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Marriage Equality in Maine: The Way Life Will Be

Bangor Daily News Editorial

 
With the governor’s signature Wednesday, Maine became the fifth state in the country to allow gay marriage. Appropriately, the final debate was about equality and civil rights. That is where the focus should remain as groups opposed to same-sex marriage have pledged a people’s veto of the new law.
 
Because he had opposed gay marriage in the past, there was much speculation about whether Gov. John Baldacci would sign the bill, LD 1020, if it reached his desk. The governor relied heavily on the Constitution in reaching a decision to sign the bill, which was passed Tuesday by the House and earlier Wednesday by the Senate.
 
“In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions,” Gov. Baldacci said. A bill to, in effect, allow civil unions in Maine was rejected by lawmakers. “I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage.” His decision illustrates a rare thing in politics — an openness to new information and the power of a changed mind.
 
Quoting from Article I of the Maine Constitution, the governor said “‘no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor be denied the equal protection of the laws, nor be denied the enjoyment of that person’s civil rights or be discriminated against.’”
LD 1020, he concluded, “guarantees that Maine citizens will be treated equally under Maine’s civil marriage laws, and that is the responsibility of government.”
 
Maine is one of a few forward-looking states that have extended marriage to same-sex couples through legislation rather than court order. Vermont lawmakers last month approved same-sex marriage and the New Hampshire Legislature is expected to soon pass a similar law.
 
The Maine legislation also took important steps, mirroring the state’s Human Rights Law, to respect religious freedom and traditions. No church will be compelled to perform or recognize marriages that run counter to its faith. This strikes the difficult balance of respecting religious freedom while ensuring equality.
 
Despite strongly held views on both sides of the issue, the debate in Maine, including at a 10-hour public hearing, was generally respectful and polite. This civility should remain a hallmark of the discussion if there is a campaign to undo the law.
 
Many lawmakers believe the issue should be decided by the voters, although amendments to LD 1020 that sought to put the question out to referendum failed. This is a popular argument, but it overlooks the basis of a representative democracy. The fight for minority rights always faces opposition, which is why we rely on elected officials. Giving a different — and small — group something the majority already has should not always face a veto from the “haves.”
 
Sen. Dennis Damon, the prime sponsor of LD 1020, Gov. Baldacci and the majority of lawmakers are to be commended for fulfilling their responsibility to uphold the Constitution and to respect the separation of church and state. Any future votes on the issue, if there are any, must meet the same standard.
 

 
 

http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/04/01/joe-the-plumber-campaigning-against-employee-free-choice-hasnt-read-bill/
 

  
on Torture


 


 

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 Oregon Jewish Museum:    Oregon Area Jewish Committee Fair Housing Council and

Portland Center Stage present

 "Yes We Can!"

Unlearning Discrimination in Oregon  January 19 - March 29, 2010 at the Oregon Jewish Museum

  Yes We Can! Unlearning Discrimination in Oregon is a review of the 150 years since Oregon became part of the United States reveals an imperfect legacy–plenty of occasions for Oregonians to feel proud of their state, but also darker chapters, discrimination among them. Oregon’s first constitution, written in 1857, denied African-Americans the right to live in the state.  Did you know that before the Fair Housing Act was amended in 1988, more than 60% of the state’s rental units were off-limits to families with children? Many astonishing facts, perspectives, and images on the history of discrimination in Oregon can be experienced in two coordinated exhibitions, Anywhere But Here: A History of Housing Discrimination in Oregon, on loan from the Fair Housing Council of Oregon, and No Easy Road: Unlearning Discrimination in Oregon, on loan from the Oregon Area Jewish Committee.  Additional stories collected by the Oregon Jewish Museum examine the experience of Oregon’s Jews.

Opening Events on Martin Luther King Day, January 19, 2010

 “Beloved Community: Hope, Housing, and a Healthy Portland

Noon-1:30 p.m. (bring your lunch!) at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Street

Join us to hear Charles Jordan, a visionary community leader and major force in the conservation movement, City Commissioner Nick Fish, a passionate advocate for homelessness, housing and civil rights issues, and others. They will discuss the bold legacy of civil rights activism and the challenges that lay ahead for the next generation around equity, opportunity, shelter, environmental quality, and true sustainability in Portland. Presented in conjunction with Portland Center Stage’s production of Nancy Keystone’s Apollo, an epic exploration of the intersection of the U.S. space race, the Civil Rights Movement and the costs of human aspiration and progress.

Co-sponsored by the Oregon Jewish Museum, Fair Housing Council of Oregon, Oregon Area Jewish Committee, and Portland Center Stage.

 Opening Reception, 2:00- 4:00 PM at the Oregon Jewish Museum, 310 NW Davis Street

Following the talk, we will take a guided historic walk to the Oregon Jewish Museum for an Opening Reception between 2 – 4 p.m. Hot cider and other refreshments will be served.

PLEASE SHARE:  COME JOIN US FOR OUR CLIMB KICK-OFF ON FEBRUARY 17TH, 2010
 
Climb to Conquer Cancer 10K/5K Run/Walk is a American Cancer Society fundraiser race to be held on May 2nd, 2010. This is the only Climb to Conquer Cancer Run/Walk in Oregon and Southwest Washington

We will have free food, giveaways, reduced registration fees, music and
wonderful guest speakers / Climb to Conquer Cancer  /  Date: February 15th
Time: 6:30 P.M.-7:30 P.M.  Location: Egtvedt Building, Room 203
              Warner Pacific College  2219 SE 68th Ave (and Division)   Portland, Oregon 97215
 Registration for individuals is $25.00 till February 17 then will be $35.00
till the race on May 2nd.
 
Team registration is $200.00 till February 17th and then is $300.00 till the May 2nd race. If your team has at least ten members, you will have your team name on the event shirt.
 ALL money raised supports the mission of the American Cancer Society.
Please make checks payable to the American Cancer Society and mail to:
American Cancer Society
Attn: Climb to Conquer Cancer
330 SW Curry St
Portland, OR
97239
 
To register and donate using a credit card, go to:
 
www.portlandclimb.org
 
 
Please let us know if you would like flyers and posters.
 
Below is the information about the charity races and please contact me if you have
any questions.
 
Sincerely,
Howard Shorr, Publicity Chair
howardshorr@msn.com
 
True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to
surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others, at
whatever cost.
Arthur Ashe

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Climb to Conquer Cancer For Oregon and Western Washington
 
Mt. Tabor Park & Warner Pacific College
Portland, Oregon

Please join us to learn how you and/or your sports team can get involved in this non-competitive 5k/10k walk/run (paved roads & trails) on Mt. Tabor Park to benefit the American Cancer Society!

What: American Cancer Society’s Climb to Conquer Cancer

When: Saturday, May 2, 2010

Where: Warner Pacific College and Mt. Tabor Park

2219 SE 68th Avenue, Portland, OR 97215

Time: 8:00 A.M.

Races: 10K Run and Walk                 5K Run and Walk

            Sponsor: American Cancer Society, Greater Portland

and Vancouver Region

Everyone is invited to participate in this fundraising event, where cancer survivors are honored and participants are rewarded with the positive energy of saving and bettering lives, and the feeling of accomplishing a beautiful trek up a scenic trail, followed by a fun festival after the Climb.

If you are interested in becoming a team captain, registering for the event or joining the planning committee to help behind the scenes with this event, please contact Bonnie Ell, for more information.

To register, donate or volunteer please look at this web site:
 

http://www.portlandclimb.org
 

Contact:       Bonnie Ell                             Howard Shorr

                        Bonnie.Ell@cancer.org      Publicity Chair

                        503.795.3963                     howardshorr@msn.com 

USA 2008: The Great Depression
Food stamps are the symbol of poverty in the US. In the era of the credit crunch, a record 28 million Americans are now relying on them to survive – a sure sign the world’s richest country faces economic crisis
 

by David Usborne
We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.
 
Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.
 
The increase - from 26.5 million in 2007 - is due partly to recent efforts to increase public awareness of the programme and also a switch from paper coupons to electronic debit cards. But above all it is the pressures being exerted on ordinary Americans by an economy that is suddenly beset by troubles. Housing foreclosures, accelerating jobs losses and fast-rising prices all add to the squeeze.
 
Emblematic of the downturn until now has been the parades of houses seized in foreclosure all across the country, and myriad families separated from their homes. But now the crisis is starting to hit the country in its gut. Getting food on the table is a challenge many Americans are finding harder to meet. As a barometer of the country’s economic health, food stamp usage may not be perfect, but can certainly tell a story.
 
Michigan has been in its own mini-recession for years as its collapsing industrial base, particularly in the car industry, has cast more and more out of work. Now, one in eight residents of the state is on food stamps, double the level in 2000. “We have seen a dramatic increase in recent years, but we have also seen it climbing more in recent months,” Maureen Sorbet, a spokeswoman for Michigan’s programme, said. “It’s been increasing steadily. Without the programme, some families and kids would be going without.”
 
But the trend is not restricted to the rust-belt regions. Forty states are reporting increases in applications for the stamps, actually electronic cards that are filled automatically once a month by the government and are swiped by shoppers at the till, in the 12 months from December 2006. At least six states, including Florida, Arizona and Maryland, have had a 10 per cent increase in the past year.
 
In Rhode Island, the segment of the population on food stamps has risen by 18 per cent in two years. The food programme started 40 years ago when hunger was still a daily fact of life for many Americans. The recent switch from paper coupons to the plastic card system has helped remove some of the stigma associated with the food stamp programme. The card can be swiped as easily as a bank debit card. To qualify for the cards, Americans do not have to be exactly on the breadline. The programme is available to people whose earnings are just above the official poverty line.
 
For Hubert Liepnieks, the card is a lifeline he could never afford to lose. Just out of prison, he sleeps in overnight shelters in Manhattan and uses the card at a Morgan Williams supermarket on East 23rd Street. Yesterday, he and his fiancée, Christine Schultz, who is in a wheelchair, shared one banana and a cup of coffee bought with the 82 cents left on it.
 
“They should be refilling it in the next three or four days,” Liepnieks says. At times, he admits, he and friends bargain with owners of the smaller grocery shops to trade the value of their cards for cash, although it is illegal. “It can be done. I get $7 back on $10.”
 
Richard Enright, the manager at this Morgan Williams, says the numbers of customers on food stamps has been steady but he expects that to rise soon. “In this location, it’s still mostly old people and people who have retired from city jobs on stamps,” he says. Food stamp money was designed to supplement what people could buy rather than covering all the costs of a family’s groceries. But the problem now, Mr Enright says, is that soaring prices are squeezing the value of the benefits.
 
“Last St Patrick’s Day, we were selling Irish soda bread for $1.99. This year it was $2.99. Prices are just spiralling up, because of the cost of gas trucking the food into the city and because of commodity prices. People complain, but I tell them it’s not my fault everything is more expensive.”
 
The US Department of Agriculture says the cost of feeding a low-income family of four has risen 6 per cent in 12 months. “The amount of food stamps per household hasn’t gone up with the food costs,” says Dayna Ballantyne, who runs a food bank in Des Moines, Iowa. “Our clients are finding they aren’t able to purchase food like they used to.”
 
