Tuesday, November 19, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day


NSA reported its own violations to intelligence court in 2009, files show – NBC
By Eileen Sullivan, The Associated Press

The National Security Agency reported its own violations of surveillance rules to a U.S. intelligence court and promised additional safety measures to prevent similar missteps over and over again, according to more than 1,000 pages of newly declassified files about the federal government's controversial program of collecting every American's phone records during the past seven years.

According to court records from 2009, after repeated assurances the NSA would obey the court's rules, it acknowledged that it had collected material improperly. In one instance, the government said its violations were caused by "poor management, lack of involvement by compliance officials and lack of internal verification procedures, not by bad faith." In another case, the NSA said it improperly collected information due to a typographical error.

The intelligence court judge, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, said in the 2009 case that since the government had repeatedly offered so many assurances despite the problems continuing, "those responsible for conducting oversight at the NSA had failed to do so effectively." Bates called his conclusion "the most charitable interpretation possible."

The Obama administration published the heavily censored files Monday night as part of an ongoing civil liberties lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the government's collection of phone records, which the White House has said is important to countering terrorism. The files published Monday night were so heavily censored that one of the two justifications for the government to search through Americans' phone records was blacked out.

The latest release reflects the administration's strenuous efforts to maintain its legal authority to collect Americans' phone records amid opposition on Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, in a legal victory for the administration, the Supreme Court on Monday refused to intervene in the NSA controversy. It rejected a call from a privacy group to stop the agency from collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers in the United States. While the justices on Monday declined to get involved in this issue, other lawsuits on the topic are making their way through the lower courts around the country.

In the new disclosures, some files were declassified ostensibly to show that even when NSA employees collected records improperly or improperly shared material among themselves, those problems were reported to the intelligence court and new procedures were put in place to prevent them from happening again.

Similar documents about the U.S. collecting phone records were previously declassified and published in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Obama administration has revealed others to convince Congress to allow it to continue collecting the phone records.

After the NSA began the bulk collection program in 2006, one NSA inspector general's report said rules already in place were "adequate" and "in several aspects exceed the terms" of what the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had required. But it recommended three additional practices be formally adopted. These included such obvious ideas as not allowing analysts who searched phone records in the terror database also to approve which numbers can be searched, and periodically checking the phone numbers that analysts searched to make sure they had actually been approved.
Despite the assurances in 2006 that rules were adequate, problems surfaced in 2009 that were so serious that the intelligence court temporarily shut down the surveillance program.

One of the newly disclosed files was a slap — intentionally or otherwise — at Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who is leading the fight on Capitol Hill to rein in the government's phone records collection. In a ruling to justify the program by the then-chief judge of the intelligence court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, she quoted a 2001 floor speech by Leahy to explain that Congress believed that phone records could be collected under U.S. laws. Leahy has proposed ending the NSA's sweep of phone records, allowing the government to seek only records related to ongoing terror investigations.

The documents included training materials for NSA analysts, who were warned that they should only search the database of all phone records for numbers they suspected were associated with terrorists: "Analysts are NOT free to use a telephone selector based on a hunch or guess," according to a 2007 training presentation. It added that the NSA's legal standard for picking a phone number for a terror suspect required "some minimal level of objective justification."

The training slides noted that the government shouldn't snoop on the phone records of Americans whose only suspicious behaviors were protected by the First Amendment, such as speaking or writing in opposition to the U.S. government, worshipping at a mosque or working as a journalist.

"A telephone selector believed to be used by a U.S. person shall not be regarded as associated with (censored) solely on the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment," it said.

The administration has been under pressure to reveal more details about the government's domestic surveillance program since a former intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, released documents showing massive trawling of domestic data by the National Security Agency.



This article summarizes the inner workings of the NSA and their activities, some of which seem to be due to errors. The Obama administration wants to continue to collect records to detect terrorists, while Capitol Hill objects and there are civil liberties lawsuits going on. This is the latest update.




Bill Clinton says he hopes for 'a woman president in my lifetime' – NBC
By Carrie Dann, NBC News

Former president Bill Clinton says he does not know if his wife will mount another bid for the White House but that he will support any decision she makes about 2016.
"I hope we have a woman president in my lifetime, and I think it would be a good thing for the world as well as for America," Clinton told a Chinese audience in Beijing when asked about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s possible run, adding “But I do not know if she's going to run, and there is no such thing as a sure thing in politics."

