One of the great things about reading a million different blogs every day is that there’s a fair bit of serendipity (see, it’s not limited to newspapers, you ink-stained print hacks). Take 538′s analysis of education and employment prospects (it’s longish, but here’s the bit.ly version: get smart, son) and, via Kottke, a Twitter-ready thesis: “In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families.”
The longer explanation after the jump: More…
538 explains why Southern Republicans are playing Jim Crow 2.0 with Hispanics:
[I]n the Deep South, …conservatives are stampeding to express solidarity with the Arizona governor and legislature, and, in one case, to revive the English-Only chesnut. Why is that?
…
[E]ven as Hispanics have become a regular (and to some, a disturbing) feature of Deep South life, they have not yet become a voting bloc significant enough to matter in all but scattered local elections. For a variety of reasons, including legal status, age, recent arrival and mobility, the percentage of southern Hispanics eligible to vote is very low. In fact, in the states of the Old Confederacy (excluding Florida and Texas), there were only two states as of 2006 in which Hispanics represented as much as 2% of eligible voters: Virginia at 2.8%, and Georgia at 2.3%. The Hispanic percentage of the population in these states in 2006 was, respectively, 6.8% and 7.4%.So whereas in states with larger and more established Hispanic populations politicians considering anti-immigrant messages have to think seriously about blowback, there are no real negative consequences in the Deep South to offset the incentives for such rhetoric.
Writing on a slightly different topic, TNC sums it up:
I think there’s a strong demographic case that consistently going to the well of white resentment, indeed defining yourself as the party of white resentment, is, as a long-term strategy, politically stupid. We’ll know a lot more as this decade proceeds.
In the meantime, I think it’s worth saying that I don’t count on diversity and multiculturalism because I think it’s kind, nice or because it makes me feel all cuddly inside. I count on it because I think that’s where this world is headed. I think banking on the world remaining as it was in 1968 or even 1998, isn’t very smart.
I don’t say this because I like rainbow huggy-time. I say this because I like math.
Blogging sure is easy when other people say everything you meant to.
I don’t know what, if anything, her stint at Harvard Law implies about her views on race (some background from 538), but I think that’s mostly a red herring. However, I am nervous about her views on government power, and you should be, too:
Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be President Obama’s second Supreme Court nominee. The emerging conventional wisdom is that Kagan, a rare nominee for the high court who hasn’t been a judge, is a very smart blank slate. On at least one category of issues that Kagan will face — the intersection of national security and law during a time of war — that conventional wisdom looks correct. But there’s a proxy for that set of issues, however inexact, that offers a few clues in advance of her confirmation hearings: Kagan’s deference to executive power.
No one has chronicled Kagan’s embrace of the executive more assiduously than Glenn Greenwald, who’s appalled that Obama would pick someone with such a record. Given her relatively thin paper trail, one of the primary pieces of evidence for her perspective is her 2009 nomination hearing for the solicitor generalship, in which she expressed eagerness to bless Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) perspective that the president possesses broad wartime authorities to detain enemy combatants. (“No daylight” was how The New York Times assessed the exchange between the two.)
That assent appears to flow from a broader perspective. Charlie Savage of the Times found this weekend that Kagan, the dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009, was the tardiest and least forceful of Obama’s Supreme Court shortlist to criticize the Bush administration’s expansive assertions of executive wartime powers.
The danger of a “blank slate” (not the case here, anyway; her opinions just aren’t public knowledge) is that it’s easy to believe the best 1 about Kagan’s politics. Nominating someone with a thin record2 to survive the nomination process would be fine if the game ended after “Hooray, Republicans couldn’t derail your confirmation! Here’s a black robe!” But that’s not what happens, and a cheerleader for an expansive view of government power and a strong unitary executive sitting on the Supreme Court for the next few decades is pretty unappealing. As SCOTUSblog points out, “At age 50, [Kagan] may serve for a quarter century or more, which would likely make her the President’s longest lasting legacy.” It’s a bit hyperbolic–Presidents are associated with their policies and actions more than their Supreme Court picks, but the general point (“This is really important, and will have extraordinarily long-lasting consequences”) is true. Anyway, we’ll have to see what happens.
In the meantime, some reading:
Update: That 9750-word SCOTUSblog post argues that fear over Kagan’s deference to executive power is based on incomplete knowledge and misunderstands the points she was making. Fair enough. I’d love to be completely, wildly wrong about this.
In order of awesomeness, five new summery albums (Cosmogramma would be fighting for #1, but I don’t really think it counts as “summery”):
I retweeted this a while ago, but for a headline like “Naked scanner reveals airport screener’s tiny penis, sparks fist-fight with fellow officers” (NSFW stock art; original story has SFW sad-sack mug shot), I’ll leave no stone unturned. Also, it’s a slightly misleading hed–the small-membered officer actually beat the crap out of a coworker with a telescoping metal baton.
…But full body scanners are foolproof!
HT: @Boing Boing