http://www.youtube.com/v/S6Uw5Rrugm4?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Continued: Social Media Anonymous
Blacks vote more actively than whites for the first time
The rate of minorities who participated in the November election was historic and largely affected the outcome of the vote, according to a new analysis conducted for the Associated Press.Preliminary data shows that African Americans represent 13 percent of all votes cast in 2012, even though they only make up 12 percent of the total population. President Barack Obama was reelected by a margin of 5 million, but would have narrowly lost to Romney without the high turnout of black voters.The overall voter turnout was 58 percent, which is down from the 62 percent that cast their ballots in 2008 and the 60 percent that did so in 2004. And while the overall turnout decreased, black and minority voter turnout rates increased.”The 2012 turnout is a milestone for blacks and a huge potential turning point,” Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, told AP. “What it suggests is that there is an ‘Obama effect’ where people were motivated to support Barack Obama. But it also means that black turnout may not always be higher, if future races aren’t as salient.”In the 2012 election, 93 percent of African Americans voted for Obama, in large part because of Romney’s inability to attract minority support. Even though Obama ran for re-election while unemployment remained high and opponents criticized him for his failure to get things done, African Americans demonstrated a strong desire to re-elect the first black president. During the election, 22 percent of black voters waited 30 minutes or more to cast their ballots, compared to just 9 percent of white voters, according to a Hart Research poll.”I got the feeling Mitt Romney couldn’t care less about me and my fellow African Americans,” said 27-year-old Lauren Howie, an administrative assistant at Case Western Reserve University’s medical school.”A white Mormon swimming in money with offshore accounts buying up companies and laying off their employees just doesn’t quite fit my idea of a president,” she said. “Bottom line, Romney was not someone I was willing to trust with my future.”"It remains to be seen how successful Democrats are if you don’t have Barack Obama at the top of the ticket,” he said.The black turnout was high even despite voter ID laws that made it more difficult to prove voting eligibility and primarily affected minorities. In late 2012, courts blocked or delayed the implementation of some of these laws, and African Americans still turned up at the polls in historic numbers.Demographers expect that the minority vote will become increasingly important with every passing election, and that candidates who don’t appeal to African Americans or Hispanics will not be able to make it into the White House. ”The 2008 election was the first year when the minority vote was important to electing a U.S. president. By 2024, their vote will be essential to victory,” William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, told AP. “Democrats will be looking at a landslide going into 2028 if the new Hispanic voters continue to favor Democrats.”For the first time since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the African American voter turnout was so significant that future elections will largely depend on addressing their concerns. … Read More
Supreme Court Rules Against Warrantless DUI Blood Tests
In divided ruling handed down today, the U.S. Supreme Court held
that Missouri police violated the 4th Amendment by obtaining a
warrantless and nonconsensual blood sample from a man suspected of
drunk driving. At issue in Missouri
v. McNeely was the question of whether or not the rapid
diminishment of alcohol in a suspect’s bloodstream should entitle
the police to enjoy a blanket emergency exception to the 4th
Amendment when it comes to seeking blood tests in drunk-driving
cases. Writing for a majority that also included Justices Antonin
Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan,
Justice Sonia Sotomayor held that the actions of the Missouri
police violated the Constitution and, more significantly, rejected
the government’s sweeping argument in favor of a blanket 4th
Amendment exception.
While “in some circumstances law enforcement officers may
conduct a search without a warrant to prevent the imminent
destruction of evidence,” Sotomayor wrote, “it does not follow that
we should depart from careful case-by-case assessment of exigency
and adopt the categorical rule proposed by the State and its amici.
In those drunk-driving investigations where police officers can
reasonably obtain a warrant before a blood sample can be drawn
without significantly undermining the efficacy of the search, the
Fourth Amendment mandates that they do so.”
In addition to Sotomayor’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John
Roberts filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part,
which was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito, and
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a lone dissent.
Click below to watch me and Nick Gillespie discuss this case and
several other notable cases from the current Supreme Court
term.
Primal Scream lead singer says Thatcher is dead but her policies live on in Cameron government
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher may be dead but her conservative policies have never been in better health, Primal Scream lead singer Bobby Gillespie has said. Left-wing Gillespie, 51, the Scottish son of a union official and a bitter opponent of “Thatcherism”, also said…
Reactions to Sen. Rand Paul’s Speech at Howard University
“I come to Howard today, not to preach, or prescribe some
special formula for you but to say I want a government that leaves
you alone, that encourages you to write the book that becomes your
unique future.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) spoke to an audience at the historically
black college Howard University yesterday. The junior senator from
the Bluegrass State said he wanted to start a conversation between
African-American voters and Republicans, who pulled just 7 percent
of the black vote in the 2012 presidential race.
Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg talked with
students and attendees to see what they thought of Paul’s talk and
his libertarian positions on military intervention, the drug war,
sentencing reform, government regulation, and school choice.
About 3 minutes.
