[OPINION] On immigration, Kasich just as extreme as Trump

A resident of Summit County, Isabel Framer is a Latina community activist whose expertise springs from her work in language access in the justice system.

It’s a sad state of affairs in the Republican Party today when the candidates are falling all over themselves to out-Trump one another on the issue of immigration. The GOP’s anti-immigrant xenophobia has gone so far, the candidates are now attacking families and innocent children. The Republican outrage du jour concerns “birthright citizenship,” which is a right guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

Donald Trump, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson, Lindsey Graham ... nearly half of the GOP field have come out recently in favor of amending the U.S. Constitution or passing legislation to take away citizenship rights from children who are born in America. Early last week Scott Walker voiced his support for ending birthright citizenship, then seemed to reverse course and now is claiming he won’t take a position on the issue. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush says folks should “chill out a little bit” with criticism of his use of the derogatory term “anchor babies.”

One of those who has seemed slightly less offensive with his comments has been John Kasich. However, a quick look at Kasich’s record reveals he has been just as extreme as Trump and the rest of the GOP. In the early 1990s, Kasich was on the leading edge of anti-immigrant fever as a co-sponsor of legislation to end birthright citizenship. The former Fox News host continued his support for this policy during his 2010 run for governor.

CINCINNATI.COM

Kasich defends immigrants as ‘contributing significantly’

Now that Kasich is running for president – against a field that offers him no room to maneuver on the right – he’s trying to sing a different tune on immigration. While Kasich says he wouldn’t take a path to citizenship off the table, he has also said he opposes it. Kasich added, “I don’t favor citizenship because, as I teach my kids, you don’t jump the line to get into a Taylor Swift concert.”

Many immigrant families have been working for decades, waiting to come out of the shadows as Republicans have failed to act, but Kasich thinks that’s somehow equivalent to teenagers cutting the line for a concert.

Now let’s take a look at Kasich’s actual record as governor on the issue of immigration. Ohio is one of the states challenging President Obama’s executive actions that have deferred action for young people who arrived in America as children and parents of U.S. citizens. To date, Kasich has stood on the sidelines while Attorney General Mike DeWine joined a lawsuit against Obama’s executive orders.

CINCINNATI.COM

Kasich clear on immigration, less on Common Core

Kasich loves to talk about balancing budgets, but he’s ignoring a real benefit for Ohio taxpayers from deferred action. This process, which requires undocumented immigrants that qualify for the program to register, undergo background checks and pay taxes, would bring in an additional $41 million in revenue for the state of Ohio. Add to that the fact that earlier this year a study by UCLA found Ohio was the worst state in the country for promoting the health and well-being of undocumented immigrants.

So ultimately, actions speak louder than words, and Kasich’s actions shouldn’t fool anyone that he’s suddenly a moderate on immigration. If Kasich wanted to do something about immigration, he could pick up the phone and tell DeWine to drop his ridiculous lawsuit. He could make it easier for immigrants in Ohio to access health care and higher education and obtain legal documents. Until then, I’ll view Kasich as a flip-flopping opportunist who can’t be trusted.

Via: CIncinnati.com

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UCLA Article: Government Should Provide ‘Free Tampons’ For ‘Individuals Who Menstruate As Women’ To ‘Slow Flow Of Gender Inequality’

Editor’s note: This blog post refers to individuals who menstruate as women because the author wanted to highlight gender inequality in health care. We acknowledge that not all individuals who menstruate identify as women and that not all individuals who identify as women menstruate, but feel this generalization is appropriate considering the gendered nature of most health care policies.

To most government officials, feminine hygiene products are a luxury item. But, every day, women are being poisoned by their own bodies because they lack access to even the most essential health products.

Meanwhile, most men have no problem getting covered for pills that will help them get a boner.

Although still greatly outnumbered and underpaid compared to their male counterparts, women have made so much progress. Yet inequality still lies in the most basic areas of human well-being. Women are still facing unequal treatment when it comes to health care and are paying out of pocket for necessary female health products, particularly tampons and pads.

It’s about time that the federal government recognizes that even the most basic health care needs to start subsidizing the cost of tampons and pads for women, or covering the cost completely. This is only fair, since health insurance is supposed to cover the major aspects of a person’s health. But more importantly, cutting the cost of these products is a crucial step in normalizing menstruation within society, and it provides women who may not have access to these resources the opportunity to feel clean and comfortable during their period.

