committee to Protect Journalists has expressed its “dismay” over a repressive new media law, inspired by Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa’s late mentor Hugo Chávez, that allows the government to “impose arbitrary sanctions and censor the press.”

As we bang on about the importance of transparency, we should remember that the Ecuadorian National Assembly, in which 100 of 137 seats are held by Correa’s ruling party, approved the controversial measure, according to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, “without debating any of its provisions—not even the ones that were added in the last moment.” Or maybe revisit Amnesty’s 2012 complaint that Correa was overseeing a “pattern of criminalization of community leaders who have participated in peaceful protests and then face unfounded charges, arbitrary arrests, and strict bail conditions simply for campaigning against laws and policies on the use of natural resources.”

Max Fisher analyzes what Putin or Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa would stand to gain by granting asylum to Snowden:

By sheltering Assange and possibly Snowden, infuriating the United States in the process, Correa bolsters his image as a national champion standing up to the Americans as well as his case for vigilance against the imperialist threat, including in the independent media he has painted as pro-Washington. Snowden, wittingly or not, could risk granting Correa’s crackdowns some political cover by accepting asylum there.

It’s difficult to imagine that Snowden or Assange earnestly support Correa’s treatment of journalists or his ideology, much less the far worse abuses of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And it’s not hard to see why someone might prefer asylum with a troubled Latin American democracy to risking life in a jail cell. But it’s difficult to escape the irony of these two high-profile activists, who got themselves wanted by the United States for leaks they say expose U.S. abuses, now allying themselves with governments infamous for abuses that are by any reasonable metric far more egregious.

Move over, Lydia Callis – meet Holly Maniatty, whose signing of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Bonnaroo show is burning up the Internets:

[Besides] memorizing their lyrics and watching past shows … [h]er prep work also includes researching dialectal signs to ensure accuracy and authenticity. An Atlanta rapper will use different slang than a Queens one, and ASL speakers from different regions also use different signs, so knowing how a word like guns and brother are signed in a given region is crucial for authenticity. … Of course, hip-hop is a highly improvisational art, and no amount of careful research can prepare an ASL interpreter for what might happen at a live show. “There are lots of times people freestyle; you have to go with the moment,” she said. “For some reason my brain is dialed into the hip-hop cadence and is able to process language really quickly.”

The rappers she works for seem to agree. At one point during Wu-Tang’s performance of “Bring Da Ruckus,” Method Man came over to Maniatty, mid-signing, and gave her a hug and a fist bump. He had been looking at her every time he said “motherfuckin” during the song and wanted to see if she signed it and how. Maniatty told me she thought to herself, “Of course I’m gonna say it, you’re saying it. Your words, not mine.”

On that note, Eric Sundermann interviews the woman who is “almost more fun to watch than Wu-Tang themselves”:

Is it weird to do interpretation for stuff that might make you uncomfortable? 

Yeah. At one point I was interpreting for Tenacious D, Jack Black’s band, and he was singing that song “Fuck Me Gently.” I was like, I cannot believe I’m signing this in front of 10,000 people.  But you know, it’s something he wanted to sing about. It’s Jack Black and you just do it.

There’s been some discussion about me signing the ‘N’ word, but that’s the word [Wu-Tang] uses and they have the rights to use it or not to use it. I wanted to make sure that the patrons can make their own political opinion, either being “okay, cool,” or be offended by it. To steal that opportunity from them is not the role of an interpreter. You know when you go to a concert and you’re like, who are these performers? And then you’re like, oh my god, they’re awesome! That’s the kind of experience you want [deaf people] to have.

For more Maniatty, watch her dance and sign with Bruce Springsteen here.

There are reports (WaPo) that the president, in his climate speech tomorrow, will propose measures to curb power plant emissions. Richard Caperton reacts:

In 2007 the Supreme Court required the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, to determine whether greenhouse gases should be regulated under the Clean Air Act as an endangerment to public health. Then-President George W. Bush balked at enforcing the law despite the recommendations of the EPA administrator and agency scientists to do so. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson finally made the endangerment finding under President Obama in 2009. In 2012 EPA proposed a carbon-pollution standard for new, yet-to-be-built power plants. Hopefully, the president will call on EPA to take the next step and develop standards for carbon pollution from existing plants.