The former president said he has “no idea” whether or not he will become a "First Husband" but that both he and his wife “still feel young and we still feel healthy." 
"If that's what she wants to do, I will support her," he said of a White House bid. "But if she decides for whatever reason she doesn't, I will support that."
The comments were reported by Agence France-Presse. 

The former president spoke at a conference organized by financial magazine Caijing.
Hillary Clinton has said it is too early to decide about her political future, but supporters have already built a wide network to draft her into the race and aid in fundraising.  



I hope Hillary runs in 2016. I, like Bill, want to see a woman in the White House. During my lifetime there have been a number of historic firsts and societal changes, and for the most part I have considered them to be steps forward, such as the desegregation of the schools and the dismantling of the Jim Crow laws in the south. I like to see a mixture of types of people in my daily life, so to see black people in the restaurant where I'm eating is just evidence of a just society. Often such changes are traumatic at the time, but they are also tremendously interesting and have opened our nation up a great deal. There are still white racists, as there are black racists, but most people are tolerating all people much better than when I was young,and even befriending them. This is real progress.






America's broken cities holding back the recovery -- NBC

John W. Schoen CNBC
For many American cities, the Great Recession is a fading memory. Others feel the damage it inflicted every day.

Across the nation, cities like Boston or San Francisco that are blessed with vibrant high-tech industries churning out high-skill, high-wage jobs, all but escaped the downturn.

And then there are the broken cities. The hardest hit find themselves in a deep downward spiral of declining services, rising crime rates and falling property values. Some have or are contemplating filing for municipal bankruptcy – a drastic step with uncertain results. What's worse, the struggling cities are like a weight dragging down the rest of the economy. (Infographic: See how your city is faring.)
Once a city is badly broken, it can be very tough to fix.

Just ask Darren Green, president of a coalition of community groups in Trenton, N.J., where deep budget cuts two years ago forced the city to lay off a third of its police force.

"We're at a place now where it's very dangerous to walk the streets," he said, his thoughts periodically interrupted by the distant sound of passing sirens. "The school system is dysfunctional and not working. You have young people who are robbing elders. Young people who are destroying communities. With no leadership and the community in disarray, there's a lot of bad here."

The disarray and mayhem in Trenton is extreme. In August, the city set a record for the most homicides in its 221-year history. Trenton's mayor, Tony Mack, has asked the state for emergency funding. But his appeal has been undermined by allegations of corruption after a federal grand jury indicted him in December 2012 on bribery charges. Several key members of his administration also have been charged with other, unrelated crimes.

The plight of the Garden's State's capital city is by no means typical of American cities in 2013. For the most part, these regional economic hubs held up relatively well after the Great Recession tore one of the biggest holes in local revenues since the Great Depression.

The high-growth local economies in San Francisco and Boston have recouped the ground lost to the recession and continue to help push the national recovery forward. Others hit hard by the housing bust, like Orlando and Phoenix, have recovered as the housing market has revived.

Innovation has also helped revive once-stagnant local economies. In Chattanooga, a newly-deployed high-speed Internet network has become a magnet for foreign investment. The southern city once known for making Moon Pies is now a model hub for the smart grid and one of the fastest-growing cities in America.

But as the national recovery sputters along, some cities are being left behind as tight budgets and lingering damage from the Great Recession continue to challenge city halls across the country. As the source of more than 90 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, the strength of that national recovery will be determined largely by the success of American cities in overcoming the challenges to short-term recovery and long-term growth.

Those challenges loom large. By 2009, the Great Recession had pushed all but four of the 384 local economies tracked by Moody's Analytics' Business Cycle Index solidly into reverse. Of these, 255 moved into recovery in 2010. But as of August, the latest month for which data are available, another 73 are at risk of sliding back into recession. Since 2010, eight cities have filed for bankruptcy including Detroit, Scranton, Pa. and Stockton, Calif. 

The hardest hit cities find themselves mired deeply in downward spiral, as cuts in services, rising crime rates and falling property values all contribute to the decline.