Access to tampons would not only allow for healthy living during that time of the month, but also every day of the year. The provision of tampons, or at least a subsidy, would give many women, especially those living on the streets or living paycheck to paycheck, access to these necessary items and the ability to change them often without the fear of running out. Not changing a tampon frequently enough can lead to complications like toxic shock syndrome or blood poisoning, among other things, which can lead to permanent damage in women’s lives.

Aside from some forms of birth control or medical complications, nothing will stop a woman’s period. It’s a natural part of having a uterus that just can’t be helped.

Health care currently covers services such as sexually transmitted infection testing, birth control, abortion and even access to erectile dysfunction treatments such as penile implants.

Although erectile dysfunction is a problem, it is not one that all men are inherently born with. Menstruation, on the other hand, is something almost every woman deals with at some point in her life. It’s a bit ridiculous that surgeries for sexual needs are covered before everyday feminine hygiene products.

Once necessary items needed to maintain feminine wellness are made attainable, public amenities outside of health centers and doctors’ offices should join in normalizing access to feminine products. Public facilities such as restrooms, schools and theaters should provide tampons and pads to women who need them, when they need them.

Via: Daily Bruin

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UCLA provides internship opportunities to illegal immigrants

Illegal immigrant students in California are actualizing their dreams this summer.

The UCLA Labor Center’s Dream Resource Center is allowing undocumented students to apply for Dream Summer, a ten-week summer program that provides paid internship opportunities for immigrants in California, regardless of their immigration or insurance status. The program will encourage them to advocate for immigration reform and promote universal health care access regardless of immigration status.

UCLA is among the growing number of University of California schools, including UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, to provide academic scholarships and opportunities for exclusively for illegal immigrants.   Tweet This

The Center says the program began in 2011 after the U.S. Senate failed to pass the DREAM Act in 2010, which would have given a path to citizenship to illegal immigrants who came to the United states before the age of 16. The program claims to have provided 418 internship opportunities to immigrant youth throughout the nation.

UCLA is among the growing number of University of California schools, including UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, to provide academic scholarships and opportunities exclusively for illegal immigrants, some of whom move on to become active spokesmen for immigration reform.

The US Census Bureau reports that as of July 1, 2014, Hispanics were the predominant ethnic population of California’s roughly 14.99 million residents. An estimated 68 percent of the state’s undocumented population is Mexican-born.

Seth Ronquillo, a spokesman for the Dream Resource Center, told the Daily Bruin, “Many of the participants in the program go on to become the leaders of the immigration reform movement. By working in social justice organizations, they are given the resources they need to continue in activism.”

For international students, the requirement is more stringent. “Students have to get credit for paid as well as unpaid internships to stay in the U.S. on an educational F-1 visa with approval from the Dashew Center for International Students and Scholars,” the Daily Bruin reports.

“I feel that UCLA as a public institution in California was established to educated the citizens of California as well as the U.S. and legal international students, not illegal immigrants. By only offering these paid internships to illegal immigrants UCLA is not only hurting law abiding citizens who are of all ethnicities including Hispanic, but they are also promoting and sponsoring people who are breaking the laws of our state and country. [This] is ironic since some of their funding comes from the state in which they are advocating for people to break this state's law,” Alexis Moran, a second-year Hispanic student at UCLA told Campus Reform,

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @PardesSeleh

Via: Campus Reform

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California Trains Professors To Avoid ‘Microaggressions’

 University of California president Janet Napolitano’s office has been training faculty members at the University of California to avoid describing America as a “land of opportunity,” along with other phrases the school claims are offensive “microaggressions.”

According to activists, “microaggressions” are subtle actions, usually unintentional, that perpetuate discrimination against disadvantaged groups even in environments where overt discrimination has been abolished. Now, the UC system has fully committed itself to formally training faculty to avoid and root out these perceived microaggressions for the good of all.

The attack on microaggressions is the centerpiece of a series of faculty leadership seminars carried out by Napolitano’s office at several campuses across the UC system. One document used in the seminars is titled Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send, and lists dozens of menacing microaggressions for faculty to avoid.

