This Is Your Grandpa's Democratic Party(?)

"Democrats abandoned ordinary Americans."

It's not true. But it's stuck, like a craw in the mouth of the American voter (and the American pundit). And the big question amongst Democratic strategists is how to dislodge it.

My latest idea, in my ongoing quest to become the Democratic Party's Francis Coppola, is to explicitly run with a narrative that says "yes, this is your Grandfather's Democratic Party" -- directly tying oneself to JFK and the New Deal and the civil rights era and that whole period where (supposedly) the Democratic Party was the party of ordinary Americans. Cut to lines about:

• Defending labor unions.
• Bringing back honest, well-paying jobs that can support your family.
• Taking on the billionaires robbing our democracy.
• Protecting civil rights.
• Restoring a women's right to choose.

All intercut with images of modern workers interspersed with older imagery (the March on Selma, men on girders building skyscrapers, etc.) that evokes the good old days.

What's the point of the ad? Basically, it's to create a permission structure for people who have -- for whatever reason -- internalized the narrative of "the party left me" to tell themselves things have changed again. They're not voting for the modern Democratic Party that Fox News has created for them in their minds over the past few years (latte-sipping coastal elites blah blah blah), they're voting for the mythologized Democratic Party of yesteryear that the Fox News caricature is tacitly juxtaposed against -- the party of the New Deal and of JFK, the party that was a working-class party, the party that built things and fought for everyday Americans.

"Mythologized" is important. Obviously, in reality the Democratic Party of that era (or any era) was not some clarion beacon of the worker's voice; nor was it some uncomplicated bastion of civil rights and women's rights advocacy. I know that, you know that. I also know that "ordinary Americans" is a loaded term, that the past wasn't actually that great for a whole lot of people, and so on.

But we're not writing a history paper here, we're dealing with a mood, and that mood is not especially connected to historical reality. How many times have you heard someone say that the current Democratic Party "just keeps moving to the right" (when it is beyond obvious that the Biden administration is the most progressive Democratic administration in my lifetime)? Objectively, it is impossible to defend the notion that the Democratic Party leadership is more conservative now than it was during the Clinton administration. In reality, making a show of affirming people who think "well, back then Democrats were fighting for me" is worth playing a bit of make-believe. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and just the gesture of "this is a change in a direction that makes you feel fuzzy" can have an outsized impact. The past wasn't actually that great, and modern changes are good actually. But if you can make people feel as if the things we're pulling for now are simply a restoration of the hazy memories they have when things were inchoately "better" (or "less complicated" or "less divided" or whatever), you're in a very good position.

I'm not saying the idea is perfect. In particular, even as a subversion of the "not your grandpa's ..." frame, the tagline still is a rough one at a time when many people are aggrieved at the "gerontocracy" in American politics. So workshop the hell out of this. I'm not prideful about it. But I think there's something here. The great insight of the contemporary conservative movement is in how they manage to fuse their present-day reactionary values as if there were simply a restoration of the greatness of the founders (I read one constitutional commentator describe originalism as "ventriloquizing the present through the past"). Democrats can do it too -- and as the Republican Party falls deeper and deeper into the grip of billionaire oligarchs and weird paranoid extremists, there's an opening here we can and should exploit.

What the UAW's New Leadership Means for Campus BDS

The United Auto Workers (UAW), fresh off their huge contract win with the "Big Three" automakers following their strike, have joined a petition calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (the petition also expressly calls for the immediate release of Israeli hostages). They are (I believe) the largest union to sign on to the statement as a full union (as opposed to via individual locals).

I think Spencer Ackerman might be a little ... optimistic (from his vantage) about what this augurs for the UAW going forward (h/t: LGM). Still, at one level, endorsing this petition is very much in line with the UAW's new, more aggressively progressive leadership. And at another level, I hardly expect the UAW to go full BDS or anything like that (as Ackerman notes, a pretty sizeable chunk of the UAW's workers are Trump-voting "economic nationalists", which may or may not put a brake on the union as a whole going too lefty on foreign policy or anything else). Ceasefire + return of the hostages is a far cry from the hyper-left politics many fantasize about the union vanguarding on Israel and Palestine.

But I'm just going to quickly flag a sideline here that's of interest to me. For obscure reasons, the UAW is the union that represents graduate students at the University of California (though strangely enough, people always gave me odd looks when I called myself "an autoworker"). My recollection from my time back at Berkeley is that the UAW national office intervened to put some brakes on BDS activity by the graduate student local when the latter got a little too frisky on the subject. But that was under the old regime. And again, while I don't expect the UAW as a whole to suddenly endorse BDS, it would not surprise me if the new leadership took a more laissez-faire attitude to what their locals did on the question -- including their grad student locals.

Just something to keep in mind.

UPDATE: For example, the Association for Legal Aid Attorneys (a union for public defenders), which is also under the UAW umbrella, just passed a resolution which not only call for an immediate ceasefire but also endorses full BDS and a Palestinian right of return while not mentioning the Israeli hostages at all (indeed, it only gives one very passing passive-voiced mention to "the violent tragedy on October 7, 2023").

Two Trip Roundup

I have two trips coming up -- one to Colorado to visit my brother and parents, and the second to Seattle to visit friends (and see Liz Miele). I've been shirking my blogging duties of late, and the travel won't help, so here's a roundup to at least get something moving again.

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JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) has launched a new journal, Distinctions, focusing on Jewish issues through a Sephardic and Mizrahi lens.

Nice to see some big Hollywood A-Listers step up and support the SAG-AFTRA's strike relief fund.

Ironically, Twitter deciding to become a site solely appealing to grifters and trolls is making it increasingly useless for grifters and trolls.

Does Cornel West actually want Donald Trump to win, or is his vanity presidential campaign a grift to dig out of his tax debts? Hard to say!

There's a new HuffPo "expose" revealing that Richard Hanania had a history of overt White supremacist writings, and I can be 100% honest in saying that it never occurred to me that Hanania ever presented himself as anything but an overt White supremacist (but yeah, apparently there were folks who tried to push the line that he was a "centrist").\

A new, if long-anticipated, frontier of artificial intelligence has hit, as an Indian politician hit with alleged leaks of scandalous material says that the recordings were actually deep fakes -- and it's really hard to figure out who's telling the truth.

Not really a "roundup" item, but I want to give a quick promotion to the internet series "Jet Lag: The Game". It's an online series where each season basically creates a new, full-scale travel board game -- "tag" but across all of western Europe, or "Connect Four" using the western United States. It's wholesome, entertaining, and just a lot of fun. Jill and I have been binging it for the past few weeks, and I'll recommend to all of you as well.

