Guilty of Being Southern

That brings me to the ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. What the Supreme Court essentially told the nation in that case was this: The states in the South used to do some really bad things a long time ago when it comes to elections, but they don’t anymore, so we are taking them out of the penalty box and treating them like any other state. As Justice Roberts said succinctly for the majority, “History did not end in 1965.”

It turns out that the decision by the court last week came less than a year after an African American was reelected president for a second term, an election in which African-American turnout in the southern states was well above the national average. Moreover, African Americans in the southern states registered at higher rates than did white people in those same states.

Mississippi, my home state and once the worst of the Jim Crow offenders, had the highest rate of African-American turnout in the nation. And Mississippi has more elected black officials than any other state. Not just more per capita — more, period.

Don’t Fear the Leaker

The freer people are to blow the whistle on wrongdoing, the more we can assume that when no whistle is blown, things aren’t so bad. The more the government cracks down on whistleblowers, the more likely it is that they’ve got something to hide.

This system isn’t perfect. Leakers can abuse their power for reasons of revenge, ego, or politics — but then, so can congressional overseers, or attorneys general, or presidents. And the strong Democratic tilt to the career civil service means that Democratic presidents probably get less leaking than Republicans (and, when leaks happen, less coverage from the Democratic-leaning press).

But nonetheless, the likelihood that if the federal government does something truly wrong, someone might blow the whistle serves as a major source of discipline. Given that — by the president’s defenders’ own admission — there’s not much other discipline available, that seems pretty important.

Feinstein’s Support for N.S.A. Defies Liberal Critics and Repute

“Some problems take conservative solutions,” she explained. “And some problems take progressive solutions.”

The Latest Suburban Crime Wave

The laws differ in their particulars, but basically they state that a child under age 6, 7 or, in Utah, 9, cannot be left alone in the car for more than five or 10 minutes. In Nebraska, having your 6-year-old wait in the car is an offense in the same category as allowing the child to be “deprived of necessary food” or “sexually exploited.” In Louisiana, a second kid-in-car infraction carries a sentence of not less than one year in prison, “with or without hard labor.” That’ll certainly make the kids safer—having mom or dad off breaking rocks in prison.

The District of Columbia city council’s hostility to capitalism and Wal-Mart as an ‘economic death wish’

But that doesn’t account for the “economic death wish” of the district’s city council, which according to Sunday’s Washington Post, voted 8 to 5 last week to impose a “super-minimum wage of $12.50 an hour — well above the District’s regular $8.25 minimum — on retailers reporting at least $1 billion in annual corporate revenue and operating in spaces of 75,000 square feet or more.”

In other words, retailers exactly like Wal-Mart for example.

Daniel Ellsberg on Snowden

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution.

 

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