One of the largest categories of microaggressions are those that that promote the “myth of meritocracy.” According to the document, this “myth” is spread by statements such as “America is the land of opportunity,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” and “Affirmative action is racist.”

Other examples of sinister microaggressions, according to the guide, include:

• Describing America as a “melting pot” (it orders people to assimilate)
• Stating that “there is only one race, the human race” (denying the significance of a person’s ethnic or racial history)
• Asking Asians, Hispanics, or Native Americans to speak up more (“pathologizing” foreign norms and treating white norms as “normal”)
• Using “he” as a generic pronoun for all people (it makes the male experience universal and the female experience “invisible”)
• Using forms where individuals must identify as male or female (it excludes the full LGBT experience)

The guide was used in faculty training sessions for UC faculty members throughout the 2014-15 school year, but its contents only recently drew more widespread attention when one professor notified The College Fix about the materials.

Via: California Political Review

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I Still Blame the Communists

What explains the years of rage on campuses?

Maybe American higher education was never all that serious about, you know, the education portion of its name. After more than a decade of teaching in the Ivy League, the philosopher George Santayana dubbed Harvard and Yale the nation’s toy Athens and toy Sparta. He actually meant it as a compliment—as much a compliment, anyway, as he could muster. Santayana resigned his Harvard professorship in 1912 and moved to Europe.

TWS PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

But something especially odd does seem to be happening on American campuses these days. I confess to a little schadenfreude about the widely reported situation of Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor whose feminist essay in praise of faculty-student dating prompted her school to investigate her for violations of the antidiscrimination provisions of Title IX. Kipnis is a widely published controversialist, and over the years she fanned the feminist flames that have now tried to burn her. The revolution, as the old story goes, devours its children.

Still, from symbolic mattresses and op-eds against Ovid at Columbia, to students interrogated about their Jewishness at UCLA and Stanford, to the stories of lawsuits filed by the undergraduates accused by their colleges of rape, to the reports of the Boston University teacher who used her Twitter account for anti-white-male messages, to the creation of “safe spaces” lest a public lecture trigger a bad memory in someone, to . . . On and on it seems to go, each fresh day bringing some fresh account of militant outrage at American colleges. “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” Santayana once warned us. Certainly only the dead have seen the end of campus upset.

It wasn’t always thus. I’m not thinking of some supposedly idyllic moment in the 1840s, or the 1910s, or the 1950s. I mean that 20 years ago, in the mid-1990s, at least a small sense of relief was felt by a number of people. Back in 1987, Allan Bloom had out-Santayana’d Santayana with his bestselling lament, The Closing of the American Mind. In the early 1990s Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza added widely read books on the radicalism of college faculty—even as the collapse of Soviet communism from 1989 to 1991 deflated the hopes of the Marxist professors they wrote about. 

It all seemed to add up to a slow but real generational retreat from an academic world still dominated by its proud memories of 1960s student protests. I remember the Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon explaining, around 1996, that she suspected the peak of political correctness had passed—since schools like Harvard and Princeton would feel embarrassed if they didn’t have one person on the faculty they could point to as a conservative. Not more than one, perhaps, but nonetheless, it seemed to mark a change that she imagined would soon filter from the Ivy League out into the rest of America’s schools. The poet Dana Gioia proposed something similar around that time, after he’d been approached by a major foundation for names of conservative authors it might support in order to blunt the charge of its being merely a subsidiary of liberalism.

Via: The Weekly Standard

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Scientific Fraud and Politics

Look who is lecturing Republicans about scientific truth.

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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

 A press release from the Union of Concerned Scientists recently hit our desk titled “Science Leaders Decry Congressional Attacks on Science and Science-Based Policy.” It flagged an op-ed in the journal Science that laments “a growing and troubling assault on the use of credible scientific knowledge.” Hmmm. Is this about science, or politics?

Since the scientists brought it up, which is the greater threat to their enterprise: the Republicans who run Congress, or the most spectacular scientific fraud in a generation, which was published and then retracted by the journal Science?

Last year UCLA political science grad student and maybe soon-to-be Princeton professorMichael LaCour released stunning findings from a field trial on gay marriage called “When Contact Changes Minds.” He found that a 20-minute conservation with a house-to-house canvasser could convert huge numbers of opponents into supporters, at least if the canvassers explained they were gay and told personal stories.