Teaching is a Job, in Grad School and Out

The NLRB is gearing up to implement a new rule which would establish that graduate students, even when acting as teaching assistants, are not "employees" of the university and therefore are not entitled to labor law protections (such as the right to unionize). This is the latest swing in an ongoing battle over that issue at the NLRB, which has largely tracked partisan politics: grad students first won the right to unionize under a Clinton-appointee controlled board in 2000, lost it under the Bush administration in 2004, gained it back under Obama in 2016, and are poised to lose it again under Trump in 2019.

The logic of the argument that grad students are not employees is that we are primarily students, and our teaching roles are extensions of our role as students. I'm somewhat uniquely positioned to address this, as I became a graduate student after serving as a (non-permanent) faculty member at two universities, and thus was able to compare whether and to what degree serving as a graduate student instructor (Berkeley's term for a teaching assistant) differed from teaching as a faculty member.

Here's my answer: there's virtually no difference.

There are many things I've done at UC-Berkeley as a "student". Most obviously, I enrolled in classes for credit. I wrote a master's thesis, and will write a dissertation. In these roles, my relationship to the departmental faculty is pedagogical -- they are there to teach and mentor me, and I interact with them in effectively the same way as I did to my teachers as an undergraduate or a secondary school student.

But as far as Berkeley is concerned, I do not teach classes to be taught how to teach. I teach classes because Berkeley needs people to teach classes, and they've decided I'm qualified to do it. As a GSI, both my day-to-day and semester-long routines are effectively the same as when I was a faculty member. I build my own lesson plans, hold office hours, give lectures, grade papers, write letters of recommendation, and often times create assignments. Nothing in how GSI work is structured remotely resembles any pedagogical practice akin to the professor/student relation that exists when I, say, submit a dissertation draft. As a GSI, I receive effectively no mentoring or even oversight by faculty members (indeed, in three of the four classes I've taught as GSI, the lead instructor was another graduate student). The only substantial difference between being a lecturer at the law school and a GSI in the political science department is that in the latter case I do not have control of my class's overall syllabus -- but all this means is that I'm a worker underneath a boss. To the extent that Berkeley has taken an interest in teaching me how to teach, it's done so through a class in pedagogy. It is an accident of structure that my GSI responsibilities come attached to my studies as a PhD student -- they are scarcely different in form than what I would be doing if I was an adjunct instructor.

This ruling will not directly affect me (it only applies to private universities). And I say all of this as someone who has had a sometimes adversarial relationship with my own graduate student union. But that doesn't change the obvious fact that when I teach, I'm engaging in work, not study, and the law should therefore treat me as a worker, not a student. The determination that graduate students serving as teaching assistants are not acting as "employees" but as "students" is patently absurd to anyone who has ever worked as TA.

Post-Op Thoughts on Tonight's Elections

With one major exception -- the Kansas Republican gubernatorial primary -- most of the big races from tonight have been called. The biggest, of course, is the special election in the Ohio 12th, where Republican Troy Balderson looks to have just eked out a victory over Democrat Danny O'Connor to keep this seat red. That about exhausts the good news for the GOP, though -- a sub-1% win in an ancestrally Republican district that voted for Trump by double-digits can hardly be thought of as good news. If the country swings the way this district did, the Democrats take back the House by a comfortable margin.

That's the obvious takeaway. But what else have we learned tonight?

• O'Connor improved on Hillary Clinton's numbers pretty much everywhere in the district (save Balderson's base of Muskingum County) -- which you kind of have to, in order turn a double-digit deficit into a near-dead heat. But where he really outperformed is in juicing turnout in the most Democratic part of the district: Franklin County, home to The Ohio State University. What does that mean? Well, on the one hand it supports those who argue that the route to Democratic success lies in exciting the core base rather than chasing swing voters. But on the other hand, it also suggests that the core base is perfectly happy to get energized about a relative moderate like O'Connor (at least in the right district).

• The other tea leaf we're seeing is that Democrats are casting more ballots in these primaries than Republicans, even in locales that have generally been thought of as Democratic stretches. So far, more Democrats than Republicans have cast ballots in the WA-03 and WA-08 primaries, and are tight in the WA-05 -- all GOP districts (Reps. Jamie Herrera-Beutler and Cathy McMorris Rodgers hold the WA-03 and WA-05, respectively, while in the WA-08 Dino Rossi will be looking to hold retiring Rep. Dave Reichert's seat). Ditto the MO-02, where incumbent Rep. Ann Wagner was thought to be a tough, if reachable, target for Team Blue.

• Gretchen Whitmer's victory over Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan's Democratic gubernatorial primary shows what should be obvious: sometimes Sanders-style progressives win primaries, and sometimes they don't. Democratic Party voters are neither implacably opposed to left-wing candidates nor are they congenitally averse to them.

• What might be true, though, is that there is genuine progressive energy right now in big cities, especially around criminal justice issues. Ferguson City Councilor Wesley Bell's upset ouster of longtime St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch (he who unsuccessfully prosecuted the Michael Brown shooting) is the under-the-radar Big Deal of the day. I also think we can slot in Rashida Tlaib's likely victory in the race to replace Rep. John Conyers in the Detroit-based MI-13. If her lead holds, Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, will become the first Muslim woman in Congress (she's also a J Street endorsee). Congrats to her!

• Finally, Missouri voters soundly rejected proposed "right-to-work" anti-union legislation, overturning the legislatively enacted bill by a crushing 2-1 margin. There's been a noticeable trend of union and working-class victories in some traditionally red-territories (think the teachers' strikes in Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona), and this seems like further evidence of a shifting tide on the issue.

Shadow of War Roundup

The newest game taking up my time is Shadow of War. You could say I'm late, but given that the developer just removed microtransactions from the game, I'd say my timing is perfect.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is leaving the Atlantic.

A really interesting profile on Aly Raisman and the work she's done re: #MeToo (in the gymnastics community generally and in the Larry Nassar case specifically). A remarkable woman.

Immigrant mother loses her effort to regain custody over her child (who was taken from her after she was picked up in a raid). The case was on remand from the Missouri Supreme Court, which described the initial proceedings which caused her to lose custody as a "travesty of justice"; it will almost certainly be appealed.

Gershom Gorenberg on Israel's new standing as part of the "illiberal international". As he notes, that the nation-state bill was passed at the same time as Bibi was welcoming Viktor Orban into the country could not be more appropriate.

There was never any doubt that Janus was part of a larger declaration of war against unions -- but Will Baude describes a particularly nasty implication of the precedent: the unions might be forced to disgorge payments collected as unlawfully obtained (even though they were perfectly lawful at the time they were collected).

Rabbi detained and taken for questioning by police for officiating a Jewish wedding ceremony. Iran? Saudi Arabia? Nope -- Israel.

Anshel Pfeffer: Orban is a smart antisemite, Corbyn is a stupid antisemite. I'll buy that.

