Month: June 2007

New York Times:

LONDON, June 29 — The headline of London’s Evening Standard newspaper today said 1,700 people could have died at “ladies’ night” in the Tiger Tiger night spot. The police gauged the potential death toll as “significant” if the car had exploded.

But, in the manner of a city that shrugged stoically at the July 7 bombings two years ago, many people in the streets near Piccadilly Circus seemed less than troubled here today after police announced that they had defused an explosive mixture of gasoline, nails and gas canisters in a car abandoned outside the Tiger Tiger on a thoroughfare called Haymarket.

“It’s something you get used to, living in London,” said Andrew Fowler, a 39-year-old lawyer who was sipping coffee at an outdoor café near Piccadilly Circus.

“And given the stance our government made on the war in Iraq and elsewhere, I think we are just getting used to being a target,” he said. “It’s something we have to live with.”

This had been another episode of How Not to Wet Your Pants.

Joe Mathews’ editorial about how Michael Bloomberg is Teddy Roosevelt and Arnold Schwarzenegger is Hiram Johnson would be a lot more interesting if Roosevelt and Johnson had actually won the 1912 election. They didn’t. Woodrow Wilson won. And before long we were being led by a virulent racist imbued with ideological grandeur, and we found ourselves involved in the most pointless and bloody war in the history of mankind. And, no that war did not make the world safe for democracy. Quite the opposite, as France and England would discover not long thereafter.

And while mentioned in Mathews piece, Arnold is ineligible to be president or vice-president of the United States of America. So what is the point of this fantasy?

In today’s news:

Fielding on Thursday explained Bush’s position on executive privilege this way: “For the president to perform his constitutional duties, it is imperative that he receive candid and unfettered advice and that free and open discussions and deliberations occur among his advisers and between those advisers and others within and outside the Executive Branch.”

Really?
What are the possible reasons the President could refuse to reveal the content of conversations with his advisors? There are only four I can think of:

1. The conversation involved classified matters, in which case redacted documents could still be released to Congress and to the public. The full documents, however, can be made available to Congressional committees whose members have the appropriate security clearances, such as the Intelligence Committee. None of this applies to the US Attorneys scandal, however.
2. The conversation involved operational details and plans for ongoing military action. This is probably the strongest argument in the bunch, except that again, there are Congressional committees that should have access to this material on request. And again, none of this applies to the hiring and firing of US Attorneys.
3. The conversation would be embarrassing to the administration. Of course, this is a non-starter; there is no presidential privilege to avoid embarrassment. I find it hard to believe that even this president would risk opening himself to an impeachment battle over mere embarrassment. It’s not like this guy has any shame to begin with.
4. The conversation involved conspiracy to commit a crime. Again, the President is subject to much the same laws as anyone else, and refusing to cooperate with a Congressional subpoena is simple obstruction of justice.

In light of these considerations, the only reasonable conclusion is that Number 4 is at work. It cannot just be that the firings were politically motivated. That would indeed be embarrassing and unethical, but it is not, strictly speaking, illegal. As the talking meatsticks have been fond of noting, US Attorneys serve at the President’s pleasure. It must be the case that actual crimes were committed — and we can safely assume that the crimes in question were either the illegal manipulation of elections or obstruction of justice, or both.

Given that most of Congress consists of former attorneys, it’s safe to bet that they know very clearly what is going on, on both sides of the aisle. We are in for a very interesting summer, less from the Democrat side than the Republican side, as the rats place their bets on whether to abandon the sinking ship of the Bush-Cheney junta or to bail faster.

Yet more Albert in the sun.

The reason his wiskers are so curled at the ends is that he gets them just a leeettle too close to the wood fire.

Also, the shaved bit on his left ear is from his last teeth triming and jaw x-ray.  I assume they used a vein on his ear to adminster the anesthetic.

Promoted by Steven D.

Weekly Voting Rights News Roundup

This an entry in a series of blogs to keep people informed on current election reform and voting rights issues in the news.

Featured Stories of the Week:

Attorney under fire for Ohio voter letter: Watchdogs said a former Justice Department official sided with Republicans in a scheme to scratch minority voters in the 2004 election – McClatchy Newspapers

Cage Match: Did Griffin Try to Disenfranchise African-American Voters in 2004? – TPMmuckraker.com

Voter Suppression – ePluribus Media

Just before the 2004 election, a federal judge in Ohio was deciding on a potential voter suppression case where the Republican Party challenged the credentials of “23,000 mostly black voters.” Former Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Alex Acosta sent the judge a letter arguing that it would “‘undermine'” state and federal election laws if voters’ credentials could not be challenged, Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers reported.

“The case was triggered by allegations that Republicans had sent a mass mailing to mostly Democratic-leaning minorities and used undeliverable letters to compile a list of voters potentially vulnerable to eligibility challenges.”

The letter is being linked to “a host of allegedly partisan Justice Department voting rights positions” in the wake of the firing of at least nine U.S. attorneys and may be subject to investigation by congressional Democrats within the next few weeks. Acosta declined to say if former voting counsel Hans von Spakovsky “had any role in writing the letter.”

