Category Archive

Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) was always going to be a tough get for the DREAMers. Though she voted for the bill three years ago she’s up for re-election in 2012, her home state just elected a Republican governor, and she’s worried about a possible Tea Party primary challenge. Add to all that the fact that she’s made something of a career of raising and then dashing Dems’ hopes on close votes, and it wasn’t hard to predict what was likely to happen.

Last night, according to a statement published on the conservative National Review website, Snowe made it official.

“Millions of illegal immigrants could attempt to become legal residents as a result of this proposal, according to some estimates,” she said, and that can’t be allowed to happen. Never mind that eligibility for the DREAM Act has always been restricted, and was narrowed further by recent concessions by its sponsors. Never mind that the legal residency process it would establish is long and arduous. Never mind that Snowe voted for a broader version of the bill in 2007. She’s got an election to win.

If Snowe’s “no” vote is confirmed, it’s a huge blow to an already imperiled bill. A few days ago the White House said they anticipated needing seven Republican votes to make the DREAM Act a reality. At the time I could only come up with six plausible GOP votes for the bill, and Snowe was one of them. Without her, I don’t see how the math can be made to work.

It’s been clear for a long time that winning the Senate was going to be tough, and the odds have grown longer in recent weeks.

Right now they’re very long indeed.

9:30 am Update | The US Senate is scheduled to convene in moments to take up the DREAM Act, with a vote expected before noon. Note that today’s vote will be what’s known as a “cloture” vote, with supporters needing 60 votes out of the 100 in the Senate to bring the bill to the floor for discussion.

11:30 am | The Senate is now voting … but not on cloture. Last night the House passed an amended version of the DREAM Act, and both the House and Senate need to pass identical bills to send them to the President. So Majority Leader Harry Reid asked the Republicans to allow the Senate to vote on the House version today. They refused. So now the DREAM Act’s supporters have moved to table the original bill so that the House version can be brought up in its place.

11:50 am | The motion to table passed in a 59-40 vote, which means that the Senate will be free to consider the House version of the DREAM Act next week. Democrats overwhelmingly voted for the motion, Republicans overwhelmingly against, with most of the exceptions being DREAM Act fence-sitters. What tea-leaf-reading this makes possible is something I don’t know, but will try to find out. (Update: See 12:55 below — this vote tells us nothing.)

12:40 pm | CNN is reporting, incorrectly, that today’s vote killed the DREAM Act. MSNBC gets it right.

12:50 pm | Immigration policy blog MicEvHill.com says Harry Reid “pulled a procedural rabbit out of his hat” today, and may have given the bill’s chances of passage a boost.

12:55 pm | I’ve looked at the roll call on today’s vote, and I’m not seeing any patterns that are of any use. On-the-fence Republican Lisa Murkowski voted for the measure, but so did four GOP senators who are known DREAM Act opponents. On the other side of the aisle, DREAM Act skeptic Mark Pryor voted against, but so did three Democratic supporters of the bill.

It’s one o’clock in the afternooon in London as I write this — eight in the morning in New York — and a parliamentary vote is expected within hours on the British government’s unprecedented proposal to raise tuition fees at UK universities to as high as £9000 (more than $14000) a year.

The plan has drawn massive protests throughout Britain over the last month, and more are already underway today. The country’s governing coalition, led by the Conservative Party and joined by the Liberal Democrats, has an 80-vote majority in the House of Commons, but announced defections and abstentions have already considerably reduced that margin on this vote.

You can find background on the upcoming vote here, while the Guardian newspaper is liveblogging today’s events here. I’ll be updating this post as the day unfolds.

1:10 pm London Time | Tonight’s Commons vote is scheduled for 5:25 pm — just after noon on the US East Coast.

4:00 pm | Huge protests in London, many reports police violence. Police on horses have rushed crowds, protesters have been beaten. Growing reports of protesters responding with violence of their own. Protesters are being “kettled” — confined to a closed location by police without charges. One officer is said to have been knocked from his horse and injured.

4:05 pm | Twitter hashtags #dayx3 and #demo2010 seem to be being used about equally, often in combination. Check out either or both for breaking news, including reports from the scene of today’s various protests.