John Strawson (formerly a professor at Birzeit University) and Martin Bright explain why the antisemitism issue means they can't be a part of Labour anymore. Meanwhile, Labour MP Margaret Hodge defends calling Corbyn a "racist and an antisemite" to his face on the floor of Parliament.

Preemptive Strikes in Antidiscrimination Law (Or: Why You Need a Union!)

Last week, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decided the case of Hales v. Casey's Marketing.

Lauren Hales was an eighteen year old employee working the graveyard shift at Casey's General Store. At 1:45 AM, a customer came in and starting making sexually suggestive comments towards her. In an attempt to avoid the man, Hales stepped outside to take a cigarette break. The man followed her, blocked the entrance to the store, and continued making sexual remarks.

Hales, who had previously been sexual assaulted, told the guy to "back off". The customer replied "what are you going to do about it?", at which point Hales extended her cigarette to ward him off. Instead, the customer stepped towards Hales, burning his arm on her cigarette in the process.

The next day, the customer complained to a Casey's manager that Hales had burned his arm. The next time Hales reported to work, a manager asked her if "anything out of the ordinary" happened on her previous shift. She forthrightly reported the cigarette incident, but said she had done it in self-defense.

Hales was then terminated.

She sued, alleging sexual harassment and retaliation -- and the Eighth Circuit just rejected both of those claims. The harassment claim failed because the customer's conduct wasn't "severe or pervasive" enough to constitute sexual harassment as a matter of law (the Eighth Circuit apparently hasn't decided whether a company can be held liable for harassment done by a customer, but it assumed for sake of argument that it could). The retaliation claim was rejected because it was filed too late, but apparently the district court had also indicated it should fail because Hales was not engaged in protected activity under Title VII.

Here's the thing: I'm not sure this decision is wrong as a matter of (current) law. The "severe and pervasive" threshold necessary to make out a harassment claim is extremely (I'd say ludicrously) high, and I know of no case law which addresses self-defense steps as a form of "opposing" harassment in the workplace.*

But even if the case "rightfully" lost, all that demonstrates is that antidiscrimination law -- even when "correctly" applied -- isn't sufficient to protect vulnerable workers (even from discrimination).

In fact, the structure of antidiscrimination law in many ways encourages employers like Casey's to act in precisely this fashion -- terminating employees who are the victims of sexual harassment (whether by customers or coworkers) as a "preemptive strike" before they're able to put together a legally cognizable claim of discrimination. Even if one doesn't think that antidiscrimination law should expand to create liability for a single case of customer harassment, there's surely something perverse about it allowing (or even encouraging!) a young woman to be fired because she refused to tolerate a customer harassing her.

When I read this case, it reminded me of one of the very first employment discrimination cases I read which got me hot under the collar -- Jordan v. Alternative Resources Corp. In that case, Jordan -- in accordance with company policy -- reported a coworker who, while watching news coverage that two Black criminals had been arrested, exclaimed "[t]hey should put those two black monkeys in a cage with a bunch of black apes and let the apes fuck them."  His supervisor took decisive action ... against Jordan: changing his work hours to less desirable times, making derogatory comments towards Jordan, and then -- within a month of the initial complaint -- firing Jordan. Jordan sued, claiming his termination was retaliation for filing his complaint.

Title VII only protects against retaliation if you're opposing an act covered under Title VII. In Jordan, the Fourth Circuit concluded that the single racist remark Jordan reported could not alone have sufficed to create legally actionable harassment (again, not being "severe or pervasive" enough to qualify), which means he was not "opposing" covered conduct, which means that his company was not retaliating against him as a matter of law (even though, again, company policy required that Jordan file his complaint).

Jordan argued that his complaint should have been protected because it covered action that, if left unabated, would have eventually ripened into unlawful harassment. The court refused to make the extension, and the result is an obvious Catch-22: Jordan has to report conduct that is not "yet" harassment in order to obey company policy (and preserve a potential future harassment claim), but he can be retaliated against for filing the reports.

But there's a deeper problem in the incentive structure this rule creates: As soon as an employer begins to observe incipient harassing conduct that has not (yet) risen to be legally actionable, it probably should terminate the victim before a sufficient record of wrongful conduct accumulates.** If the employee is reporting the bad conduct, then so much the worse for them -- they're showing themselves to be the sorts who stand up for themselves and so may be more likely to file a discrimination complaint.

Consider how this dynamic might have played out in Hales' case. Suppose the manager knew that one instance of customer harassment of this sort against Hales would likely not be enough to create any legal liability for Casey's. But if it happened again to Hales, or multiple times, then Casey's may well be on the hook. What are the options? Well, one is to take concrete steps to protect Hales from this predatory customer (e.g., banning him from the store) and harassment more generally. But that's difficult, and maybe expensive, and it alienates a customer! So option two is just to fire Hales. If you fire her now, the legal case is nipped in the bud. Problem solved.

And make no mistake: this set of perverse incentives will fall heaviest on the most vulnerable employees. It is entirely predictable that the employees most likely to be subjected to repeat instances of sexually aggressive, harassing conduct are young, those working overnight shifts, racial minorities, gender-nonconforming, and the like (Hales met at least the first two of these). Hence, it is these employees who are most likely to be -- and be perceived as -- potential "repeat victims". And that means they are the most likely to encounter "preemptive strike" discrimination -- a form of employment discrimination that does not just avoid legal accountability, but in many ways is the product of the (exceptions to) antidiscrimination law itself.

So the obvious reform is to make clear that Title VII retaliation protections extend to cases of opposition to sexual or racial misconduct even where the practices would not themselves (yet) rise to being independently legally actionable.

But it's also the more straightforward case that what Hales really needed here was a union. It is very difficult to craft legal rules which do not create some sets of bad incentives or which a clever employer cannot game to their advantage. Given who writes laws (political elites) and who interprets them (legal elites), these unanticipated consequences are unlikely to be randomly distributed -- they will track the usual lines of social power and advantage.

Hence, what Hales really needs is someone whose job it is to be in her corner, a body which can protect her from such arbitrary employer action in the particular case even when the general law couldn't shield her. In other words, she needs a union.

* Retaliation jurisprudence generally envisions "opposition" to mean something like reporting the conduct to company officials or public authority officials. Nonetheless, I'd be inclined to say that physically resisting harassment in the workplace should qualify as "opposing" that conduct. But there remains the separate problem illuminated by the Jordan case: where the conduct "opposed" does not alone suffice to create a "severe and pervasive" hostile work environment (as it almost never will in the first instance), then no action by the employee -- whether it's filing a report or physical resisting her harasser -- would be covered under anti-retaliation protections.

