New Putin laws crack down on free speech, assembly and Internet

Get used to these restrictions on your liberty and more to come, you Putin-loving Russians. 

Uncle Vova isn't going anywhere, and he knows what's best for you.

Putin Increases Penalties For 'Illegal' Street Rallies

July 22, 2014 | Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

URL: http://www.rferl.org/content/putin-penalties-rallies-law-bill/25466235.html

Yale prof.: How privileged kids can 'avoid becoming out-of-touch, entitled little shits'

You might have seen that movie Admission with Tina Fey. I watched it on a plane, quaffing a lot of red wine with my tiny meal, so parts of it really got to me.... Anyhow, if the admissions process at Ivy schools is anything like in that movie... it's no wonder today's well-groomed leaders are out-of-touch, elitist, uncreative, self-absorbed a-holes.

Here's how Deresiewicz sums it up:

Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

Sedulous readers might recall how back in 2007 I re-posted an Atlantic article by conservative pundit David Brooks with similar sentiments, "The Organization Kid." Unlike Deresiewicz, Brooks also worried that kids today are too coddled (safe) and pleasantly addled with mollifying prescription pharmaceuticals:

All your life you have been pleasing your elders, performing and enjoying the hundreds of enrichment tasks that dominated your early years. You are a mentor magnet. You spent your formative years excelling in school, sports, and extracurricular activities. And you have been rewarded with a place at a wonderful university filled with smart, successful, and cheerful people like yourself. [...] The world they live in seems fundamentally just. If you work hard, behave pleasantly, explore your interests, volunteer your time, obey the codes of political correctness, and take the right pills to balance your brain chemistry, you will be rewarded with a wonderful ascent in the social hierarchy. 

Of course, Brooks said the problem is that we've taken the moral backbone out of elite education, that "when it comes to character and virtue, the most mysterious area of all, suddenly the laissez-faire ethic rules: You're on your own, Jack and Jill; go figure out what is true and just for yourselves." In other words, elite education is OK, as long as it inculcates a touch of roughhousing rebel sensibility and dash of Christian noblesse oblige in future leaders.

Brooks and  Deresiewicz agree that these coddled kids are less likely to be brave and original than their parents or grandparents, because, as Deresiewicz describes it:

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not  being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. 

Personally, I find Deresiewicz's thesis, minus Brooks' moral backbone stuff, more convincing. Smart kids from privileged families learn a lot, they're polite, kind and well-intentioned, but they're so busy with studying, extracurriculars and having "essay-ready summers" that they don't experience real life the way most other kids do. For example, if they work it's because they WANT to, because it looks good on a college application, not because the HAVE to.  

I'm not saying all high schoolers should work. No, at least not during the school year. Studying is their job, forget sports and extracurriculars. At the same time, public university should be free for those with good grades, like it is in Europe. That should be the new social contract: study hard, free college. It's also the smartest investment we could make in our workforce. (And those who aren't cut out for college should be tracked into quality trade and technical schools.) 

The way things are now, we have kids who work to help pay the family's bills and save up for college, then work during college, and then probably never finish college. (The NY Times recently showed just how dependent U.S. college graduation rates are on their parents' income.) Privileged children will never understand that world; they're carried up and away from it blithely and forever on their parents' shoulders. 

That's a failed system of education for top and bottom. For those who never make it to college or don't finish, the failure is obvious. For those who "succeed" their failure is less obvious, since they will have mastered at an Ivy "climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy [they] decide to attach [themselves] to;" however, leadership for them has no higher meaning, or any meaning at all, it just means being on top: the One Percent.

Or as Deresiewicz  writes: "This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead."

UPDATE (08.17.2014):  Here's a pretty critical review by Carlos Lozada of Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep in the Washington Post: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste at Yale." I think most of Lozada's criticisms miss the mark and are full of snark.

UPDATE (08.23.2014): And here's a pretty sympathetic interview with Deresiewicz in Slate: "My Most Offended Readers Are Ivy-Bound 18-Year-Olds."

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League

By William Deresiewicz

July 21, 2014 | New Republic

URL: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

Begala: Cheney can't seem to lie enough on national TV

It's scary to think that Cheney, who is obviously a deeply disturbed and narcissistic liar, was practically running the country for eight years.