With his letter, Acosta was “cheerleading for the Republican defendants,” said former deputy chief of the DOJ’s voting rights section, Robert Kengle.

“It was doubly outrageous,” he said, “because the allegation in the litigation was that these were overwhelmingly African-American voters that were on the challenge list.”

Former chief of the department’s voting rights section Joe Rich called it “vote-caging.”

So, what is vote caging?

According to this feature by ePluribus Media, writer Mark Johnston defined “caging” as a “method of voter suppression in which first-class mail is sent to registered voters to confirm their addresses. If the letter is returned to the sender, the name and address on the returned mail is entered into a database known as ‘caging list.'”

The report by ePluribus Media and this TPMmuckraker.com article cite this 2004 BBC News report by Greg Palast as first reporting the discovery of a “caging list” of 1,886 names and addresses of voters in “predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.”

The lists came as attachments in two emails addressed to former national research director of the Republican National Committee, Tim Griffin, among others, according to Paul Kiel of TPMmuckraker.com. The newsblog did a comparative analysis of the list with Duval County voter rolls to find if black voters were targeted in a voter suppression scheme. The results showed that “most of those on the list were Democrats and most of those were African-Americans. 57% of Duval County voters voted for Bush in the 2004 election. On the other hand, while the list is composed disproportionately of African-Americans, our analysis of the zip codes showed that the mailing was not sent exclusively to predominantly African-American neighborhoods.”

In a similar analysis, Johnston wrote that letters were sent “diffusely throughout Duval County,” perhaps to “superficially counter claims of selective targeting in the event this version of caging ended up in court. However, detailed analysis reveals evidence of racial bias against blacks and Hispanics.”

While Griffin called the vote caging allegations by Palast “ridiculous,” challenge lists as a Republican tactic is nothing new, Kiel said. The tactic was not only used in Ohio, but “in 1982, a federal judge in New Jersey issued a consent decree banning the targeting of racial minorities with challenge lists; Democrats have since alleged numerous times that Republicans have broken that decree.”

“Caging warrants the attention [of] the highest levels of government and concerned citizens – since it has been notoriously used to suppress minority votes in the past,” wrote Johnston.

In Other News:

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood asked to delay the new requirement for voters to re-register with party affiliation to 2009, according to the Associated Press. U.S. District Judge W. Allen Pepper recently ruled to require party registration and voter ID to vote in the March 2008 primaries. Hood said it would take at least a year to re-register all of the state’s 1.7 million voters, and early implementation of the law could lead to voter disenfranchisement.

Hood also asked Pepper for clarification of the voter ID mandate. Former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Fred Banks Jr. filed documents with the NAACP, saying voter ID “‘could harm participation of many voters who are elderly and poor – a disproportionate number of whom are African-American.'”

“Banks said voter ID is not necessary to enforce problems Pepper found with the Democratic primaries.”

A bill barring against voter deception passed the House on Monday. The measure would make it a Federal crime to knowingly provide false information in order to disenfranchise another person in a Federal election with up to five years in prison and $250,000 fines, the Associated Press reported.

“The measure also would require the attorney general to provide voters with accurate election information when allegations of deceptive practices are confirmed, and to report to Congress on allegations of deceptions after each federal election.”

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

One advantage to running for office (at least if yo belong to one of the two major parties) is that you get a  forum for your ideas.

I was watching the dem debate on PBS
Black Community at Howard University listening to dems

The ideas I saw coming out of the debate were interesting

more:
1) Tax investment just as earnings are taxed.  Why should the investor have to pay less tax than a worker bee?

my take on this is – stock purchase, except at the initial IPO or later release is not adding to the economy.  One might tax expansive stock at a different rate if one wanted to increase investment in companies.  But in truth taxing investment is damn difficult since it is based on self reporting.  You and I worker bees are not trusted so everything we do via work is documented with 1099 and W2 forms.  We might get a little more serious and look to documentation.

2) No fly zone over Darfur.  This seems as if it would be a piece of cake.  We have very great flyers but the will is needed to do just this one thing.

There were others, but those were what I thought were good.  I think of more later.

(Have to go play Grandma!)

I am the only LIVING member of my family who has decided that the Republican party is completely insane.  Sure, there were Grandma and Grandpa….but they were just members of the greatest generation – what did they know?  Anyhow, I was recently in a discussion with my sister who ended with “you’re so lost….you are living you life wearing blinders!”.  Gee Wiz!  Why is it that whenever someone doesn’t agree with a Republican (s)he has lost his mind?  Why am I the one wearing blinders?  Why is it me who needs to take a reality check?  Can someone please help me out here and answer the $60,000.00 question?  

You gotta love this seventh grader:

Putting its recent ruling on student speech into practice, the Supreme Court on Friday rejected a school district’s appeal of a ruling that it violated a student’s rights by censoring his anti-Bush T-shirt.

