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Charlie Webster, the state chair of the Maine Republican party, has produced documents claiming to show that over two hundred of the state’s college students have committed fraud by voting in Maine while paying out-of-state tuition.
This is a lie. It’s an evil lie. It’s just … jeez.
Here’s the deal. If you move to Maine for college, you have to pay out-of-state tution your first year. And your second. And your third. And your fourth. And your fifth. You have to pay out-of-state tuition forever, in fact, until you demonstrate that you have “established a Maine domicile for other than educational purposes.”
And as long as you’re attending college full-time, you’ll be “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile.” Again: Forever.
You can arrive in Maine fresh out of high school, move into your own place, live there 365 days a year. Work there, spend summers there, get married there. Finish your undergraduate degree, go on to grad school. But as long as you’re still a student, you’re “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile,” and the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise. (“No one factor can be used to establish domicile,” by the way. “All factors and circumstances must be considered on a case-by-case basis.”)
Paying out-of-state tuition isn’t evidence that you don’t live in Maine, in other words. It’s not evidence of anything at all. Out-of-state tuition is a revenue stream for the university and the state, and as such, it’s designed to put every possible burden on the student who’s looking to get out from under it.
Which brings us back to Charlie Webster.
What Webster is doing here is deploying a state regulation designed to deprive Maine’s college students of their money as a mechanism to deprive them of their votes. There’s no other way to describe it. Take their money, take their votes. Justice, fairness, and the Supreme Court of the United States be damned.
It’s really that simple.
The 2011 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association is winding down today — as I type this, the group’s newly elected 2011-12 Board of Directors is meeting for the first time. It’s been a whirlwind of a conference, so I haven’t had the chance to update as much as I’d have liked, but I’ll be compiling a full report here over the next few days.
The conference began with a couple of days of speeches and workshops and meetings. The Congress site was Florida A&M University, the first historically black college or university (HBCU) ever to host a USSA annual meeting, and they were wonderful hosts — it’s a hell of a campus, and a hell of a student body. If you’re ever down here, be sure to stop by their archives — it’s one of the best-curated university galleries I’ve ever visited, as well as being a gem of a small museum of the history of race and racism in the United States.
Nothing huge broke in the first few days of the Congress. No huge drama, no dramatic developments. The association’s sitting vice president, Victor Sanchez, drew one competitor in his race for USSA President, while National People of Color Student Coalition chair Tiffany Dena Loftin was unopposed for the vice presidency.
The Congress was looking like a quiet one as Monday broke, but Monday — plenary day — turned out to be a doozy.
The plenary was scheduled to begin at nine in the morning in the FAMU basketball stadium. Students entered down a long stairway past row after row of deeply raked seats, taking their positions on the parquet of the stadium’s center court. Technical glitches delayed the start of the session for a couple of hours, but spirits remained good as the group started work, held a brief session, and then boarded buses for a barbeque lunch, step show, and rousing speech by a Wisconsin union leader on that state’s recent student-labor uprising.
The group reconvened early in the afternoon, making its way through the agenda to the first contentious issue — a constitutional amendment altering the makeup of the USSA Board of Directors.
USSA’s board is based on a hybrid structure combining regional representatives and identity-based caucuses representing various student constituencies. Monday’s amendment proposed adding a designated seat for each member State Student Association, giving those organizations — which, along with USSA’s campus chapters, make up the Association’s membership — a direct role in the group’s governance for the first time.
In the eyes of the proposal’s authors, the change was intended to strengthen USSA’s relationship with its member SSAs, to encourage non-member SSAs to join, to foster the development of SSAs in states where none exist. To some opponents, though, it represented a power grab by already powerful factions within the Association.
The proposal was brought up Monday afternoon, and passed by a comfortable margin. After the vote was completed, but before it was announced, the body went into recess for fifteen minutes. During that time some simmering frustrations bubbled over, and several delegations who had opposed the amendment walked out of the meeting.
…and my flight has just been called. More soon.
Two survivors of yesterday’s massacre at Utoya have written blogposts describing their experiences.
One post comes from Prableen Kaur, the head of the Worker’s Youth League in Grorud, a district in Oslo. Her post has been verified by, and republished in, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.
The other was written by Khamshajiny Gunaratnam, a 23-year-old youth activist, whose identity and authorship of her blogpost was confirmed by the newspaper Dagbladet.
Kaur and are apparently close friends — each makes references in their post that seem to refer to the other.
I’m not going to quote at length from either of the posts — if you decide to click through, be aware that they describe harrowing scenes of violence in some detail. (Be aware as well that the links above are to Google automatic translations of the posts, which were written in Norwegian.) But I do want to repost something that Gunaratnam said near the end of her entry:
“I’m still in shock. And that is why I write this note. I can not bear to tell the story over and over again. … We continuously hear who was shot, etc. I have omitted that. It is degrading to the relatives. They deserve better.
“We deserve not to die. And that is also why I write this note. We are just normal teenagers. We are engaged in politics. We will make the world a better place.”
Not long ago, Norwegian police announced that at least eighty people are known to have been massacred at the Labor Party youth camp at Utoya today. The vast majority appear to have been teenagers participating in an organizing retreat at the camp.
Police indicated that the number of dead may rise in the hours to come. Many of the bodies recovered so far were removed from the sea, as their attacker apparently shot at those who attempted to escape by swimming away after the shooting began.
One person, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik, has been arrested in connection with the Utoya massacre and the bombing of a government building in Oslo earlier in the day. Seven people died in that bomb attack.
Media reports have connected Breivik to far right-wing politics, and police are attempting to determine whether he may have had accomplices in the two attacks.
Much remains unclear about the Utoya massacre, but the facts that are known stagger the mind.
Dozens of young activists murdered. There are no words.
Update | From Mashable: “According to multiple news reports in Norway and Sweden, Brievik belonged to Oslo’s extreme right wing. He was a frequent poster in Norwegian right-wing online forums, the accounts said, and had two guns registered to his name. He also appears to have launched a social media presence just days before the attacks.”
Second Update | The final death toll at Utoya was sixty-nine. Another eight people died as a result of Breivik’s Oslo bombing earlier in the day.
News is still spotty, and early reports from an event like this should always be taken skeptically, but the basic outlines of the story appear to be these:
A gunman disguised as a policeman opened fire earlier today at a camp for young activists affiliated with Norway’s Labor Party, a center-left party which is the leading member of Norway’s governing coalition. The campers, who were apparently on an organizing retreat, were in their mid-teens, and reports suggest that as many as a dozen — and perhaps many more — have been killed.
Initial claims as to the identity of the shooter have been confused and contradictory.
Update | Police have released new details on the Utoya massacre, and now say at least eighty people have died there. A white Norwegian with reported ties to far-right groups is in custody, as officials attempt to determine whether he had accomplices in the attacks.
studentactivism.net 
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