And the next monthly job numbers, to be released this Friday, are likely to show 50,000 more jobs were lost nationwide in March, and the unemployment rate is up to perhaps 5 per cent

 

World’s Best-Known Protest Symbol Turns 50

by Kathryn Westcott
 
It started life as the emblem of the British anti-nuclear movement but it has become an international sign for peace, and arguably the most widely used protest symbol in the world. It has also been adapted, attacked and commercialized.0320 06
 
It had its first public outing 50 years ago on a chilly Good Friday as thousands of British anti-nuclear campaigners set off from London’s Trafalgar Square on a 50-mile march to the weapons factory at Aldermaston.
 
The demonstration had been organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) joined in.
 
Gerald Holtom, a designer and former World War II conscientious objector from West London, persuaded DAC that their aims would have greater impact if they were conveyed in a visual image. The “Ban the Bomb” symbol was born.
 
He considered using a Christian cross motif but, instead, settled on using letters from the semaphore - or flag-signalling - alphabet, super-imposing N (uclear) on D (isarmament) and placing them within a circle symbolizing Earth.
 
The sign was quickly adopted by CND.
 
Holtom later explained that the design was “to mean a human being in despair” with arms outstretched downwards.
US peace symbol
 
American pacifist Ken Kolsbun, who corresponded with Mr Holtom until his death in 1985, says the designer came to regret the connotation of despair and had wanted the sign inverted.
 
“He thought peace was something that should be celebrated,” says Mr Kolsbun, who has spent decades documenting the use of the sign. “In fact, the semaphore sign for U in ‘unilateral’ depicts flags pointing upwards. Mr Holtom was all for unilateral disarmament.”
 
In a book to commemorate the symbol’s 50th birthday, Mr Kolsbun charts how it was transported across the Atlantic and took on additional meanings for the Civil Rights movement, the counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s including the anti-Vietnam protests, and the environmental, women’s and gay rights movements.
 
He also argues that groups opposed to those tendencies tried to use the symbol against them by distorting its message.
 
How the sign migrated to the US is explained in various ways. Some say it was brought back from the Aldermaston protest by civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, a black pacifist who had studied Gandhi’s techniques of non-violence.
Vietnam
 
In Peace: The biography of a symbol, Mr Kolsbun describes how in just over a decade, the sign had been carried by civil rights “freedom” marchers, painted on psychedelic Volkswagens in San Francisco, and on the helmets of US soldiers on the ground in Vietnam.
 
“The sign really got going over here during the 1960s and 70s, when it became associated with anti-Vietnam protests,” he told the BBC News website.
 
As the combat escalated, he says, so did the anti-war protests and the presence of the symbol.
 
“This, of course, led some people to condemn it as a communist sign,” says Mr Kolsbun. “There has always been a lot of misconception and disinformation about it.”
 
As the sign became a badge of the burgeoning hippie movement of the late 1960s, the hippies’ critics scornfully compared it to a chicken footprint, and drew parallels with the runic letter indicating death.
 
In 1970, the conservative John Birch Society published pamphlets likening the sign to a Satanic symbol of an upside-down, “broken” cross.
 
While it remained a key symbol of the counter-culture movement throughout the 1970s, it returned to its origins in the 1980s, when it became the banner of the international grassroots anti-nuclear movement.
Power
 
The real power of the sign, its supporters say, is the reaction that it provokes - both from fans and from detractors.
 
The South African government, for one, tried to ban its use by opponents of apartheid In 1973.
And, in 2006, a couple in suburban Denver found themselves embroiled in a dispute over their use of a giant peace sign as a Christmas wreath. The homeowners’ association threatened them with a daily fine if they didn’t remove it.
 
The association eventually backed down because of public pressure, but a member told a local newspaper it was clearly an “anti-Christ sign” with “a lot of negativity associated with it.”.
Commercial
 
CND has never registered the sign as a trademark, arguing that “a symbol of freedom, it is free for all”. It has now appeared on millions of mugs, T-shirts, rings and nose-studs. Bizarrely, it has also made an appearance on packets of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
 
A decade ago, the sign was chosen during a public vote to appear on a US commemorative postage stamp saluting the 1960s.
 
The symbol that helped define a generation of baby boomers may not be as widely used today as in the past. It is in danger of becoming to many people a retro fashion item, although the Iraq war has seen it re-emerge with something like its original purpose.
 
“It is still the dominant peace sign,” argues Lawrence Wittner, an expert on peace movements at the University at Albany in New York.
 
“Part of that is down to its simplicity. It can be used as a shorthand for many causes because it can be reproduced really quickly - on walls on floors, which is important, in say, repressive societies.”
 
And can its success be measured? Fifty years on, wars have continued to be waged and the list of nuclear-armed states has steadily lengthened.
 
But the cup is half-full as well as half empty.
 
“There are many ways in which nuclear war has been prevented,” says Mr Wittner. “The hawks say that the reason nuclear weapons have not been used is because of the deterrent. But I believe popular pressure has restrained powers from using them and helped curbed the arms race.
 
And the symbol of and inspiration for that popular pressure, says Mr Wittner, is Mr Holtom’s graphic.
 
Peace: A biography of a symbol is published by National Geographic Books in April.

Inside protest
Karen Ducey / P-I
Bearing signs proclaiming, "I'd rather wear trash bags than Macy's sweatshop clothing," two students from the University of Washington walk through Macy's department store wearing trash bags to voice their concerns over Macy's hiring non-unionized workers for factory work in Guatemala.

Stripped-down student protesters rush Macy's aisles
Suppliers exploit Guatemala labor, demonstrators say
By AMY ROLPH, Seattle P-I REPORTER

One by one, about six young women marched out of the downtown Macy's women's lounge Sunday afternoon wearing supersized garbage bags and little else, save the signs taped to their backs.
 
"I'd rather wear trash bags than Macy's sweatshop clothing," the signs read.
 
If there had been more room, they probably would have gone on to detail the plight of Guatemala's unionized garment factories -- the reason those young women and about 30 other activists waged a covert invasion of Macy's on Sunday.
 
Among the activists were University of Washington students devoting their college experience to helping workers at Cimatextiles and Choishin, two Guatemalan factories in Villa Nueva that manufacture clothes for Talbot's, Liz Claiborne and other brands sold at Macy's.
Owners closed Cimatextiles earlier this summer, displacing unionized workers and prompting students at the UW and Seattle University to rev up their campaign for improved factory conditions.
 
"In our nation, and in pop culture, there's really the sense that youth aren't interested," UW student Lauren Anderson said. "This is a case where youth are interested, and I think that should be applauded and noticed. And I hope it will help the unions."
 
And so, garbage bags rustling briskly, the young women dispersed Sunday among racks of sweaters and dresses, up escalators and past startled shoppers. The rules of the invasion were simple: Keep it civil, quick and solitary. They've learned in four previous demonstrations at the store that if everyone makes a dash for it on their own, security has a harder time herding them out onto the sidewalk.
 
But a department store clerk is quick to pick up a phone when he or she sees a half-naked college student dash by complaining that the store's clothes "smell like blood." Sunday evening, store managers declined to comment on the demonstration, and it wasn't clear which -- if any -- of the store's wares were manufactured in the two Guatemalan factories.

Protesters were in the store only 15 minutes. Outside, 12 students stood in trash bags while UW senior Travis Thomas hollered "don't shop at Macy's this holiday season" into a bullhorn.
 
Thomas is one of almost 60 UW students who have traveled to Guatemala to study human rights over the past several years, part of a study-abroad program coordinated by Angelina Godoy, a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies. That class marked the inception the UW Guatemala Project, a student organization that raised more $70,000 last year for a 10-year scholarship endowment to benefit children in the San Marcos region.
 
Godoy said her goal for the summertime study-abroad program is to get students out of a classroom and into the real world, where they meet laborers at coffee plantations, gold mines and -- maybe most notably -- struggling factory workers who tell stories of women who have lost unborn children to extreme factory conditions, been threatened for belonging to unions and even denied regular bathroom breaks.
 
"Unfortunately, in Guatemala, there's no lack of human rights issues to examine," Godoy said, adding that Cimatextiles and later Choishin were founded when international eyes were watching the Guatemalan government during trade negotiations. If not for that, the political climate probably would have squelched those attempts to unionize, she said.
 
A handful of Godoy's students returned to Guatemala after graduation to help union workers fight for legitimacy, including June graduate Michele Frix. In an e-mail, Frix said she signed a six-month lease last week for an apartment just miles outside of Guatemala City, committing herself to the workers' fight through April of next year, at least.
 
"I never question staying here because I feel like what has happened to these workers is so unjust that I couldn't possibly stop working in solidarity with them," she wrote.
 
On Monday, Frix plans to protest with unionized workers outside their factories, demanding that management come out to speak with them. The unions and the group of Seattle students have written letters to the clothing companies that outsource to the factories, but both say they haven't received any response yet.

NGO Coalition Slams U.S. Record at Home

by William Fisher
NEW YORK - A coalition of more than 200 not-for-profit human rights and social justice organisations charge that the George W. Bush administration is contributing to racial, religious and ethnic discrimination in the U.S. — and attempting to cover up its violations in a report to the United Nations they term “a complete whitewash”.1210 02 1
 
The charges are contained in a “shadow report” timed to coincide with International Human Rights Day Monday, and designed to rebut a far more positive picture painted by the U.S. State Department. State’s report, quietly submitted to the U.N. last spring and posted without publicity on the department’s website, was a requirement under the world body’s International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, to which the U.S. is a signatory.
 
The shadow report was prepared by the U.S. Human Rights Network (USHRN), a large group of non-governmental organisations ranging from Amnesty International to the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund.
 
It charges that the U.S. government has failed both by action and inaction to promote racial and ethnic justice in a host of areas, including voting rights, health care, housing, education, homelessness, police brutality and fairness in the criminal justice system.
 
It says the government report “misrepresents and/or cherry picks data demonstrating ongoing racial disparities and discrimination” and “suffers from glaring gaps clearly aimed at covering up the most egregious examples of persistent racism and racial discrimination in the U.S. today.”
USHRN’s executive director, Ajamu Baraka, told IPS, “This report is an important effort to correct the historic record as it relates to the failure of the Bush administration and previous administrations to address the ongoing crisis of racial oppression and discrimination in the U.S.”
 
Next March, the U.S. will be required to defend its record on race relations, persistent racial inequalities and ongoing racial discrimination, before a panel of U.N. experts.
 
The USHRN highlights a number of areas where it says the government report fails to confront the facts.
 
For example, said a USHRN spokesperson, the government’s report highlights training and outreach programmes for law enforcement agencies to encourage sensitivity to Arab and Muslim communities developed in the aftermath of 9/11, “while completely failing to acknowledge widespread racially and ethnically targeted law enforcement practices such as the special registration programme and aggressive round-ups and interviews of thousands of non-citizen Muslims, Arabs and South Asians.”
 
The USHRN report says, “Since Sep. 11, 2001, new federal laws and policies have limited non-citizens’ access to due process rights, while at the same time creating an atmosphere of elevated fear and mistrust of those who are foreign-born, as well as those who are perceived to be of a particular religious or ethnic background.”
 