** A similar dynamic sometimes emerges in the labor law context, where employees are protected insofar as they engage in "concerted action". On face, this gives employers who see the potential for emergent concerted labor action an incentive to fire the source employee before any organization can begin. But unlike in the discrimination-retaliation context, both courts and the NLRB have concluded that such "preemptive strikes" also violate labor law, even where they come before any conduct that itself would qualify as "concerted action" and even where they successfully preclude any such action from later manifesting.

Mandatory Swastika Recommendations

A student in Massachusetts constructed a swastika in the hall. Two teachers talked about it (one by broaching the topic of antisemitism in class, the other in private conversations with teachers and another student); a third rescinded her letter of recommendation for the student (contacting colleges to explain why).

All three teachers have now been disciplined by the school. The first two teachers received disciplinary letters, the third has been suspended from teaching.

This is outrageous. I can -- barely -- wrap my head around some discipline for the two "talkers" on student privacy grounds if (a) they mentioned the swastika-creating student by name and (b) it was not generally known that he was the perpetrator. I still would be very, very dubious, but I can see a superficially not-entirely-frivolous rationale there.

But the suspension of the teacher who rescinded her letter of recommendation is far more troubling. While we don't often talk about "academic freedom" in the context of secondary school, it does exist and this is a great example of it. A teacher's decision to recommend a student for college or a job is an exercise of their personal judgment as academics and directly puts their reputation on the line. There can be no obligation to "go to bat" for a student if the teacher has lost confidence in the qualities that triggered her recommendation in the first place. It is beyond unreasonable to mandate that a teacher continue to back a student who is either pro-Nazi himself or so negligent with respect to the sentiments of others that he just doesn't care about the hurt and offense he causes.

By and large, the story here seems to be that the school district wanted to sweep this incident under the rug and several teachers declined to assist it in doing so. And when the perpetrating student's mother called and complained, the district swung into action to ensure that his not-right to have a favorable recommendation wasn't jeopardized just because he threw up some Nazi symbolism. It's grotesque. The Boston Globe describes the case as "difficult terrain", but it wasn't all that "difficult" until neo-Nazism managed to squirm back into the mainstream.

The teachers here are unionized, and I hope they grieve the hell out of this one.

UPDATE: Yep, the union is interceding on behalf of all three teachers.

Playing with Cards: Malia Bouattia and the Double Down

Perhaps the single most ubiquitous response to a claim of discrimination or other biased treatment is to allege that the claimant is proceeding in bad faith. "You're just playing the race card!" "Stop hiding behind your gender!" "Yet another case of Jews crying anti-Semitism to stifle criticism!" This retort is notable because it does not listen to the claim and then provide a substantive, on-the-merits response -- "I actually don't think you were discriminated against for X, Y, and Z reasons". Rather, the response is a statement that one will not even entertain the claim in question. It is so transparently ludicrous, or so obviously made with illicit, instrumental motives, that it is not even worth considering.

Earlier this spring I published my first peer-reviewed article, Playing with Cards: Discrimination Claims and the Charge of Bad Faith, on this topic. I argued that the "bad faith" response is problematic for a host of reasons: For one, it disrespects the discrimination claimant by presenting them as presumptively untrustworthy and not worth engaging with, often implicitly or explicitly because of their group membership (those people are always crying discrimination). For two, it evinces far too much faith in our prediscursive intuitions regarding what does and does not constitute "discrimination" (or "bias", or "oppression"), particularly when dealing with marginalized outgroups. And for three, it is far too tempting of a well to draw upon for persons with strong psychological or ideological motives to think of discrimination as rare, aberrant, or uncommon. If we want to believe that racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia (or what have you) is not a major problem in our community or does not implicate our own commitments, one way of protecting that belief is to preemptively write off such claims as bad faith hogwash. The "bad faith" response, after all, is typically the retort of first resort -- it does not come after we have fully and charitably explored the allegation and ultimately found it lacking, it comes as an initial gambit designed to delegitimize the claim as one worth thinking about at all. And so I conclude that we should not dismiss discrimination claims by arguing that they're leveled in bad faith. We should instead give them full and fair investigation. The conclusion of that investigation, of course, might still be that the argument was wrong, even bogus. But there is a marked difference between reaching that conclusion at the end of an inquiry versus at its beginning.

Last month brought an interesting permutation and difficult test case for my theory, when the UK's National Union of Students elected Malia Bouattia as its new president.Ms. Bouattia has a history of statements and positions that at least create a reasonable inference of anti-Semitism, including condemning her home Birmingham University as a "Zionist outpost in higher education" because it has "the largest J-Soc [Jewish Society] in the country," attacks on "mainstream Zionist-led media outlets," and a tepid endorsement of BDS -- tepid because she worried it would supplant and delegitimize violent "resistance" by Palestinians against Israelis. As a result of these statements and others, 57 leaders of UK university J-Socs signed an open letter expressing concerns over Ms. Bouattia's views, and several universities are contemplating disaffiliating with the NUS (Lincoln University became the first to do so today, though student leaders denied Ms. Bouattia's election was the precipitating cause of the move).

Ms. Bouattia's response to these claims has generally been to contend that the Jewish student leaders have falsely conflated Zionism and Judaism, crafting a "false" claim of anti-Semitism that is really about insulating Israel from criticism. We can of course quibble with whether that's true (particularly when part of the objection was to the number of Jews at Birmingham), but for present purposes the more interesting issue came at the end, where she -- the first Muslim and first black woman to be elected president of the NUS -- said "I am deeply concerned that my faith and political views are being misconstrued and used as an opportunity to falsely accuse me of antisemitism, despite my work and dedication to liberation, equality and inclusion saying otherwise." In effect, she accused the Jewish students of Islamophobia in the course of their anti-Semitism allegation.

And that presents a very interesting permutation of the phenomenon I'm talking about: Ms. Bouattia used a discrimination claim (Islamophobia) to try to delegitimize another discrimination claim (anti-Semitism). My initial instinct, of course, is to roll my eyes and think that her response was, well, made in bad faith -- a way of avoiding reckoning with serious complaints registered by the Jewish student community. But of course, that response -- "oh, she's making the charge in bad faith" -- is precisely what I claim is illicit in my article. Hoisted by my own petard!

On reflection, I've fallen back into line with the argument my article makes -- namely, that Ms. Bouattia's should not be dismissed as bad faith posturing and should be considered seriously (just as the Jewish students' claims of anti-Semitism should likewise be taken seriously). Before I go into why, though, I want to quickly dispense with one argument one might use to distinguish Ms. Bouattia's discrimination claim -- to wit, that she was using it to respond (or perhaps more accurately, avoid responding) to another discrimination claim. We might say that in such circumstances the discrimination claim is being leveraged as a means of avoiding other discrimination claims and thus ought to lose its protected status. But I don't think that argument works, because I don't think our deliberative obligation actually depend upon what order various claims and counterclaims are made. If we tweaked one of Ms. Bouattia's original statements a little so it said something like "large Jewish societies like the one at Birmingham are the main purveyors of Islamophobic sentiment in higher education today," then she would have gotten off the blocks first but I nonetheless would not want to say a Jewish response that called such a statement anti-Semitic should be viewed as prima facie illegitimate. Going down this route ends up arriving at something like the "doctrine of the preferred first speaker" -- whoever claims discrimination first gets protection -- and that just isn't tenable.