"If you can't provide the environment for investment, the process of shrinking just continues," said Jeffrey Keefe, a labor economist at Rutgers University. "The people and businesses leave, and there's no inflow of economic resources. So all you're doing is living off external subsidies to provide law and order and some basic education and social insurance." 

Since the Great Recession ended, there are now a half million fewer municipal workers patrolling streets, teaching kids and fixing potholes, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their disappearing paychecks have further drained local income and sales taxes.

Lost spending by local governments has also hampered the national recovery. Fueled in part by a surge in real estate taxes, state and local government spending grew by about six percent a year from 2001 through 2009. In the past three years, however, that growth has slowed to less than 1 percent a year. The difference amounts to about $450 billion over that period, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Trenton's decline has been slow in coming and will take time to reverse.
The city has deep roots. George Washington is said to have chalked up his first Revolutionary War victory here. The city briefly served as the nation's capital. For the next century and a half, Trenton grew steadily as a thriving manufacturing hub. On the city's South Bridge, the first built over the Delaware River, bright neon lights still proudly proclaim at night the slogan cooked up in 1917 by the local Chamber of Commerce: "Trenton Makes, the World Takes."

But Trenton stopped making things many years ago. The city's economic decline has tracked the decades-long ebb of American manufacturing might. Today, state government is the largest employer – but the government presence does little to help balance the city's books.

Some state and federal officials argue that cities need to be run more like a business. But unlike a private business that can exit markets or consolidate product lines when times are tough, a city grappling with a 20 percent drop in revenues can't just decide to ignore every fifth 911 call, or plow only 80 percent of city streets.
Perversely, ongoing budget cuts in declining American cities can force up the cost of running local government. High unemployment brings increased demand for social services —from packed homeless shelters to police response to increased crime. Years of deferred maintenance on infrastructure like roads and sewers only accelerates the need for costlier replacement.

For the most part, though, taxpayers are in no mood to pony up more money to offset those costs. That presents local political leaders with a tough balancing act if they want to develop long-term solutions and continue to serve through the next election.
In good times, local governments looked to plug budget holes with state aid, which once accounted for as much as a third of local government budgets. But those funds have also shrunk after states took their own income tax and sales tax beating from the Great Recession. Some three dozen have gone further to tighten local revenues, by enacting so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights laws that cap the level of tax increases local governments can impose.

In better times, Uncle Sam also used to provide generous federal funding for job training, community development block grants and public housing. But local officials complain that has been replaced by unfunded mandates for clean water and higher school test scores.

That has left many of America's most distressed cities to fend for themselves. "The resources are there; the question is whether they can be reallocated from the communities that have resources to those that don't," said Keefe.

It won't be easy for America's most badly broken cities to bootstrap themselves back to prosperity. But with the right political leadership, it's not impossible, according to Bruce Katz, founding director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

"Thirty years ago, we thought Boston was dead. We thought New York was dead. We thought Pittsburgh was dead," he said. "All these places have sprung back to life. So if you're left behind in the near term because of misguided political leadership, in 10, 15 or 20 years you might find a very different kind of political environment."
In Trenton, community leader Darren Green agrees. "Trenton is a phenomenal city," he said. "It has a lot of great history; it has a lot of great people. It just needs leadership that is committed, competent and caring."
"We're going to rebuild this city," he said. "I promise you that."



Jacksonville, FL where I live goes through great stresses every time they do a budget, with landowners objecting to higher taxes. Florida is unusual in that there is no state tax. All the taxes come from landowners. This is good for me, but bad for the budget because there is less revenue available for police and other city functions. It's also unfair to the landowners. Every year the libraries budget is cut again, causing restricted hours and tightening of jobs. This year they almost closed three of the branches, including the one I go to, but they managed to get the money from the city finally.

Businesses within the city are not burgeoning, and jobs are scarce. There are no major manufacturers like steel mills or tobacco factories to provide employment. There is a large naval base, which employes a good many people. Supposedly we have recovered from the Great Recession, but things are still tight here. I am relieved that I no longer have to look for work. I would like to see more growth and a busier downtown.

Jacksonville is not a “failed” city, but it isn't flourishing either. We do have a good mayor, though, who comes outside his office to interact with the populace from time to time and always presents a good image. It's a good place to live by and large, with pretty good racial relations and communities. I enjoy living here.