It adds, “In an increasingly anti-immigrant climate, authorities have collaboratively advanced hundreds of measures denying immigrants and refugees access to employment and a living wage, labour protections, access to public benefits, health care, and education, and adequate public safety.”
 
The USHRN warns that “the humanitarian crisis at the border has reached new heights as migrant deaths hit record numbers and the federal government pours billions of dollars into militarising the region. In the interior, workers are increasingly subject to violent and disruptive immigration raids at their workplaces and in their homes, typically targeting a population of ethnic minorities that is hugely disproportionate to the number of people actually charged with violations.”
 
The report highlights a number of issues relating particularly to women. It charges that the U.S. government’s claim that “substantial progress has been made in addressing disparities in…access to health care has been made over the years” is belied by “persistent and dramatic racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality rates, life expectancy, and prevalence and survival rates of cancer, HIV-AIDS, and heart disease shocking in a country of the United States’ wealth and resources.”
 
For example, African American women are nearly four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women and 24 times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS, the report says.
 
It attributes these disparities to “a range of government actions and inactions, from the failure to address high rates of uninsured women of colour to restrictions on public funding for sexual and reproductive health services.”
 
Women of colour, it says, “are more economically disadvantaged than white women and more likely to rely on government funded health insurance, are disproportionately impacted by federal and state policies that restrict access to and public funding for sexual and reproductive health care.”
 
It also faults the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for failing to reopen public health care facilities in the Gulf Coast communities devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, thereby contributing to “an increase in the number of deaths due to the lack of medical services.”
 
Housing discrimination is another area underlined in the USHRN report. It says the government “has not adequately responded to private acts of housing discrimination. African Americans and Latinos frequently encounter discrimination when attempting to rent or purchase a home, or when attempting to secure funding or insurance for a home purchase.”
 
The report also links race with predatory and subprime lending, or loans to borrowers with poor credit ratings and that often carry higher interest rates and penalties.
 
“The subprime mortgage market clearly adversely impacts members of minority groups seeking mortgages within the U.S. Women of colour have been victimised by subprime lending abuses more than any other group of homeowners.”
 
The culprits, it says, include “federally regulated depository institutions, state regulated institutions, non-regulated independent mortgage bankers and brokers, secondary market institutions, private investors, rating agencies, and appraisers.”
 
The report singles out police brutality and the negative experiences of racial and ethnic minorities throughout the criminal justice system as examples of racist practices.
 
Law enforcement officers “known to have engaged in even the most egregious forms of racist police torture and violence often go unprosecuted and unpunished, and lack of transparency and effectiveness in complaint and disciplinary mechanisms allows widespread abuses to go undeterred,” the report says.
 
It accuses the Department of Justice of taking “no action to launch a comprehensive investigation into the abusive treatment of hurricane evacuees by law enforcement and military personnel, which has been documented by law enforcement agencies and non-governmental organisations. Federal courts have dismissed claims associated with these events without reaching the claims’ merits.”
 
Education is another target of USHRN’s criticism of the government report. It says, “More than five decades since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education the U.S. has failed to provide equal educational opportunity and a high quality, inclusive education to all students. Public schools today are more segregated than they were in 1970.”
 
It says that major factors contributing to racial inequality in educational opportunities include “under-performing, poorly financed schools that perpetuate minority students’ underachievement due to lower teacher quality, larger class size, and inadequate facilities; student assignment policies that promote segregation.”
 
It adds, “The legislative and executive branches of the federal government have all but abandoned school integration and diversity as a matter of policy. The public school system has become an entry point into the juvenile justice system, in particular for youth of colour.”
 
It says this “school to prison pipeline,” is fed by “historical inequities, such as segregated education, concentrated poverty, and racial disparities in law enforcement. Racial disparities exist in suspension, expulsion and arrest rates in school which contribute to disproportionately high dropout rates and referrals to the justice system.”
Company gets kindergartners' Social Security numbers, data
Permission not needed to hand over Social Security info; TEA says it's safe
Saturday, January 12, 2008

By STACI HUPP / The Dallas Morning News
shupp@dallasnews.com

 
Texas school districts are handing over Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other sensitive information about the state's kindergarten students to a private software company without permission from the children's parents.

State education officials who set up the unusual arrangement insist that the information is safe. But some educators and parents worry about sending student Social Security numbers to a private company hired to store kindergarten reading test scores.
A privacy expert says thousands of 5- and 6-year-olds are vulnerable to identity theft as a result.
 
"I would hope that any company that had the financial future of every single kindergartner in Texas would be put through the mill as far as security," said David Holtzman, a former security analyst who wrote the book Privacy Lost.
 
"This is more valuable than a million dollars in gold coins in the bank."
OZ Systems, an Arlington software company, has received at least $2.3 million in state money to create databases of preschool and kindergarten student records.
 
The new database for kindergarten test scores also includes sections for children's names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, gender, school identification numbers and parents' names and addresses, educators say.
 
OZ Systems was hired by a University of Texas research group that describes itself as the early childhood arm of the Texas Education Agency, which regulates public schools.
 
"It's quite amazing the security that OZ has in place for this information," said Susan Landry, director of the UT group, known as the State Center for Early Childhood Development. "You are overemphasizing the Social Security number."
 
More than 350,000 children attend public school kindergarten in Texas.
Dr. Landry's group uses their scores on the Texas Primary Reading Index and its Spanish equivalent, the Tejas LEE, as part of a new "school ready" ratings system that gauges the quality of preschools in Texas.
 
The UT-developed ratings system hopes to judge public and private preschool classrooms by how children fare on reading and behavior tests that they take as kindergarteners the following school year.
 
A new state law requires school districts to report the kindergarten reading scores to UT. But it doesn't require the behavior test or the reporting of a child's personal information.
 
Tracking from preschool

TEA officials said Social Security numbers help UT researchers track children from preschool, when they're too young to have a state-assigned school identification number.
 
"We have a great deal of experience in keeping that information secure," said Gina Day, deputy associate commissioner at TEA.
 
Dr. Landry said elementary school teachers are not required to enter student Social Security numbers into the OZ database. But some school officials dispute that.
 
"It won't let you do anything until you put the Social Security number in," said Mark Lukert, principal of Lakeside Elementary School in Coppell.
 
Social Security numbers and dates of birth are key ingredients for cooking up a fake identity, said Mr. Holtzman, the privacy expert.
 
"Just think about when you have to identify yourself to a credit card company," he said. "These are the questions they ask."
 
In recent years, government agencies have moved away from using Social Security numbers to identify people and now use random numbers instead.
 
Pearson Educational Measurement officials, who develop or administer standardized tests in Texas and 22 other states, say they use ID numbers to link students to their test data.
 
"I don't think in the testing side of it that we ever encounter Social Security numbers," said David Hakensen, vice president of public relations.
 
Last month, TEA told elementary school principals in a letter that they have until Feb. 22 to enter the student records in the OZ database. Some educators said they didn't question the database security because they believed the information goes to TEA and not a private vendor.
 
"As adults you don't even put your Social Security card in your wallet," said Mr. Lukert, an officer with the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association. "And yet here we are required to give that information out. It doesn't make sense."
 
TEA officials said OZ Systems' contract requires the company to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, a federal law that protects student educational records.
 
OZ Systems executives compare their security levels to that of a bank.
 
Steve Montgomery, the company's vice president of operations, said software hasn't fallen prey to hackers in OZ Systems' 22-year history.

'Nothing to worry about'
 
The company also has a proven track record in Texas and worldwide, Mr. Montgomery said.
Parents "have nothing to worry about," he said. "If you think about the state maintaining the information, your best and brightest in technology don't work for state departments. They're in the private sector."
 
Laura Jordan isn't convinced. The Richardson mother of three doesn't like putting her own Social Security number on secure Web sites, let alone her children's.
 
"I don't feel comfortable with my son's Social Security number being out there," said Mrs. Jordan, whose son is a kindergartener at Yale Elementary School. "Certainly, I would like to be asked for permission."
 
Mari McGowan, a McKinney attorney who represents Dallas-area school districts, said releasing student Social Security numbers to OZ probably doesn't break federal privacy laws that require parent consent.
 
One exemption to FERPA appears to allow schools to send private student information to organizations working on behalf of state education agencies.
 
Kyle Ward, a Texas Parent Teacher Association spokesman, says he trusts UT and TEA officials to safeguard children's identities as closely as they safeguard them in the classroom.
 
"We have no reason to believe there is a problem," Mr. Ward said.
 
But problems have cropped up in the past.
 
Personal data for millions of U.S. veterans fell into the hands of thieves who stole a laptop computer from a Department of Veterans Affairs computer analyst in 2006.
 
"People have a hard time getting worked up because they don't see the cause and effect," Mr. Holtzman said. "You've got to stop it when they're collecting it because by the time they've lost it, it's too late."
 
CHILD PRIVACY TIPS
Here are a few ways parents can protect their children's identities:

At home:  
•Check your child's credit report. Credit reporting agencies generally don't keep files on children, so a check should turn up nothing until the child's 18th birthday unless the child is a victim of identity theft.
 
•Check for an earnings statement from the Social Security Administration. Unless your child is a victim of identity theft, there should be no earnings associated with the child's Social Security number. Request an earnings statement online at www.ssa.gov or by calling 1-800-772-1213.
 
•Protect Social Security numbers. Shred anything that contains the number and keep Social Security cards at home.
 
•Warn your children against giving out personal information unless it's vital and explain to them why.
 
•Be wary of credit offers to your children. If you see anything suspicious, notify the credit bureaus and check your child's credit report.
 
•Get a police report. If your child's identity has been stolen, file a police report and keep copies on file. You'll need the report for proof that your child is a victim.
SOURCE: Truston.com
 
At school:

•At the beginning of each school year, parents can sign a statement that they do not want their child's student directory information released to the public. Directory information includes the child's name, address, telephone listing, e-mail address, photograph, date and place of birth and grade level.
SOURCE: Texas attorney general's Public Information Act handbook.

 

 
A spate of negative publicity raises the question of whether police are using excessive force against women. A nurse's aide in Arizona, who faces a trial after being pulled over by an officer, says the issue is central to her own case.
 

CORNVILLE, Ariz. (WOMENSENEWS)--The four successive signs at the side of the road greet drivers saying: Welcome to Cornville . . . A quiet place . . . Please slow down . . . To a leisurely pace.
But Cornville was far from quiet for Dibor Roberts, a nurse's aide born in West Africa, who took a short cut on her drive home from work last summer. At about 10:45 p.m. on a Sunday evening she saw a blue light, then bright lights and a vehicle with "Sheriff" written on it.
 
It was the beginning of what she calls a giant misunderstanding with law enforcement that leaves her facing two felony charges: resisting arrest and unlawful flight from an officer.
 
Roberts says she doesn't know if she was speeding. She insists the reason she didn't stop was because she wasn't certain it really was the police. She had seen news stories about police impersonators arresting unknowing victims, so she wanted to get to a well-lit area before pulling over.
 
Before she could get there, she says the driver of the other car forced her off the road and jumped out of his car screaming and yelling with gun drawn. She claims he broke her window, grabbed her cell phone and threw it away, eventually knocking her to the ground and handcuffing her. He told her she would be going to jail.
 