With respect to Ms. Bouattia's claim, it actually seems quite plausible that currents of racism and Islamophobia are playing a role in how the controversy shakes out. It hardly seems unfeasible that someone with her background might be viewed with extra suspicion. Ambiguous statements might not be given benefit of the doubt, or nuances presumed not to exist. We might be more stingy with forgiveness or recognition of evolving views. Ms. Bouattia has reported facing a barrage of violent threats online, and given the fact that she's a woman of color on the internet her account seems almost assuredly accurate in this respect. Notably, while Ms. Bouattia frames all of this in terms of a "false" accusation of anti-Semitism, it is equally important to engage in these interrogations even if the claim is a true or reasonable one. Prejudice doesn't only afflict saints; an important of egalitarian treatment is how we treat persons who are accused of or have actually committed moral or social wrongs. In the discussion over Ms. Bouattia's attitudes and behavior towards the Jewish community that we find oppressive, we should absolutely be thinking about how racism and Islamophobia can channel the discussion. Likewise, in discussions regarding Israeli behavior that we think worthy of scorn and condemnation, we should absolutely be thinking about the ways in which anti-Semitism may affect or interact with our evaluations. Instead of thinking of the one as falsifying the other -- if the anti-Semitism claim is valid than the Islamophobia one is false, or vice versa -- we should think of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as part of the broader discursive current which inescapably channels how issues related to Jews and Muslims are understood and are cashed out in public settings.

Put another way, we often frame the question as "Is criticism of Israel or Zionism anti-Semitic," a question which is ridiculous for the same reason the question "Is criticism of Malia Bouattia Islamophobic" is ridiculous. They're both ridiculous because the answer is both (a) obvious and (b) near-universally agreed-upon: "Sometimes -- it depends." Whether or not a given criticism of a Jewish person or institution is anti-Semitic or a Muslim person or institution is Islamophobic can't be answered universally; it depends on the particular criticism in its particular context, and so should analyzed and evaluated on its particular merits (which was, of course, the basic demand of my article). But there's no way to talk about any Jewish body or institution in a way that wholly extracts it from a system of anti-Semitic domination, just as there is no way to talk about any Muslim body or institution in a way that wholly extract is from a system of Islamophobia. So we can say that while it is obviously true that there are plenty of criticisms of Israel that are not anti-Semitic, there is no worthwhile, non-trivial statement one can make about Israel (positive or negative) that does not take seriously anti-Semitism as a central facet of its analysis; and likewise no statement one can make about the first black Muslim woman to lead the NUS that does not take seriously the impact of Islamophobia and racism. This was in many respects the point I was trying to make in my post on Mizrahi Jews and intersectionality -- not that any opposition to the political desires of the Mizrahi community is racist, but the more mundane point that if you're talking about Middle Eastern Jewish institutions and history inside and outside of Israel without grappling with the particularities of Mizrahi Jewish oppression and marginalization (by both Ashkenazi Jews and Arab Muslims and Christians), you're probably talking these things poorly.

So where does this all leave us? Ms. Bouattia did not really "respond" to the anti-Semitism claim against her in a meaningful sense, instead seeking to traverse the issue by suggesting that there is a hermetical seal between anti-Semitism versus speech that attacks Zionism or Zionists. This is a non-response: since any reasonable person must agree that some anti-Zionist speech is anti-Semitic, the operative question is whether hers, specifically, was or was not. And while I think one can colorably answer that question in the affirmative, the far more productive angle of approach is to consider how her rhetoric and positions -- with talk of Zionist-run media and hordes of Jews taking over certain universities -- interact with and leverage anti-Semitic structures in ways incompatible with equal Jewish standing in the British and global community. And in terms of Islamophobia, I think it is pretty clear -- particularly in light of the broader scandal over anti-Semitism in Labour and several other goings-on at the NUS (delegates applauded a proposal for the union to stop commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, though ultimately did not vote for it; earlier this year the union eliminated what had been the solitary guaranteed spot of Jewish representation on a union committee) -- that the Jewish community is equal-opportunity in finding remarks such as Ms. Bouattia's objectionable and views her election as part of a broader wave of social marginalization that is not attributable to a particular color or creed. Likewise, I did not see anything in their statement that seemed to leverage Ms. Bouattia's faith against her or play upon traditional stereotypes regarding either Muslims or people of color to accentuate their arguments (though I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong here). That notwithstanding, it remains important, valid, indeed essential to situate the progression of this discourse inside patterns of Islamophobia and racism, because they will always play a channeling role in determining how arguments gain leverage, how issues are covered publicly, and so on.

It is very easy for people to demand egalitarianism for their preferred side while being derisive and dismissive towards the other. And for the same reason, it is very easy for these debates to turn into dueling charges of hypocrisy. But there's no way forward other than a principled way. There is, to be sure, a "principled" argument that all groups are really just whiners when it comes to oppression and we should generally ignore all of them (the problem with that position is not that it's unprincipled, it's that it is wrong). But there is no principled reason to suggest that we should take Jewish claims of anti-Semitism seriously, but dismiss Muslim claims of Islamophobia. And likewise there is no principled reason to contend that we should be careful, considerate, and charitable listeners to Muslim claims of Islamophobia, while denigrating Jewish claims of anti-Semitism as bad faith card playing.

Cross-posted on The Faculty Lounge, where I am guest-blogging this month. While most of the content I'm putting up is unique to one blog or the other, this post in particular I thought might have resonance to both readerships.

Why are Police Leadership Better than Police Workers on Police Racism?

The other day, the chief of Pittsburgh's Police was photographed holding a poster saying "I resolve to challenge racism @ work. End White silence." (The chief, Cameron McLay, is White). The local police union erupted in rage, accusing the chief of calling his force racist.

Chief McLay's act, and the union response, are part of an emerging pattern I've observed. It's not just that police unions -- and the rank-and-file more generally -- are behaving exceptionally poorly in response to protests over racist police work. It's that police leadership is performing, comparatively at least, so much better. In Richmond, California, the chief of police joined a protest with the sign "Black lives matter"; the local accused him of breaking the law. In Phoenix, a police chief who long clashed with the union was fired, one alleged source of the antipathy was the chief's crackdown on bad apple cops. And in Nashville, Tennessee, Police Chief Steve Anderson made news with a thoughtful letter to a constituent complaining that he had not cracked down sufficiently on protesters, defending their right to protest and observing that all of us have a tendency to get stuck in the views of our own social circles (in fairness, I've seen no reports of any bad behavior or backlash from Nashville police).

