Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Voter Suppression: Coming to a State Near You?

If you're planning on voting in November, here's a few things you should know.

—By Tasneem Raja, Jaeah Lee, and Ben Breedlove

| Mon Sep. 17, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Since the start of 2011, more than 180 bills have been introduced in 41 states (and counting) that could make it harder for you to register to vote, prove that you're eligible to vote, vote early, or vote by mail. In fact, the Brennan Center for Justice estimates that at least 5 million voters nationwide could be affected by these bills. Thanks, local legislators!

To find out how new restrictions might affect your vote, click on the hypothetical profiles we've created below. You can also track where your state's restrictions currently stand at our database, powered by research from theBrennan Center for Justice, National Conference of State Legislatures, and ProCon.org, which are monitoring these bills.

I tried but could not embed the cute chart, so click the Block the Vote and check it out.

Block The Vote

Choose a voter to see how these laws could affect someone like you.

Jose is a Latino student at a Florida high school. He just turned 18 and isn't registered to vote yet.

For many years, Jose's US government teacher has been helping her students register to vote. But Florida passed onerous new restrictions on voter registration efforts. Rather than risk paying a $1,000 fine for turning in her students’ registration forms late, Jose's teacher has decided to abandon voter registration this year. The restrictions disproportionately target African American and Latino voters, as well as first-time voters like Jose, who are more likely to register through drives than whites.

202,000 votes nationwide are threatened by this type of restriction

STATES WHERE SIMILAR LEGISLATION IS ALREADY IN PLACE OR BEING PROPOSED

Members of Congress Who Reauthorized Warrantless Wiretapping Bill Don't Understand What It Does

Or they're ignoring the surveillance of US citizens it allows.

—By Adam Serwer

| Fri Sep. 14, 2012 12:17 PM PDT

jcjgphotography/Shutterstock

Congress doesn't really understand what it's doing.

Specifically, the House members who voted 301-118 on Wednesday to reauthorize the vast spying powers in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (or FISA Amendments Act, and yes, that's really its name) don't seem to understand what they were doing. The same thing happened in 2008, when Congress first voted to retroactively legalize warrantless wiretapping. Then, as now, supporters of the legislation falsely insisted that it does not collect the communications of American citizens.

"This bill has nothing to do with Americans on American soil," said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on the floor. The bill only grants authority for "targeting foreigners located outside of the United States, and not on Americans in the United States, or anywhere else in the world," said House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who repeated this twice for emphasis. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) even emphasized that "the government cannot reverse target individuals overseas in order to monitor those in the United States. That means the government cannot target a US person simply by monitoring a non-US person that the US person is talking to."

That's not true. The bill "allows the bulk suspicionless collection of communications coming into and out of the United States," explains Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. "While the proponents always point out we're targeting the overseas end and those people don't have Fourth Amendment rights, the Americans and other people in the US on the other end of that call, or email or Skype, do have Fourth Amendment rights."

See, the law allows the government to collect communications between individuals abroad who are interacting with people in the United States. In other words, the government can get around Americans' Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure by "targeting" the communications of a foreigner who just happens to be communicating with someone in the United States. They're not supposed to deliberately exploit the loophole to get around the Fourth Amendment, but once they use it to get information, they can keep it, even if they find out that they were spying on an American citizen after the fact.

The Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez, who watched in horror as the House floor debate unfolded and first noted that supporters in Congress seemed not to grasp the implications of the bill, points out that the key word here is "target." Citing David Kris, the former head of the Justice Department's national security division under Obama, he writes that "the 'target' of a surveillance program under [the bill] is typically just the foreign group—such as Al Qaeda or Wikileaks—that the government is seeking information about." It's that broad.

Imagine there's an email address the US believes Al Qaeda is using—and note that emails aren't necessarily tied to a given location. Well then it can monitor those emails, because Al Qaeda is a "non-US person." If they just happen to pick up a bunch of information about Chicago resident Rio Murrikan, well then they get to keep it, because they weren't "targeting" him. They were targeting Al Qaeda. Despite what supporters of the bill claim, the NSA has certainly intercepted communications when both persons were located inside the United States before.

How often does the personal information of American citizens get collected while the government is ostensibly targeting non-Americans? The government won't say. Two senators, Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), sent a letter to the National Security Agency asking how often the agency collects information on Americans while it's technically "targeting" foreigners' communications. The NSA's answer, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired put it, was that it would violate Americans' privacy for the NSA to acknowledge how often it spies on them.

Since the NSA wouldn't play ball, Udall and Wyden tried to get two changes into the FISA bill that would address the massive hole the FISA bill burns into the Fourth Amendment. The first would compel the NSA's inspector general to conduct an audit of how frequently Americans' communications are collected. The second would ensure that the NSA can't use any information it hoovers up on Americans unless the government has obtained a warrant or the situation is an emergency. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted down both amendments. A bill that allows the government to spy on Americans without a warrant is sailing to passage, almost untouched, as the country's attention is fixed on the slow-motion train wreck that is the US presidential election.

Still, Wired's David Kravets reports that Wyden has put a hold on the bill, and it's unlikely to come to a vote in the Senate before the election in November, despite having already passed the House. But given that the Obama administration has supported the mostly unaltered version of the bill, the most likely outcome is that it passes with no changes no matter who ends up in the White House, despite the fact that members of Congress don't seem to understand what it does.