Yavapai County Sheriff Steve Waugh defended the officer in a press conference in January saying he clearly identified himself by pulling alongside her car so she could see his patrol vehicle, which was well marked. He contends that the sergeant was ignored and that she refused to pull over. He insists Roberts was not thrown to the ground--a witness who was driving by indicated she was "combative"--and that the officer was well within his rights to take the action he did. He says the incident snowballed into something unfortunate for all parties.
 
"He didn't tell me what he was arresting me for," Roberts contends. "I tried to explain what happened when I was in jail but no one would listen. I've lost my trust in the police. It seems they can do whatever they want regardless of the truth."
 

 
Over 35.5 Million Found Hungry in 2006 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 
Published: November 14, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 35.5 million people in this country went hungry in 2006 as they struggled to find jobs that can support them, a figure that was virtually unchanged from the previous year, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday.   
Single mothers and their children were among the most likely to suffer, according to the study.
 The 35.5 million people represented more than 1 in 10, or 12.1 percent, who said they did not have enough money or resources to get food for at least some period during the year, according to the department's annual hunger survey. That is compared with 35.1 million people who made similar claims in 2005.
 ''This is encouraging, but we know we have more work to do,'' said Kate Houston, USDA's deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services. She said the numbers aren't much different from 2005, which saw a decline after five straight years of increases.
 Of the 35.5 million people, 11.1 million reported they had ''very low food security,'' meaning they had a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat. For example, among families, a third facing disruption in the food they typically eat said an adult in their family did not eat for a whole day because they could not afford it.
 ''No one in America should go hungry,'' Houston said.
The survey was based on Census Bureau data and does not include the homeless. About three-quarters of a million people were homeless on a given day in 2005, according to federal estimates.
Among the findings:
--Among families, about 12.6 million, or 10.9 percent, reported going hungry for at least some period last year. Those disproportionately reporting hunger were single mothers (30.4 percent); black households (21.8 percent); Hispanic households (19.5 percent); and households with incomes below the official poverty line (36.3 percent).
--States with families reporting higher prevalence of hunger from 2004-2006 included: Mississippi (18.1 percent); New Mexico (16.1 percent); Texas (15.9 percent); and South Carolina (14.7 percent).
--Of the 35.5 million people reporting periods of hunger last year, 12.6 million were children.
''This report comes at a critical time for hungry Americans and those of us who help serve them,'' said Vicki Escarra, president of the nation's largest hunger relief group -- America's Second Harvest-The Nation's Food Bank Network. ''There simply may be no food for many families when the rest of the nation gathers to celebrate Thanksgiving and religious holidays.''
In the report, the terms ''low food security'' and ''very low food security'' replace the old descriptions of ''food insecurity without hunger'' and ''food insecurity with hunger.'' The change was made last year based on a recommendation by the National Academies, which advise the government on science issues, a move that has drawn criticism by some Democrats who say the report speaks too euphemistically.
Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group, said he is troubled by the report. He said figures for 2007 could prove to be worse, given rising food prices and an uneven economy this year.
''We need to do more to make sure that households have access to healthy food by improving and expanding proven programs that help,'' he said.
 
On the Net:  Hunger Report:  http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err49/err49.pdf
Department of Agriculture: http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usdahome

Statistic: Army desertion rate up 80 percent since invasion of Iraq 
Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer   November 16, 2007 

WASHINGTON - Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.    

While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam war, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.

According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year.

The increase comes as the Army continues to bear the brunt of the war demands with many soldiers serving repeated, lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military leaders - including Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey - have acknowledged that the Army has been stretched nearly to the breaking point by the combat. And efforts are under way to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps to lessen the burden and give troops more time off between deployments. 

Despite the continued increase in desertions, however, an Associated Press examination of Pentagon figures earlier this year showed that the military does little to find those who bolt, and rarely prosecutes the ones they get. Some are allowed to simply return to their units, while most are given less-than-honorable discharges.
On the Net: Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

Hate Crimes Rose 8 Percent in 2006  By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer   November 19, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) - Hate crime incidents in the United States rose last year by nearly 8 percent, the FBI reported Monday, as racial prejudice continued to account for more than half the reported instances.   Police across the nation reported 7,722 criminal incidents in 2006 targeting victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability. That was up 7.8 percent from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005.  Although the noose incidents and beatings among students at Jena, La., high school occurred in the last half of 2006, they were not included in the report. Only 12,600 of the nation's more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006 and neither Jena nor LaSalle Parish, in which the town is located, were among the agencies reporting. Nevertheless, the Jena incidents, and a rash of subsequent noose incidents around the country, have spawned civil rights protests in Louisiana and last week at Justice Department headquarters here. The department said it investigated the incident but decided not to prosecute because the federal government does not typically bring hate crime charges against juveniles

Bush Loses Ground With Military Families

by Faye Fiore
WASHINGTON - Families with ties to the military, long a reliable source of support for wartime presidents, disapprove of President Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq, with a majority concluding the invasion was not worth it, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.1207 03
 
The views of the military community, which includes active-duty service members, veterans and their family members, mirror those of the overall adult population, a sign that the strong military endorsement that the administration often pointed to has dwindled in the war’s fifth year.
 
Nearly six out of every 10 military families disapprove of Bush’s job performance and the way he has run the war, rating him only slightly better than the general population does.
And among those families with soldiers, sailors and Marines who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 60% say that the war in Iraq was not worth the cost, the same result as all adults surveyed.
 
“I don’t see gains for the people of Iraq . . . and, oh, my God, so many wonderful young people, and these are the ones who felt they were really doing something, that’s why they signed up,” said poll respondent Sue Datta, 61, whose youngest son, an Army staff sergeant, was seriously wounded in Iraq last year and is scheduled to redeploy in 2010. “I pray to God that they did not die in vain, but I don’t think our president is even sensitive at all to what it’s like to have a child serving over there.”
 
Patience with the war, which has now lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in World War II, is wearing thin — particularly among families who have sent a service member to the conflict. One-quarter say American troops should stay “as long as it takes to win.” Nearly seven in 10 favor a withdrawal within the coming year or “right away.”
 
Military families are only slightly more patient: 35% are willing to stay until victory; 58% want the troops home within a year or sooner.
 
Here, too, the military families surveyed are in sync with the general population, 64% of whom call for a withdrawal by the end of next year.
 
“You generally expect to see support for the president as commander in chief and for the war, but this is a different kind of war than those we’ve fought in the past, particularly for families,” said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.
 
Today’s all-volunteer force is older and more married than any before it. Facing a shortage of troops, the Army increased the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42 and called up reservists, who tend to be older and more settled than recruits fresh out of high school. The result is a fighting force that left thousands of spouses and children behind.
 
At the same time, deployments have grown longer and more frequent as troops rotate in and out of the war zone, sometimes three and four times, with no fixed end date in sight, a wearing existence that has contributed to opposition to Bush and his war strategy.
 
“The man went into Iraq without justification, without a plan; he just decided to go in there and win, and he had no idea what was going to happen,” said poll respondent Mary Meneely, 58, of Arco, Minn. Her son, an Air Force reservist, served one tour in Afghanistan. “There have been terrible deaths on our side, and it’s even worse for the Iraqi population. It’s another Vietnam.”
 
The survey, conducted under the supervision of Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus, interviewed 1,467 adults nationwide from Nov. 30 through Monday. It included 631 respondents from military families and 152 who have had someone in their family stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The margin of error for the entire sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points; for military families it is 4 percentage points, and for families with someone in the war zone it is 8 percentage points.
 
Other surveys have shown an erosion of support for Bush and the war among military personnel, including a 2005 poll by Military Times of their active-duty readers.
 
Now the disapproval of Bush appears to have transferred to his party. Republican leanings of military families that began with the Vietnam War — when Democratic protests seemed to be aimed at the troops as much as the fighting — have shifted, the poll results show.
 
When military families were asked which party could be trusted to do a better job of handling issues related to them, respondents divided almost evenly: 39% said Democrats and 35% chose Republicans. The general population feels similarly: 39% for Democrats and 31% for Republicans.
 
“The Democrats are not seen as the anti-soldier group anymore,” said Charles C. Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University. He added that Bush’s firm backing of the troops did not gain him any points because the entire country was now viewed as supportive of the military, even if not of the war. “He doesn’t get extra credit for that.”
 
“We support the troops; we don’t support Bush,” said respondent Linda Ramirez, 52, of Spooner, Wis., whose 19-year-old son is due to be deployed with the Marines early next year. “These boys have paid a terrible, terrible price.”
 
The carnage — nearly 3,900 killed and 29,000 wounded — is contributing to the war’s unpopularity, even though the number of dead is low compared with previous wars, Moskos thinks.
 
Medical advances on the battlefield have saved more lives but sent home more severely injured troops; for every soldier killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, eight are wounded — nearly triple the ratio in Vietnam.
 
Asked about the Bush administration’s handling of the needs of active-duty troops, military families and veterans, 57% of the general public disapprove. That number falls only slightly among military families — 53% give a thumbs-down.
 
And most military families and others surveyed took no exception to retired officers publicly criticizing the Bush administration’s execution of the war. More than half of the respondents in both groups — 58% — say such candor is appropriate. Families with someone who had served in the war are about equally supportive at 55%.
 

Tom Tancredo Hired Illegal Laborers to Renovate His McMansion

By Max Blumenthal, AlterNet. Posted December 1, 2007.

Anti-immigration zealot and GOP presidential candidate Tom Tancredo hired what he often refers to as "criminal aliens" to renovate his Colorado house.
When Republican Representative Tom Tancredo isn’t railing against the “scourge” of illegal When Republican Representative Tom Tancredo isn’t railing against the “scourge” of illegal immigration on the presidential campaign trail, he relaxes in the 1053 square foot basement recreation room of his Littleton, Colorado McMansion. There, he and his family can rack up a game of billiards on their tournament size pool table, play pinball, or enjoy their favorite movies in the terraced seating area of a home theater system. Tancredo, who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by producing evidence that he suffered from mentally illnesses, especially likes entertaining his buddies with classic war movies.
 
“We have friends over and I have now shown Pearl Harbor about six times,” Tancredo boasted to the Rocky Mountain News about his 102-inch television. “But I mainly just show the attack scene because the sound is so good.”
 
When Tancredo hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them. Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.
 
During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn't want us here, but he'll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It's just not right.”
 
The Post report momentarily threw Tancredo on the defensive. In a fiery speech soon after the story’s publication, Tancredo blamed his foibles on the INS. “I haven't the foggiest idea how many people I may have hired in the past as taxi drivers, as waiters, waitresses, home improvement people,” he boomed from the House floor. “I haven't the foggiest idea how many of those people may have been here illegally, and it is not my job to ask them.” Then defiance gave way to vitriol as the congressman dubbed undocumented immigrants, “the face of murder.”
 
Only days before the Post’s story appeared, Tancredo had personally reported an honor student profiled in the Denver Post to the INS because the 14-year-old was not a legal resident of the United States. The stunt forced the boy’s family to go into hiding. Fortunately for Tancredo, the ensuing revelations of his hiring of illegal labor fell below the radar of the national media, allowing his anti-immigrant crusade to proceed unabated.
 
