But it's whose bid the committee won't hear today that's set off a bit of a controversy.

Aides for Senate President pro tem Darrell Steinberg said last week that the committee would not hold a hearing for PUC Commissioner Rachelle Chong. Without the green light from lawmakers, the Schwarzenegger appointee's time on the panel will come to an end later this month.

Chong, who was first confirmed to the post in 2007, has been criticized by consumer groups who say she votes at the bidding of the telecommunications industry.

Chong's supporters cried foul, saying the Senate should at least give her the consideration of a hearing. They also pointed to her voting record, which is identical to Peevey's.

Those complaints have continued, with groups representing the business and Asian-American communities sending letters in support of Chong.

This morning, representatives from several of those organizations are meeting with Steinberg's office to make their case. UPDATE 7:40 : The meeting with Steinberg's office was cancelled by the advocates, Steinberg's office said.

"They're really withholding fair due process of a very highly qualified person," said Filipino Progress board member Norm De Young, who was scheduled to attend the meeting. "Our expectation is that if we present a fair, unbiased representation of the [appointee], that [Steinberg] will do his best to be fair and earnest on her behalf. Our expectation is one of fairness."

I only worked for the Commissioner for a few months, but I can still say this about her: to her core, Commissioner Chong is an earnest, incredibly sharp, hard-working public servant.

She has a stellar record on items she's spearheaded before the Commission, and always has the best interests of the state at heart. I certainly didn't agree with all of her assumptions or opinions, but she is utterly consistent and works from a thoughtful, considered, informed base. An intense free market advocate, she's also passionate about helping minority groups, immigrants, the poor, and those in rural areas. Though she never needed to do so, I saw the Commissioner give up some time at home with her beloved twins in order to personally visit non-profits for the elderly and immigrant groups to make sure they were prepared for the Digital Television transition. Her pet project? Minimizing the digital divide by ensuring that universal high-speed Internet access is available to all. Though it's a little-known fact, only around 10% of the CPUC's work focuses on telecom regulation. Therefore, her other big interests are just as important as her telecom-related priorities: upgrading California's energy grid to increase it's efficiency as a smart grid, and expanding the state's use of renewable energy.

Sure, anti-corporate groups are never going to like her. That's fine. That's their job, and Commissioner Chong, as someone with a free market worldview is an easy and natural target. But her worldview shouldn't be any cause for holding up her confirmation hearing. Her record is spotless and her tireless leadership speaks for itself.

Get to it, Sacramento. Reconfirm Commissioner Rachelle Chong.

Bruce Sterling’s comment about "Nazi layers" in his recent address to augmented reality (AR) company Layar comes true very fast, as the BNP releases a "British layer" that superimposes on your camera view of any British town a hyperlocal guide to population pressure, of "indigenous" British supposedly being "forced out" by what the rest of us call simply "other people". AR is self-selected mediation of the world. It lets us choose the glasses we want to see through. A nicked iPhone and credit card lets you buy criminal layers that establish where CCTV is densest in relation to regions with the wealthiest demographic, establishing the easiest predation. Soon enough, citizens of the digital cities are peering at everything through their AR phones, seeing not the city that’s in front of them, but the city they want to see.

via ‘Look out for Hollywood films about spelunking on the Moon’.

Published on behalf of the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition, the website collects and analyzes voter calls to the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline, gathering important data about voters' questions, registration and identification problems, difficulties with voting machines, and polling place accessibility issues.

In addition to raw incident data, OurVoteLive.org also features incident maps, nationwide trend information and an active election issues blog that will highlight important election incidents as they develop. As part of our defense of digital rights, EFF is committed to protecting the electoral process and producing tools that help educate and inform the public.

Transparency, disciplined review and diligent enforcement are the three key prongs needed to develop faith in the purity of the election process. Kudos to EFF and the Election Protection coalition for working to stop such dishonest, disenfranchising practices as...

Ridiculous lines to vote.

Suppose in your neighborhood there are 600 registered voters per machine, while across town there are only 120 per machine. (That's a 5 to 1 disparity, which is what exists in some places in Virginia today.) On Election Day, your line wraps around the block and looks to be a four-hour wait, while in other areas lines are nonexistent.