Read Paul’s remarks
here.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV’s YouTube
Channel to receive notification when new material goes
live. … Read More
Nick Gillespie on The Great Gatsby’s Creative Destruction
Very few American novels have demonstrated the
remarkable staying power of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby. Published in 1925, it remains a critical darling, a
widely read popular novel, and the scourge of indifferent high
school students who suffer through it as that most soul-killing of
literary forms, “assigned reading.” Gatsby looms so large
in the American imagination that it’s already been filmed four
times (the first time in 1926, as a silent movie) and will hit
theaters yet again in May, with an A-list cast (Leonardo DiCaprio,
Tobey Maguire) and director (Baz Luhrmann).
The reason that Gatsby (the novel, if not the
character) still has plenty to say to us, writes Nick Gillespie, is
that it captures the precise moment that modern America came into
recognizable shape. It is about the move from countryside to
metropolis, from unum to pluribus, from hierarchy to heterarchy in
all aspects of cultural and economic life. It captures a world in
which nothing is fixed in terms of status, fortune, and
self-fashioning—and it narrates the anxieties caused by such
freedom. View this article.
… Read More
Of Soda Bans, Sodomy, Single Moms and Sycophants of the Nanny State
Nick
Gillespie noted
earlier today an op-ed in the New York Times by Sarah
Comly, author of the wonderfully titled “Against Autonomy:
Justifying Coercive Paternalism,” arguing in favor of
what else but the nanny state. Comly asks why there’s “so much
fuss” over Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to regulate soda sizes.
“[S]ometimes we need to be stopped from doing foolish stuff,” Comly
argues, because we’re not always rational (stop the presses!). And
the government, for Comly, is the agent to do the stopping. It
seems she adopts a “we are the government” stance, at one point
saying the government’s supposed to “help us get where we want to
go.” But if people are prone to be irrational, and the government
is made up of people, why wouldn’t it prone to irrationality? The
soda ban itself, after all, is irrational; Jacob Sullum pointed out
even the mayor doesn’t think it’ll work.
Nevertheless it’s nothing new for Bloomberg to support a policy
despite evidence to the contrary, like with stop and
frisk. The attempted soda ban is part of a policy basket that
includes reducing salt in food products and banning transfats. Its
supporters argue that curbing public health costs justifies the
policy. ;As Nick Gillespie
noted earlier today, a debate on the soda ban between MeMe Roth
(pro) and Ann Coulter (against) featured Coulter asking if a soda
ban were acceptable, why not ban sodomy, which also has associated
health risks? Bloomberg himself, however, has turned a version of
this hypothetical into a real example. Earlier this month, while
the city prepared for the new soda regulations, the city also
rolled out an ad campaign
against teen pregnancy. It didn’t ban teen pregnancies, it
didn’t introduce any new regulations to try to nudge the teen
pregnancy statistics done. Yet some of the same people in favor of
the soda ban were aghast by the notion of the teen pregnancy
campaign. “This ad doesn’t provide info about safe sex or how to
attain low-cost or free birth control,” ;a Yahoo blogger
wrote, calling the ads insulting and enraging. Planned
Parenthood agreed,
calling birth control an effective strategy against teen pregnancy.
Yet New York City’s government does promote and subsidize birth
control and contraceptives as well. A campaign to distribute Plan B
in public schools
was met with resistance, but as is the Bloomberg way, went full
speed ahead anyway. The New York Post revealed the program
was far more widespread than the Bloomberg administration initially
acknowledged. 12,721 doses were distributed to girls as young as 14
last school year. With the administration pursuing this kind of
program, it could use the same arguments deployed in favor of a
soda ban for measures meant to discourage teen pregnancy and even
teen sex.
After all, as Comly argued, sometimes we don’t know what’s best
for us. Liberals use the argument of need to support regulations
and bans ranging from soda to guns. Who needs a 32 ounce soda at
dinner? Who needs a so-called assault weapon? But what do people
really need? A hovel and some gruel. Everything else is part of
life’s rich accoutrement, our desire (need) for more knowledge,
more material goods, more experiences, more emotions. The pursuit
of happiness includes guns, soda, sex, ; transfats, tobacco,
narcotics, all depending on the eye of the beholder. Comly invokes
John Stuart Mill’s “no harm” principle, conflating it with the idea
of the rational man (as
Nick Gillespie noted). The no harm principle, of course, works
independent of the idea of a rational man. It gains new strength in
the absence of one, in fact. Despite the effort by nanny state
apologists to attribute consensus to their policy prescriptions,
the controversy each stirs belies that argument. Given enough time,
every apologist will learn the lesson at some point, when the state
large enough to stop the behavior he or she disapproves is set to
the purpose of stopping behavior the nanny state apologist sees
nothing wrong. And if we keep bring up how ridiculous the contrary
notion of a benevolent nanny state formed by a weak-willed populace
is, maybe we won’t have to see how bad it has to get for people to
start thinking rationally. … Read More