Power plants are the single-largest uncontrolled source of climate pollution, producing one-third of greenhouse-gas pollution in the United States, according to EPA. The World Resources Institute found that setting ambitious standards are the most important reduction measures to be taken in order to meet the 2020 goal. And the Natural Resources Defense Council found that a system of strong but flexible standards, along with state-led compliance mechanisms combined with existing reductions, would achieve three-quarters of the 17 percent reduction goal.

Brad Plumer explains why a renewed effort is necessary:

Over the past few years, U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions have been falling rapidly, thanks to the recession, improved energy-efficiency, and a shift from coal to natural gas. But those trends have bottomed out recently, and coal started making a comeback in 2013.

That means the United States is no longer on track to reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, as Obama pledged under the Copenhagen Accord. To hit that target, the White House report argued, new “policy steps” will be needed.

Meanwhile, Justin Guay and Vrinda Manglik see an opportunity for reform at American overseas investment agencies:

When it comes to clean energy, OPIC punches well above its weight, with over $1.6 billion in support to “renewable resources” last year alone. Better yet, it hasn’t supported a dirty coal plant in a decade.

The problem is OPIC can’t make up for the billions the administration’s other overseas investment agencies are providing to coal and other fossil fuels. It’s time the administration brought other agencies up to the OPIC clean energy standard and dropped coal finance for good.

A reader writes in with a good bloody question (I’m back from England but the language is still a bit transitional):

In your latest episode of beard-blogging, you write that “Men …. will grow beards if they do nothing. The case, it seems to me, has to be made by those who want them to scrape the constantly growing hair off their face every day with a metal edge.” As a bearded man, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement (and your many others proclaiming the aesthetic, health, and philosophical advantages of beards).

However, as a bearded straight man, I find myself wishing that our culture would allow women to make the same “defer to the default” decision about their body hair. Ever since I was a teenager, I have found it really hot when women don’t shave. For a while I tried to surpress this preference, having internalized the cultural message that women’s body hair was deviant or gross. But I now realize that those who push for the removal of ever-more body hair are the ones who ought to explain themselves.

After all, our best theory about why pubic and underarm hair evolved is that it helps with sexual signaling – either olfactory signaling, by catching and concentrating pheromones, or visual signaling, by serving as a visual cue that someone has gone through puberty.

I realize that it would be incredibly problematic for me to say that women should stop shaving simply because I find underarm or leg hair attractive. People should do what they want with their own bodies, full stop. But I can’t help but think that we are in an unfortunate equilibrium where heterosexual women shave because they think they have to in order to be attractive to men, and heterosexual men don’t speak up about their true preferences because they don’t want to sound deviant or weird. I have been in several relationships with women who shaved who – when I told them that I wouldn’t mind and in fact would find it attractive if they stopped – were more than happy to stop wasting time and effort on shaving.

I just wish we could remove the social stigma surrounding women’s body hair so that women could make decisions about shaving their legs and armpits in the same way that men are increasingly able to make decisions about whether to shave their faces: based on their and their partners’ preferences, and without having to seem completely countercultural for making what is ultimately the more natural choice.

I have to say I should stay entirely neutral on this, for obvious reasons. But if I were required to shave my legs and armpits every day, I would regard it as a form of unnatural servitude. But if it objectively helps women get laid, who am I to stand in their way? It’s a woman’s choice – coerced by men. Or am I wrong?

Explanation for the above image:

ChinaSMACK is reporting that a user on China’s microblogging site Sina Weibo has invented “hairy stockings” as a way for young girls to fend off perverts. It’s hard to tell if these are real or imagined but given that some people in China have been putting dogs in pantyhose, these might just be the former.

Update from a reader:

Could a false beard to be worn by females be next?

A reader writes:

To the previous reader who took this woman to task for smoking inside her apartment: where is she supposed to go? Smoking outside is a great way to get caught. Many MJ smokers, myself included, would vastly prefer to go outside for all the reasons mentioned, but in many places it’s just too dangerous.