Begala's list of Cheney's lies and the proof of them is must-read stuff, for the historical record, but also because Cheney is out on every TV show now as some kind of voice for a conservative U.S. foreign policy. It's insane.

Does Dick Cheney believe his lies?

By Paul Begala

July 18, 2014 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/17/opinion/begala-dick-cheney-lies/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

U.S. Amb. Power: Russia can and must end this war in Ukraine

You can read the clinical part, but this is the upshot, according to U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power:

"This war can be ended. Russia can end this war. Russia must end this war."

Unfortunately Ms. Power is speaking more strongly than President Obama himself. Why?

I understand that Mr. Obama is reluctant to involve U.S. power in yet another international conflict. The U.S. already has Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc. to deal with. And many Americans are more concerned about one Israeli killed by Hamas rockets than the American killed in MH flight 17, not to mention hundreds of others killed on the Malaysian Airlines flight from at least 11 countries, including at least 80 children.

But Ukraine is Europe.  Europe is different.  And the shooting down of this plane is international terrorism by any definition. Hopefully this will be wake-up call to the EU; but more importantly, it should be a wake-up call to President Obama and the United States. America must lead; America must bring this Russia-inspired and Russia-supplied and -supported war to an end.  

MH flight 17 showed that this war cannot be contained to Eastern Ukraine. Maybe that's how Russian president Vladimir Putin envisioned it a few months ago to boost his domestic approval rating, but no more: his heedless gorillas with guns have murdered 298  non-Ukrainians, including scores of Europeans. Russia is now at war with Europe, the West and the civilized world, in the bloodiest air catastrophe in history. (And now some of these pro-Russian militia groups are looting the bodies -- and taking some for ransom -- in what has been described as the "biggest crime scene in history.")

For my Russian-speaking friends, I urge you to read this article by Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian military analyst who points out the obvious lies and logical inconsistencies in Russia's and the terrorists' arguments:  "Павел ФЕЛЬГЕНГАУЭР: Малайзийский «Боинг» — ошибка, которую никто не признает."

What President Obama should understand is that Russian public opinion is a non-factor. They are complete brainwashed zombies. So says prominent Russian liberal pundit Yulia Latynina:  "Юлия Латынина: Главное — чей это 'Бук'."  President Putin cannot be influenced from within Russian, only from strong outside Western pressure.

Cox: Gerrymandering and voter-ID laws are systemic racism

I'll say it again: I'm not necessarily against voter ID in order to vote, although I think it's an extravagant non-necessity.  But any such ID should be a national  ID; it should be free of charge (because voting must be free/poll taxes are illegal); it should have a very long duration (at least 10 years) and be renewed at any number of places; and any kind of photo-ID law should be grandfathered in, along with state and national outreach programs, hotlines, etc.  

But really, given modern technology, voting doesn't require a photo-ID to avoid the rare case of fraud. Voting can and should be as easy and secure as using an ATM. Polling stations, while they should always probably exist in some quantity to serve poor areas, are as outdated as tricorn hats.

If the true goal was to prevent voter fraud (even though there is none to begin with) while preserving citizens' most sacred democratic right -- the right to vote -- then we would certainly go about it otherwise, not making people who are lifelong eligible voters suddenly ineligible, as Republican state legislatures have. 

Voter-ID laws are a cynical and desperate ploy coordinated by the national GOP; and they a prime example of systemic racism that conservatives deny even exists.

Voter ID's last stand: let's finally declare laws what they are – racist on purpose

By Ana Marie Cox

July 16, 2014 | Guardian

This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas's voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as "exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state" at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won't just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of "voter fraud" to rest once and for all.

These battles, plus parallel cases proceeding in North Carolina, hinge on proving that the states acted with explicitly exclusionary intent toward minority voters – a higher standard was necessary prior to the Supreme Court's gutting of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) back in January. Under Section 3, the DoJ had wide latitude to look at possible consequences of voting regulation before they were even passed – the "preclearance" provision. Ironically, because the states held to preclearance had histories of racial discrimination, some of the messier aspects of the laws' current intentions escaped comment.

But meeting that higher standard of explicit exclusionary intent comes with the opportunity to show some of the many skeptical Americans the ugly racism behind Republican appeals to "fairness" and warnings about fraud. Progressives have tried, and mostly failed, to show the institutional racism underpinning the sordid history behind voter ID laws; that may have been too subtle. In courts in Texas and North Carolina, the DoJ will make the jump from accusations that laws have a racial impact to straight-up calling voter ID laws racist.

