Tuesday, February 17, 2015


News Clips For The Day


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-judge-blocks-obamas-immigration-move-for-now/

Judge blocks Obama's immigration moves, for now
CBS/AP
February 17, 2015

HOUSTON -- A federal judge temporarily blocked President Obama's executive action on immigration Monday, giving a coalition of 26 states time to pursue a lawsuit that aims to permanently stop the orders.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen's decision comes after a hearing in Brownsville, Texas, in January. It puts on hold Mr. Obama's orders that could spare as many as five million people who are in the U.S. illegally from deportation.

CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett reports the judge ruled that the 26 states did indeed have standing to sue, and that the program should go through an administrative review process. He did not rule on the constitutionality of Mr. Obama's actions.

Hanen wrote in a memorandum accompanying his order that the lawsuit should go forward and that without a preliminary injunction, the states would "suffer irreparable harm in this case."

"The genie would be impossible to put back into the bottle," he wrote, adding that he agreed with the plaintiffs' argument that legalizing the presence of millions of people is a "virtually irreversible" action.

The states argued that the president's actions would place financial burdens on them. For example, they would have to process drivers licenses for some of the undocumented immigrants who applied for deportation relief -- a process that could drain time and money from state resources.

The White House in a statement early Tuesday defended the executive orders issued in November as within the president's legal authority, saying the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress have said federal officials can set priorities in enforcing immigration laws.

"The district court's decision wrongly prevents these lawful, commonsense policies from taking effect and the Department of Justice has indicated that it will appeal that decision," the statement said. An appeal would be heard by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

The first of Mr. Obama's orders - to expand a program that protects young immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the U.S. illegally as children - was set to start taking effect Wednesday. The other major part of the president's action, which extends deportation protections to parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been in the country for some years, was not expected to begin until May 19.

Joaquin Guerra, political director of the Texas Organization Project, called the ruling a "temporary setback." "We will continue getting immigrants ready to apply for administrative relief," he said in a statement.

Hanen, who's been on the federal court since 2002 after being nominated by President George W. Bush, regularly handles border cases but wasn't known for being outspoken on immigration until a 2013 case.

In an order in that case, Hanen suggested the Homeland Security Department should be arresting parents living in the U.S. illegally who induce their children to cross the border illegally.

The coalition, led by Texas and made up of mostly conservative states in the South and Midwest, argues that Mr. Obama has violated the "Take Care Clause" of the U.S. Constitution, which they say limits the scope of presidential power. They also say the order will force increased investment in law enforcement, health care and education.

In their request for the injunction, the coalition said it was necessary because it would be "difficult or impossible to undo the President's lawlessness after the Defendants start granting applications for deferred action."

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called the decision a "victory for the rule of law in America" in a statement late Monday. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who as the state's former attorney general led the state into the lawsuit, said Hanen's decision "rightly stops the President's overreach in its tracks."

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, hailed the decision in a statement issued Wednesday. "President Obama's executive overreach on immigration poses a clear and present danger to our Constitution and I am pleased that the President's actions have been temporarily halted so that the states' lawsuit can move forward," Goodlatte said. "By acting unilaterally to rewrite our nation's immigration laws, President Obama has disregarded the will of the American people and violated the Constitution. We cannot allow one man to nullify the law of the land with either a stroke of his pen or a phone call."

Congressional Republicans have vowed to block Mr. Obama's actions on immigration by cutting off Homeland Security Department spending for the program. Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled House passed a $39.7 billion spending bill to fund the department through the end of the budget year, but attached language to undo Mr. Obama's executive actions. The fate of that House-passed bill is unclear, as Republicans in the Senate do not have the 60-vote majority needed to advance most legislation.

Goodlatte said Monday's ruling only "underscores the importance and urgency of Congress defunding President Obama's executive overreach on immigration."

Those supporting Mr. Obama's executive order include a group of 12 mostly liberal states, including Washington and California, as well as the District of Columbia. They filed a motion with Hanen in support of Mr. Obama, arguing the directives will substantially benefit states and will further the public interest.

A group of law enforcement officials, including the Major Cities Chiefs Association and more than 20 police chiefs and sheriffs from across the country, also filed a motion in support, arguing the executive action will improve public safety by encouraging cooperation between police and individuals with concerns about their immigration status.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, predicted on the CBS News broadcast "Face the Nation" on Sunday that congressional differences over DHS funding "would be resolved," but didn't say exactly how he thought that would happen.

"I'll be the first to say when we have a department whose mission is to protect the homeland, especially in these times we need to fund it, and hopefully Congress over the next period of time will figure out a way to go forward," he said. "We do not need to leave our nation in a situation with the type of threats that we have with an agency that's not working at full steam."

President Obama's chief of staff, Denis McDonough, openly admitted he doesn't see how the dispute ends.

"I don't see exactly how Congress is going to resolve this," he said in a separate "Face the Nation" interview. "It is very important that we not, however, take the path that they're suggesting we do take, which is, Congress will continue to get paid, but law enforcement officials associated with defending our borders, protecting us against cyberattacks, defending our airports and making sure that airlines and aviation security is upheld are forced to work without pay. That is something we should not do."




“.... giving a coalition of 26 states time to pursue a lawsuit that aims to permanently stop the orders. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen's decision comes after a hearing in Brownsville, Texas, in January. It puts on hold Mr. Obama's orders that could spare as many as five million people who are in the U.S. illegally from deportation. CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett reports the judge ruled that the 26 states did indeed have standing to sue, and that the program should go through an administrative review process. He did not rule on the constitutionality of Mr. Obama's actions. Hanen wrote in a memorandum accompanying his order that the lawsuit should go forward and that without a preliminary injunction, the states would "suffer irreparable harm in this case."... The first of Mr. Obama's orders - to expand a program that protects young immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the U.S. illegally as children - was set to start taking effect Wednesday. The other major part of the president's action, which extends deportation protections to parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been in the country for some years, was not expected to begin until May 19.... Hanen, who's been on the federal court since 2002 after being nominated by President George W. Bush, regularly handles border cases but wasn't known for being outspoken on immigration until a 2013 case. In an order in that case, Hanen suggested the Homeland Security Department should be arresting parents living in the U.S. illegally who induce their children to cross the border illegally.... argues that Mr. Obama has violated the "Take Care Clause" of the U.S. Constitution, which they say limits the scope of presidential power. They also say the order will force increased investment in law enforcement, health care and education.... Those supporting Mr. Obama's executive order include a group of 12 mostly liberal states, including Washington and California, as well as the District of Columbia. They filed a motion with Hanen in support of Mr. Obama, arguing the directives will substantially benefit states and will further the public interest. A group of law enforcement officials, including the Major Cities Chiefs Association and more than 20 police chiefs and sheriffs from across the country, also filed a motion in support, arguing the executive action will improve public safety by encouraging cooperation between police and individuals with concerns about their immigration status.... Congress will continue to get paid, but law enforcement officials associated with defending our borders, protecting us against cyberattacks, defending our airports and making sure that airlines and aviation security is upheld are forced to work without pay. That is something we should not do."

