The Republican Party is bending its entire will, staking its very soul, fighting to its last breath, in service of a crusade to....

Make sure that the working poor don't have access to affordable health care. I just thought I'd mention that in plain language, since it seems to get lost in the fog fairly often. But that's it. That's what's happening. They have been driven mad by the thought that rich people will see their taxes go up slightly in order to help non-rich people get decent access to medical care.

That's a pretty stirring animating principle, no?

In 2008, the Supreme Court decided Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board. Previously, the state of Indiana had passed a statute requiring voters to show photo ID at polling places, something that was likely to disproportionately hurt black turnout. Indiana's justification for the law was its interest in preventing voter fraud, something that they were unable to demonstrate even a single case of. Nonetheless, the court upheld the law under this reasoning:

If a nondiscriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators. The state interests identified as justifications for SEA 483 are both neutral and sufficiently strong to require us to reject petitioners’ facial attack on the statute. The application of the statute to the vast majority of Indiana voters is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting “the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.”

Today, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County vs. Holder, an attack on the "preclearance" requirement of the Voting Rights Act. In 2006, Congress renewed the Act for 25 years, and after considering voluminous evidence decided not to make changes to the formula for deciding which states require preclearance for changes to their voting regulations and which ones don't. Nonetheless, the court overturned the law:

Congress did not use the record it compiled to shape a coverage formula grounded in current conditions. It instead reenacted a formula based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day. The dissent relies on “second-generation barriers,” which are not impediments to the casting of ballots, but rather electoral arrangements that affect the weight of minority votes. That does not cure the problem. Viewing the preclearance requirements as targeting such efforts simply highlights the irrationality of continued reliance on the §4 coverage formula, which is based on voting tests and access to the ballot, not vote dilution. We cannot pretend that we are reviewing an updated statute, or try our hand at updating the statute ourselves, based on the new record compiled by Congress.

Note the difference. In Crawford, where the target is a law that's likely to disenfranchise black voters, the bar for constitutionality is almost absurdly low. Regardless of what the real motives of the lawmakers are, or what the likely effect of the law is, it's valid if the state merely asserts a "neutral justification." That's it.

But in Shelby County, where the target is a law designed to protect black voters, the bar for constitutionality is suddenly much higher. Even though the Fifteenth Amendment gives Congress the unconditional right to enact legislation designed to prevent states from abridging the right to vote "on account of race [or] color," the court ruled that, in fact, Congress is quite fettered after all. It cannot decide to simply renew a law that it thinks is working well. Instead, it's required by the court to update its formulas to satisfy the court's notions of what's logical and what isn't.

So here's your nickel summary. If a law is passed on a party-line vote, has no justification in the historical record, and is highly likely to harm black voting, that's OK as long as the legislature in question can whomp up some kind of neutral-sounding justification. Judicial restraint is the order of the day. But if a law is passed by unanimous vote, is based on a power given to Congress with no strings attached, and is likely to protect black voting, that's prohibited unless the Supreme Court can be persuaded that Congress's approach is one they approve of. Judicial restraint is out the window. Welcome to the 21st century.

It’s been six weeks since the MTA raised fares and instituted a $1 fee for all new MetroCard purchases made at a vending machine, and already, straphangers may be starting to change their purchasing patterns. The MTA won’t release official numbers on fare media liability for a few months, but if our eyes are to be believed, the fee is having its intended impact.

Take a glance down around the fare control area during your next subway rider, and you will likely see the floor. By itself, this isn’t so strange, but just a few months ago that floor would often be littered with discarded MetroCards. New Yorkers in a hurry often didn’t take the time to toss their empty cards and would rather drop them than refill them. Today, the situation seems different, and my mom — a very long-time SAS reader — offered up this observation:

There is a noticeable lack on MetroCards being tossed on the ground as a result of the $1 charge. The other day Dad needed to a monthly MetroCard, and he had tossed his old one forgetting about the $1 charge. He scoured the 96th St. station and stairs and couldn’t find one. We looked when we got out of the subway and same thing — none on the ground.

I’ve noticed the same around the Grand Army Plaza and 7th Ave. B/Q stations in Brooklyn. MetroCard litter has all but disappeared lately. I’m still awaiting word from the MTA on their own numbers, but the fee may just be working. A $1 surcharge doesn’t sound like much, but for New Yorkers who refuse to give keep up any extra money to the MTA if they can help, it may be enough of a deterrent to refill and reuse. What have you seen?

