Month: June 2015

“The bulk of the reason” he pursued the case

by digby

You’ve heard by now about this latest assault on voting rights with the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a case that overturns “one person, one vote.” TPM has an informative profile of the guy who’s spearheading that effort:

Edward Blum has been trying to take down “one person, one vote” — a tenet of modern voting rights law — since 1997. Last week brought him his biggest breakthrough yet, with the Supreme Court surprising many election law experts by taking up a redistricting case that has the potential to redefine “one person, one vote” and fundamentally alter how electoral districts are drawn nationwide.

The case also fits into Blum’s undeniably successful crusade to dismantle longstanding civil rights laws and remove race as a factor in governmental decision-making.

“That’s the bulk of the reason I pursued this,” Blum told TPM last week after the Supreme Court announced it was taking the case. “The effect that this policy has on race is surely one of the reasons I’ve been interested in it and many others have. But also a question of fairness in our democracy drove the filing of the suit.”

The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, is a challenge to Texas’ state Senate redistricting plan, in which two Texas residents are asking the Court to declare unconstitutional the use of total population to draw districts of roughly equal size. They say that because they live in a district with a relatively high ratio of eligible voters, their vote is worth less than districts that have the same total population, but fewer voters, specifically due to the presence of Latino noncitizens.

Experts contend that if Blum’s side prevails it will mean redrawing districts to favor older, whiter, more rural voters at the expense of younger, minority, urban ones.

The use of total population to determine “one person, one vote” is a near-universal practice nationwide for local, state and federal elections. Before last this week, the use of total population to define “one person one vote” was considered settled territory and a common practice since a 1964 Supreme Court decision establishing that districts needed to be drawn with roughly the same population. The challengers, however, object to the idea that districts should be drawn by the total number of people living in their boundaries, rather than the number of those registered or eligible to vote.

They really will stop at nothing. They believe that rich white men should run the country and any attempt to update that throwback view is un-American. The fact that the stated motive of this is to stop the government from legislating anything that benefits people other than rich white men is more than just a tip-off. It’s everything.

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What really happened yesterday

by digby

It’s nice that everyone thinks the good guys got a win last night on the Patriot Act. The good guys deserved one. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of an exaggeration as March Wheeler explains over at Salon:

The PATRIOT Act-authorized phone dragnet expired last night. For the first time since 2006, the NSA won’t receive records of the phone calls you make within the United States.

But that doesn’t mean spying on Americans has stopped. The NSA still obtains records of calls — potentially all calls — you make with people overseas. It still tracks Americans’ Internet communications using metadata obtained overseas. The FBI can still access the content of any communications Americans have with foreigners targeted under PRISM without a warrant or even any evidence of wrong doing. FBI can still, and indeed does, obtain phone records of individuals in conjunction with national security investigations without any court review.

Not even the spying conducted under Section 215 — the authority that had been used to collect all of Americans’ phone records, but which is also used to collect certain kinds of Internet data — or the two other expiring provisions will stop. Because they’re tied to more focused investigations (though the Internet collection is probably not targeted at one individual), they will probably continue under a grandfather clause allowing ongoing investigations using those authorities to continue.

So in spite of all the alarmism you’re hearing, not much changed today. A phone dragnet that has never stopped a terrorist was shut down, but will probably be restarted later this week or next, for at least 6 months.

Rand Paul is getting credit (or being blamed) for the lapse in the program. But that’s actually not correct. As Harry Reid and Patrick Leahy laid out in speeches last night, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set up this lapse by delaying considering of the House-passed USA Freedom Act. While McConnell would have preferred a short-term extension, creating urgency that would give the Senate more leverage to weaken the so-called reform bill, he clearly wanted to foster the sense of crisis. But this deliberately manufactured crisis just got away from him.

McConnell will now use the claims of crisis to try to push through changes he and other surveillance hawks have been demanding for a year — things like forcing providers to retain metadata they otherwise have no need for and delaying the end of the dragnet program an extra six months.

Probably — as Rand Paul admitted last night — that’s what will happen: A weaker bill will be rushed through the House. If it is too much weaker, it will face further delay, and maybe defeat; but on some issues, like data retention, McConnell is actually asking for less than providers have already agreed to. If turnover to the new program is extended too long, the ACLU may have legal means to muck up the transition.

The biggest outcome of the last two weeks, then, may ultimately stem from the misperception that Rand Paul has caused this delay and not Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell will still get what he wanted all along, but Paul will get credit for fighting a good fight.

I think it’s good that civil libertarians made a big deal out of this regardless of the outcome. It benefits Paul in the short run, which I don’t much care for, but in the long run we’re better off if people are talking about this. It spooks the spooks, at least a little and they may be a bit less reckless if they think somebody out there gives a damn.

But I am a pessimist about such national security “reforms” in general since there’s little evidence that they ever actually stop anything and in the end they almost always result in some kind of “legal” framework to allow something that was previously unheard of. I hope I’m wrong this time but watching the GOP go at it on national security and listening to the hysterical speeches in the Senate yesterday, I’m pretty confident that as long as the GWOT exists — decades at least — this is not going to get a lot better. As I said, fighting the good fight is important on a psychological basis (which is where I think the future of true reform lies) so I’m not knocking anyone for doing it. But it’s important to stay vigilant.