A seventh-grader from Vermont was suspended for wearing a shirt that bore images of cocaine and a martini glass – but also had messages calling President Bush a lying drunk driver who abused cocaine and marijuana, and the “chicken-hawk-in-chief” who was engaged in a “world domination tour.”

After his suspension, Zachary Guiles returned to school with duct tape covering the offending images.

Williamstown Middle School Principal Kathleen Morris-Kortz said the images violated the school dress code, which prohibits clothing that promotes the use of drugs or alcohol.

An appeals court said the school had no right to censor any part of the shirt.

World Domination Tour? I love it.

Much of the news reporting on the Supreme Court’s school integration cases has gotten it wrong, describing the outcome as a 5-to-4 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts against voluntary school integration.  In fact, the outcome of these cases was a 4-to-1-to-4 decision in which Justice Anthony Kennedy (the “1”) controlled the outcome and wrote a mixed opinion with both positive and negative implications for the future of diversity and our Constitution.

Justice Kennedy voted with Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas to strike down the specific policies used by the Louisville and Seattle school districts, but also agreed with Justices Souter, Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer that educational diversity and combating segregation are compelling governmental interests that governments may pursue through careful efforts that consider race.
Justice Kennedy ruled, for example:

•    “If school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositions of certain schools interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational opportunity to all of their students, they are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race.” (p.8).
•    “In the administration of public schools by the state and local authorities it is permissible to consider the racial makeup of schools and to adopt general policies to encourage a diverse student body, one aspect of which is its racial composition.” (p.8)

Justice Kennedy (and therefore a majority of the Court) firmly rejected Chief Justice Roberts’ position that considering race in a careful way to promote inclusion inflicts the same constitutional harm as the hateful segregation laws that Brown v. Board of Education began to overturn.  Kennedy’s opinion says, “[t]he enduring hope is that race should not matter; the reality is that it too often does,” and notes that “as an aspiration, Justice Harlan’s axiom [that our Constitution is “colorblind”] must command our assent.  In the real world, it is regrettable to say, it cannot be a universal constitutional principle.”

What Justice Kennedy (and, therefore, the Court) says is unconstitutional is considering the race of individual students in determining their school assignment.  That element, and the inexact details of the particular Seattle and Louisville plans, Kennedy said, made those programs insufficiently narrow in their tailoring to meet constitutional muster.

According to most educators and advocates concerned about promoting diversity and inclusion, Justice Kennedy “gets it”; he just doesn’t get how hard it is.  In other words, he understands and articulates well why integration is so important to equal educational opportunity, and to the future of our nation.  But he fails to see why achieving it sometimes requires attention to the details of student assignment.  Research and practical experience show that considering broad demographic trends in school attendance policy is necessary, but not always sufficient, to fostering diverse and inclusive schools.

So the Court’s ruling will no doubt make it harder to bring our kids together across lines of difference.  Yet it’s very important to acknowledge the remarkable victory for the principles of integration, inclusion and diversity, which a majority of the Court strongly embraced yesterday.

So now that consideration of individual student characteristics in school assignment is off the table in the K-12 voluntary integration context, what can schools, policymakers, parents and their children do to promote the vision of inclusion that a majority of the Court endorsed?

Justice Kennedy’s opinion makes clear that numerous options do remain, many of which include explicit consideration of race.  His opinion says: “School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races through other means, including strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race.”

Educators and civil advocates are already hard at work to craft innovative approaches within the Court’s parameters that work on the ground.

In addition, a number of civil rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, still require schools to avoid segregation or exclusion of students by race.   The Bush Administration has an atrocious record of enforcing those laws, and yesterday’s decision should be an impetus to push for change.   Certainly the next president should make it a priority.

Congress, too, has an important role to play in promoting inclusion and combating segregation in the wake of yesterday’s decision.  For example, Congress should allocate significant resources for communities that want to pursue diversity efforts in line with the Court’s ruling.  Federal support for school construction and expansion should depend, in part, on whether school locations and attendance zones will foster or stymie integration.

And, of course, the U.S. Senate must give far greater scrutiny of judicial nominees than it has done to date.  It’s deeply disturbing that four members of the Court–including the two newest members (Roberts and Alito) nominated by President Bush–would have outlawed almost all effective efforts to promote inclusion in our nation’s schools.  And their view that the modest voluntary integration efforts at issue in these cases are constitutionally tantamount to Jim Crow-era segregation is nothing short of outrageous.

While a majority of the Court correctly rejected that extreme position, the Chief Justice’s opinion–joined by Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas–fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of our Constitution and highlights the importance of exacting questioning of the President’s judicial nominations by the U.S. Senate.  Flawed as Justice Kennedy’s opinion is on this subject, it’s worth noting that, if not for the rigorous questioning and consideration of President Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee 20 years ago, Robert Bork would have been the fifth conservative vote in this and many other decisions, instead of Justice Kennedy.

Additional details regarding the decisions may be found at www.naacpldf.org and www.civilrights.org.