This divergence poses a puzzle for some on the left. To be sure, they are reckoning with the fact that a public sector union seems to be among the primary bad guys in this saga -- this article in Jacobin Magazine is a good example from a perspective well to my left. As befits their Marxist perspective, Jacobin argues that police officers are so fully integrated in the project of defending capital and the dominant classes that they have no conception of themselves as in solidarity with the everyday, working class. They are hired to manage and suppress that precise class. I wouldn't buy this explanation anyway, but it is particularly notable in that it can't explain why the police leadership isn't worse (and seems to be better) than the rank-and-file. After all, this narrative (which boils down to little more than "cops are terrible") should see a unified front of police awfulness, indeed, the police leadership should if anything be more enthusiastic players in the capitalism-preserving project. Still, one almost can't fault them for the oversight -- it is hard enough to ask a Marxist rag to abandon a union, to further expect them to throw their lot in with management is obviously a bridge too far.

But those of us not slaves to a defunct economist can think further. So what is the explanation? One answer is simply to blame the unions, and that definitely is part of the story. Protests against police racism are in large part about demanding accountability (firings, lawsuits, or prosecutions) of police officers, and protecting police officers from precisely these consequences is part of the union's job. In general, unionization increases the relative power of labor vis-a-vis management, to the extent that labor is behaving badly, unionization will accentuate those effects. But while unionization may accentuate the hostile attitude police workers take towards reform efforts, I think it is a stretch to say unions produce them. The hostility seems to be genuinely organic to the rank-and-file (witness the mass back-turning on Mayor De Blasio; an action opposed, natch, by NYPD Chief Bill Bratton). So we need another explanation for what causes the working cadre to differ so substantially from its leadership.

If I were a regular police officer, the answer I'd probably give is that police leaders are desk jockeys who don't understand the risks and realities of being a beat cop. It's easy for them to criticize, they just shuffle papers all day. Unfortunately, nearly all police leaders came up through the ranks and have plenty of experience on the streets -- indeed, they almost certainly put in their time in an era when crime was far more prevalent than today. It is unlikely that police leaders are under any delusions regarding the stresses of being a cop.

Another possibility relates to political and interest group pressure. It is almost certainly the case that police leadership are more democratically accountable than are their peers on the line. Sometimes this accountability is direct (as in an elected sheriff), but in nearly all cases the police chief can be hired or fired by the local city or county government. To the extent that the politicians are being pressured to implement reform, those pressures will diffuse down to the police management. Obviously, this depends on who the effective pressure groups are, and perhaps we'd expect to see this divergence be more stark in large cities with majority-minority electorates than in the suburbs. But maybe not -- Pittsburgh and Nashville are both majority-White cities, and Phoenix is 46% non-Hispanic white. Indeed, the only city where minority groups are a clear majority is the suburb, Richmond (though with a population of over 100,000, it isn't exactly typical).

Finally, it may be the case that the structure of police work creates a different perspective for the leadership compared to the beat. Not everything a regular cop does is particularly antagonistic -- directed traffic or providing security at a street fair, for example -- but it is no stretch to say most of their interactions with the populace occur when something bad has happened. That creates a particular perspective wherein their community is the sort of place where bad things happen and they're going to be at the center of it all. Police leadership, by contrast, gets to occupy a much wider vantage point. In addition to engaging with the police themselves and hearing their stories, they also read aggregate crime statistics, listen to public complaints, interact with local political leadership, and liaison with the community. This likely alters their understanding of what good policing is.

Either way, this presents an interesting case. It is one thing to focus on attacking the police unions, it is quite another to suggest that empowering police management might be the most progressive response. At the very least, we need to develop a theory for why in a non-trivial amount of cases, it is the police leadership that seems most amenable to the sorts of reforms progressives want to see with respect to policing behavior.

ILWU Statement on "Block the Boat"

Nothing is more progressive than threatening workers!

At 6:00 PM Saturday, ILWU [International Longshore and Warehouse Union) Local 10 and 34 represented longshoremen and clerks dispatched to work the vessel ZIM Shanghai at SSA’s Oakland California Terminal were met with hostile demonstrators, effectively blocking all access to the terminal. Longshoremen and Clerks trying to report to work were threatened physically at some points of ingress and their personal vehicles were physically blocked. As such, all personnel stood-by outside of the demonstration perimeters for health and safety purposes. At approximately 8 PM SSA released all personnel from work.

As far as the union can ascertain, the protests are organized by a coalition of individuals and organizations that plan events and create action alerts under the name of “Block the Boat for Gaza” online.

The ILWU is not among the groups organizing the protests, and the leadership and membership of the ILWU have taken no position on the Israel/Gaza conflict.

Indeed, pretty much all efforts to block Israeli boats on the West Coast end up resorting to threatening the dockworkers. Curious, that.

A Ship Docks in Oakland

Protesters in Oakland have blocked an Israeli-owned ship from unloading. The ship is owned by ZIM, the 10th largest shipping company in the world. Notably, ZIM is privately-owned (the Israeli government divested its minority ownership in 2004) and to my knowledge there is no claim that the company is implicated in the occupation other than by its nationality.

Protesters claim that local unionized dockworkers (members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, I believe) honored the picket line and refused to unload the ship; with one leader saying "[t]his is the first time in history that this has happened." If indeed the workers made a voluntary decision to refuse to unload the ship in deference to the picketers, that would be a first -- but only because the last time time this happened the picket temporarily succeeded only because the union workers feared for their personal safety if they unloaded the ship.

UPDATE: This news story indicates that we're in roughly the same boat as we were in 2010 -- union workers did not cross the picket line "for safety reasons." The ILWU confirmed that it had not taken a stance favoring (or disfavoring) the picket.

UPDATE x2: The ship was unloaded last night, when the union concluded there was no longer a "safety issue." Basically, this great non-violent BDS "success" was that they successfully created a safety hazard for union workers which kept them off the job. Hurray!

Jews Are Liberal, Part Eleventy Billion

A new poll finds, once again, that Jews harbor opinions well to the left of the American mainstream on a host of issues. Nearly 70% favor gay marriage. Nearly 90% favor legal abortion in most cases.

And while it is sometimes asserted that Jewish social liberalism is balanced by economic moderation, that's only true as a matter of degree. Two-thirds support tax increases on persons making over $200,000/year, 62% feel that banks and financial institutions pose a "major threat", and 61% say they tend to favor unions over corporations when they hear about a strike (to be fair, when the corporations are run by guys like this, it's easy to root against them).