"The genie would be impossible to put back into the bottle." This relief from deportation for 5 million aliens which is feared by conservatives for its potential to increase the financial burden on states, has been heralded by some 20 city police officials who say it would improve relations between police and immigrants. Apparently enforcing immigration rules has been a burden on the local authorities. All these approving cities are in the North, however, which may not have as many illegal aliens living there as the South. The fear that illegal aliens will vote against conservative candidates is apparently one of the reasons for their desire to send those people “home” to Mexico or beyond. The Washington Post article below indicates that in some states at least, enough non-citizens have actually been able to vote to influence tight elecitons, which is interesting.

Apparently Obama's plan would allow them to get driver licenses and, yes, vote. See this Washington Post article on the subject: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-dec, Could non-citizens decide the November election?:
“Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data.... Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.... Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. … We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted. … In 2008, non-citizens with less than a college degree were significantly more likely to cast a validated vote, and no non-citizens with a college degree or higher cast a validated vote. This hints at a link between non-citizen voting and lack of awareness about legal barriers. …Our research cannot answer whether the United States should move to legalize some electoral participation by non-citizens as many other countries do, and as some U.S. states did for more than 100 years, or find policies that more effectively restrict it. But this research should move that debate a step closer to a common set of facts.”





http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2015/02/13/what-does-it-take-to-change-a-mind-a-phase-transition/

Scientific American
What Does It Take to Change a Mind? A Phase Transition [UPDATED]
By Jennifer Ouellette | February 13, 2015

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

This week’s Virtually Speaking Science episode featured yours truly in conversation with Laurie Paul, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and author of a new book, Transformative Experience. We chatted about so-called transformative experiences, empathy, identity and the fluid nature of the self, and whether having a child can be considered a rational decision. You can listen to the entire conversation at Blog Talk Radio, but I wanted to highlight one aspect of our discussion, since it pertains to a topic of great interest among those interested in science education and outreach — notably, how best to deal with staunch denialism.

Recently an excellent May 2014 article at The New Yorker by Maria Konnikova has been recirculating among my social networks. It describes a 2014 study by political scientist Brendan Nyhan examining what it might take to get people with strongly held beliefs on certain hot-button issues — in this study’s case, attitudes about vaccines — to change their minds. Nearly 2000 parents were shown one of four pro-vaccination campaigns, each adopting a different persuasive strategy (facts, science, emotions or stories) plus one control group, to see which was most effective in changing minds. The punchline: none of the above. Nothing changed people’s minds, and in fact, the strategies often backfired. “It’s depressing,” Nyhan admitted to Konnikova, adding after a pause, “We were definitely depressed.”

It’s just one more piece of mounting evidence that those most “dug in” when it comes to rejecting well established science are pretty much immune to the traditional strategy of presenting them with “Just the facts, ma’am.” Surely, rationalists have thought for decades, those in denial are merely ignorant, and if we just educate them and show them the error of their ways, they will change their minds and embrace the truth. Maybe they’ll even thank us profusely for our trouble. (Dare to dream, Jen-Luc Piquant murmurs indulgently.)

Credit: Zach Weiner/Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2865

Now we know this can backfire: presenting hardline denialists with the facts just makes them dig their heels in deeper. As Konnikova concludes, “Facts and evidence may not be the answer everyone thinks they are: they simply aren’t that effective, given how selectively they are processed and interpreted.”

Yet people do change their minds; it depends on how strongly they connect a particular opinion or belief with their personal identity — and it’s not always about how someone identifies politically. “When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs,” Konnikova writes. “It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.”  As she observes about the results of a climate change study from 2012, “If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.”

So what’s a science writer/communicator to do? Give up in despair at ever making a difference in swaying public opinion? Au contraire! I do think it’s possible to have an impact. I’m just not sure that impact can be quantitatively measured over the short time-frames associated with most psychological studies. The key here is how beliefs are tied to personal identity, and as Paul and I discussed, identity is fluid: it shifts and evolves continually over time in response to personal experiences (some transformative per Paul’s definition) and other variables.

That means the question, “Who are you?” will evoke a different answer at different points in a person’s life. I readily acknowledge that while my core temperament has remained the same, I’m a very different person today than I was at 15, or 25, or 35, and my life took many unexpected twists and turns, all of which shaped my personal identity — for the better, I think. Nobody would have predicted, had they met me at 15, that I would become a science writer, an atheist, or a wife, thriving in sunny Southern California. My 15-year-old self wouldn’t have believed such a prediction. Yet I couldn’t imagine a better life.

I posed the following premise to Paul for discussion: Change a person’s self-identity, and maybe you’ve got a better shot of swaying their opinion. Maybe there was a time when someone couldn’t imagine being married, being a parent, or ever accepting the reality of climate change, but that doesn’t mean they will always feel that way. A transformative experience, or series of such experiences, can make all the difference.

I like to think of the process as something akin to a phase transition. (Regular readers know of my great fondness for this ubiquitous concept.) As I wrote in 2011:

Any substance has a specific moment when the pressure or temperature is just right to cause it to shift from one state to another. Water is the most common example: lower the temperature sufficiently and it will turn into ice; raise the temperature to a boil and it will evaporate into steam. That’s a phase transition. The precise moment when this happens is called the critical point, when the substance is perfectly poised halfway between one phase and the other. That critical point can vary even for the same substance. At sea level, water boils at 212 degrees F (100 degrees C) and freezes at 32 degrees F (0 degrees C). But try to boil water in Denver — the Mile-High City — and you’ll need a slightly lower temperature (approximately 95 °C).