This is just another irritating, pointless consequence of the drug war – if it were legal, people wouldn’t need to be afraid to go out to the patio or the parking lot. They wouldn’t need to be afraid to check with their neighbors to see if their smoking is bothersome, or to make arrangements to avoid causing a nuisance. Most of all, they wouldn’t fear arrest and prosecution for what is usually nothing more than a slight inconvenience or annoyance to others. To me that’s one of worst consequences of these stupid policies – the dissolution of trust and community you see when people are afraid to live openly and publicly, despite not doing anything harmful or damaging that would actually merit the involvement of the Law. And that’s bad for everyone, smokers and non-smokers.

Another reader:

I live in Montreal and despite the fact weed is not legal, it might as well be. Reading that story, completely crazy by our standards, reminded me of the two encounters I had with cops related to weed:

One night I was in the line-up of  a club on the Main smoking a big joint with friends when a cop car stopped right in front of us, I kind half hid the joint behind my back, the cop shouted to me, “Hey what’s behind your back”, so I went on and showed him the fatty, he said with a big smile: “Hey that’s a big one” and left.

Another night, I saw two cops watching a guy rolling a joint. The guy obviously didn’t see the two cops watching him. Smiling, they waited for him to finish the joint, and just when he was about to light it up, they whistled him over, took the joint and destroyed it on the ground and left. No fine, just a smile.

So yeah, that’s what the cops are like here when it comes to weed. The Montreal Police chief already said they don’t have time or resources to waste on smokers. They’ll go after dealers and growers, but that’s it. Smoke away!

Another had a much different experience in the US:

I no longer smoke pot.  Not for any significant reasons – I just prefer bourbon.  I find it more social.  However, back in the day, I did smoke on occasion. My story starts about two days before I left for college.  My friends and I were out having a last night together (it was actually the very last time I hung out with my high school friends, in part due to the events that happened after this story).  There were two guys and a girl.  The girl and I smoked on occasion, but the other two were heavy users.  We made our way out to the boardwalk where, against my wishes, the two heavy users lit up the tail end of a joint to kill it off.  Obviously this was dumb, and this is no excuse, but we did look around and all we saw (at 11 at night) was a homeless person on the bench about 30 yards away.

On the bench we were seated from left to right: heavy smoker 1, me, girl, heavy smoker 2.  After about three minutes of smoking, a very large van came speeding, and I mean gunning it, onto the boardwalk towards us.  Obviously this was disconcerting.  My first reaction was, “Oh my god, someone completely drunk out of his mind is speeding on the boardwalk” – we all started to scatter.  It turns out it was a van full of cops.  It also turns out that homeless person was a cop.  Well, they sped right at us, stopped short and got out and tackled us.  They thought we were trying to run away, which we were, but not from the cops.

They cuffed us.  And by us, I mean the three guys.  They let the lady go, saying that nobody saw her smoke.  Remember earlier when I told you the seating order?  Well, on that bench heavy smoker 1 did smoke, me and the girl didn’t, and heavy smoker 2 smoked as well.  The cops said they saw heavy smoker 1, heavy smoker 2, and me smoke.  How did they see me passing the joint across as me smoking, but when our girl friend did the same thing, it wasn’t smoking?  How does it get from one end of the bench to the other, passing me and the girl, but I get in trouble and the lady doesn’t?

Anyway, as they pushed me up against the van and patted me down, I explained to them that the thing they feel in my pocket is my asthma inhaler, which prohibits me from smoking anything (a bit of a lie, but can you blame me?).  They didn’t care.  We spend the rest of the night handcuffed to the seats in a van riding around picking up actual criminals. Then we spent the overnight in the local prison cell while they mocked us.  At one point, one of them came over and said something like, “Well I can see you and you are potheads (referencing heavy smoker 1 and heavy smoke 2) and you (referencing me) don’t smoke.  Too bad you got caught up with them.” They knew the whole time I did nothing wrong.  They let the girl go, but not me.

Fortunately, where I grew up, everyone knew a cop, so we were able to get six months probation and expungement thereafter. But it’s an easy collar for the cops and it fills their quotas with no danger.  It is absurd.

Barro analyzes the compromise being worked out:

The basic outline of the deal is this: Democrats agreed to spend as much money on border security as Republicans wanted (some $30 billion over 10 years) so long as Republicans agreed that there wouldn’t be consequences if the security doesn’t work.