Tancredo proceeded to organize over 90 anti-immigration House members into an informal but powerful caucus that has effectively prevented any non-enforcement related immigration legislation from reaching the President’s desk. His Team America PAC, which is chaired by right-wing pundit Bay Buchanan, has donated tens of thousands of dollars this election cycle to nativist candidates who hope to fill Tancredo’s caucus with new blood when he retires next year. Down on the border, Tancredo announced his support for the Minutemen, providing the anti-immigrant militia with a veneer of respectability while its pistol-packing members hunt for brown-skinned evildoers.
 
Tancredo has also played an instrumental role in shaping the way immigration is discussed in the media. Despite his third tier status in the presidential campaign, as of November 19 the congressman has appeared on Fox News more times during 2007 than any other presidential candidate. A former Tancredo staffer speaking on condition of anonymity told me recently that the congressman spends extensive time on the phone with top-rated CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, offering him tips and ideas for his daily “Broken Borders” segments.
 
Dobbs, in turn, has produced an unending string of specious “reports” painting undocumented immigrants from Latin America as disease-ridden criminals. In May, for example, Dobbs falsely claimed that illegal migrants from Mexico were responsible for 7000 new cases of leprosy in the United States. A wave of negative publicity forced Dobbs to acknowledge his source for the bogus story as Madeleine Cosman, a deceased white supremacist activist who often appeared at anti-immigrant rallies beside her pal Tancredo.
 
The success of Tancredo’s efforts to project his nativist politics onto the national stage were apparent during CNN’s November 26 Republican Youtube debate. In a heated exchange that highlighted press coverage of the debate, presidential frontrunners Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney competed with one another over who could appear the most draconian towards “illegals.” When Romney accused Giuliani of running a “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants while serving as mayor of New York, Giuliani shot back that Romney had run a “sanctuary mansion” when he was governor of Massachusetts. Giuliani pointed to a lengthy Boston Globe report revealing that Romney paid a gardening service that employed illegal workers to tend the lawns of his mansion. Suddenly, the candidates with the most tolerant records on immigration issues sounded like Tancredo.
 
While the two rivals clashed, Tancredo stood at the far end of the stage smiling contentedly. The cause he championed for years with a band of ornery border vigilantes, white supremacists, and assorted dregs by his side had become a central theme in the race for the White House. Of all the major GOP candidates, only Sen. John McCain has countered Tancredo with big tent appeals to socially conservative Latinos. The other candidates have reliably parroted his talking points, parrying accusations of ideological impurity by accusing one another of being soft on illegal immigration. “All I've heard is people trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo,” Tancredo observed during the debate. “It is great.”
 
But there is one way the Republican candidates can never out-Tancredo Tancredo. The congressman lives in a “sanctuary mansion” built by the kind of people he has made a career out of demonizing. Tom Tancredo may have no hope of winning the Republican nomination, but in the cause of hypocrisy, he is the frontrunner.
 

Dummies

 

In hit Iranian TV drama, Holocaust no 'myth'

An Iranian student helps save his love – a French Jew – from the Nazis in World War II.

 
For seven months, millions of Iranians have turned on their television sets Monday at 10 p.m. to watch a World War II drama that challenges stereotypes about Iran and Judaism.
 
The story line could not be less likely in the Islamic Republic, whose president calls the Holocaust a "myth": An Iranian-Palestinian student in France helps save his love – a French Jew – and her family from the Nazis and from becoming victims of the Holocaust. This week the 30-part love story comes to a spectacular end with state-owned television broadcasting an encore presentation of the final episode, which includes a shootout amid the ancient ruins of Persepolis.
 
The message of the series, says director Hassan Fathi, is that "what is endangering peace is extremist thinking, and political hard-liners that separate people from each other. God created people to love each other, regardless of religion.... Unfortunately [when it comes to] religion the current of extremism is always on, creating misunderstanding between cultures." The Iranian hero and his Jewish love are finally united in the last scene at the foot of Iran's snow-covered Damavand mountain, ending a saga sympathetic to the fate of European Jews. The series is fiction, but inspired by Abdol Hussein Sardari, a real-life Iranian consul in Paris who issued Iranian passports to more than 1,000 European Jews during World War II so they could flee.
 
The tale surprised many Iranians with its apparent challenge to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statements about the Holocaust.
 
But "Zero Degree Turn" highlights another message commonly lost amid fierce anti-Israel rhetoric: That Iran and many Iranians differentiate between Jews, who are meant to be accepted by Muslims as fellow monotheists and "people of the book;" and Zionism, which is officially vilified in Iran as the destructive ideology of Israel.
 
That difference is often highlighted by Iran's estimated 25,000 Jews, who form the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel.
 
"Of course, nothing in cinema and television will be complete [but] overall, we think the whole story is a positive point for Jews in Iran," says Ciamak Moresadegh, chairman of the Tehran Jewish Committee, which wrote a letter of thanks to Iran's state-owned television. "The problems between the Zionist movement and Iran are not related to the Jewish population in Iran," says Mr. Moresadegh. The TV drama "helps make this clear."
 
A large number of Jews left Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and many were purged as untrustworthy from the military officer corps and other professions. The exodus has slowed considerably, but continues. Judaism is an officially sanctioned religion, and Jews are allotted one seat in Iran's parliament. But the Jewish community has sometimes come under pressure; several Jews arrested in 1999 were charged with spying for Israel.
 
Mr. Ahmadinejad says the six million killed in the Holocaust are a modern exaggeration used by the West to create Israel on occupied Muslim lands; and not a birthright of Jews who consider Israel a land promised them by God. He routinely decries Israel, saying the Jewish state will be "wiped from the face of time."
 
The final episode of "Zero Degree Turn" shows Nazi Germany in favor of the Zionist enterprise as a way of moving Jews out of Europe. In the story, the Zionist uncle – who tries to keep the Iranian Muslim and his Jewish niece apart, sometimes at the point of a gun – is seen in a synagogue, expounding on the virtues of Zionism. "Any Jew who lives outside Palestine is not a Jew."
 
The series could not have come at a more relevant time for Iranians. The president hosted a Holocaust conference last December that featured Holocaust deniers. In a bid to reassure the Jewish community, Iran's foreign ministry in March facilitated a diplomatic tour of Jewish facilities in Tehran.
 
The magnified relevance of the series has been coincidence, says Mr. Fathi, a veteran director of historical fiction. "I decided to produce this series in 2002, and in those days the Holocaust was not an issue," he says.
 
"Even if one single Jew is killed in German camps, the world should be ashamed. By the same token, if a single Palestinian dies, the world should be ashamed," says Fathi. "I sympathize with the Jewish victims of World War II, to the same extent [I sympathize] with women and children victims of the war in Palestine."
 
The TV series is one of the most expensive and elaborate ever produced here, with period costumes on location in Paris, Budapest, and cities in Iran. Iranian viewers say the love story and its iconoclastic content kept them glued to their sets Monday nights. "This was the most professional TV series in Iranian history. Everybody watched it," says one regular viewer. "The first episodes were counter to what President Ahmadinejad was saying, and showed the Holocaust existed, so it was not clear what the signals were."
 
But it was not long before the differences between Judaism and Zionism were made clear, a point made by Ali Akbar Velayati, a foreign affairs adviser to Iran's supreme leader. His live commentary immediately after the final segment was advertised during the show by a ticker along the bottom of the screen.
 
"The European policies created Zionism more than the Jews [though] extremist Jews had a role. The Jews are victims, and Muslims were the same," asserted Mr. Velayati. "Europeans fighting Jews, the last time in Germany, has historic roots. And the correlation between Zionism and Nazis is known."
 
The political subtext was secondary to the story for many Iranians. Iranian character Habib Parsa's pursuit of his Jewish heartthrob, Sarah, lands him in prison three times. She also surmounts constant challenges and then is waiting in the falling snow when Habib — much older — is released from prison.
 
"It was a very tough night for me," says Fathi of the final episode. "But I was so happy Sarah and Habib got together. The days that God is very happy are the days that people from different cultures hug each other in brotherhood."

Community colleges ordered to let in illegal immigrants:  Decision won't cost N.C., officials say, but critics say colleges shouldn't ignore broken laws

MARK JOHNSON, Charlotte Observer

November 27, 2006

mjohnson@charlotteobserver.com

North Carolina's community college system has ordered the state's 58 campuses to admit illegal immigrants, overturning a policy of letting the heavily enrolled schools set their own rules for handling undocumented applicants.

 
David Sullivan, the system's top lawyer, dispatched a memo this month telling the community colleges that state regulations require the schools to admit illegal immigrants who meet the schools' basic requirements of being either a high school graduate or an adult in need of skills training.
 
"That's just wrong," said state Sen. Richard Stevens, a Raleigh Republican and co-chair of the higher education committee. "The law ought to be changed."
 
Rep. Winkie Wilkins, a Person County Democrat who chairs the House committee on community colleges, said he was "blindsided" by the news.
 
The state's community colleges focus on training and retraining the work force, usually through skills and trade education. Melinda Wiggins is executive director of Student Action With Farm Workers, which helps children of migrant farm workers get into high school and college. She said barring illegal immigrants from community colleges penalizes youths who were brought to the United States as children.
"North Carolina is their home. It's where they've been raised and lived," Wiggins said.
 
"By denying them an education, we're really creating an underclass of folks here in the state who cannot contribute to society."
 
N.C. public schools must accept children of illegal immigrants under federal regulations. The University of North Carolina system admits undocumented applicants, but a bill to provide in-state tuition to some was quickly shot down in 2005.
 
Decision won't cost N.C.
 
Community college executives said the admissions guidelines won't cost the state. Illegal immigrants must pay out-of-state tuition, $7,465 for a full class load, which is more than the actual cost of providing the education, $5,375, the officials said.They also emphasized that under the old policy, with most schools admitting undocumented applicants, 340 of the 270,000 students last year -- or about one-tenth of 1 percent -- were illegal immigrants. If that figure quadrupled, the system could handle it, Sullivan said.
 
"Colleges should immediately begin admitting undocumented individuals," Sullivan wrote in the Nov. 7 memo.
 
It's unclear how many schools prohibited illegal immigrants from enrolling.
 
A study this year by a Duke University graduate-level class listed 22 campuses as having a written or unwritten policy to bar undocumented applicants. The Observer contacted the three schools nearest to Charlotte, McDowell Technical, Cleveland and Stanly community colleges. All said they had no such policy and had been admitting illegal immigrants.
 
Central Piedmont Community College has been admitting illegal immigrants.
 
Wake Technical Community College, in Raleigh, was among the schools that had to change its policy after the recent memo.
 
"We had just always required appropriate documentation," including legal residency, said Laurie Clowers, the school's public relations director.
 
After review, a policy change
 
The new policy memo came after an unverified complaint that an illegal immigrant was dismissed from one of the colleges and after the Duke class's study. The study was prompted by an unrelated research request from the community colleges.
 
The community colleges are required to keep an open-door admissions policy, but were allowed in 2004 to set their own regulations on illegal immigrants.
Sullivan said administrators reviewed that practice this year. They discovered a 1997 advisory letter from the office of then-Attorney General and now Gov. Mike Easley that, while not addressing illegal immigrants specifically, said that the community colleges cannot impose nonacademic criteria for admission.
 