When you see this laid out neatly on a graph, you’ll note that it doesn’t produce a continuous curved slope as the substance moves between phases. Rather, it resembles a staircase of sorts: the temperature drops (or rises) a bit, then there’s a long stretch where nothing appears to be happening at all. Things seem to flatline, and the substance looks like it will be stuck in that phase permanently. (Will this water never freeze?!?) But then there’s a sudden drop again as it hits the critical point and it moves into a new phase.

You wouldn’t be able to see the shift coming if all you were measuring was the temperature, because that’s a higher-level emergent property arising out of interactions of all the atoms making up the material. But change was still burbling at the atomic level, below what you could see on the surface.

That sudden shift is the physics equivalent of a Saul on the road to Damascus moment, and frankly, such clear-cut transformative moments are rare. But there’s more than one kind of phase transition. What I described above is a first-order transition, which occurs abruptly, such as boiling water or melting ice. A second order phase transition occurs more smoothly and continuously, such as when ferromagnetism switches to paramagnetism in metals like iron, nickel and cobalt, or when a substance becomes superconductive. That strikes me as a better analogy for how we change our minds.

Last week the Washington Post ran a wrenching Op-Ed by Gal Adam Spinrad, detailing how she moved — over a period of 12 years — from being fearful of vaccinating her young daughter, to insisting the entire family stay up-to-date on all immunizations, including flu shots. There was no one moment when she changed her mind completely; rather, many different incidents over the years reshaped her thinking by degrees. Initially as a new young mother in San Francisco, she self-identified strongly with the local home birth collective’s views that vaccines could be harmful to newborns, delaying her daughter’s first immunizations until the child was one year old.

Then Spinrad developed shingles while abroad, a result of having had chickenpox as a child, and her views began to shift; she began to see the value in such protections. A second daughter, born with a serious congenital defect, lived just 58 days, and a broken-hearted Spinrad realized she couldn’t continue to take her children’s health (and her ability to protect them) for granted. Moving to the Midwest and finding a staunchly pro-vaxx doctor sealed the deal. By 2013 she finally understood the concept of herd immunization and why it wasn’t just about protecting her children: it was also about protecting other vulnerable members of society who for various reasons couldn’t have vaccinations.

Those are just the episodes Spinrad recalled as she shaped her narrative with the advantage of hindsight. There were likely countless other tiny things, adding up over the years with seemingly imperceptible effects, until that critical threshold was reached. Spinrad’s views about vaccines gradually underwent a phase transition — more of a second-order phase transition, rather than the abrupt phase shift of ice melting into water.

Of course, as Paul pointed out, you can’t precisely control how people respond and evolve over time. It’s a complex system, and your input is just one variable among many working to shape said system. All you can do is sow the seeds and hope some find fallow ground. And since most of us can’t see into a person’s innermost thoughts, there’s no way of knowing where that fallow ground might lie. Those seeds might not flourish for months, or years. You might not see any outward change at all for a good long while. That doesn’t mean your efforts are useless. I find some small comfort in remembering that.

UPDATE, 2/15/15: Brendan Nyhan kindly emailed me with a link to an interesting 2010 paper in Political Psychology that supports my phase transition analogy: “The Affective Tipping Point: Do Motivated Reasoners Ever “Get It”?” (A tipping point is basically the critical point in a phase transition.) Per the abstract:

In order to update candidate evaluations voters must acquire information and determine whether that new information supports or opposes their candidate expectations. Normatively, new negative information about a preferred candidate should result in a downward adjustment of an existing evaluation. However, recent studies show exactly the opposite; voters become more supportive of a preferred candidate in the face of negatively valenced information. Motivated reasoning is advanced as the explanation, arguing that people are psychologically motivated to maintain and support existing evaluations. Yet it seems unlikely that voters do this ad infinitum. To do so would suggest continued motivated reasoning even in the face of extensive disconfirming information. In this study we consider whether motivated reasoning processes can be overcome simply by continuing to encounter information incongruent with expectations. If so, voters must reach a tipping point after which they begin more accurately updating their evaluations. We show experimental evidence that such an affective tipping point does in fact exist. We also show that as this tipping point is reached, anxiety increases, suggesting that the mechanism that generates the tipping point and leads to more accurate updating may be related to the theory of affective intelligence. The existence of a tipping point suggests that voters are not immune to disconfirming information after all, even when initially acting as motivated reasoners.

I’ll just bet “anxiety increases” the closer one gets to the proverbial tipping point: the cognitive dissonance must be severe. So perhaps that person loudly and passionately ignoring any and all evidence to the contrary is so forceful precisely because they are close to the tipping point and fear the phase change. Per Nyhan, “It’s hard to get people to that stage – it may take overwhelming evidence to the contrary if the belief is deep-seated or psychologically meaningful enough – but it can and does happen. I think strong social cues and elite consensus play an important role, as with (say) negative stereotypes about race and more recently gay people. Those beliefs haven’t gone away, of course, but a lot of people have revised their beliefs.”

See? People can change their minds and progress can be made on a broad social scale. Don’t despair just yet.



http://bactra.org/notebooks/emergent-properties.html
Emergent Properties
In complexity theory.
13 Jun 2014

“The weakest sense is also the most obvious. An emergent property is one which arises from the interaction of "lower-level" entities, none of which show it. No reductionism worth bothering with would be upset by this. The volume of a gas, or its pressure or temperature, even the number of molecules in the gas, are not properties of any individual molecule, though they depend on the properties of those individuals, and are entirely explicable from them; indeed, predictable well in advance.” For those who really want to try to understand these concepts much more fully, read this bactra article. I am not one of those. If you want to really put it into perspective, look up Complexity Theory as well. I'm not going to do that. Have fun, dearies. I'm really only interested in how to change minds. We must make an all out effort to do that in this country, or we won't have it much longer.