The study quickly became a media sensation, the most talked-about poli-sci paper in years, and it led gay-rights activists including some working on the Ireland referendum to retool their voter outreach.

The problem is that Mr. LaCour stands accused of faking everything from start to finish. Ph.D. candidates at Berkeley David Broockman andJosh Kalla tried but failed to replicate Mr. LaCour’s results. They then noticed unusual statistical irregularities in Mr. LaCour’s survey panel. He now says he pulled a Hillary Clinton and deleted his raw data. But the canvassing firm he claimed to have employed has never heard of the project—and there is no proof anyone was ever contacted, much less changed their minds.

Mr. LaCour denies wrongdoing and in a response paper assailed the motives of Messrs. Broockman and Kalla, whose violations of academic decorum include their decision to go public and “bypass the peer-review process.” That would be the same process that failed to catch Mr. LaCour’s non-findings at Science magazine.

Via: Wall Street Journal

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Oregon has become the new California

 Imagine if a grizzly bear and a beaver squared off in a cage match. It would be a decided mismatch in the bear’s favor.

That’s how interstate competition used to be between California – which prominently features a bear on its state flag – and Oregon – which boasts a two-sided flag, the backside on which appears a beaver.

But the script has been flipped, according to United Van Lines’ annual migration study, which tracked nearly 130,000 interstate moves in 2013. While California continues to lose residents to other states, Oregon is now the nation’s top moving destination.

Oregon boasts much of the same appeal as California, UCLA economist Michael Stoll told CNNMoney, including mild winters, open spaces, and local arts and entertainment scenes. But the Beaver State does not have California’s sky-high cost of living.

For instance, the median price for a single-family home in greater Portland is $285,000, according to Zillow Real Estate Market Reports. In greater San Diego, it’s $468,000; Los Angeles, $522,500; San Francisco, $617,500; and San Jose, $722,500.

Meanwhile, Oregon’s economy is stronger than California’s by several key measures:

• The Beaver State’s GDP grew by 3.9 percent in 2012, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which ranked third among the 50 states. The Golden State’s GDP increased 3.5 percent, ranking fifth.
• Oregon’s nonfarm employment grew in 2013 by 2.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, tied for fourth in the country. California’s nonfarm employment increased 1.6 percent, tied for 16th in the country.
• Oregon’s personal disposable income grew by 10.1 percent between 2006 and 2011, according to BEA. California’s grew by 6.3 percent over the same span.

Finally, the Beaver State’s tax regime is less onerous than here in the Golden State.

Via: California Political Review

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California: Prop 13: Who’s the Fairest of Them All?

Almost twenty years ago, Money Magazine sponsored a debate and panel discussion at UCLA on Proposition 13. When one of the panelists, with ties to the public sector, began to assert vigorously that the tax cutting measure was unfair, he was challenged by Craig Stubblebine, Professor of Political Economy at Claremont McKenna College. Stubblebine said he would be happy to discuss fairness, but charged that the critic’s true motivation was simply the desire for more revenue. The Proposition 13 critic sheepishly conceded the point.

I thought of this last week when we of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association caucused with about a hundred Southern California taxpayer advocates and activists to discuss attacks on Proposition 13. After the event, a longtime homeowner approached me and told me that he had had words with a new neighbor over the fact that he was paying less in property taxes and the recent homebuyer thought this was unfair.

While Professor Stubblebine’s opponent refused to continue the fairness debate, knowledgeable taxpayers are always glad to address the issue.

Because Proposition 13 uses acquisition value (usually the purchase price) as a basis of taxation and not current market value, it is possible for owners of identical side-by-side properties to have significantly different tax bills. Critics claim that this is an “inherent flaw.” But this criticism flows from a mind-set accustomed to market-value-based taxation.

To understand why Proposition 13 is fair one must understand how it works. Proposition 13 limits property taxes by limiting the maximum rate to one percent and, more importantly, by limiting increases in assessed valuation to two percent annually. With the latter provision, it is easy to see how, during a real estate market upswing, a property’s market value can greatly exceed its taxable value over the span of just a few years.

This difference between a property’s actual value and its taxable value disappears when the property changes hands because then county assessors reassess the property to market value. Thus, recent purchasers derive no immediate benefit from the limitation on annual increases in taxable value.

Via: California Political Review

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