"We thought through the policy again," Sullivan said, and concluded they were wrong to let schools reject undocumented applicants.
 
Easley's current staff deflected any comment on whether the community colleges were correctly interpreting the 10-year-old letter.
 
"You're going to have to ask the current attorney general that," said Sherri Johnson, Easley's
communications director.
 
Questions of legality
 
Robert Luebke, an education policy analyst with the conservative Civitas Institute in Raleigh, said the new community college directive orders the schools to ignore the fact that the prospective students are breaking the law."These students cannot legally work in North Carolina," Luebke said in a prepared statement. "Subsidizing the education of students who can only work using a forged or stolen Social Security card is absurd."
 
N.C. Sen. Fred Smith and Salisbury lawyer Bill Graham, both Republican candidates for governor, both said they oppose admitting illegal immigrants.
 
"People can't pick and choose which laws they're going to follow," Smith said, "and which laws they're not going to follow."
 
Mike Taylor, president of Stanly Community College, said the out-of-state tuition expense effectively serves as an exclusion for illegal immigrants, since many cannot afford the extra cost. That means members of that community can't get job training.
 
"We're put between a rock and a hard place on this," Taylor said. "These same people we can't admit without paying out-of-state tuition can graduate as valedictorian from any high school in Stanly County."
 

Ryan Beckwith of The (raleigh) News & Observer contributed.

In Name Count, Garcias Are Catching Up to Joneses By SAM ROBERTS, New York Times

Published: November 17, 2007
 
Step aside Moore and Taylor. Welcome Garcia and Rodriguez.
 
Smith remains the most common surname in the United States, according to a new analysis released yesterday by the Census Bureau. But for the first time, two Hispanic surnames — Garcia and Rodriguez — are among the top 10 most common in the nation, and Martinez nearly edged out Wilson for 10th place.
 
The number of Hispanics living in the United States grew by 58 percent in the 1990s to nearly 13 percent of the total population, and cracking the list of top 10 names suggests just how pervasively the Latino migration has permeated everyday American culture.
Garcia moved to No. 8 in 2000, up from No. 18, and Rodriguez jumped to No. 9 from 22nd place.
 
The number of Hispanic surnames among the top 25 doubled, to 6.
Compiling the rankings is a cumbersome task, in part because of confidentiality and accuracy issues, according to the Census Bureau, and it is only the second time it has prepared such a list. While the historical record is sketchy, several demographers said it was probably the first time that any non-Anglo name was among the 10 most common in the nation. “It’s difficult to say, but it’s probably likely,” said Robert A. Kominski, assistant chief of social characteristics for the census.
 
Luis Padilla, 48, a banker who has lived in Miami since he arrived from Colombia 14 years ago, greeted the ascendance of Hispanic surnames enthusiastically.
 
“It shows we’re getting stronger,” Mr. Padilla said. “If there’s that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it’s a great thing.”
 
Reinaldo M. Valdes, a board member of the Miami-based Spanish American League Against Discrimination, said the milestone “gives the Hispanic community a standing within the social structure of the country.”
 
“People of Hispanic descent who hardly speak Spanish are more eager to take their Hispanic last names,” he said. “Today, kids identify more with their roots than they did before.”
 
Demographers pointed to more than one factor in explaining the increase in Hispanic surnames.
Generations ago, immigration officials sometimes arbitrarily Anglicized or simplified names when foreigners arrived from Europe.
 
“The movie studios used to demand that their employees have standard Waspy names,” said Justin Kaplan, an historian and co-author of “The Language of Names.”
 
“Now, look at Renée Zellweger,” Mr. Kaplan said.
 
And because recent Hispanic and Asian immigrants might consider themselves more identifiable by their physical characteristics than Europeans do, they are less likely to change their surnames, though they often choose Anglicized first names for their children.
 
The latest surname count also signaled the growing number of Asians in America. The surname Lee ranked No. 22, with the number of Lees about equally divided between whites and Asians. Lee is a familiar name in China and Korea and in all its variations is described as the most common surname in the world.
 
Altogether, the census found six million surnames in the United States. Among those, 151,000 were shared by a hundred or more Americans. Four million were held by only one person.
 
“The names tell us that we’re a richly diverse culture,” Mr. Kominski said.
 
But the fact that about 1 in every 25 Americans is named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis “suggests that there’s a durability in the family of man,” Mr. Kaplan, the author, said. A million Americans share each of those seven names. An additional 268 last names are common to 10,000 or more people. Together, those 275 names account for one in four Americans.
 
As the population of the United States ballooned by more than 30 million in the 1990s, more Murphys and Cohens were counted when the decade ended than when it began.
Smith — which would be even more common if all its variations, like Schmidt and Schmitt, were tallied — is among the names derived from occupations (Miller, which ranks No. 7, is another).
 
Among the most famous early bearers of the name was Capt. John Smith, who helped establish the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Va., 400 years ago. As recently as 1950, more Americans were employed as blacksmiths than as psychotherapists.
 
In 1984, according to the Social Security Administration, nearly 3.4 million Smiths lived in the United States. In 1990, the census counted 2.5 million. By 2000, the Smith population had declined to fewer than 2.4 million. The durability of some of the most common names in American history may also have been perpetuated because slaves either adopted or retained the surnames of their owners. About one in five Smiths are black, as are about one in three Johnsons, Browns, and Joneses and nearly half the people named Williams.
 
The Census Bureau’s analysis found that some surnames were especially associated with race and ethnicity.
 
More than 96 percent of Yoders, Kruegers, Muellers, Kochs, Schwartzes, Schmitts and Novaks were white. Nearly 90 percent of the Washingtons were black, as were 75 percent of the Jeffersons, 66 percent of the Bookers, 54 percent of the Banks and 53 percent of the Mosleys.

Commentoon

GAP and Slave Labor

Run Date: 11/02/07

Children Receive Inadequate Healthcare

        Children Receive Inadequate Healthcare
 
Med Headlines - Children in the United States are getting less than 50% of health-care in the area of prevention than they should have been getting. In fact, they are getting worse care in comparison with the adults in the country. This is the finding of a new study performed by Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute.
 

 

The research team was led Dr. Rita Mangione-Smith, who is a researcher at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. The findings are published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

However, the senior author Elizabeth McGlynn, associate director of Rand Health adds, "This is a real wake-up call for the American public. It's easy to be complacent when you don't look at things, but we've shown that care for kids is way below what [we] would hope to see, and I hope that the attention that we can bring to bear from this study will cause us to take action that can improve care for kids today. We will, as a country, will be better off if we take serious action."

 

The role of study becomes more crucial in the wake of a presidential veto of the SCHIP bill, which deals with imparting healthcare coverage to millions of children in the USA.

Dr. Lisa Simpson, who is the director of the Child Policy Research Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center said that the study provides a significant reason to override the veto. This is because the study indicates that the quality of care given to children is far poorer than it should be. The lack of a well-documented health insurance plan is a major barrier against providing preventive health-care in America.

-->
 

Simpson said, "the bill contains some of the most important provisions for quality health care for children in the history of this country.”.

 

The research team studied outpatient medical records of 1,536 children across 12 metropolitan areas in the U.S. The records were compared with 175 quality indicators of healthcare. The analysis revealed that children received only 46.5% of the suggested care.

However, only 67.6% of the suggested care is given to children with severe medical problems. The study also indicated that 53.4% of the suggested care is given to children with chronic medical conditions. However, only 40.7% of children get the suggested preventive care.

 

The study revealed that quality of healthcare differed as per the clinical area. For example, 92% of the indicated care was given in respiratory tract infections and only 34.5% in the area of prevention.

 

Smith said, "As a pediatrician, I was shocked by some of our findings, especially those related to preventive care and screening. Prevention is the bulk of what we do. I even re-screened the charts, because I couldn't believe the results."

 

Often physicians are required to see as many patients as possible in a short duration. And, in many cases, the yearly health check lasts for as long as 10-minutes.

 

The research gives a strong indication that the physicians must also be trained to provide better preventive health-care. Currently, the emphasis is more on providing medical care only in cases with acute illness. In addition, the role of parents is also important, as they need to be more proactive with their child’s health care.

 

Source: New England Journal of Medicine

Foes target Pacifica Forum   By Jeff Wright, Salem (OR) The Register-Guard

Published: Wednesday, October 31, 2007  

Critics of a speaker widely viewed as one of the nation’s most prominent deniers of the Holocaust say they will counter his talk in Eugene on Friday with a competing event and a later symposium.
 
Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, will speak on “The Israel Lobby.”
 
His visit comes at the invitation of the Pacifica Forum, a local discussion group founded by retired University of Oregon professor Orval Etter.
 
Weber, a historian who grew up in Portland, describes himself as a Holocaust revisionist. But detractors point to Weber’s own writings in labeling him a white supremacist, racist and anti-Semite.
 
“People may think I’m wrong or I’m right, but they should have a chance to hear what I have to say,” Weber said in a telephone interview from his institute’s office in Newport Beach, Calif.
 
Local critics affiliated with Community Alliance of Lane County have scheduled a free speech vigil to be held just outside the UO hall where Weber will speak. “We are operating under the theory that the best response to hate speech is more speech,” volunteer Michael Williams said. “We want an opportunity for the community to show its opposition to the kinds of things that Mark Weber stands for.”
 
Williams said opponents don’t plan to shout slogans or prevent people from hearing Weber’s talk. “We will have a presence that is unavoidable but not obstructionist.”
 
David Frank, a professor in the Honors College at the UO, said he and two faculty members are planning a Holocaust symposium in response to Weber’s talk.
Weber “has the right to come to campus and make preposterous statements,” Frank said.
 
“But we have a responsibility as scholars to demonstrate the expertise and research that shows his claims are not only false but dangerous.”
 
Weber’s speech is not the first to draw charges of anti-Semitism against the Pacifica Forum, which last year sponsored multiple talks by Valdas Anelauskas, a resident of Eugene and native of Lithuania who describes himself as a journalist, researcher and “white separatist and racialist.” Anelauskas dedicated one of his lectures to a Holocaust denier.
 
Critics responded by buying a newspaper ad denouncing such ideas, and by giving several public talks on anti-Semitism — including one at the Pacifica Forum itself.
Etter and other forum members have complained that anyone who sharply criticizes Israeli politics is automatically defamed as anti-Semitic.
 
Forum critics have said it’s not critiques on policy, but Jewish stereotypes and historical revisionism that cross the line into anti-Semitism.
 
Etter said he has long been impressed with the Institute of Historical Research’s work, and that he and other forum members decided several months ago to invite Weber.
 
Weber’s institute “has been battling Israel and the Jews for a long time,” Etter said. “They sort of lead the parade against those who say any extensive criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.”
 
Etter said he welcomes the controversy sparked by Weber’s appearance because it will “improve understanding in this community about what’s been going on for a long time in regard to Israel and the Israeli lobby .... This will be another pinnacle of free speech.”
 
The forum has access to UO space because he and forum colleague George Beres are former UO employees, Etter said.
 
Weber said his talk will focus on contemporary U.S.-Israeli policies, not historical events. He said he doesn’t discount that many Jews perished in concentration camps at the hands of Nazi Germany during World War II, but said the number cited by historians of 6 million or more “is certainly too high.”
 