“We chatted about so-called transformative experiences, empathy, identity and the fluid nature of the self, and whether having a child can be considered a rational decision. You can listen to the entire conversation at Blog Talk Radio, but I wanted to highlight one aspect of our discussion, since it pertains to a topic of great interest among those interested in science education and outreach — notably, how best to deal with staunch denialism.... 2014 study by political scientist Brendan Nyhan examining what it might take to get people with strongly held beliefs on certain hot-button issues — in this study’s case, attitudes about vaccines — to change their minds. Nearly 2000 parents were shown one of four pro-vaccination campaigns, each adopting a different persuasive strategy (facts, science, emotions or stories) plus one control group, to see which was most effective in changing minds. The punchline: none of the above. Nothing changed people’s minds, and in fact, the strategies often backfired. “It’s depressing,” Nyhan admitted to Konnikova, adding after a pause, “We were definitely depressed.”.... Surely, rationalists have thought for decades, those in denial are merely ignorant, and if we just educate them and show them the error of their ways, they will change their minds and embrace the truth..... As Konnikova concludes, “Facts and evidence may not be the answer everyone thinks they are: they simply aren’t that effective, given how selectively they are processed and interpreted.” Yet people do change their minds; it depends on how strongly they connect a particular opinion or belief with their personal identity …. “When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs,” Konnikova writes. “It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.”.... “If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.”.... The key here is how beliefs are tied to personal identity, and as Paul and I discussed, identity is fluid: it shifts and evolves continually over time in response to personal experiences (some transformative per Paul’s definition) and other variables..... You wouldn’t be able to see the shift coming if all you were measuring was the temperature, because that’s a higher-level emergent property arising out of interactions of all the atoms making up the material. But change was still burbling at the atomic level, below what you could see on the surface. That sudden shift is the physics equivalent of a Saul on the road to Damascus moment.... What I described above is a first-order transition, which occurs abruptly, such as boiling water or melting ice. A second order phase transition occurs more smoothly and continuously.... Moving to the Midwest and finding a staunchly pro-vaxx doctor sealed the deal. By 2013 she finally understood the concept of herd immunization.... Of course, as Paul pointed out, you can’t precisely control how people respond and evolve over time. It’s a complex system, and your input is just one variable among many working to shape said system. All you can do is sow the seeds and hope some find fallow ground. And since most of us can’t see into a person’s innermost thoughts, there’s no way of knowing where that fallow ground might lie. Those seeds might not flourish for months, or years. You might not see any outward change at all for a good long while. That doesn’t mean your efforts are useless.".... However, recent studies show exactly the opposite; voters become more supportive of a preferred candidate in the face of negatively valenced information. Motivated reasoning is advanced as the explanation, arguing that people are psychologically motivated to maintain and support existing evaluations.... “It’s hard to get people to that stage – it may take overwhelming evidence to the contrary if the belief is deep-seated or psychologically meaningful enough.... “strong social cues and elite consensus” may be effective.

Being confronted over a damaging personal belief by proponents of a very different viewpoint in an immersion philosophically and interpersonally with a (hopefully) superior group with higher ideals is very possible for an educable and sane person to do. It's always a slow process, though. Let's say that our living in fairness, affection and peace with members of another racial or social group is a superior stance to walking around carrying a pistol on the fear that someone with darker skin will attack or simply just poison our neighborhood with their tainted presence (no blacks being allowed in a restaurant, for instance.) We will eventually see that we don't need a gun, and that the brown skinned person is a decent, trustworthy citizen just as we are. I think these changes happen more easily to young people than the aged, and also in the presence of a social or physical reward for making the change – advancement on the police force, for instance. I do believe in the overall human desire to be more virtuous and decent people, and I think we are moving forward on that in this country. Upward mobility is our only hope.

Being able to live in a Middle Class and comfortable setting might be such an incentive to a child from a dangerous slum, and he will then decide to study hard in school rather than walking around with a gang and threatening people. That's why people hope that a good education and a well-paying job will help. I have found that well educated people can be just as racist as more ignorant ones, of course, but there are fewer of those individuals in “good society,” especially if they believe in fairness and upward mobility for everyone like Progressives generally do.

I believe we are in a changing society in this regard. The police departments around the nation in recent months, in reaction to the traumatic events in Ferguson, MO, are beginning to try to reeducate their officers and require that they wear body cameras. Fifty years ago that wouldn't have happened. Fifty years ago the KKK would have beaten some people up just to scare them a little and enforce obedience to white control. We are making progress.





http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/13/us/new-york-homicide-record/index.html

New York City goes 11 days without a homicide -- a modern record
By Lorenzo Ferrigno, CNN
Sat February 14, 2015

(CNN)New York City has gone 11 days without a homicide, its longest stretch without any on modern record, the New York Police Department said Friday.

The record was broken midnight Thursday. It was the 11th full day without a reported homicide.

The last reported homicide was February 1, or Super Bowl Sunday, in Upper Manhattan, a police representative said Friday.

Police then responded to a 911 call about multiple shots being fired and found five individuals with gunshot wounds, New York police said. One of those five, Graham Shadale, 28, was pronounced dead at the scene.

The streak has been the longest since the New York Police Department began recording statistics with a computerized program called Compstat in 1994, the police representative said.

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton hushed talk of the streak Friday on "CBS This Morning."

"Shh ... we don't want to jinx it," Bratton told host Charlie Rose. "We're into our 12th day now, Charlie. Eleven is a record and let's keep it going."

Despite the record-breaking streak, there has been an uptick of shooting incidents compared with the same time period last year.

The week between February 1 and February 8 experienced 110 shooting incidents in 2015 versus 91 in 2014, according to Detective Cheryl Crispin of the New York Police Department's Public Information office.




“The record was broken midnight Thursday. It was the 11th full day without a reported homicide. The last reported homicide was February 1, or Super Bowl Sunday, in Upper Manhattan, a police representative said Friday.... The streak has been the longest since the New York Police Department began recording statistics with a computerized program called Compstat in 1994, the police representative said. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton hushed talk of the streak Friday on "CBS This Morning." "Shh ... we don't want to jinx it," Bratton told host Charlie Rose. "We're into our 12th day now, Charlie. Eleven is a record and let's keep it going.".Despite the record-breaking streak, there has been an uptick of shooting incidents compared with the same time period last year.”