5:00 pm | BBC is reporting seven arrests so far, 19 people treated for injuries by medical workers on the scene of the protests. Six of the 19 were taken to hospital.

5:30 pm | Parliament voting now. Results in a few minutes.

5:45 pm | The proposal passed 323-302. With 650 seats in parliament, that means abstentions and no-votes carried the day for the government.

10:30 pm | Police are still kettling protesters — confining them behind barricades and refusing to let them leave the area.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. As I write this, “Yoko Ono” is sixth on Twitter’s global trending topics list, and “Lenon” is fifth.

Neither “Lennon” nor “John Lennon” appears.

Why is this? Is it because more people are misspelling John Lennon’s name than spelling it correctly? No. Far more people are spelling it right than wrong — and a big chunk of those who are spelling it wrong are doing so to criticize it.

But Twitter doesn’t measure raw numbers in calculating trending topics, it uses a complex algorithm that values novelty over frequency. So when “Lennon” goes from a lot of hits to a whole huge humongous lot of hits, it doesn’t trend. But when Lenon goes from almost no hits to a lot of hits, just because a tiny percentage of something really big is bigger than a tiny percentage of something sort of big, it does. And when we start tweeting about how ridiculous it is that “Lenon” is trending at all, it trends bigger and longer.

This is why Twitter’s trending topics are broken. They don’t care that we care about John Lennon. They just care that we’ve noticed that some people are spelling his name wrong.

Last week I argued that some media outlets were publishing stories about the Julian Assange sexual misconduct investigation that seemed to misrepresent both the relevant law and the allegations against him. Despite what you might have read on the web, for instance, consensual sex without a condom isn’t illegal in Sweden.

I didn’t take a position on Assange’s guilt or innocence in that piece, because I don’t have one. I was just trying to make sure that the accusations against him were reported accurately. (For the record, Assange is accused of holding a woman down against her will during a sexual encounter, and of failing to comply with her request that he use a condom during sex. He is accused of having sex with another woman without her consent while she slept — again without using a condom.)

When a public figure is accused of misconduct, his supporters are often tempted to minimize the charges against him — to say that the accusations are not merely false, but also unserious. But in this case the accusations are serious. Assange may be guilty or he may be innocent, but he is accused of serious crimes.

Some who read my previous piece on this issue have accused me of taking Assange’s guilt as a given, but the fact is that the question of his guilt or innocence just wasn’t relevant to my post, because what I was trying to say was this: Whether he’s guilty or innocent, his accusers deserve a fair and honest hearing. They deserve justice. Whatever justice winds up meaning, they deserve justice.

And by the same token, guilty or innocent, Assange deserves the same. He deserves a fair and honest hearing. He deserves justice.

Whether Assange is guilty or innocent, justice will not be served if he is charged without sufficient evidence, if he is denied a fair trial, or if, having been convicted at trial, he is denied a fair sentencing process. Whether he is guilty or innocent, justice will not be served if his prosecution is manipulated to serve the interests of his political enemies.

Every student of history knows that innocence is no protection against persecution. But every student of history knows as well that the guilty have also often been persecuted. The guilty may be railroaded. The guilty may be framed. The guilty may be punished unfairly and excessively.

There is already reason to be concerned about whether justice will be served in this case, and whether we believe Assange to be guilty or innocent, that concern is reason for vigilance.

Update | See also Afua Hirsch, Lindsay Beyerstein, and Amanda Marcotte.

Some two hundred students at University College London have been occupying the Wilkins Building on campus for the last two weeks in protest against planned funding cuts and fee hikes at Britain’s universities. On Thursday the university demanded that they leave.

In the US, the university’s next step would have been obvious — call in the cops. In California, student occupations are becoming a regular occurrence, and police evictions accompanied by mass arrests are almost inevitable.

But this isn’t the US.

In the UK, you can’t evict students who are peacefully occupying a campus building without a court order, and the university has in this case so far failed to get one. Lawyers for both sides have faced off in court twice in the last week — first on Friday, and then again this morning — without a decision being reached. The judge’s ruling is now expected tomorrow.

A parliamentary vote on the government’s plan for higher education is scheduled to take place on Thursday evening.