He questioned, for example, whether Anne Frank of diary fame should be counted as a Holocaust victim, since she died of typhus rather than at the direct hands of German soldiers in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
 
Weber said it’s “probably” true that his critique of Israeli political power would carry more credence if he didn’t also challenge history’s understanding of the Holocaust. “But I see the two as connected.”
 
In one of its brochures, Weber’s institute says that “the ‘Holocaust’ campaign is a major weapon in the Jewish-Zionist arsenal. It is used to justify otherwise unjustifiable Israeli policies, and to extort enormous sums of money.”
 
Weber has been tied to the neo-Nazi National Alliance, an affiliation he downplays. In court testimony, however, he has acknowledged once serving as news editor of the alliance’s National Vanguard publication. In 2002, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., identified Weber as one of “40 to Watch” among key activists of the radical right.
Local critic Williams said the Pacifica Forum’s decision to invite Weber is deeply troubling.
 
“This is a major escalation,” Williams said. “He is the No. 1 Holocaust denier; he has international status.”
 
David Luebke, an associate professor of history at the UO, is among the faculty planning next month’s symposium on the Holocaust. Luebke worked for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., from 1989 to 1993, and has taught classes on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
 
Luebke said Weber practices “a pretty sophisticated form” of Holocaust denial in which historians’ evolving understanding about the event is selectively scoured for information that can be used to minimize or question the reality of the genocide.
 
“There’s debate in good faith among historians about what it all means,” Luebke said of the Holocaust. “But we tend not to disagree on the overwhelming positive confirming evidence, including from the people who perpetrated it.”

Copyright © 2007 — The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

Activist fighting for migrants with children born in U.S.
She is battling odds to get her day in Supreme Court
 
 
MIAMI — Experts say Nora Sandigo doesn't have a prayer in her bid to get the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the deportation of illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children.
Sandigo just nods — she's heard it all before.
 
Naysayers scoffed when the immigration activist and former supporter of Nicaragua Contra rebels worked to stop the deportation of thousands of Central American immigrants who'd fled their region's civil wars in the 1980s. But her work prompted Congress to pass a law protecting them in 1997.
 
Experts said the same thing before she helped thousands more Central Americans win temporary protection after natural disasters struck several years later.
"We have to try. The worst battle is the one not waged," said Sandigo, a single mother of two who runs the nonprofit immigrant advocacy group American Fraternity and owns two small businesses.
 
Illegal immigrants in Florida, New York, California and Illinois have asked Sandigo to become the legal guardian of their 600 children, so she could help the children if the parents are deported.
 

Going to the top

About 100 children have been entered into her lawsuit seeking to allow the parents to stay in the U.S. until Congress passes an immigration bill that would give them legal status or until the Department of Homeland Security provides them another avenue to remain. The lawsuit eventually could cover an estimated 4 million children.
 
Children born in the U.S. are automatically citizens, even if their parents are illegal immigrants. If their parents are deported, they are allowed to stay, but most have to return with their parents to a country and culture they've never known.
Sandigo's lawsuit has been filed directly with the Supreme Court because federal law has limited lower courts' abilities to hear deportation cases.
 
It is a long shot. The Supreme Court rarely takes cases that have not moved through the lower courts.
 
However, she said the lawsuit is the best option because the U.S. Senate failed last month to revive a bill to allow some illegal immigrant students to seek U.S. residency — likely dooming any immigration bills this year.
 
Sandigo, 42, fled Nicaragua as a teen, leaving her own parents behind, after the socialist Sandinista government confiscated her family's farm. During the 1980s, she provided the U.S.-backed Contra insurgents with clothes and "everything that was needed" and later spirited her 16-year-old brother out of the country before he could be drafted. She became a U.S. citizen in the early 1990s.
 
Her support of free trade agreements with Latin America puts her at odds with many immigrant advocates who fear such deals won't protect worker rights and small businesses. Sandigo says free trade and immigration go together.
 
"I don't want people to say we are just trying to bring more immigrants to the U.S. I want people to be able to stay in their countries and find work," she said.
 

'It will become a magnet'

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict limits on immigration, said her lawsuit will only encourage more people to come.

 


 
"Family relationships and employment are what bring people here," he said. "On the other hand, if having a U.S.-born child is a guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card, then it will become a magnet."
 
Sandigo said she's not asking for open borders and favors more border security. She simply believes immigrants who've worked for years in the U.S. shouldn't be separated from their children or forced to uproot them.
 
Among the children in her lawsuit is 15-year-old Teresa Flores of Yakima, Wash.
Teresa and her four siblings awoke in April 2006 to see her mother hauled off by immigration agents. She dropped out of school to take care of her younger brother before returning to the Mexican town of La Huerta, Jalisco, where her mother now works as a waitress. That job does not pay Teresa's mother enough to provide the basics for her children, so Teresa returned to the U.S. to live with another family and catch up in school.
 
"As a citizen, I want to be heard," Teresa said.
 
Even if the Supreme Court accepts Sandigo's case, the odds against her are great, says University of Virginia law professor David Martin, who served as Immigration and Naturalization Services general counsel under President Clinton.
Sandigo is adamant.
 
"By sending parents back, what are you creating here? You're creating children who are going to be resentful, angry," she said. "You're creating enemies within the country."
 



Children Receive Inadequate Healthcare

 
Med Headlines - Children in the United States are getting less than 50% of health-care in the area of prevention than they should have been getting. In fact, they are getting worse care in comparison with the adults in the country. This is the finding of a new study performed by Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute.
The research team was led Dr. Rita Mangione-Smith, who is a researcher at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. The findings are published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

However, the senior author Elizabeth McGlynn, associate director of Rand Health adds, "This is a real wake-up call for the American public. It's easy to be complacent when you don't look at things, but we've shown that care for kids is way below what [we] would hope to see, and I hope that the attention that we can bring to bear from this study will cause us to take action that can improve care for kids today. We will, as a country, will be better off if we take serious action."

The role of study becomes more crucial in the wake of a presidential veto of the SCHIP bill, which deals with imparting healthcare coverage to millions of children in the USA.

Dr. Lisa Simpson, who is the director of the Child Policy Research Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center said that the study provides a significant reason to override the veto. This is because the study indicates that the quality of care given to children is far poorer than it should be. The lack of a well-documented health insurance plan is a major barrier against providing preventive health-care in America.

Simpson said, "the bill contains some of the most important provisions for quality health care for children in the history of this country.”.

The research team studied outpatient medical records of 1,536 children across 12 metropolitan areas in the U.S. The records were compared with 175 quality indicators of healthcare. The analysis revealed that children received only 46.5% of the suggested care.

However, only 67.6% of the suggested care is given to children with severe medical problems. The study also indicated that 53.4% of the suggested care is given to children with chronic medical conditions. However, only 40.7% of children get the suggested preventive care.

The study revealed that quality of healthcare differed as per the clinical area. For example, 92% of the indicated care was given in respiratory tract infections and only 34.5% in the area of prevention. 

Smith said, "As a pediatrician, I was shocked by some of our findings, especially those related to preventive care and screening. Prevention is the bulk of what we do. I even re-screened the charts, because I couldn't believe the results."

Often physicians are required to see as many patients as possible in a short duration. And, in many cases, the yearly health check lasts for as long as 10-minutes. 

The research gives a strong indication that the physicians must also be trained to provide better preventive health-care. Currently, the emphasis is more on providing medical care only in cases with acute illness. In addition, the role of parents is also important, as they need to be more proactive with their child’s health care.

Source: New England Journal of Medicine

Child Dying Of Cancer, Mother To Be Deported

   (WCCO, Minneapolis, MN)
October 22, 2007
 
On Wednesday immigration officials plan to send a Minnesota mom back to Mexico, being deported after living here illegally for years.

The deportation is going through despite the fact the woman has a young daughter who is dying of cancer.

Four-year-old Samantha has cancer and she has a rare disease. Her mom, Cecelia Sanchez-Zurita had been caring for her but now she is in jail, awaiting deportation.

"Cecelia's place is here in a home with her daughter. Her daughter is terminally ill and doctors give her two years to live," said Maribel Ponce, Samantha's aunt.

Samantha is too sick to receive chemotherapy. The family wants Cecelia Sanchez-Zurita's deportation delayed so she can hold her daughter when she dies.

The family's attorney has been begging immigration officials in Bloomington to give the case another look. So far the answer has been no, with deportation scheduled in two days.

"People are accusing you of being heartless for not helping a child who is dying of cancer," said WCCO-TV's Lisa Kiava.

"I think it's important to point out that we use prosecutorial discretion everyday, that we make exceptions everyday, that we consider humanitarian circumstances every single day of the week," said Tim Counts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

However, Counts said this case is different because there are options, like having Samantha's father care for her in the United States.

"They're difficult decisions but they're decisions that the parents must make because of the situation that they have placed themselves in," said Counts.

The family is praying for a change of heart.

"There's nothing like the mother's love so Samantha is really going to need her on her last days," said Ponce.

Cecelia Sanchez-Zurita has been deported before, that's why immigration officials aren't backing down this time.

Family members aren't backing down either saying they'll continue their last-minute appeals.

 

Published on Thursday, October 18, 2007 by The Chicago Tribune

Gay-Rights Milestone Draws Transgender Activists’ Outcry

by Gabrielle Russon
 
A bill forbidding workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation — which gay activists see as a milestone in three decades of activism — is moving steadily through the House, encouraging advocates who hope to make advances now that Democrats control Congress.
 
But the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, has been met by impassioned resistance, and it’s not from conservatives opposed to gay rights. Rather, transgender activists, backed by many in the gay community, are angry that the bill’s sponsors, in a bow to political reality, stripped out protections for those who are born as one gender but live as the other.
 
The small but vocal transgender community has generated notable support among activists for its demand that the bill not move forward without including them. A coalition of about 300 groups sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter Oct. 1 saying, “We oppose legislation that leaves part of our community without protections and basic security that the rest of us are provided.”
 
This opposition has deeply frustrated the bill’s backers, including Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who warn that a short-sighted insistence on purity could torpedo a long-cherished goal. The non-discrimination bill — scheduled for a committee vote Thursday — cannot pass if it includes transgender rights, they say.
 
“You protect people when you can,” said Frank, one of the only openly gay members of Congress. “The notion you don’t do anything until you do everything is self-defeating.”
Activist: Bill writes a wrong
 
For many gay activists, a non-discrimination bill that omits transgender people would write immorality into the law, akin in their view to a civil rights bill that protects blacks but not Hispanics. The way transgender people have been incorporated into gay activism is symbolized by the frequent use of the term GLBT, or gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender.
Cutting off transgender people would betray that coalition, some argue. “We as a community are accustomed to gaining our rights incrementally,” said Roberta Sklar, spokeswoman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “Issue by issue, not person by person.”
 
Rick Garcia, public policy director at Equality Illinois, a GLBT advocacy group with 12,000 members, said the bill would not cover all gays and lesbians if it omits transgender people. He points to Illinois, which has a state law banning discrimination based on gender identity, as proof that such a bill could pass.
 
“I am in the heartland. I am in the middle of the country,” Garcia said. “If it can play here, it can play anywhere.”
 