Psychologists used to say that “the long, hot summers” used to make slum areas erupt in violence. Maybe long, cold winters make people hole up in their apartments and watch TV instead. Such a quiet period really can't go on forever, but it is good news anyway. As Bratton said, let's don't jinx it.





http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2015/02/16/385528919/not-a-group-house-not-a-commune-europe-experiments-with-co-housing

Not A Group House, Not A Commune: Europe Experiments With Co-Housing
LAUREN FRAYER, Ari Shapiro

Photograph – About 15 people live at the Threshold Center at Cole Street Farm, a shared living space in the Dorset countryside.
Ari Shapiro/NPR

In an abandoned building near Spain's Mediterranean coast, someone softly strums a guitar. Chord progressions echo through empty halls.

It's an impromptu music lesson, offered among unemployed neighbors in Alfafar, a suburb south of Valencia. The town was built in the 1960s for timber factory workers. It's high-density housing: tidy, identical two- and three-bedroom apartments, in huge blocks — some 7,000 housing units in total.

But the local timber industry has since collapsed. More than 40 percent of local residents are now unemployed. A quarter of homes are vacant. Apartments that sold for $150,000 decades ago, are going for just $20,000 now.

That guitar lesson is just one way residents are using their free time and empty space creatively. And it's here that two young Spanish architects saw potential.

While still in architecture school, María García Mendez and Gonzalo Navarrete drafted a plan to re-design a high-density area of Alfafar, called Barrio Orba, using the principle of co-housing — in which residents trade and share space and resources, depending on their needs.

"It's like up-cycling the neighborhood — connecting existing resources to make them work," García explains. "For example, all this work force that's unemployed, all these empty spaces that are without use, all these elderly people that need help, all these natural resources that are not being taken care of — making a project for all these things."

Through their architecture startup Improvistos, García and Navarrete submitted their Orba design to U.N. Habitat, a United Nations agency holding a competition for urban mass housing. And they won.

Redefining Public And Private Space

The architects, both in their 20s, were relatively unknown, working in a Spanish region — Valencia — that's famous for soaring space-age designs of museums and other public infrastructure — which have bankrupted the local government.

Valencia's native son is Santiago Calatrava, the famous Spanish architect who's now working on the new Ground Zero transit station in New York.

In contrast to Calatrava's work, the Improvistos architects sketched out a humble plan to revamp some 7,000 nearly identical apartments, with minimal structural changes, to adapt the current structures to residents' changing spatial needs. Neighbors can trade rooms, and share kitchens, roof gardens and office space.

"We're trying to redefine the limit between public and private," Navarrete says. "So the way you walk on your street, and where your house and your private space finishes or starts."

"A thing as simple as creating a new door — having a room with two doors — can give enormous flexibility," García chimes in. "So that this same room can be used by one or another, depending on the need."

Their plan also has a time bank element, trading space for services.

"For example, you have an 80-year-old person who needs some help once or twice a week, [living alongside] a family with three children that doesn't get enough income," García explains. "So maybe [someone from] the low-income family can help the elderly person once a week, and get, in exchange, one room. It's like an exchange system — so every house can gain or give out some space. And that can change with time."

The Improvisto architects in Alfafar plan to sit down with residents and sketch out how their buildings can adapt to different families' needs. They can add doors, retractable walls and shared space.

García and Navarrete, the Spanish architects, came up with the idea on a study trip to rural India — watching how a poor family would enlarge their thatched hut for new children, and share cooking areas with neighbors. The architects think that system can work in the Western world as well.

Collective Living In Rural England

One place it's already working is on England's southwest coast, amid picturesque rolling fields. A decade ago, Jane Stott helped create the Threshold Center at Cole Street Farm, a community that consists of a central 300-year-old farmhouse surrounded by small, low houses and about 15 residents.

The goal here is quite different from in Spain: This isn't about revitalizing an existing neighborhood. It's about creating something new. People have come to the Threshold Center for a variety of reasons, ranging from a desire to live in an environmentally sustainable way to the meditative aspects of living with others.

There are some echoes of life on a commune at the Threshold Center, where there's an optional group meditation each morning and the residents raise chickens.

But everyone also has a day job: among the residents are a nurse, a gardener and a social worker, for instance.

More broadly speaking, each co-housing community is different: Some are very religious; some are very environmentally friendly; some have lots of children; some have lots of seniors.

And the movement is growing: Stott says that when she founded the Threshold Center 10 years ago, she could count on one hand the number of British co-housing arrangements. Now there are more than 35.

Real Solutions For Real People

But the idea is a newer one in Spain, and residents in Alfafar have many questions. Over a traditional Valencia paella, residents of the Orba neighborhood discuss the plan. Some ask, how would the value of a home change, with the addition or subtraction of a room?

But in general they say they're intrigued by the plan — and flattered that the two architects chose their neighborhood for it. Most of Orba's residents have been living side-by-side for decades. They're not strangers.

Take Nacho Campillo and Patricia "Patri" Sanchez, a couple in their early 30s. They've lived in Orba for eight years, and took over Sanchez's grandmother's apartment there when she died. The flat hasn't been renovated since the 1960s.

But the young couple wants to stay in the neighborhood. Sanchez spent her childhood there and loves it — but they need more space. They have a small two-bedroom on the fourth floor with no elevator — and Sanchez is three months pregnant.

"Going up and down four flights of stairs is tiring now, and I'm not sure I'll be physically able to do it when I'm nine months pregnant!" Sanchez exclaims. "And what about the baby's stroller?" she says, exchanging a look with her partner, Campillo, and laughing.

But co-housing may help. The couple may "borrow" a ground-floor bedroom from a neighbor for the last few months of Sanchez's pregnancy — or for stroller storage afterward. The couple currently uses their second bedroom as a home office. But the addition of a shared co-working hub in the apartment complex would free up space for the baby's nursery.

Fusion Of Architecture And Social Policy

People in working-class Alfafar aren't used to getting attention from award-winning architects. The local mayor, Juan Ramon Adsuara, says he's surprised and bewildered by all the interest — but proud his town has been chosen by the architects and awarded the U.N. Prize.

"It's not just an architecture project. It's a fusion of architecture and rehabilitation. It's social policy," Adsuara says. "Architecture is not just for big star projects like museums. It's for the slums around them, too."

