From their mouth to Jim Johnson’s ears:
With blacks complaining about the lack of minorities on his campaign team, Kerry might be tempted to choose a civil rights hero such as Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
Brian Kehrl reports on the Justice Department’s campaign against government accountability for government injustice:
On March 30 the High Court heard arguments on two combined cases involving the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 (ATCA), a law interpreted to allow foreign victims of human rights violations the ability to sue in federal court. The cases involve a Mexican doctor who was arrested and brought to the United States by Mexican nationals hired by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Dr. Humberto Alvarez-Machain was charged in 1990 with participating in the murder of a DEA agent in Mexico but was acquitted after two years of court battles for lack of evidence. The presiding judge called the government’s charges “wild hunches and speculation” when he dismissed the case. Alvarez-Machain returned to Mexico and filed suits against the U.S. government and Francisco Sosa, a Mexican policeman hired by the DEA for the kidnapping. A federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed the suit against the government but ruled in favor of Alvarez-Machain in the suit against Sosa and awarded the doctor $25,000 in damages. After Sosa appealed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the judgment and also reinstated the case against the government. Both decisions were appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Republicans have subjected Kerry’s time in Vietnam to the kind of going-over normally accorded war criminals. Did he really deserve that third Purple Heart? How big, exactly, was that piece of shrapnel that had to be removed from his left arm?
We could, I suppose, ask an equivalent question of Bush, but only if they awarded Purple Hearts for paper cuts incurred in the campaign headquarters of the Republican Senate candidate for whom Bush worked during the year he was supposed to be serving with the Air National Guard in Alabama.
From Ha’aretz:
In the first, potentially the decisive, formal hurdle for the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to end the Israeli presence in the whole of the Gaza Strip by next year, the members of his Likud party are to vote on the plan in a referendum to be held Sunday. With the vote only days away, the polling numbers themselves may prove historically significant. They may determine whether the prime minister, who has seen a strong majority in opinion surveys dwindle over the past week, will opt to put in play one or another of the Doomsday cards he has thus far kept face down on the political table. “If the margin is less than six or seven percent in the weekend polls, then Sharon must be very, very concerned,” says Haaretz commentator Yossi Verter.
Even in the short time remaining, a margin of no more than seven percent can be erased through organizational work, where the settlers have a decided advantage in campaign resources, he says. Organization – on short notice, and on a national scale – is the acknowledged forte of the settlers’ disciplined, well-financed, energetic and experienced Yesha Council, by far Israel’s most potent lobbying force. The settlers shocked all of Israel – themselves included – with the success Tuesday of an Independence Day mass anti-withdrawal protest in the southern Gaza Gush Katif settlement bloc, a hastily organized event that drew tens of thousands. The protest could not be said to have attracted a cross-section of Israelis, as the crowd was overwhelmingly Orthodox in composition. But organizers said that they hoped the momentum generated by the event would translate into a groundswell of fresh opposition to the Sharon plan, enough to bury the initiative in its first large-scale test in the Sunday referendum.
In an unfortunate move, the Supreme Court upholds gerrymandering in Pennsylvania:
The court affirmed on a 5-4 vote boundaries drawn by the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania Legislature, rejecting a challenge from state Democrats. Four court conservatives would have gone even further, by blocking legal attacks on gerrymandering, the practice of drawing voting districts to favor a political party. Those justices — Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — wanted to overrule part of a 1986 high court ruling that permitted challenges. A fifth moderate conservative, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, disagreed, as did four liberal justices. Kennedy voted with the conservatives in upholding Pennsylvania’s new map.
This is good news for incumbents and Republicans and bad news for the rest of us.
Specter narrowly defeats Toomey, who pledges his support for the incumbent in the general election. But don’t be surprised if Specter, who’s spent the past months announcing that he’s the real conservative and that getting Thomas on the Supreme Court should count for more than keeping Bork off of it, isn’t quite as lucky come November against Joe Hoeffel, who today kicks off his “A Future That Works” tour of Pennsylvania.
After an apparently rather embarassing reporting error in Bucks County, Specter and Toomey are now in a dead heat with 85% of the vote counted so far.
Brian accuses professional students of “mooching”:
If you go to graduate school, you know going in what it’s going to cost. If you don’t have the means, and aren’t prepared to deal with debt coming out of it, then maybe you shouldn’t make the choice to attend that school. To my way of thinking, it is not Yale’s responsibility to provide anyone with an education — it is your choice to take advantage of a system, with full knowledge of your responsibilities. Even protesting tuition before you attend the school, I might understand. But once you’ve made the choice, you have to deal with the results. You have entered a contract to attend school for a certain price, and that includes the contract to pay back what you borrow to cover that fee. Seriously, if anyone can explain to me why these people are entitled to “forgiveness” (I’d call it mooching), please educate me.
There are a few perspectives from which to come at this. I’ll try (briefly) to make the case from the perspective of Yale’s own convictions about itself rather than an appeal to my more radical perspective on education and democracy. One is the social mission of the University, which the majority of people on this campus would agree includes extending educational opportunity to deserving students and creating strong national national leaders. Don’t take it from me – read Levin’s book on the topic (although I should warn you, it has some dull stretches). Yale is a non-profit educational institution and not, say, an elite private racquet club, and so while there may be disturbing parallels between the two at times, many within and outside of this community are rightly more indignant when Yale institutes or maintains policies which narrow the population to whom its tremendous resources are accesible. Because yes, it is precisely Yale’s responsibility to seek to provide education to qualified students. Ergo we have financial aid and a need-blind admissions policy in Yale College.
Accepting the conception of the academy which Brian posits – if you don’t have the means, you shouldn’t go – hurts everyone’s education here. It keeps exceptionally talented students with a tremendous amount to learn from and teach their peers and their teachers out of the University. And it further narrows and weakens the social and academic community experienced here by robbing it disproportionately of the perspectives of working-class students and students of color. That further divorces Yale’s students from the country they’re being trained (however much comfort some of us may or may not have with such a project) to lead, and does a disservice to everyone being educated here.
And accepting crippling debt as a consequence of professional education narrows the viable options for students to pursue after school, making careers in advocacy and non-profit work potentially untenable for many students and narrowing the career options for Yale’s graduates. This is, as they say, a double whammy.
That’s why professional school students will keep fighting for a more progressive policy that would both widen the opportunities available to them after college and widen the backgrounds of their incoming peers. They’re uniquely poised to do so as students already attending this school; discounting their advocacy because they chose to attend Yale is no more justifiable than discounting criticism of this country from immigrants who chose to come to the United States.
Specter is now ahead by eighteen percent with over a third of the votes counted, granting him a likely insurmountable lead and consigning the increasingly-frantic National Review bloggers to a disappointing night with, one suspects, a very stiff drink.
Specter leads Toomey by six percent with 11% of precincts reporting.
For those of you starved for PA Senate Primary numbers, with about a quarter of a percent of precincts reporting (i.e., caveat: no information following this clause is of any conceivable weight) PoliticsPA has Specter ahead of Toomey by 14%. Now let’s see how the other 99.75% of the precincts go…
The National Review, which endorsed Pat Toomey, offers anecdotal evidence from various folks on the ground to suggest that their guy will have edged past Arlen Specter when the polls close tonight.
Josh Eidelson 