Just a reminder: As I noted earlier this month, the voting section of the Justice Department is sending election observers to the primaries in Noxubee County Mississippi today, where the Bush administration filed a case on behalf of white voters under Section 11(b), the same part of the Voting Rights Act used to secure an injunction against the New Black Panthers. At the time, Noxubee was the first voting rights case ever filed on behalf of white voters. Now, a key part of the conservative narrative in the NBPP case was that the Obama administration would not intervene to protect white voters. Aside from the fact that last year the voting section requested that the injunction against the individual in that case, Ike Brown, be extended, they are now sending election observers to Noxubee, with the implied purpose of making sure white voters aren't being disenfranchised. The allegations of anti-white racial bias in the narrowing of the NBPP case were debunked by an internal report by the...

The New York Times has a feature asking "If I were president" which basically involves the enlisted getting wistful about all the things they'd do if you know, Congress didn't existed and if the office of the presidency conferred the ability to work magic. As for me well, if I were president, I would make sure all the money's spent on good things. I would not jock the fact that there are rich people in the world because, yo, I got a girl and she needs new clothes and I need new sneakers. And that's all I know.

Over at Greg's I mock the right's reaction to good news in Libya: McCain and Graham, both of whom had warm personal interactions with Ghadafi in the past, have now gotten exactly what they wanted from the administration’s decision to intervene. But GOP partisanship demands that they not acknowledge the president’s role in assembling the global coalition that aided the rebels. Indeed, with the Republican Party wedded to a contradictory image of the president as foreign policy weakling and iron-fisted domestic dictator, we’re going to see a lot of bizarre rationalizing of what happened in an attempt to preserve this narrative of the Obama presidency. While the Libyan rebels have earned a moment of celebration, toppling Ghadafi was still the “easy” part, relatively speaking. The “hard” part is the post-conflict transition to a stable government that respects the individual rights of its citizens. The premature celebrations of victory in Iraq in 2003 should be a reminder of this. A...

I talk Rick Perry, civil liberties, and the genius of Louie CK with Conor Friedersdorf: A coda on our discussion on Perry's decision to mandate the HPV vaccine, from Amanda Hess: Thanks to HPV, just about everyone has a sexually transmitted infection these days. About 20 million Americans are currently infected with one or more strains of the virus. Six million more are infected each year. If you have sex, you're more likely than not to get it before you die. Forty percent of women will contract it within just 16 months of their first vaginal intercourse. And the virus' proliferation has complicated Americans' moral judgments concerning sexual activity. The ubiquity of HPV has democratized sexual stigma—the virus infects people of all races, classes, and sexual orientations. If contracting a virus from sex is the norm, it makes it more difficult to dismiss people with STIs as moral degenerates or irresponsible sluts. At the same time, the proliferation of HPV among young people has...

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, fresh off yesterday's remarks that Barack Obama wants "to create dependency because it worked so well for him,” because he's black, offers some thoughts on Afghanistan: The best way to get us out of Afghanistan is to grow our economy, change the regulations, have a vibrant, growing America where people are afraid to come against us,” Coburn said. Yesterday Coburn said Obama's ideas were "goofy and wrong." Completely unlike the idea that deregulation would get us out of Afghanistan. Almost seems like a missed opportunity to promote other Republican cure-all's like lowering taxes or bombing Iran. Those would get us out of Afghanistan too right?

Mansfield Frazier (via Sara Mayeux ) reports that recidivism rates in Florida are lower for offenders who get back their right to vote post-incarceration. According to a recent report by The Florida Parole Commission, “the overall three-year recidivism rate based on all released inmates” was 33..1, while the recidivism rate for released prisoners who were given their civil rights back and were allowed to vote stood at 11 percent. These findings were not generated by a progressive organization such as The Sentencing Project, the ACLU, or the NAACP, but by a state governmental body utilizing exacting scientific methodologies. The inescapable conclusion has to be that allowing formerly incarcerated persons to more fully participate in society will result in a reduction of crime and recidivism. Well I wouldn't go that far. The study suggests that the formerly incarcerated who are reinfranchised are less likely to recidivate. Correlation is not causation. Under the Florida process, those...

The Obama administration's decision to defer deportation of undocumented immigrants who don't post a threat to public safety is really a huge deal : What changed? Obama’s poll numbers among Latino voters began to slip. Both on the local and national level, immigration reform advocates upped the pressure, even protesting at the Obama administration’s headquarters in Chicago. While the debate over the administration’s aggressive enforcement policy largely occurred under the radar in the mainstream media, Obama was getting pilloried in the Spanish-language press for breaking his promises. All the while, the administration was getting no credit from the right for its aggressive enforcement policies, even as deportations rose, the number of illegal immigrants dropped, and more resources were deployed at the border. Heading into 2012 with little in the way of progress to show on immigration reform, the administration likely felt that it had to do something to show that its immigration...