And there are political implications to all this, which Marcy nicely outlines in the rest of her piece.  I suspect that Paul’s stand on civil liberties will not make much of an impression in the GOP nominating process because I believe that party is as hawkish as it’s possible to be and that the only reason any Republican would balk at government surveillance of any kind is because a Democrat is for it or because they are, as Marcy points out, threatened by a civil liberties Democrat at the polls.

She points out a couple of races where that may be in play and it says to me that this is something Democrats should exploit more than Republicans. Yes, the president is pretty much a surveillance hawk but there is a large faction of Democratic voters, much larger than in the GOP, who aren’t.
Donna Edwards voted against the USA Freedom Act forcing her primary opponent Chris Van Hollan to switch. There’s a lesson in this — the Democratic activist base is much more committed to civil liberties than the Republicans. Civil liberties activists like say, anti-abortion activists on the right, actually vote on those issues. This is an organizing opportunity and an important one. Marcy points out that when politicians see their electoral futures hinging on these issues perhaps we’ll see some legitimate legislative change. As I said, I’m a pessimist on this but I’m not hopeless. And anyway, it’s important to keep whatever heat we can on the spies.

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He signed legislation defunding Planned Parenthood in the Badger State and requiring that women seeking abortions get ultrasounds first but then ran an ad in his 2012 gubernatorial reelection bid saying he backed legislation that “leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.

Whatever. She came away from that meeting feeling soothed by Walker’s gibberish but most of the others are still holding out. This is important for him.  One of his selling points has been his social conservative cred, which was supposed to line up this faction from the beginning and allow him some room on the other fronts. And he may still be able to do that. The problem is that the social cons are feeling burned by gay marriage and are paranoid about losing their clout so they may feel it’s in their best interest to play hard to get or to go another way. Its not like their aren’t a bunch of strong social conservatives in the race. In fact, which one’s aren’t strong social conservatives?

As I’ve been saying, Walker is a highly overrated politician. It’s still possible that he could learn quickly and that the Koch money could come in and put him over the top.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kochs really are taking a second look at the field.  Walker’s just not that good.

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Section 215 sunsets
by Tom Sullivan

USA Freedom Act advances 77-17 in the Senate. Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act expired at midnight, ending (temporarily, at least) the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records:

In a double blow for Washington security hawks, represented by embattled Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, it now looks likely that Congress will have to wait several days before passing that bill, the USA Freedom Act.

The reform legislation, which bans the NSA from collecting Americans’ telephone records in bulk, was initially opposed by McConnell. But with the clock ticking down toward the midnight expiration of broader powers initially granted after 9/11 under the Patriot Act, Republican leaders had few options but to get behind the bill as the best way of preserving other surveillance authority.

Democrats Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico spent time on the Senate floor last night debunking past assertions by the intelligence community that the bulk collection was essential to national security. Conventional intelligence gathering is sufficient to do the job without bulk collection of Americans’ data, they argued. “Not a single instance” of bulk collection materially improving security has turned up, Wyden said.

.@RonWyden ODNI has given 5 different explanations for why [Clapper lied] abt collecting data on millions of Americans.— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 31, 2015

Heinrich and others credited whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the secret program as a factor in shifting the debate:

“No doubt it played a role,” Republican senator Dean Heller told the Guardian. “I think it played the same role for me as it did for most of the American people, who were surprised and stunned that the government had this sort of access to this kind of data.”

Security hawks forecast apocalypse with a chance of brimstone:

I’ve heard of leopard sharks, but this is something else

by digby

Beautiful:

In other leopard news:

In an amazing tale of recovery, Amur leopard populations have more than doubled in just seven years. New census data reveals Amur leopards in Russia’s Land of the Leopard National Park now number at least 57 cats (up from just 30 cats in 2007). And an additional 8-12 leopards were counted in adjacent areas of China.

For the census, camera traps were spread out over more than 900,000 acres of leopard habitat. Scientists then reviewed 10,000 images and identified nearly 60 individual animals, judging by the distinctive pattern of spots on the leopards’ fur. The census was carried out by the Land of the Leopard National Park jointly with the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, with the support of The Amur Leopard Center and WWF-Russia.

Established in 2012, Land of the Leopard National Park includes all of the Amur leopard’s known breeding areas and about 60 percent of the critically endangered cat’s remaining habitat. “The national park became the main organizational force for leopard protection and research,” said Yury Darman, head of WWF Russia Amur Branch and a member of the Supervisory Board of The Amur Leopards Center.

Saving the world’s rarest cat

Conservationists are also working towards monitoring leopard populations across the border in neighboring Chinese nature reserves. One of the highly anticipated next steps would be the establishment of a Sino-Russian transboundary nature reserve.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done in order to secure a safe future for the Amur leopard, but these numbers demonstrate that things are moving in the right direction,” said Dr. Barney Long, Director of Species Conservation for WWF-US.

The dramatic good news for Amur leopards comes on the heels of WWF’s release of the first footage of a family of Amur tigers inside China. Both animals share the same habitat.

Animal species can be saved if the human species would get its act together. I can’t imagine how bland and colorless this world would be without these beautiful creatures in it.

Update: The swimmer is a Jaguar, btw. Im told they’re known to be exceptional swimmers.  Who knew?’
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