Reading this story on Peter E. Waldron, a staffer for Michele Bachmann in Iowa who was arrested on charges of terrorism in Uganda (the charges were later dropped) I can’t help but think of how fortunate he was that he was not immediately assumed to be guilty, placed in indefinite military detention, and then forced […]
Adam Serwer
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Can DHS Prioritize?
The American Immigration Lawyers Association has released a report on DHS immigration enforcement efforts (via The Economist), arguing that the tools DHS is using to reduce illegal immigration conflict with its stated priorities of focusing on undocumented immigrants who are a threat to public safety. Essentially, their argument is that the use of programs like […]
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Adventures In Logic With Tom Coburn
Obama’s pal, Senator Tom Coburn on, of all things, Medicare: Responding to a man in Langley who asked if Obama “wants to destroy America,” Coburn said the president is “very bright” and loves his country but has a political philosophy that is “goofy and wrong.” Obama’s “intent is not to destroy, his intent is to […]
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Recidivism, Israel Edition
The Prospect’s Jerusalem correspondent Gershom Gorenberg sent me a note in response to my recidivism and unemployment post earlier: Reminded me of attending a Jewish student convention in 1975 and meeting the guy who was there to raise consciousness of the situation of Jews who couldn’t keep their religion in American prisons. He’d gotten religion […]
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Begging For Recidivism
Matthew Yglesias comments on a New York law recently signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo that would make “convictions for 26 felonies…become automatic disqualifying factors, raising the number of crimes for which a conviction would warrant a permanent ban from school-bus driving to 58.” Obviously, it’s tough to be the guy who’s going to bat for […]
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Georgetown, Apartheid, What’s The Difference?
The folks who brought you the now-discredited charges behind the New Black Panther voter intimidation case are busy trying to prove that the Justice Department is deeply politicized because it’s hiring people with experience in civil rights organizations to work in the civil rights division, as opposed to establishing an illegal Republican litmus test like […]
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Rick Perry Doesn’t Apologize Except When He Does
It’s 2000 all over again: A Republican governor from Texas is running for president, and the press is swooning over his manly manliness. Opinion columnists are already lining up to squeeze Perry’s biceps. Washington Post “liberal” columnist Richard Cohen thinks Perry “looks like a president,” whatever that means, while Kathleen Parker writes that Perry shares […]
Posted inEducation in America
Desegregation In Wake County
Trymaine Lee has a fascinating story on the role Americans for Prosperity played in dismantling a school desegregation program in North Carolina: Since 2000, Wake County has used a system of integration based on income. Under this program, no more than 40 percent of any school’s students could receive subsidized lunches, a proxy for determining […]
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Reihan Salam, writing…
Reihan Salam, writing about the conservative quest to unravel the Great Society, makes this observation: As Steven Teles has argued, in Conservatism and American Political Development and elsewhere, opponents of the expansion of the welfare state have had an impact on the shape and structure that the welfare state happens to have taken. The peculiar […]
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When Military Commissions Aren’t An Option
Robert Chesney, looking at the trial of Mahamud Said Omar, a Minnesota resident who is accused of aiding Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab, cites it as an example of a case in which military commissions simply can’t be used: The case is not unlike the much-discussed (and frequently critized) Warsame scenario, in that it involves […]