The big question, though, is how to pay for all this. The U.N. award comes with fame, but no funding. The mayor says the town hall is struggling to pay for basic services — let alone a progressive architecture revamp.

"I need to make payroll for municipal employees — the cleaning staff, the garbage collectors," Adsuara says. "But our economy is improving. We need to think about what model we want for our town's future. And that's where this project comes in."

The Improvistos architects have no price tag for their design. It's adaptable — based on what residents want. They all hope to begin workshops to sketch that out, this spring. The mayor is applying for funding from the European Union, to help launch this project — and also add bike lanes throughout the city. García and Navarrete are also thinking about launching a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Residents have volunteered to even do some of the renovation work themselves.

Among all of them, they're determined to change this neighborhood, for the better.




“But the local timber industry has since collapsed. More than 40 percent of local residents are now unemployed. A quarter of homes are vacant. Apartments that sold for $150,000 decades ago, are going for just $20,000 now.... María García Mendez and Gonzalo Navarrete drafted a plan to re-design a high-density area of Alfafar, called Barrio Orba, using the principle of co-housing — in which residents trade and share space and resources, depending on their needs. "It's like up-cycling the neighborhood — connecting existing resources to make them work.”... Through their architecture startup Improvistos, García and Navarrete submitted their Orba design to U.N. Habitat, a United Nations agency holding a competition for urban mass housing. And they won. Redefining Public And Private Space.... In contrast to Calatrava's work, the Improvistos architects sketched out a humble plan to revamp some 7,000 nearly identical apartments, with minimal structural changes, to adapt the current structures to residents' changing spatial needs. Neighbors can trade rooms, and share kitchens, roof gardens and office space.... "A thing as simple as creating a new door — having a room with two doors — can give enormous flexibility," García chimes in. "So that this same room can be used by one or another, depending on the need." Their plan also has a time bank element, trading space for services.... They can add doors, retractable walls and shared space. García and Navarrete, the Spanish architects, came up with the idea on a study trip to rural India — watching how a poor family would enlarge their thatched hut for new children, and share cooking areas with neighbors. The architects think that system can work in the Western world as well.... A decade ago, Jane Stott helped create the Threshold Center at Cole Street Farm, a community that consists of a central 300-year-old farmhouse surrounded by small, low houses and about 15 residents. The goal here is quite different from in Spain: This isn't about revitalizing an existing neighborhood. It's about creating something new. People have come to the Threshold Center for a variety of reasons, ranging from a desire to live in an environmentally sustainable way to the meditative aspects of living with others.... There are some echoes of life on a commune at the Threshold Center, where there's an optional group meditation each morning and the residents raise chickens....Some are very religious; some are very environmentally friendly; some have lots of children; some have lots of seniors. And the movement is growing: Stott says that when she founded the Threshold Center 10 years ago, she could count on one hand the number of British co-housing arrangements. Now there are more than 35.... The couple may "borrow" a ground-floor bedroom from a neighbor for the last few months of Sanchez's pregnancy — or for stroller storage afterward. The couple currently uses their second bedroom as a home office. But the addition of a shared co-working hub in the apartment complex would free up space for the baby's nursery.... The Improvistos architects have no price tag for their design. It's adaptable — based on what residents want. They all hope to begin workshops to sketch that out, this spring. The mayor is applying for funding from the European Union, to help launch this project — and also add bike lanes throughout the city. García and Navarrete are also thinking about launching a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Residents have volunteered to even do some of the renovation work themselves. Among all of them, they're determined to change this neighborhood, for the better.”

What people expect out of society has drastically changed down through time. In 35,000 BC a whole group of people lived together in one cave with separate hearths but little or no privacy. Most of the group were in the same blood lines, a group of extended families living together. They shared food that was gathered and hunted, and the shaman was the doctor and an advisor to the headman (or woman, some people think). There is some evidence that those early cultures were matrilineal, so the ultimate leader may have been a woman. The earliest god figurines are female, with very exaggerated sexual features. The closest thing they had to wealth was their stone tools and vessels, stored dry food material, and ornaments such as pierced animal teeth and sea shells. That sounds bleak, but it would have been comforting to have their family members and friends close by and available to help when needed. The space was all very much shared – no “private” ownership. At that early date there was at least one case of a wolf found among the bones in the cave, and not dismembered either – very possibly a pet.

Living like that is no longer preferred, but it has its emotional validity. One reason we have so much crime in our society today is that we don't live in small villages anymore, but rather in disjointed groups who often barely know each other. We don't know who to trust in all cases. I don't know all my neighbors in this apartment building, and in the town where I grew up neighbors were in small houses which were too close in one way – you could hear the neighbor's arguments – but not necessarily companionable with one another. I knew some dozen or so from the neighborhood or the church. They were all decent and safe people to live near, luckily. It was working class, but basically good people.

One element in this story is the effect of what sounds like an economic depression on the town in Spain. 40% of people are out of work and a quarter of the homes vacant? That forces the people back to a similar economic level of the prehistoric dwellers where the group had to stick together and share resources in order to survive. The original economic system was undoubtedly barter. In 35,000 BC there was no “money” though there is evidence that some of the articles found in the caves originated hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Archaeologists and geologists have teamed up together to show where a good, malleable hunk of stone or beautiful piece of amber was originally found. People walked and traded goods with those from other locations. Something similar to this is happening again. I'm glad to see it because, if Climate Change or an atomic bomb causes the downfall of our societies and we are forced to live life on its simplest terms again, we can do it.





http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/02/16/the-rolling-disaster-of-john-boehners-speakership/

The rolling disaster of John Boehner’s speakership
By Paul Waldman 
February 16, 2015

For years now, John Boehner’s continued occupation of the House speakership has been in doubt. Would the tea partyers evict him in a coup? Would he simply not want this thankless task anymore? The presumption, which I’ve always shared, is that Boehner is in a nearly impossible position. Pressed by a large right flank that sees any compromise as a betrayal, he is constrained from making the deals necessary to pass legislation. While Mitch McConnell can successfully corral his caucus to vote as a unified bloc, the one over which Boehner presides contains so many extremists and cranks that it’s just impossible to hold together.

All of that is true. But might it also be true that Boehner is just terrible at his job?