Shortly before 9 p.m. I got out of a much-needed, much-delayed catch-up with a friend who shared my desire to escape -- briefly -- the news from Boston. It was unescapable. A bar next door had turned a flatscreen toward the street, then cranked up the sound, so that CNN's live feed/interviews/speculation echoed around the block, attracting a steady crowd.

We walked past it right in time to hear the "false flag" guy. Dan Bidondi, a "reporter/analyist" (sic) for Alex Jones's InfoWars, managed to ask Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick the very first question in a nationally televised press conference. 

Why were the loud speakers telling people in the audience to be calm moments before the bombs went off? Is this another false flag staged attack to take our civil liberties and promote homeland security while sticking their hands down our pants on the streets?

Patrick, looking on with a mixture of rage and pity, said "no," surely aware that he couldn't halt this guy's incipient Internet fame.

Which I'm furthering by writing about him. Sorry about that.

Still, the emergence of the truthers was inevitable. My friend Alex Seitz-Wald was writing about it less than 90 minutes after the bombings, explaining that Jones et al looked at the carnage and figured "the government did it and is going to pin the blame on them because today is Patriots’ Day, a special day in the militia movement." More than 11,000 people quickly shared Seitz-Wald's article on Facebook, because before we actually know anything about the perpetrators of the bombings, the truthers make useful punching bags. Like Seitz-Wald says, it's easier to mock them them to speculate about right-wing motives (and become infamous on Fox) or Muslim connections (and... feel no repurcussions, really, but probably make yourself unelectable in 23 or 24 states).

But the truthers have a tough road ahead. The attacks in Boston lack a number of the factors they need to concoct a really compelling conspiracy theory. They're always on the lookout for a "false flag" attack, a government-run ruse intended to bring public opinion in line. In reality, the last example they can point to of this is the Reichstag Fire; in fiction, it's usually fun to point to Watchmen. But the Boston bombings are going to present some challenges.

Too many cameras and witnesses. There's hi-def video of the first explosion from Boston.com, and there'll inevitably be more video from the spectators filming their friends at the finish line. Compare this to the classic founts of conspiracy-think: The meetings at Bohemian Grove, the Pentagon's damage on 9/11, the Kennedy assassination. The massacres at Sandy Hook, Aurora, and the parking lot in Tucson happened with no video cameras rolling.

Bad information dies quicker these days. Most 9/11 conspiracy theories, as my colleague Jeremy Stahl discovered in 2011, were rooted in erroneous news reports. These things happen; Reporters on the scene are hustling and chasing rumors and tips, and sometimes bogus news gets out. But rumors don't fester like they used to. Shoddy rumors are run up the Twitter flagpole, then debunked; video, which includes the errors, can live online forever, but so can the corrections issued by the networks.

No politician really stands to gain. This was supposed to be the week of liberal breakthroughs on guns and immigration. Both of those issues, and related bills, fade from the priority list for a few days. If you give the 9/11 conspiracy theorist a ton of credit -- and why would you? -- he draws a line from the aftermath to the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq War. The Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist points out that we got a debate on gun control. The reaction to a bombing at a marathon will bring... what? Unenforceable security standards on all city streets? Further militarization of police forces, something that was already underway?

So far, the conspiracies are weak. And so easily debunked! There were no "loud speakers telling people in the audience to be calm." Jones seems obsessed with proving that there were bomb-sniffing dogs on site. It's a comforting worldview -- the only way that police on the scene might have missed the bombs is a conspiracy of silence. You can understand why they cling to this. Maybe they shouldn't get the first questions during the press conferences, though.

"I'M NOT sure Paul deserves any praise for his performance," wrote Jamelle Bouie at the Daily Beast. Mr Bouie was discussing a speech given by Rand Paul, Kentucky's junior senator and a possible candidate for president in 2016, at Howard University, America's pre-eminent historically black college. It is no secret that Republicans have a race problem—in 2012 Mr Obama won black, Hispanic and Asian voters by sizable margins—and in an increasingly multi-ethnic country, that sort of race problem translates into a long-term political problem, and Republicans know it. Republican leaders have been vocal about their need to appeal to Latino voters. Reince Preibus, the Republican National Committee chairman, just hired a field director and a communications director to boost outreach among Asian voters. And last month Mr Preibus convened a "listening session" at a black church in East New York, a predominantly black section of Brooklyn.