This ought to be a crime. It amounts to a "time-tax" on your right to vote, and some of your neighbors will undoubtedly give up and go home.

Purging voter rolls.

Voting rights advocates in Colorado, to take just one example, told a federal judge Wednesday that the names of nearly 30,000 voters were recently purged from the state registry in violation of federal law and ought to be restored by election day. In a compromise, those voters will be allowed to cast provisional ballots.

Lack of trust in voting machines.

Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week. This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for 'Barack Obama' kept flipping to 'John McCain.'

A variety of other attempts to disenfranchise voters and swing elections.

A separate report by Common Cause found voter suppression tactics in 10 key states, the most frequent being aggressive use of "voter match" requirements that put thousands of voters at risk if, for example, a middle initial on a voter registration form doesn't exactly match the name on a driver's license. Republicans in Ohio demanded a list of 200,000 voters' names with such minor mismatches so that they could be challenged at the polls. Fortunately the US Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio secretary of state did not have to supply the names, and the US Justice Department has declined to wade into the controversy, despite a personal request for a review from President Bush.

Tax plans drawn to scale.

I've gotten into a few debates recently with friends who oppose Obama's tax plan for two main reasons: (1) they feel that raising the capital gains tax will hurt the national economy by discouraging investment and removing liquidity from the market; and (2) taxes are going up for those households making over $250,000 per year. That's not much money, they argue -- a good chunk of my friends have advanced degrees (with associated debt) and live in S.F. and NYC. If they want to even dream of owning their own apartment in a decent neighborhood, making that kind of money is a necessity.

If you agree with point number two, first take a look at the chart above, which shows how the tax plans of McCain and Obama will directly impact different segments of the population.*

Clear? Good. Welcome back. Next, Daniel Gross takes apart the second argument in his Slate article "The deluded Obama critics who think $250,000 is a middle-class salary."

Barack Obama's tax plan, . . . promises to improve the nation's fiscal standing by scaling back tax cuts for people making more than $250,000. Since then, the business pundit class has been griping that people who make $250,000 a year aren't really wealthy, especially if they live in and around New York; San Francisco; or Washington, D.C. . . . On Wednesday afternoon, CNBC's unscientific online poll found that (surprise!) only 35 percent of respondents believed an income of $250,000 qualified a household for elite rich status.

I have two pieces of bad news for the over-$250,000 crowd. First, the reversal of some of the temporary Bush tax cuts is probably inevitable, given the Republican fiscal clown show of the past eight years. Second, I regret to inform you that you are indeed rich. . . . [I]ncome data can surely tell us something. And they tell us that $250,000 puts you in pretty fancy company. The Census Bureau earlier this week reported that the median household income was $50,223 in 2007—up slightly from the last year but still below the 1999 peak. So a household that earned $250,000 made five times the median. In fact, as this chart shows, only 2.245 million U.S. households, the top 1.9 percent, had income greater than $250,000 in 2007. (About 20 percent of households make more than $100,000.)

In dealing with aggregate nationwide numbers, we should of course take account of the significant differences in the cost of living from state to state. . . . But even in wealthy states, $250,000 ain't bad—it's nearly four times the median income in wealthy states like Maryland and Connecticut. And even if you look at the wealthiest metropolitan areas—Washington, D.C. ($83,200); San Francisco ($73,851); Boston ($68,142); and New York ($61,554)—$250,000 a year dwarfs the median income.

Still feel that $250,000 isn't much money? Let me know why -- I'd love to discuss.

[Update -- According to this 1997 paper put out by the Fed [pdf], 1% of the population owns 82% of the stock market.]

* Looking at tax policy alone can be misleading, especially because of the radical differences in proposed health care plans.

The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation’s selective colleges should be a national scandal. Yet the problem resides not so much in discrimination in the admissions process . . . as in the definition of merit used by the elite colleges. For by the conventional definition, which relies heavily on scores on the SAT, the privileged are the meritorious; of all students nationwide who score more than 1300 on the SAT, two-thirds come from the top socioeconomic quartile and just 3 percent from the bottom quartile.

Only a vigorous policy of class-based affirmative action that accounts for the huge class differences in educational opportunity has a chance of altering this pattern. This change should be accompanied by a fundamental re-examination of the very meaning of “merit.”