Pulse surges in woman's neck reveal heart condition – NBC
Rachael Rettner LiveScience

A 33-year-old woman in Canada who had large, abnormal pulses that were clearly visible in her neck ultimately needed surgery to combat a bacterial infection in her heart, according to a new report of her case. The pulses were observed while the woman was being evaluated to see if she needed a replacement heart valve.

Such abnormal pulses are actually common, and are caused by a heart problem known as tricuspid regurgitation, said Dr. Juan Crestanello, a cardiac surgeon and assistant professor of surgery at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, who was not involved with the woman's care. 

Normally, as blood flows from the right atrium (an upper chamber of the heart) down into the right ventricle (a lower chamber of the heart), a valve between the two chambers, called the tricuspid valve, prevents blood from flowing backward.
"The valves in the heart are like doors," allowing the blood to flow only in one direction, Crestanello said.

But if the tricuspid valve is damaged, some blood can leak from the right ventricle back up into the right atrium, causing tricuspid regurgitation. This causes the right atrium to get bigger, and can change the pressure in nearby blood vessels, potentially leading to abnormal pulses seen in the neck veins, according to the American Heart Association.

Often, people with this condition have heart valve inflammation, or endocarditis, caused by a bacterial infection. The woman in the report had been previously diagnosed with a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection in the heart valve.

The woman required surgery for a new heart valve, and she recovered.
Crestanello said he sees about 10 to 15 patients a year with tricuspid regurgitation, but he treats only patients that need surgery. Some patients can be treated with antibiotics, and don't require surgery, he said.

The report, by researchers at the University of Saskatchewan, was published Nov. 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine.



I have never heard of a bacterial infection in the heart before. I wonder how bacteria are introduced into the apparently closed system of the heart and blood vessels. I am going in a week for an ultrasound test on my carotid artery, though I don't expect them to find any problems. At least the heart infection in this article can often be treated with antibiotics, though it can sometimes require surgery. Ten or fifteen patients a year aren't very many, at least, so the condition isn't common.




­

Little-Known Immigration Mandate Keeps Detention Beds Full – NPR
by Ted Robbins
­ Imagine your city council telling the police department how many people it had to keep in jail each night. That's effectively what Congress has told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a policy known as the "detention bed mandate." The mandate calls for filling 34,000 beds in some 250 facilities across the country, per day, with immigrant detainees.

When NPR visited the Department of Homeland Security's detention center in Florence, Ariz., hundreds of men — nearly all from Latin America — were lining up for lunch. They were caught by the Border Patrol or, if apprehended away from the border, by local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. People can stay behind the razor-wire fences for days, weeks or years.

NPR was not allowed to talk with anyone in the detention center, but Francisco Rincon, who was recently released from Florence on bond, says he was in the facility for three weeks. Every day he was in detention cost taxpayers at least $120. Add up all the nation's detention centers and that's more than $2 billion a year.
The detention bed mandate, which began in 2009, is just part of the massive increase in enforcement-only immigration policies over the last two decades. The last time Congress passed a broad immigration law dealing with something other than enforcement — such as overhauling visa or guest worker policies — was 1986.
­
Supporters of the directive include Rep. Hal Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. In an email, the Kentucky Republican wrote that the bed mandate is "intended to compel the agency to enforce existing immigration law."
But Janet Napolitano, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, called the bed mandate "artificial" when she spoke to a House Appropriations subcommittee in April. "We ought to be managing the actual detention population to risk, not to an arbitrary number," she said.

Supporters: Mandate Ensures Deportations
Immigrants in detention range from violent criminals to people with no criminal history. On the day NPR visited Florence, nearly two-thirds of the 400 detainees had no known criminal record.

Take Rincon. He came to the U.S. from Mexico eight years ago and had no trouble with the law. Then he was arrested by the Border Patrol near Tucson when he took a wrong turn on his way home from work as a day laborer. Rincon has a hearing before an immigration judge in February, and he says he'll ask to remain in the U.S. legally.
"Because for Mexicans, particularly from Chiapas, where I'm from, it is very hard to get a visa," he says through an interpreter. "Otherwise, we come with visas."
That kind of story upsets immigrant-rights activists. They say ICE and local police departments are arresting more and more people for less and less.