On the other hand, maybe they do know that the bill allows warrantless surveillance of American citizens, and they simply don't care
.

Afghanistan at a Glance

Conflict in Afghanistan: From the Soviet Invasion to the Obama "Surge''

1979 The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. Mujahedeen — Islamic fighters — from across the globe, including Osama bin Laden, come to fight Soviet forces.
1989 Last Soviet troops leave Afghanistan.
1996 The Taliban take control of Afghanistan, imposing fundamentalist Islamic law. Osama bin Laden takes refuge in the country.
Sept. 2001 After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush gives the Taliban an ultimatum to hand over bin Laden; the Taliban refuse, and in October the U.S. leads a campaign that drives the Taliban out of major Afghan cities by the end of the year.
2002 Hamid Karzai becomes interim president of Afghanistan. The Taliban continue to wage guerrilla warfare near the border with Pakistan.
2004 New constitution is ratified, making Afghanistan an Islamic state with a strong president. Later, Mr. Karzai wins the country’s first presidential election.
Feb. 2009 President Obama orders 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
Aug. 2009 President Karzai wins re-election in a vote marred by fraud.
Dec. 2009 President Obama issues orders to send 30,000 troops in 2010, bringing the total American force to about 100,000.

Headlines Around the Web

What's This?

news.yahoo.com
September 18, 2012
Afghanistan seek to boost war-torn homeland

Rough Sketch
September 17, 2012
Suicide blast kills 12 near Kabul's airport in Afghanistan

The Huffington Post
September 17, 2012
Afghanistan: Suicide Bombing Kills 12 In Kabul

Patterico's Pontifications
September 17, 2012
Taliban Claims Responsibility for Murdering Marines for Insult to Prophet Muhammad

The Associated Press
September 17, 2012
Afghanistan Attacks

More at Blogrunner »

Afghanistan Navigator

A list of resources from around the Web about Afghanistan as selected by researchers and editors of The New York Times.

Overview of the Afghanistan and Pakistan Annual Review: Dec. 16, 2010
Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
NATO mission in Afghanistan
United States Embassy in Afghanistan

C.I.A World Factbook
Maps of Afghanistan
University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
Operation Enduring Freedom Casualties
iCasualties.org
World Bank Country Profile
World Health Organization Country Profile
United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)
Afghanistan Digital Library
New York University

Advocacy Groups and Blogs

Other Coverage

Books

Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia By Ahmed Rashid
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia By Ahmed Rashid
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 By Steve Coll
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 By Lawrence Wright
The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban By Sarah Chayes
Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier By Joel Hafvenstein
A Thousand Splendid Suns By Khaled Hosseini
Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil By Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson
The Places in Between By Rory Stewart
Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager's Story By Said Hyder Akbar and Susan Burton

Afghanistan

Romney: If you were born in America, you didn’t build that

Posted by Ezra Klein on September 15, 2012 at 2:43 pm

This leaked video (via Political Wire) from a Mitt Romney fundraiser is being sold as “Romney talks about Bain profiting from Chinese slave labor.” That’s wrong. There’s no evidence that any of the labor at the factory Romney is discussing was slave labor. There’s no evidence it’s even mildly coerced labor. In fact, the entire point of the story is that the jobs from that factory, despite the seemingly awful conditions, are in tremendous demand.

But after recounting his visit to the factory, Romney ends with a lesson. “The Bain partner I was with turned to me and said, ‘You know, 95 percent of life is settled if you are born in America.”

To Romney, this is a patriotic thought. “This is an amazing land and what we have is unique, and fortunately it is so special we are sharing it with the world.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, or how it relates to a Chinese factory where the workers make little and 12 of them share a single, dormitory-style bathroom. But it’s a nice sentiment.

The more straightforward interpretation of his story is that, if you were born in America, you didn’t build that. Success in life is determined by more than pluck and intelligence and effort. It’s influenced by the quality of political institutions and the level of economic advancement. It’s influenced by whether you’re in a developed economy or a developing one, and whether you can find jobs that make use of your unique talents, and whether the labor market is tight or loose.

This is not a controversial claim. It’s the subject of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s “Why Nations Fail.” It’s a common theme in Warren Buffett’s speeches, where he asks audiences to imagine a pre-birth lottery for where you’re born, and to consider how much they would sacrifice to get a ticket labeled “America.” It’s what every politician means when they speak about how blessed they are to inhabit this great land.

Over the past few months, however, a lot of Republicans have pretended that this actually is a controversial claim — that they don’t, in fact, believe that small-business owners and wealthy investors are anything less than 100 percent responsible for their success in life. But that’s just politics. As you can see in this video, when the doors are closed and they’re just talking with one another, they know they only built part of that.

So let’s just stipulate it: Democrats and Republicans agree that individuals are not solely responsible for their success in life. But let’s also stipulate that that agreement doesn’t really help us answer the policy question at the heart of the “you didn’t build that” furor, which is whether we should raise taxes on Americans making more than $250,000 by about $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

Politics - what I see and what I do not understand

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