WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

“The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters made history Friday when it allowed eight county residents to register to vote by writing their signatures on iPads, iPhones and other mobile touch-screen devices.”

Well, to be fair, it should enfranchise a bunch of new voters in China.

THAT ARIZONA BOYCOTT REALLY GETS RESULTS:  Utah’s governor cancels plans for a special session intended to weaken his state’s restrictions on hiring illegal workers:

Amid the fallout from Arizona’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration, Gov. Gary Herbert has scrapped plans to call a special session to water down a bill requiring businesses to verify the legal residency of employees.

Legislators balked at making the change and some wanted to go in a different direction, adding tough new penalties for not checking a worker’s legal status and even suggesting Utah should adopt Arizona’s law requiring residents to prove they are in the country legally — an unsettling prospect for business leaders.

The boycott might seem like a miscalculation on the left, unless the whole point is to lose — noisily. 

And how likely is that?  Why, it would make millions of immigration reform advocates look like rubes …

BIG BROTHER GOES GLOBAL?  The Indian government reportedly “plans to do both an audit as well as security checks of all Chinese made telecoms gear installed on the existing networks of all service providers before allowing any fresh imports from that country.”  Meanwhile, privacy advocates in the United States are spending their time and treasure trying to stall new cybersecurity measures in this country.  Talk about misplaced priorities.  As I said in Skating on Stilts,

It’s remarkable when you think about it. Right now, this minute, agents of an authoritarian government are covertly turning on cameras and microphones in homes and offices all across America, spying on the unsuspecting and the innocent. They’re recording our every thought, our every keystroke, as we prepare private documents or visit websites.

And they’re able to do that today thanks to the hard work of privacy advocates.

More context here.  (And apologies to casual readers.  I should have warned you earlier that my posts won’t be exactly libertarian.  I like to think I speak for the Jacksonian wing of Instapunditarianism.)

WELL, THAT’S ALL RIGHT THEN:  Dean Chris Edley (now of Berkeley, formerly of Harvard) explains why we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about a Harvard-Yale lock on the Supreme Court.  You see, any worries about elitism and a narrow vision of American values have been solved, by affirmative action:

The gatekeeper power of such institutions is why it was so important to desegregate them (using affirmative action, among other tools) and why virtually all leaders of great universities talk about diversity and access.

For about 40 years now, all the top law schools have tried to pick students who are not just brilliant but who have the potential to be outstanding leaders from and for all of America’s communities. Today, “elite” doesn’t carry the old-boy, classist, midcentury sense.

He’s right; it definitely carries more of a new-boy, classist, end-of-century sense of elitism.  Which must be why Dean Edley doesn’t even notice it.