"They're trying to pick people up for either very minor traffic violations or other minor convictions that wouldn't be considered serious, but that they can quantify as a criminal alien," says Nina Rabin, an immigration law professor at the University of Arizona.

Immigration hardliners not only disagree with that contention, they want even more aggressive enforcement. They say the current detention system is too lax — and point to a startling statistic: As of October, a total of 870,000 immigrants have absconded after being ordered deported following their release from detention. They've gone back underground. ICE confirms that number.
­
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think-tank that favors tougher enforcement, says the only way to make sure that people ordered deported actually leave is to keep them under lock and key.

"Detention is necessary because of the high risk that people are simply going to flee or skip out on their hearings," Vaughan says.

Looking For Less Expensive Alternatives
Victor Cerda, ICE's head of detention and removal during part of the George W. Bush administration, says that argument is "very simplistic." Such extensive detention, he says, is "very expensive. It's very resource intensive."

Cerda agrees that detention is the surest way to hold people, but says that building tens of thousands more detention beds is unrealistic. "If you know what the problem is and the complexity of it, you quickly realize that there is not enough money in the government," he says. "And I don't think the taxpayers are ready to fork over the amount necessary to detain everybody."

There are options besides locking up tens of thousands of people. Alternative forms of supervision range from GPS-monitored ankle bracelets to routine check-ins with ICE. Those alternatives can cost less than $10 a day, but the budget for alternatives is only about 3 percent of the federal budget for detention.

The immigration bill passed by the Senate earlier this year calls for increased use of detention alternatives, but the House has yet to pass an immigration overhaul. It reinforced the status quo in June — voting down a Democratic-sponsored end to the detention bed mandate.


Here is another thing the government does that seems unfair and unnecessarily hurtful – especially since so many of the people detained have committed no crime, having been picked up by authorities simply to fulfill the mandate. Even Victor Cerda, former head of the detention program, is against it because of the expense of housing the detainees. Those who favor it do so because of a high number of aliens absconding and escaping into life in the underground after being ordered deported. I would like to see more immigrants becoming citizens or at least being placed in temporary work programs. I understand many illegal immigrants can't get enough work to maintain a basic living and have substandard nutrition and housing.




­ A New Life For An Old Slave Jail – NPR
by Hansi Lo Wang
­ President Abraham Lincoln stood on a battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa., 150 years ago and declared "a new birth of freedom" for the nation. That same year, an African-American man named Lewis Henry Bailey experienced his own rebirth. At age 21, Bailey was freed from slavery in Texas. His journey began in Virginia, where he was sold as a child in a slave jail.

Today, the building where Bailey and thousands of slaves once lived before they were sold is the home of the Freedom House Museum and the Northern Virginia chapter of the Urban League, one of the nation's oldest civil rights organizations.
­ 'Finally, This Building Can Be Some Good'

The four-story, brick row house at 1315 Duke Street in Alexandria, Va., contains a bundle of contradictions: Its exterior is painted ashen gray, while inside, colorful walls greet visitors with warm reds and yellows.

"Slaves were held in this building. The men who sold slaves like animals lived in this building," explains Cynthia Dinkins, president and CEO of the Northern Virginia Urban League. "And we come here every day working to empower people. So maybe some of the forefathers are probably turning over in their graves, saying, 'Oh, my God!' But we love it. We absolutely love it."

Still, Dinkins admits working in a building where thousands of enslaved men, women and children were sold against their will can come with surprises. Last year, Dinkins had a memorable encounter alone at the office late one night.

"I can feel spirits. I felt someone touch my shoulder, and it was not to scare me. I felt it was like, 'You're finally here. You know, finally, this building can be some good,' " she recalls.

'Touching The Walls'
Visitors to the Freedom House Museum take a narrow wooden staircase lined by an exposed brick wall to enter the basement, which once served as a slave jail.
"You're touching the walls where former slaves were held captive until they were sold down South. So you feel it," says Julian Kiganda, one of the exhibit's curators. "I really think people feel it when they come through here."

Kiganda still remembers when the basement was empty, dark and dank — just five years ago, before the museum opened, when Kiganda says it was easier to imagine being locked away in a slave jail of one of the largest slave-trading firms in the country.
"We had abolitionists here [in Alexandria] who were not happy about the fact that they're seeing these slaves walking up and down these streets, dejected," says Kiganda. "People were very well aware of what was going on here."