Look at the two stories about Boehner making the rounds today, both of which were addressed in an appearance he made on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday. The first is the possibility of a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security if Congress can’t pass a bill to fund the department. At a moment when the news is being dominated by terrorism, both in the Middle East and in Europe, a shutdown would be a PR disaster for the GOP (even if, in reality, the key functions of the department would continue with little interruption). The House passed a bill to fund the department, including a provision revoking President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Everyone knows that such a bill is going nowhere — it failed to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and even if it had, Obama has made clear that he’ll veto it.

Asked repeatedly by host Chris Wallace whether the House would revisit the Homeland Security spending bill, Boehner kept repeating that “The House has done its job.” And he couldn’t have been clearer on the possibility of a shutdown:

WALLACE: And what if the Department of Homeland Security funding runs out?

BOEHNER: Well, then, Senate Democrats should to be blame. Very simply.

WALLACE: And you’re prepared to let that happen?

BOEHNER: Certainly. The House has acted. We’ve done our job.

Boehner can say “Senate Democrats should be to blame,” but that won’t make it so. Everyone knows how this is going to end: Both houses are going to pass a “clean” spending bill, which Obama will sign. The only question is whether there’s a department shutdown along the way. If and when that happens, Republicans are going to be blamed, just as they were when they forced a total government shutdown in 2013. His calculation now seems to be the same as it was then: I’ll force a shutdown to show the tea partyers that I’m being tough and standing up to Obama, and then once it becomes clear that we’re getting the blame, that’ll give me the room to end the crisis by giving in and allowing the vote that will bring everything to a close. It’s not exactly a strategy to maximize his party’s political gain.

That brings us to the second ongoing PR catastrophe Boehner has engineered, the upcoming speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both here and in Israel, where Netanyahu faces an election next month, the speech has been roundly condemned for politicizing the relationship between the two countries, essentially turning the Israeli prime minister into a partisan Republican coming to the U.S. to campaign against President Obama’s approach to negotiating with Iran about their nuclear program. Worst of all, Boehner invited Netanyahu to make the speech without informing the White House, a bit of foreign policy usurpation that people in both parties find somewhere between inappropriate and outrageous. Here’s how Boehner talked about it yesterday:

BOEHNER: And then when it comes to the threat of Iran having a nuclear weapon — these are important messages that the Congress needs to hear and the American people need to hear. And I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu is the perfect person to deliver the message of how serious this threat is.

WALLACE: But when you talk with [Israeli ambassador] Ron Dermer about inviting Netanyahu, you told him specifically not to tell the White House.

Why would you do that, sir?

BOEHNER: Because I wanted to make sure that there was no interference. There’s no secret here in Washington about the animosity that this White House has for Prime Minister Netanyahu. And I frankly didn’t want them getting in the way and quashing what I thought was a real opportunity.

WALLACE: But it has created a — if not a firestorm, certainly a controversy here. It has a created a controversy in Israel. And shouldn’t the relationship between the U.S. and Israel be outside of politics?

BOEHNER: It’s an important message that the American people need to hear. I’m glad that he’s coming and I’m looking forward to what he has to say.

It may be that by now Boehner thinks that having come this far, he can’t rescind the invitation without making the whole thing look even worse. That’s possible, but by making the invitation in the first place, and keeping it secret from the administration, he created a truly epic blunder, one that not only makes him look bad but also damages American foreign policy interests.

So on the whole, Boehner is managing to combine legislative incompetence with PR incompetence. He’s already sure to be known as one of the weakest speakers in American history, for at least some reasons that are out of his control. But he might also be known as one of the least effective. Perhaps no one could have done a better job in his place, but since no other Republican seems to want the job, we may never know.

Paul Waldman is a contributor to The Plum Line blog, and a senior writer at The American Prospect.




“Pressed by a large right flank that sees any compromise as a betrayal, he is constrained from making the deals necessary to pass legislation. While Mitch McConnell can successfully corral his caucus to vote as a unified bloc, the one over which Boehner presides contains so many extremists and cranks that it’s just impossible to hold together.All of that is true. But might it also be true that Boehner is just terrible at his job? .... The first is the possibility of a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security if Congress can’t pass a bill to fund the department. At a moment when the news is being dominated by terrorism, both in the Middle East and in Europe, a shutdown would be a PR disaster for the GOP.... The House passed a bill to fund the department, including a provision revoking President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Everyone knows that such a bill is going nowhere — it failed to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and even if it had, Obama has made clear that he’ll veto it.... Boehner can say “Senate Democrats should be to blame,” but that won’t make it so. Everyone knows how this is going to end: Both houses are going to pass a “clean” spending bill, which Obama will sign. The only question is whether there’s a department shutdown along the way.... I’ll force a shutdown to show the tea partyers that I’m being tough and standing up to Obama, and then once it becomes clear that we’re getting the blame, that’ll give me the room to end the crisis by giving in and allowing the vote that will bring everything to a close. It’s not exactly a strategy to maximize his party’s political gain.... Both here and in Israel, where Netanyahu faces an election next month, the speech has been roundly condemned for politicizing the relationship between the two countries, essentially turning the Israeli prime minister into a partisan Republican coming to the U.S. to campaign against President Obama’s approach to negotiating with Iran.... Worst of all, Boehner invited Netanyahu to make the speech without informing the White House, a bit of foreign policy usurpation that people in both parties find somewhere between inappropriate and outrageous.... But when you talk with [Israeli ambassador] Ron Dermer about inviting Netanyahu, you told him specifically not to tell the White House. Why would you do that, sir? BOEHNER: Because I wanted to make sure that there was no interference. There’s no secret here in Washington about the animosity that this White House has for Prime Minister Netanyahu. And I frankly didn’t want them getting in the way and quashing what I thought was a real opportunity. …. So on the whole, Boehner is managing to combine legislative incompetence with PR incompetence. He’s already sure to be known as one of the weakest speakers in American history, for at least some reasons that are out of his control. But he might also be known as one of the least effective.”

The rise of the Tea Party appeared to come out of the blue and sweep to the fore in the GOP. Standard Republicans have shown some discomfort with its radical views and forceful intraparty competitions. I have been under the impression that Boehner, left to his own devices, wouldn't be so radical, but he is afraid of the Tea Party's power. More than just two or three Tea Partiers have made overt racist, economic, political and social class statements that are contrary to a democracy with an economically viable Middle and Working Class.