But those were largely reactive measures, in keeping with many Republicans' belief that their problem in 2012 was the messenger, not the message. Mr Paul took a commendably more active approach. He is the first Republican to speak at Howard since Colin Powell delivered the commencement address almost 20 years ago. Mr Bouie was unimpressed: "Paul showed a complete unwillingness to deal with the actual issues that divide Republicans from the black community... [H]e condescended with a dishonest and revisionist history of the GOP." Other liberal commentators heaped similar scorn on Mr Paul. It's true that parts of Mr Paul's speech, such as his presumption that students good enough to get into Howard would not know that Abraham Lincoln and the NAACP's founders were Republicans, could be read as condescending. And to his discredit he was a bit too eager to elide Republicans' record on race since mid-1960s, when the party made a successful play for white voters disaffected by Lyndon Johnson's championing of civil-rights legislation.

Part of that is Rand being Rand, as the saying goes: even for a politician Mr Paul is unusually sure of himself and to my ear often comes off as an odd mixture of belligerent and brittle. And his critics need to remember that Mr Paul is an ambitious Republican politician who lives in the real world, not an Aaron Sorkin show. The scales will not fall from his eyes to the swell of a string section and Martin Sheen's approving smirk. Mr Paul will have to compete in Republican primaries, and he cannot do that effectively if he calls those voters bigots. Republican racial rebalancing will be a subtle and lengthy affair, just as Democratic racial rebalancing was. I don't recall John Stennis or Robert Byrd being cast into the outer depths, and I'm willing to bet that Jimmy Carter won the South in 1976 with plenty of help from nostalgic segregationists.

Mr Paul's Democratic critics should be worried; his speech showed that once that rebalancing happens, Republicans—particularly the libertarian wing of the Republican Party from which Mr Paul hails—can make inroads with black voters on civil-liberties grounds. He won applause when he told the audience he opposed unduly harsh sentences for non-violent drug offences. He reminded his listeners that George W. Bush and Barack Obama both admitted to using drugs but "they got extraordinarily lucky". He called mandatory minimum sentences "heavy handed and arbitrary". Of course, these policies do not only appeal to black and Latino voters (said the pasty little man typing this post and cheering inwardly), but blacks and Latinos bear the brunt of America's cruel criminal-justice practices; they stand to gain the most by their reversal. They may not like everything in the Republican platform, but then again, socially conservative black Democrats are probably not the strongest cheerleaders for gay marriage. Such are coalition politics, and it is heartening to see Republicans, however imperfectly at first, begin the process of building a diverse, policy-based coalition.

Read on: Lexington says Mr Paul is running from Goldwater's ghost

(Photo credit: AFP)

One of the worst things about "public" schools in many American jurisdictions is that even though the facilites are financed by the public they're de facto the private property of local homeowners. In DC where I live, for example, all you have to do to get your kid into a relatively high-performing DCPS school is move to the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. Meanwhile if you're poor you're out of luck.

Charter schools aren't free of this kind of concern. Obviously if you plop a school down in an affluent area you're likely to attract a disproportionately affluent group of applicants if only because convenience counts. And there are things you can do with marketing to try to select the applicants you want. But a real virtue of charters in DC is that they need to be at least formally open to applicants from anywhere in the city, while Ward 3 "public" schools can simply refuse to take any kids from the poor parts of the city. For now, that is. One of our newer Council members, David Grosso, says charter schools should give preference in admissions to kids from nearby neighborhoods. And according to Rahul Merand-Sinha this kind of arrangement is fairly common and exists already in major cities such as New York and Chicago.

In my view, over the long term the question of how linked schools are to particular places is a more important issue than the cliché debate over "charters" vs "traditional" public schools. In a zoning-free Yglesiastopia this might not be such a big deal. But in a real world where real estate markets are defined by location, location, location tying school access to location turns the school system into a form of private property. You can call a facility "public" all you like, but if the only way to gain access to it is to first buy your way into an expensive neighborhood then there's nothing public about it. It's just owned collectively by the residents of the neighborhood, in much the way that a luxury condo might have a fitness center or a gated community might have a golf course.