Alexandria and Arlington, Virginia are now linked closely with Washington, DC in an area that is more like the north than the south in its cultural climate, but Virginia was enemy territory to Washington in the Civil War, and is still largely conservative in politics outside the large cities.

A building owned by a slave-trading company is now an historical site and a museum. People step off the city streets into a basement where slaves were held captive until they were sold, giving themselves a tour into the not too distant past which was, nonetheless, a world of its own in Virginia's southern culture. It seems romantic until I think about the abuse to so many people which was the basis of the southern agricultural wealth. I am glad that my family were struggling small farmers who owned no slaves. I can be proud of their efforts without that taint.




­ University Of Texas Students Cancel 'Catch An Illegal Immigrant Game'
by Eyder Peralta
­ Our friends at NPR member station KUT report the Young Conservatives of Texas has called off a game of "catch an illegal immigrant," which had sparked condemnation from the University of Texas at Austin community at large.

According to KUT, the head of the group's University of Texas chapter, Lorenzo Garcia, said he cancelled the event because he feared retaliation from the university and he also worried that it would "create a safety issue for our volunteers."

Our Original Post Continues:
A conservative group of students has sparked a heated discussion on the campus of University of Texas at Austin after it announced a game of "catch an illegal immigrant."

The Young Conservatives of Texas say some of its members will walk around campus on Wednesday with an "illegal immigrant" label on them. "Any UT student who catches one of these 'illegal immigrants' and brings them back to our table will receive a $25 gift card," the group said on its Facebook page. "The purpose of this event is to spark a campus-wide discussion about the issue of illegal immigration, and how it affects our everyday lives."

The school's administrators reacted swiftly, saying the event was "completely out of line with the values" of the university. "As Americans, we should always visualize our Statue of Liberty and remember that our country was built on the strength of immigration," University of Texas President Bill Powers said in a statement. "Our nation continues to grapple with difficult questions surrounding immigration. I ask YCT to be part of that discussion but to find more productive and respectful ways to do so that do not demean their fellow students."

Gregory J. Vincent, the university's vice president for diversity and community engagement, said in a statement that under Texas law, undocumented students are allowed to enroll at UT and the game encourages the exclusion of a certain population.
Vincent added that the university also values free speech and will not try to stop the game.

The Daily Texan, the university's student newspaper, reports that some students gathered in protest on Monday. "I think it's classless, childish and racist," Melanie Diamond, a sociology freshman, told the paper. "If they are willing to have an honest discussion about [illegal immigration], that would be OK."

The Associated Press reports that the game is reverberating in the state's upcoming gubernatorial race. Lorenzo Garcia, who was the YCT chapter leader who originally posted the notice about the game on Facebook, was recently employed by Republican Greg Abbott's gubernatorial campaign.

The AP adds: "The Democratic party has been pushing Abbott to state his position on a Texas law that allows children brought into the country illegally by their parents to receive in-state tuition, legislation called the Texas DREAM Act." While Abbott has said he doesn't support the DREAM Act as it is, he refuses to say what he would change and if he supports it at all,' state Democratic chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said. 'He must come out and immediately denounce Wednesday's event. This style of hatred and fear is not the type of leadership Texas deserves.'

"Abbott's Press Secretary, Avdiel Huerta, said the 'campaign has no affiliation with this repugnant effort.' "

Of course, this reminds us of a 2011 incident at the University of California, Berkeley. As we reported then, young Republicans sparked controversy by holding an "Increase Diversity Bake Sale." They had planned to charge different prices depending on a customer's race and to give women a discount, but changed course before the actual bake sale.



This tendency toward racial and cultural discrimination, which is shown in both the Young Republicans groups mentioned here, is a good indication of the same biases in their elders, it seems clear. The candidate Greg Abbott was quick to disavow the students activities, of course, because he is clever enough to know that it isn't good publicity; but the Tea Party's extreme opposition to everything President Obama does is at least partly due to their racial prejudices, I have no doubt.

I notice the Tea Party is beginning to get some bad press from a few Republicans now. Even they know the party has become really unbalanced compared to the more centrist positions of many Republicans of 20 years ago, and Congress has trouble enacting legislation because of all the fighting. I have hopes that this trend is turning around now.