Category: Politics As Usual

Punt

~ susie

The Supreme Court kicks back on affirmative action:

The Supreme Court finally ruled on one of the Big Three Monday, but the decision was a bit anticlimactic: In a 7-1 decision on the affirmative action case known as Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin, the high court essentially passed on issuing a sweeping opinion and instead sent the issue back to a lower court.

Here’s Politico with the early analysis:

Writing for the court’s conservatives and two of its liberals in the 7-1 decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the university did not demonstrate that the program was “narrowly tailored” to meets its goals. The ruling emphasized “strict scrutiny” for educational affirmative action programs, but didn’t exclude the possibility that UT or other schools would be able to show such programs to be both necessary and carefully managed.

And here’s SCOTUSBlog with the a little more analysis on whether the decision represents a “punt” by the high court or simply a compromise between conservatives and liberals on the bench:

[T]he word “compromise” seems most appropriate, and “punt” gets there in second place. The Court is clearly not deciding whether UT’s program is constitutional or not; it’s clearly not overruling Grutter; but it’s clearly also sending a signal that it’s serious about the “narrow tailoring” rule.

The main pull-quote form the decision seems to be: “The reviewing court must ultimately be satisfied that no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity.” As the Associated Press explains, the decision “leaves unsettled many of the basic questions about the continued use of race as a factor in college admissions.” Justice Ginsburg was the lone dissenter. Justice Kagan had recused herself.Here’s the majority opinion.

Howard Dean in 2016?

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

He told CNN at Netroots Nation last night that he’s open to running:

San Jose, California (CNN) – Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who electrified anti-war liberals during the 2004 presidential race, said Thursday he would consider another run for the White House – a statement that will surely be met with mixed reaction in the Democratic Party.

Dean, whose underdog presidential campaign officially launched 10 years ago this weekend, said he has “mixed feelings” about running for office again but added he would consider another bid for the Democratic presidential nomination if he doesn’t think the other candidates are adequately addressing progressive issues that are dear to his heart.

“I am not driven by my own ambition,” Dean told CNN in an interview at the Netroots Nation conference, an annual gathering of left-leaning political activists. “What I am driven by is pushing the country in a direction that it desperately needs to be pushed; pushing other politicians who aren’t quite as frank as I am who need to be more candid with the American people about what needs to happen. I am not trying to hedge, it’s a hard job running. It’s really tough. I am doing a lot of things I really enjoy. But you should never say never in this business.”

Continue reading “Howard Dean in 2016?” →

Scene from LAX

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

stars

I’m sitting in the waiting area at LAX (not one of my favorite airports, for a variety of reasons) and charging my phone on one of the Virgin charging stations; I’m charging my laptop, too, which is why I can write this. As per a friend’s useful advice, I always travel with an extension strip now.

The flight, as always, was an ordeal for someone with ADD. And my seat was right behind first class, which meant I had to edge my way down the EXTREMELY narrow aisle to the back of the plane to use the restroom. Oh well! I’m almost there, and then I don’t have to think about flying again until Sunday.

Tom Terrific

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Why do the voters keep falling for this crap?

For the first time, Gov. Corbett has issued a formal statement on Philadelphia’s school-funding crisis, saying he is “committed to finding a solution … that is focused on students and is fiscally responsible for taxpayers.”

His statement came minutes after Daniel Denvir of City Paper published a leaked poll, conducted by a prominent national Republican polling group, Public Opinion Strategies. The poll of Pennsylvania voters concludes that Corbett can increase his popularity — and chances for re-election — by taking on the Philadelphia teachers’ union, especially on the issue of teacher seniority.

PennCAN, a chapter of a national education reform organization that emphasizes school choice and “better measures of teacher effectiveness,” paid for the poll, said its executive director, Jon Cetel.

Among other things, the poll asked more than 600 respondents whether they supported proposals that the School District is asking for in contract negotiations with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers — using “performance” rather than seniority in assigning and transferring teachers, giving principals more say in who teaches in their buildings, and ending automatic raises for extra years of service and additional degrees or certifications.

“My organization is about being a pragmatic organization finding a way to achieve our goal,” Cetel said. “We want more funding for Philadelphia schools, and we think a winning political strategy is putting political pressure on the governor by showing him there is a strong appetite for funding if it’s accompanied by fair reforms.”

Cetel said that the poll, which oversampled voters in the Philadelphia suburbs, “came back even stronger than anticipated” on the issue of teacher seniority. It said that 82 percent supported “a proposal that would allow Philadelphia’s public schools to assign and transfer employees based on performance, not based on seniority of the individual.” Eighty percent also supported a similar statement, saying principals should have more say in who teaches in their classrooms.

Via DUI attorney Ed Tayter.

Isn’t that interesting

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I know a lot of people who thought this was a coverup. Maybe it was!

In a new documentary, former investigators who looked into the mysterious crash of TWA Flight 800, which killed 230, are breaking their silence to claim that the explosion that brought down the plane in 1996 was likely no accident, and that the final report on the cause of the blast was falsified.

TWA Flight 800 exploded in mid-air on July 17, 1996 about 11 minutes after taking off from New York’s JFK airport on its way to Paris. Though theories abounded as to what happened to the plane — from a bomb on the aircraft to it being struck by a missile or even a meteorite — the National Transportation Safety Board concluded after a four-year investigation that the probable cause of the crash was an accidental fuel tank explosion. The NTSB said it could not be sure what exactly ignited the blast, but “of the sources evaluated by the investigation, the most likely was a short circuit outside of the [fuel tank] that allowed excessive voltage to enter it through electrical wiring…”

DOCUMENT: 2000 NTSB Report on TWA Flight 800’s 1996 Crash

But according to the new documentary, named TWA Flight 800 and premiering on Epix next month, six former members of the official crash investigation have stepped forward to refute the NTSB’s findings, saying the crash report was purposefully falsified, and to claim the investigation was “systematically undermined” by federal authorities.

“We didn’t find any part of the airplane that indicated a mechanical failure,” one of the whistleblowers says in a trailer for the film. The former officials allege the explosion came from outside the plane, though they don’t speculate any further on the original source.

Was Dick Cheney hunting with a missile launcher that day?

H/t Karin Porter.

Uh huh

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

The FBI found agents “faultless” in 150 shootings. I’ll bet they’re brave and handsome, too!

WASHINGTON — After contradictory stories emerged about an F.B.I. agent’s killing last month of a Chechen man in Orlando, Fla., who was being questioned over ties to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the bureau reassured the public that it would clear up the murky episode.

“The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally,” a bureau spokesman said.

But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are also predictable: from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings.

In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.’s internal investigation was the only official inquiry. In the Orlando case, for example, there have been conflicting accounts about basic facts like whether the Chechen man, Ibragim Todashev, attacked an agent with a knife, was unarmed or was brandishing a metal pole. But Orlando homicide detectives are not independently investigating what happened.

Basic rule of thumb: Don’t let the accused organization investigate itself.