Oh, and on Israel/Palestine? No surprises there either. Jews tend to think Israel wants peace and Palestinians do not. But perhaps the most striking finding was their opinion regarding a settlement freeze. Though opinions were divided, a plurality of 40% believes that the Israel government should freeze settlements, versus only 22% opposed (39% are unsure).

Another Hajaig-Style Apology

After a speech where she darkly warned about "Jewish money" controlling America, South African official Fatima Hajaig issued an "apology" that somehow managed to be more offensive than the original statement. Its hallmarks included claiming that the statement was only anti-Semitic in the minds of the beholder (alongside the classic I-apologize-if-you-were-offended structure), and spent the vast majority of her time reassuring everyone that she would not be cowed in expressing anti-Israel rhetoric or her belief that the evil hyper-sensitive Jewish Zionists were the real problem in any way, shape, or form.

Union activist Steve Hedley apparently was taking notes. We reported on him for referring to a Jewish interlocutor as a member of the "chosen people", implying in the course of it that this would cause the Jew to feel better than him. Now he's, well, sort of apologized (via TULIP):

The phrase “chosen people” refers to the Jewish people, comes from The Torah and is repeated in The Bible (Deuteronomy 14:2. It has been adopted by right-wing Zionists as a Biblical justification for the seizure of Palestinian land, which they see it as their God-given right. However, I accept that my use of the phrase in the context of the highly inflammatory argument with aggressive and disruptive intruders trying to wreck a public meeting and provoke a reaction, was unwise and I regret using the phrase. I apologise to anyone who may have been offended by this remark.

I have never been, nor will I ever be, anti Jewish, or racist against any nationality or ethnicity. Neither will I refrain from criticising Israeli state policy towards the Palestinian population where that policy is discriminatory, oppressive and racist. I regret that I was provoked into making statements that could be deliberately and maliciously miscontrued by right-wing Zionists who are openly hostile to trade unions, openly consort with the neo-fascist EDL and who wish to smear my reputation and that of my union.

"I'm sorry that I let evildoers provoke me saying into something that they were able to manipulate." My heart just wrenches. It is worth noting that I know of no evidence that "chosenness" is an important or even noticeable part of right-wing Israeli rhetoric justifying seizure of Palestinian land. I'm dubious given the actual religious meaning and pedigree of the term, and suspect that Hedley is simply lying here, but I'm open to evidence to the contrary.

The apology, incidentally, is prefaced by several paragraphs of accusation that paints the victim of his anti-Semitic assault as a consort of the EDL who was there to disrupt the meeting in service of an anti-union agenda, as well as the classic "can't tolerate criticism of Israel charge". You can read the victim's account of the story here, as well as his response to Hedley's faux-apology, which he calls "defamatory".

Technical Error Roundup

This one might be a bit more haphazard than most, as it incorporates some election night celebration. As for the title, my laptop had its hard drive replaced, and in the middle of doing so my wireless card somehow snapped. So that has to get fixed too.

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My comment to this post set of a twitter war between myself and the Republican Jewish Committee, centered around my observation that if disliking Bibi means hating Israel, then disliking Obama means hating America. Why do Republicans hate America so much, anyway?

Occupy movement inspires unions to get bolder.

Andre Berto is dropping his belt to pursue a rematch against Victor Ortiz, which may pave the way for a match between Randall Bailey (42-7, 36 KOs) and Carson Jones (32-8-2, 22 KOs) to claim the vacant belt. I like both guys, but I'm a particularly fervent Jones fan, so I approve. Bailey is average at best in all dimensions of the sport save one: concussive, brutal, devastating, one-punch power. So it should be good.

Though Blacks are far more likely to be imprisoned for it, it's White kids who actually are more likely to use drugs.

Mostly a good election night for Team Blue: Maine voters reinstated same-day voter registration, Ohio voters tossed Gov. John Kasich's (R) anti-union law, Mississippi(!) voters decisively rejected a "personhood amendment" that would declare life begins at conception, and won massive victories in most Kentucky statewide races as well as an Iowa State Senate election that preserves their control of the chamber. Also, one of the chief xenophobes in the Arizona State Senate, Senate President Russell Pearce, was successfully recalled by another (more moderate) Republican.

On the negative side, the Virginia state Senate will likely flip by an agonizingly small margin (86 votes in the pivotal race) and Mississippi approved a voter ID law (and elected a new GOP governor -- no shock there).

UPDATE: Another bit of good news: Dems have retaken the Wake County (NC) school board. That's a big deal: Wake County had been one of integration's few true success stories, and the GOP board that swept to power last cycle was looking to undo that.

Take Two

Some might have forgotten that there were two recall elections in Wisconsin today as well, both targeting Democrats. The AP has called both races for the incumbents (one won by a 58/42 margin with all precincts reporting, another is up 54/46 with 79% in). The net result is that Democrats gained a total of two seats in the state Senate, winning 2/6 of their recall attempts while Republicans went 0/3 (there was another failed recall attempt against a Democrat earlier in the cycle).

Republicans still maintain a one seat edge in the state senate. All eyes are currently on Sen. Dale Schultz (R), easily the most moderate member of the GOP caucus (and a "nay" vote on Governor Walker's union busting plan). Schultz has already declared he won't switch parties, but the possibility he might defect on individual votes may be enough to stem some of the worse abuses of the Wisconsin Republican leadership.

UCU Redefines Anti-Semitism to Shield UCU

The UCU, perhaps embarrassed over continuing allegations that it harbors a culture of institutional anti-Semitism, has finally agreed to investigate complaints from Jewish members and a torrent of resignations by Jewish academics.

Just kidding! Actually, they just decided to redefine the meaning of anti-Semitism itself, rejecting the commonly held EUMC definition (which affirms the possibility -- though, of course, not the inevitability -- that criticism of Israel could constitute anti-Semitism) in favor of, well, it appears in favor of no definition at all. So I guess it's not a "redefinition" of anti-Semitism so much as an erasure of it entirely -- which, when you think about it, is at least more in line with the UCU's general practice.

The closest thing any of the resolution proponents came up with as a counter-definition of anti-Semitism is "hostility towards Jews as Jews". As was observed, this is a far narrower definition of racism than is applied towards any other group; indeed, it is one that scarcely encompasses any anti-Semitism at all (so long as the speaker can claim to have his one Jewish friend). "I don't hate Black people, just the uppity ones" is still racism. "I don't hate Jews, just the Zionist ones", apparently is not.

Some members complained that the EUMC definition was used inappropriately to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel. Some of these complaints were clearly bogus -- I'm sorry, Sean Wallis, but "refuted utterly" or not, what you said was anti-Semitic under any plausible definition of the term. But even to the extent there were some "bad" allegations made, as one of the few opponents of the motion observed, no definition can, in itself, prevent misuse. The only way we can evaluate the validity of a charge of racism is by assessing it on the specifics -- not by starting with a presupposition that the charge is made in bad faith.