It’s not as dumb a deal as it sounds like.

This approach substitutes for one that many Senate Republicans had previously been demanding in exchange for supporting the immigration bill: A “hard trigger” that only activated the path to citizenship for previously-unauthorised immigrants once border security was apprehending 90% of people trying to cross the border illegally.

Brad Plumer adds:

It’s not clear what all this extra staff and technology will do for border security. There are also good questions about whether the Department of Homeland Security can even train that many guards, or whether there’s actually room for 700 miles of fence — Corker called the provisions “almost overkill.” But for Republicans looking to convince their base that they’re taking border security seriously, overkill might be exactly what they need.

Yglesias is skeptical that more border enforcement will do much good:

Visa overstayers are already a large share of the unauthorized population, and creating a guest-worker program is going to increase the possibility of visa overstaying. You could build the Berlin Wall all across the U.S.–Mexico border and you’re not going to solve anything. What you need to do is either increase the number of W Visas (my preference) or increase behind-the-border security or some combination of the two. Personally, I don’t really care that a border surge is going to be ineffective. But it can get corrosive in the long term if you promise the voters something your legislation can’t deliver. If this bill passes, the immigration-enforcement problem won’t be at the border.

Reihan agrees that focusing exclusively on the border is counterproductive:

Not surprisingly, my preference would be for much more stringent behind-the-border security and for the elimination of the guest-worker program, but my preferred policy option has many serious downsides, e.g., the enforcement measurements it would likely require would be expensive, draconian, and potentially intrusive. Canada, for example, imposes a one-year mandatory prison sentence on unauthorized immigrants, which seems impracticable in the U.S. context.

And Ed Krayewski argues that, if “the Border Patrol is underfunded (big if), it’s because they have to pursue drug cartels and human traffickers operating along the border”:

Real immigration reform would mean liberalizing immigration laws to make it easier to enter the United States legally. Appropriately implemented, immigration reform should cut down significantly on human trafficking at the border. Once it is easier to go the legal route than to hire a coyote, the human trafficking problem should largely take care of itself.

Though he would prefer to deal with the drug trafficking issue by ending the war on drugs, he goes on to note that, “if the Border Patrol is mandated to pursue narcotraffickers and terrorists along the border, easing the demand for illegal entry (by lowering the cost of legal entry) ought to allow the Border Patrol to focus on those narrower problems.”

Literally, me. New York is debating the issue:

The New York City Council is seriously considering a measure that would permit voting by legally resident noncitizens in municipal elections after six months’ residence. If the measure passes, it would surely energize similar initiatives in other major metropolitan areas.

Noncitizen voting was once the norm, even in federal elections. At the beginning of the 20th century, as many as 22 states and territories allowed noncitizens to vote not just for local but also for national elections. Noncitizens legally voted in every presidential election until 1924. The practice coincided with an immigrant surge approximating today’s.

The case for permanent resident voting:

Opponents of noncitizen voting ignore basic conceptions of self-governance. Noncitizens are directly affected by local government and pay local taxes. Accordingly, they should have the same say as their neighbors in how they are governed. It was on that theory that even undocumented immigrant parents were allowed to vote in New York City school-board elections until the elected board was abolished in 2002.

More than 35 percent of New Yorkers are foreign-born; many remain noncitizens and many are economically challenged. Denying the vote to so large a proportion of the community gives rise to a new kind of rotten borough.

Because of the HIV ban, I have lived in the US for 20 years with no right to vote, no citizen’s constitutional rights, no guarantee of social security, no access to any medical benefits by the state … and yet, I have been taxed at a rate of roughly 50 percent for the past decade or so. You’d think I’d be furious. I am maddened by the irrationality of the HIV ban – and the long decades of complacency since.

And yet I favor restricting votes to citizens. Voting is integral to a democratic society and although I have paid my taxation and had no representation, that merely makes me the same as every other US citizen in the District of Columbia. My view is that until all citizens are able to be represented in the Congress, no permanent residents should.

DC’s core rights must come first – or we will be giving non-citizens more democratic leverage than citizens.