Is resilience in the face of deprivation a form of achievement? Should universities expect — and even demand — higher levels of achievement from applicants who have enjoyed every social and educational advantage? Does the emphasis on outstanding extracurricular accomplishments privilege already privileged students who have the time, the resources and the opportunities to display such accomplishments?

This field is Karabell's area of expertise. Says Slate, of his book The Chosen:

Karabel's ultimate goal in deconstructing merit is not, however, to vindicate affirmative action but to expose the hollowness of the central American myth of equal opportunity. The selection process at elite universities is widely understood as the outward symbol, and in many ways the foundation, of our society's distribution of opportunities and rewards. It thus "legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability and hard work over the prerogatives of birth." But the truth, Karabel argues, is very nearly the opposite: Social mobility is diminishing, privilege is increasingly reproducing itself, and the system of higher education has become the chief means whereby well-situated parents pass on the "cultural capital" indispensable to success. "Merit" is always a political tool, always "bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society." When merit was defined according to character attributes associated with the upper class, that imprint was plain for all to see, and to attack, but now that elite universities reward academic skills theoretically attainable by all, but in practice concentrated among the children of the well-to-do and the well-educated, the mark of power is, like the admissions process itself, "veiled." And it is precisely this appearance of equal opportunity that makes current-day admissions systems so effective a legitimating device.

In his 2005 New Yorker article Getting In, Malcom Gladwell cites to The Chosen and expounds on how admissions directors at elite schools are primarily concerned, long term, with creating and maintaining a brand:

Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn't have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It's confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modeling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don't become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you're beautiful.

At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road.

The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps[.]
Ivy League admissions directors are in the luxury-brand-management business, and "The Chosen," in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years. . . . No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain. The admissions directors at Harvard have always, similarly, been diligent about rewarding the children of graduates, or, as they are quaintly called, "legacies." . . . Karabel calls the practice [of legacy admissions] "unmeritocratic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst," but rewarding customer loyalty is what luxury brands do. Harvard wants good graduates, and part of their definition of a good graduate is someone who is a generous and loyal alumnus. And if you want generous and loyal alumni you have to reward them.

Regarding law schools, Gladwell notes:

Most élite law schools, to cite another example, follow a best-students model. That's why they rely so heavily on the L.S.A.T. Yet there's no reason to believe that a person's L.S.A.T. scores have much relation to how good a lawyer he will be. In a recent research project funded by the Law School Admission Council, the Berkeley researchers Sheldon Zedeck and Marjorie Shultz identified twenty-six "competencies" that they think effective lawyering demands—among them practical judgment, passion and engagement, legal-research skills, questioning and interviewing skills, negotiation skills, stress management, and so on—and the L.S.A.T. picks up only a handful of them. A law school that wants to select the best possible lawyers has to use a very different admissions process from a law school that wants to select the best possible law students. And wouldn't we prefer that at least some law schools try to select good lawyers instead of good law students?

This search for good lawyers, furthermore, is necessarily going to be subjective, because things like passion and engagement can't be measured as precisely as academic proficiency. Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want.

And discrimination is what I see every day when I look around at law school. My school clings to our tenuous position as one of the top-100 law schools in the nation. At the same time, we're also one of the most diverse law schools in the nation. While I commend our administration for being more inclusive than administrations at peer institutions, I still feel, everyday, that I'm surrounded by the wealthy and the privileged.

Most of my classmates have parents who, at minimum, have college educations, if not advanced degrees. A huge percentage - if not a majority
then close to it - have parents who are lawyers and/or doctors. On balance, all of my classmates work hard, but very few know just how lucky they are, just how few get the opportunity to attend law school, how few would even deign to consider college an option for them. Even fewer of my classmates can imagine or would dare try to place themselves in the shoes of someone who has lived their whole life without the safety nets, the time, the opportunity, the support, the balance, the lack of stress that they, themselves have enjoyed.

Meritocracy is preached from start to finish in law school. "Work hard and you'll succeed" is the mantra. By inference, those who don't succeed fail because they're not working hard enough. If only the school/teachers/students/profession would recognize that mantra is only true in a protected space, on a balanced field. All too often, for the vast majority, hard work alone isn't enough.