The broader point is this. We have in the UCU a union which endorses a boycott of Israel while praising human rights luminaries like Venezuela, specifically invited a convicted hate speaker to talk up said boycott (and affirmatively refused to disassociate itself from his anti-Semitism), and, faced with a wave of Jewish resignations from the union, elected to celebrate the demise of "Zionist" influence rather than investigate the possibility of a culture of anti-Semitism.

Each day that the UCU continues down this path is a day Eve Garrard's demand becomes more undeniable -- the UCU is simply not an organization that anyone genuinely concerned with anti-Semitism can retain membership in. It is infected beyond salvation.

Exam Time Roundup

It'd feel more like "these are my very last exams!" if I wasn't already at work studying for the bar exam.

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Are social conservatives seeing the writing on the wall with respect to gay marriage? The youth is just gone on this issue for them.

Congrats to newly elected Rep. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), who scored a massive upset (by a surprisingly comfy margin, too) to flip a historically Republican seat in upstate New York. The race was widely seen as only being competitive because of the Ryan Budget, which proved to be massively unpopular.

Remembering that the plural of anecdote is not data, it is still incredibly demoralizing to hear that Bibi's speech to Congress might have flipped a Kadima voter over to Likud.

Remembering that the plural of anecdote is not data, Bibi's speech seems to have caused Kevin Drum to reevaluate is previously staunchly pro-Israel position.

Putting the above to bits together, we manage to have a situation where both Americans and Israelis are moving in the wrong direction off this. As Ori Nir put it: "Good speech for Netanyahu; Horrible speech for Israel."

Eve Gerrard says the UCU is beyond salvation, after its latest ploy to abandon Europe's commonly-accepted definition of anti-Semitism because it was hitting a little too close to home (actually combating anti-Semitism in the union, of course, appears entirely off the table).

Moot Court Finals Roundup

Good luck to my friends participating in the final round of the University of Chicago's moot court competition. The three judge panel is comprised of Judges William Fletcher (9th Circuit), Diane Sykes (7th Circuit), and Jeffrey Sutton (6th Circuit). At a lunch talk featuring the three, the host started by introducing the panelists: "To my far right -- physically at least -- Judge William Fletcher."

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Group pushing a resolution honoring the King James Bible also thinks Obama may be the anti-Christ. As The Agitator puts it: "This one may be more difficult to disprove."

Releasing the birth certificate doesn't satisfy the "where's the birth certificate?" crowd. Huge surprise.

Jonathan Freeman remarks on his experience "role-playing" as a Palestinian negotiator (the Israelis were represented by persons affiliated with pro-Palestinian perspectives).

Wisconsin Republicans may finally just repass the anti-union bill, which is tied up in court challenges due to them missing some procedural hurdles as they tried to ram in through minus Democratic presence. This would end the legal problems, but it would return the bill to the news -- hardly what the six Republicans facing recall want at the moment, I imagine.

TNC -- who doesn't make the charge lightly -- declares the wild anti-Obama conspiracy theories, from birtherism to ridiculous aspersions on his academic record, as racism of the bone. Incidentally, I think it was Matt Yglesias on Twitter who observed that, if Obama was an "affirmative action" admittee to Harvard Law, that's arguably the single best case study for the validity of the program, seeing as he graduated magna cum laude, was President of the Law Review, and, oh yeah, became President.

Right-wing Israeli organization honors a Rabbi who urged Jews not to rent apartments to Arabs (the award was presented by Daniel Hershkowitz, a minister in the current Israeli government representing one of Bibi's furthest-right coalition partners).

I'm pretty sure Rick Santorum's accusation that Planned Parenthood practices eugenics is going to be revealed as one of those "not intended to be factual statements" (where, as in Kyl's similar gaffe, "not intended" means "absolutely intended").

Is there anything distinguishing this bill from that overturned in Romer v. Evans?

Madison Versus the World

All ballots (minus absentees, I believe) have been tallied, and JoAnne Kloppenburg has pulled out an exceptionally tight, 200-vote-margin victory over incumbent David Prosser. The election was widely considered the first salvo in the recall fight sparked by Gov. Scott Walker's radical anti-union agenda, and Walker was eager to downplay what it all means for those races.

Gov. Scott Walker said this afternoon that the spring election results show there are "two very different worlds in this state."

"You've got a world driven by Madison, and a world driven by everybody else out across the majority of the rest of the state of Wisconsin," Walker said at a press conference in the Capitol.
[...]
Walker added that Justice Prosser's performance in many parts of the state bodes well for GOP senators who may face recall elections later this year.

"For those who believe it's a referendum, while it might have a statewide impact that we may lean one way or the other, it's largely driven by Madison, and to a lesser extent Milwaukee," the governor said. "But those Senate recall elections on both the Democrat and Republican side aren't being held in Madison, they aren't being held in Milwaukee."

The problem is that this doesn't actually tell the story of yesterday's contest at all. While Madison and (to a lesser extent) Milwaukee are key Democratic strongholds, it is not those two cities versus the rest of the state. Much the opposite: it's those two cities versus Milwaukee's suburbs, with the rest of the state being far more swingy than one might expect.

Look at this results map. Obviously, large chunks of Kloppenburg's margins came from Milwaukee and Madison (Dane County), though actually the bluest parts of the state are in the northwest corner. Meanwhile, the darkest red swaths are Ozaukee, Washington, and Waukesha counties -- the Milwaukee suburbs. Beyond that, the divide is not Madison versus the rest of the state, but east and west -- the eastern part of the state being more conservative, the western portions more liberal.

And while Walker's right that the recall elections aren't occurring in Madison, they're not occurring in Waukesha either. None of the five most vulnerable Republican state senators -- the five with re-elects under 50% -- are anywhere near Milwaukee. Dan Kapanke's district is in southwest Wisconsin, anchored in LaCrosse -- a pretty blue area. Self-inflicted wounds notwithstanding, Randy Hopper's geographically in good shape, with the help of the GOP stronghold of Fond du Lac. Luther Olson is right on the border of where red meets blue, with conservative Waushara and Waupaca counties alongside more liberal climes in Columbia and Sauk counties. Shawano, Outagamie, and Brown counties are all red, which is good news for Rob Cowles, but Sheila Harsdorf is like Olson in that her district straddles a red/blue divide (here, where Pierce and Dunn counties meet St. Croix and Polk, plus Burnett).

This isn't to say this is terrible terrain for the GOP (except for Kapanke, who may well be toast). But just as Democrats aren't operating out of their home base in Madison, Republicans aren't on their strongest Milwaukee metro turf either. If Walker thinks he can chalk this race up to Madison saving the liberal day, he's got another thing coming.