Their belief system is hostile to Democracy. They are picking up energy from the White Supremacists and the anarchy leaning Militias, which are mainly located in the South and the West. Those people are very uneducated and violent – nothing but modern day “outlaws.” The big money interests of the nation and the world, who have more in common with each other than with honest Americans of any political stripe, are behind this far right leaning trend here in the US and in Europe because the social “outlaws” will always vote an ultra-conservative ticket, and are willing to act the role of the KKK of the 1900s in suppressing poor immigrants and racial minorities.

Tea Party History:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement

The Tea Party movement is an American political movement known for its conservative positions and its role in theRepublican Party ("GOP"). It demands a reduction in the U.S. national debt and federal budget deficit by reducing governmentspending and taxes.[1][2] The movement has been described as a mix of libertarian,[3]populist,

[4] and conservative[5]activists. It has sponsoredmultiple protests and supportedvarious political candidates since 2009.[6][7][8] It was successful in 2010, when the Republicans made major gains. It failed to defeat President Barack Obama's reelection in 2012. In 2013 it had escalating conflicts with the big business wing of the GOP, which began organizing to fight back.[

In the 2014 GOP primaries, the Tea Party's highest profile victory was the defeat of Eric Cantor, the #2 House leader who was attacked for being too close to Wall Street.[10] The most serious defeat for the Tea Party came in Mississippi, where it failed in a bitter challenge to the renomination of Senator Thad Cochran. Commentators saw a "civil war" underway inside the GOP between Tea Party elements and the business-oriented establishment. CQ's Chuck McCutcheon says the fight is "whether the GOP should run candidates who are ideologically devoted to a strict limited-government agenda (the tea party's belief) or those with the broadest possible political appeal in their states and districts (the establishment's).”

Demonstrators at the U.S. Capitol celebrated the movement's five-year anniversary in February 2014. Various polls have found that slightly over 10% of Americans identify as a member.[12]

The name refers to the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773.[13][14][15][16] Anti-taxprotesters in the United States have cited the original Boston Tea Party as their inspiration.[17][18][19] References to the Boston Tea Party were part of Tax Dayprotests held in the 1990s and before.[20][21][22][23]

The origins of the current Tea Party movement can be traced back to circa 2007. The movement's beginnings were kick-started by Republican Congressman Dr. Ron Paulin 2007.

The Tea Party does not have a single uniform agenda. The decentralized character of the Tea Party, with its lack of formal structure or hierarchy, allows each autonomous group to set its own priorities and goals. Goals may conflict, and priorities will often differ between groups. Many Tea Party organizers see this as a strength rather than a weakness, as decentralization has helped to immunize the Tea Party against co-opting by outside entities and corruption from within.[35]

The Tea Party has generally sought to avoid placing too much emphasis on traditional conservative social issues. National Tea Party organizations, such as theTea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks, have expressed concern that engaging in social issues would be divisive.[35] Instead, they have sought to have activists focus their efforts away from social issues and focus on economic and limited government issues.[36][37] Still, many groups like Glenn Beck's 9/12 Tea Parties, TeaParty.org, the Iowa Tea Party and Delaware Patriot Organizations do act on social issues such as abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, and illegal immigration.[36][37][38]

Tea Party members generally advocate a national economy operating without government oversight.[39] Among its goals are limiting the size of the federal government, reducing government spending, lowering the national debt and opposing tax increases.[40] To this end, Tea Party groups have protested the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), stimulus programs such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, commonly referred to as the Stimulus or The Recovery Act), cap and trade, health care reform such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, also known simply as the Affordable Care Act or "Obamacare") and perceived attacks by the federal government on their 1st, 2nd, 4th and 10th Amendment rights.[41] Tea Party groups have also voiced support for right to work legislation as well as tighter border security, and opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants.[42][43] On the federal health care reform law, they began to work at the state level to nullify the law, after theRepublican Party lost seats in congress and the Presidency in the 2012 elections.[44][45] It has also mobilized locally against the United Nations Agenda 21.[44][46] They have protested the IRS for controversial treatment of groups with "tea party" in their names.[47] They have formed Super PACs to support candidates sympathetic to their goals and have opposed what they call the "Republican establishment" candidates.

Even though the groups have a wide range of different goals, the Tea Party places the Constitution at the center of its reform agenda.[40][48][49] It urges the return of government as intended by the Founding Fathers. It also seeks to teach its view of the Constitution and other founding documents.[35] Scholars have described its interpretation variously as originalist, popular,[50] or a unique combination of the two.[51][52] Reliance on the Constitution is selective and inconsistent. Adherents cite it, yet do so more as a cultural reference rather than out of commitment to the text, which they seek to alter.[53][54][55][56][57

 Several constitutional amendments have been targeted by some in the movement for full or partial repeal, including the 14th,16th, and 17th. There has also been support for a proposed Repeal Amendment, which would enable a two-thirds majority of the states to repeal federal laws, and aBalanced Budget Amendment, which would limit deficit spending.[40]

In the aftermath of the 2012 American elections, some Tea Party activists have taken up more traditionally populist ideological viewpoints on issues that are distinct from general conservative views. Examples are various Tea Party demonstrators sometimes coming out in favor of U.S. immigration reform as well as for raising theU.S. minimum wage.[60]

An October 2010 Washington Post canvass of local Tea Party organizers found 87% saying "dissatisfaction with mainstream Republican Party leaders" was "an important factor in the support the group has received so far".[

Journalist Jane Mayer has said that the Koch brothers were essential in funding and strengthening the movement, through groups such as Americans for Prosperity.[92][93] In 2013, a study published in the journal Tobacco Control concluded that organizations within the movement were connected with non-profit organizations that the tobacco industry and other corporate interests worked with and provided funding for,[94][95] including groups Citizens for a Sound Economy (founded by the Koch brothers).[96][97] Al Gore cited the study and said that the connections between "market fundamentalists", the tobacco industry and the Tea Party could be traced to a 1971 memo from tobacco lawyer Lewis F. Powell, Jr. who advocated more political power for corporations. Gore said that the Tea Party is an extension of this political strategy "to promote corporate profit at the expense of the public good."[98]