This ought to be interesting.

The DoJ filing in Texas lays it all out pretty clearly, putting the voter ID law in context of a concerted legislative strategy to deny representation to the state's growing Hispanic population, including Republicans advancing more and more aggressive voter ID bills over the years. The filing points to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that laced the floor debates over the law, and to the measures taken by the Republican-controlled state house to limit the participation of Democratic minority lawmakers in considering or amending the legislation (the bill was heard in front of a special committee selected by the governor, on an expedited schedule). And, the DoJ notes, lawmakers produced "virtually no evidence during or after enactment of SB 14 that in-person voter impersonation – the only form of election fraud addressed by the identification requirements of SB 14 – was a serious problem."

Perhaps the most significant piece of context in the voter ID suit is how Texas's voter ID law came on the heels of the redistricting that the DoJ claims was also racially motivated. In the redistricting cases, DoJ's allegations of malicious intent have been helped along by the admission of the state that it had malicious political intent. The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, chose as his defense in that case what only can be called the Lesser Evil Strategy – stating up front that the state's GOP legislators had ulterior motives, but not the ones that the VRA outlaws:

[R]edistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats ... [They] were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.

Abbott's smugness – and his apparent faith in partisanship as a permissible and distinct form of discrimination – will take center stage as the DoJ presses on with both suits. In court, Abbott will be asked to prove his ignorance of demographics for the very state in which he is currently running for governor. Out of court, other GOP defenders of the law will have to do more or less the same. And they will need to defend the outrageous details of the law – such has how a concealed carry permit is a permissible form of voter ID but a federally-issued Medicare card carried by an elderly woman is not.

Some people of Texas may support the kind of bullying Abbott has prepared to defend, and most progressive activists are hardened to it, but I think average Americans hate it. Putting malice under a national spotlight might be the best way to turn people against voter ID laws in general.

Right now, Americans support the idea of voter ID laws by huge margins: polls show favorable attitudes toward a generic "ID requirement" to be between 70 and 80%. Approval exists across all demographic groups – even among black voters (51%), one of the groups that is, of course, disproportionately disenfranchised by these laws.

But the reasons that the public supports such laws aren't the same as the GOP's reasons for pursuing them: Republicans want to prevent specific types of people from voting; the American public wants voting to be fair.  That's why conservatives have had to hammer so hard on the false narrative of "voter fraud" – to convince everyone that it's what the laws are really about.

Add context to the "ID requirement" poll question that Americans get behind, though, and public support changes dramatically. Asurvey in North Carolina (taken as the state was considering taking up an amendment on the issue) found initial support for voter ID to be 71%. Pollsters then drilled further down and came up with numbers that speak to a truly democratic impulse:

• 72% say it's wrong to pass laws that make it harder for certain people to vote.
• 62% say they oppose a law that makes it harder for people of one party to vote.
• 74% say there should be demonstrated problems before legislators apply a fix.

If nothing else, these results suggests that Abbott's argument that supposedly party-based redistricting isn't the free pass – at least, from the public's standpoint, if not the court's – that he thinks it is.

In North Carolina, pollsters found that support for the law decreased as the 2012 election neared and voters started to pay attention and become educated on the issue. Voting rights advocates filled yet another suit based on disenfranchising young voters, which could make a further difference. (Way to keep pissing off millennials, GOP!)

That context effect is true nationwide. A different survey found that informing respondents that "Opponents of voters ID laws argue they can actually prevent people who are eligible to vote from voting" brought support for voter ID down by 12 points.

Pollsters have not publicly investigated whether Texan voters would show a similar shift, though it could be significant that support in the state for voter ID has remained at around 66% for the past two years, less than its support nationwide. Of course, 77% of Texasbelieve "voter ID laws are mainly used to prevent fraud," an alternate-reality bubble that attention to these cases may just yet pop.

It's the Department of Justice that'll have to bring this to pass. The GOP has always easily waved away "systemic" racism charges, like those made under the non-gutted VRA, as either outright inventions or the result of looking for equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. Making clear the racist intent of voter ID laws will bring the discussion back to where it belongs: on equal opportunities, in the voting booth.