The battle reflects a larger issue facing the Democrats now that they control Congress for the first time in 12 years. Activists, full of pent-up energy after their long exile, are pushing the party on a variety of issues — from the Iraq war to impeaching President Bush — toward positions that party leaders fear are unrealistic and even politically damaging.
 
“I came to the Congress as an advocate myself, so on any issue you can name, I appreciate the relentless, dissatisfied persistence of advocates,” Pelosi said recently. “There is a level of dissatisfaction that will always be there.” But, she added, activists and party leaders have distinct roles.
 
Frank echoed that point. “Does a political party say to its most militant, committed, ideologically driven believers in purity that they have a veto over what the party does?” Frank said. “How do we relate to those people? And it has become an increasing problem for both parties.”
 
He emphasized that the choice on this measure is between getting no bill and one that omits transgender people. In a highly personal Oct. 9 speech on the House floor, he seemed agonized that he was being accused of indifference to transgender rights.
 
“I say to my colleagues in the gay community, maybe I will do a little stereotyping, maybe they have seen ‘The Wizard of Oz’ too often,” Frank said. “They seem to have Speaker Pelosi — a wonderful, dedicated, committed supporter of human rights — confused with Glenda the good witch. They think if she waved her magic wand, she could somehow change things.”
‘Attack on people of faith’
 
On the conservative side, most activists oppose the bill whether or not transgender rights are included.
 
“It’s an attack on businesses and people of faith,” said Tom McClusky, vice president for government affairs at the Family Research Council. “Businesses wouldn’t have the freedom to hire whoever they want.”
 
Still, American culture and politics reflect a growing acceptance of gay rights, but a discomfort with the notion of someone born into one gender but identifying with the other.
 
“Little by little, the broader culture has included gay people,” said Sheila Kennedy, a law and public policy professor at Indiana University who has written on the subject. “You don’t see that same thing occurring with transgender people, at least not nearly to the same extent. … It’s perceived as strange or unusual.”
 
For now, Democratic leaders are pushing ahead with their version of the bill that omits transgender protection. The House Committee on Education and Labor is scheduled to vote Thursday, and supporters are hopeful the full House will pass it.
 
Pelosi has agreed to allow an amendment on the floor to include transgender rights, which is expected to fail.
 
Meanwhile, gay activists fear Bush will veto the bill, but they argue that even congressional passage would mark an enormous step forward.

 

At Texas theological school: The role of the godly woman 101

Baptist seminary espouses old-time gender inequality

 
FORT WORTH, Texas - Equal but different.
 
 
You hear that a lot on the lush green campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
God values men and women equally, any student here will tell you. It's just that he's given them different responsibilities: Men make decisions; women make dinner.
 
This fall, the internationally known seminary - a century-old training ground for Southern Baptists - began reinforcing those traditional gender roles with college classes in homemaking. The academic program, open only to women, includes lectures on laundering stubborn stains and a lab in baking chocolate-chip cookies.
 
Philosophical courses such as "Biblical Model for the Home and Family" teach that God expects wives to submit graciously to their husbands' leadership. A model house, to be completed by next fall, will allow women to get credit toward bachelor's degrees by learning how to set tables, sew buttons, and sustain lively dinner-time conversation.
 
It all sounds wonderful to sophomore Emily Felts, 19, who signed up as soon as she arrived on campus this fall.
 
Several relatives have told Felts that she's selling herself short. They want her to become a lawyer, and she agrees she would make a good one. But that's not what she wants to do with her life.
 
More to the point, it's not what she believes God wants of her.
 
"My created purpose as a woman is to be a helper," Felts said firmly. "This is a college education that I can use."
 
Seminary President Paige Patterson and his wife, Dorothy - who goes by Mrs. Paige Patterson - view the homemaking curriculum as a way to spread the Christian faith.
 
In their vision, graduates will create such gracious homes that strangers will take note. Their marriages will be so harmonious, other women will ask how they manage. By modeling traditional values, they will inspire friends and neighbors to read the Bible and then, perhaps, to follow the Lord.
 
"I'm personally going to teach the course in table manners," Paige Patterson said, moments after sneaking scraps of poached chicken off his lunch plate for his black Labrador, Noche.
 
So far, just eight of the 300 students in the seminary's undergraduate program are enrolled in the homemaking concentration, which is similar to a major and counts toward a bachelor of arts in humanities. Many more women, including graduate students and wives of seminarians, study traditional gender roles in courses such as "Wife of the Equipping Minister." On a recent evening, more than 50 women - some in sloppy sweats, others in prim sweater sets - pulled out notebooks as class opened with student presentations. One woman talked about her hobby of cross-stitching. Another showed how she uses the Internet to track grocery coupons.
 
Laney Homan, 30, drew excited murmurs with her talk on meal planning, featuring a recipe for a sure-fire "freezer pleaser" - a triple batch of meatloaf (secret ingredient: oatmeal). Thanks to a computerized system for generating grocery lists, Homan said, "I've actually trained my husband to shop for me."
 
Laughing, she threw her palms toward the heavens and added: "Praise Jesus!"
 
For the rest of the nearly three-hour class, guest lecturer Ashley Smith, the wife of a theology professor, laid out the biblical basis for what she calls "the glorious inequalities of life."
 
Smith, 30, confided that she sometimes resents her husband for advancing his career "while I'm changing diapers and getting poop all over me." But then she quoted from Ephesians: "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord." And from Genesis: God created Eve to be a "suitable helper" for Adam.
 
"If we love the Scripture, we must do it," said Smith, who gave up her dreams of a career when her husband said it was time to have children. "We must fit into this role. It's so much more important than our own personal happiness."
 
More moderate Southern Baptists disagree, and they counter with their own biblical references. When Jesus dined at the home of two sisters, he praised Mary, who spent the evening studying his teachings, above Martha, who did chores. Elsewhere in the New Testament, the apostle Paul writes that "there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ."
 
"We're confusing 1950s culture with the teaching of Scripture," said Wade Burleson, a Southern Baptist pastor in Oklahoma. "I nowhere see where the Lord Jesus places limitations on the role of women in our culture."
 
Homemaking classes went out of style at most secular colleges a half-century ago, but undergraduate Quincy A. Jones said he considers them essential in a world where too many families are fractured and unhappy. Jones, who is married and has five children, said he would encourage his teenage daughter to study homemaking.

 

Immigration, Congressional Oversight, Gonzales, Thurgood Marshall, and much more... 
Migrant must go, and $49,000 stays, U.S. says
BY ANA MENENDEZ, Miami Herald
October 10, 2007
 
After nine years of washing dishes, Pedro Zapeta managed to save $62,000. Then he lost most of it overnight. Not to addiction or street thugs. To the U.S. government.
Customs agents confiscated $59,000 of Zapeta's money when he tried to board a plane home to Guatemala (he had another $3,000 in his pockets) in 2005. It's not illegal to take that much money out of the country. But it's illegal not to report it on a special form. Zapeta didn't know that. He's not a frequent flyer.
Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge James Cohn levied a heavy civil penalty for Zapeta's mistake: $49,000. Zapeta was graciously allowed to keep the remainder of his earnings. Then he was kicked out. He has until January to leave the country.
Exhausted and bewildered, Zapeta wants to go -- but not without his money, which everyone agrees he acquired through honest labor.
''You can imagine the great effort it took me to earn that money and when they took it, it caused me a great sadness,'' Zapeta told me in Spanish. ``But I know there is a God who is great and good, and I know he is looking down and will help me.''
Zapeta's story, initially reported by the Palm Beach Post, exploded after CNN recently ran a segment on him. By this week, dozens of bloggers were weighing in from Omaha to Denmark.
Reaction ranged from the sentimental to the outright vicious. That's because a simple story of outrage is muddied by the circumstances of Zapeta's arrival in the United States: In 1996, Zapeta admits, he entered the country illegally through the Texas frontier. Later, he bought a fake Social Security number for $25.
HARD WORKER
He spent the next decade working -- sometimes 13 hours a day -- scrubbing dishes and pots in Stuart restaurants. He never filed an income tax return, but some of his pay stubs show that his employers took taxes from his wages, says his attorney, Robert Gershman. Zapeta rode his bike to work and lived quietly. He labored hard at tedious work and earned his pay.
None of that satisfies the few embittered nativists who (lacking imagination as well as heart) have copied the same screed from site to site: ``Deport Pedro Zapeta Sans $59,000.''
Sure. And while we're at it, let's round up speeders and impound their cars.
Fortunately, the hate-mongers are outclassed by those who know the punishment is way out of proportion to the crime. One blogger quoted scripture: ''The wages you withheld from the worker who mowed your fields cry out, and the cries of the worker reach the ears of the Lord of hosts.'' Another offered to trade Guatemala one for one: ''Lou Dobbs for Pedro Zapeta. We'd be getting the better end of the deal.'' An Oregan man wrote his representatives on Zapeta's behalf: ``So deduct the taxes, give the man his money and deport him, although we could use more people like him.''
Since his story became public, people have donated $10,000, which his attorney is keeping in trust.
Part of the outpouring is due to Zapeta's sad story. His break across the frontier was motivated by the kind of poverty that most Americans can't understand. His hard life here was sustained by the hope of one day returning to Guatemala to build a home for his mother and four sisters. For 11 years, he carted his money around in a bag, afraid to wire any of it. ''I thought I'd take it with me all at once,'' he told me. ``My only regret is that I've stained my name here.''
THE `CRIME'
The ''crime'' he's being punished for is not illegal immigration. It's a bureaucratic technicality meant to catch drug dealers and smugglers, of which he is neither. We can disagree all we want on immigration policy; it takes an especially hateful nature to argue that a man is not entitled to his wages.
But there's another appeal to Zapeta's story. At a time when most Americans are deep in the red and the national debt rises by more than $1 billion a day, Pedro Zapeta may be the last man on earth who still embodies the great American ideal of thrift and hard work.
He never owned a car, rode his bike everywhere and denied himself every luxury beyond rent and electricity. If Zapeta were wise to the ways of popular culture, he'd pitch a self-help book: How to Think and Grow Rich on Minimum Wage.
Zapeta doesn't care about any of that. He just wants to get home to his family. That's understandable. But I think the authorities should reconsider.
Anyone who can amass $62,000 in nine years should be forced to stay here and teach the rest of us how to do it.

Immigration activist deported   By Antonio Olivo, Chicago Tribune staff reporter
August 20 2007  
 Elvira Arellano, the illegal Mexican immigrant who was arrested on a downtown Los Angeles street Sunday after leaving Chicago, has been deported to Mexico, federal officials said...
Here are the latest articles about Elvira: 
Elvira's Song:
http://www.latinalista.net/palabrafinal/2007/08/did_elvira_plan_to_be_captured_by_ice.html#more

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-react21aug21,1,281891.story?coll=chi_tab01_layout
 
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/518336,CST-NWS-IMMIG21.article
 
http://www.latinalista.net/palabrafinal/

Howard  

"One day there will be no borders, no boundaries, no flags
and no countries and the only passport will be the heart."
                                                          ~ Carlos Santana

 
"
Do your little bit of good where you are; its those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
Desmond Tutu

Undocumented Immigrants are Showing
a Strength of Character that Congress Lacks

By Marisa Trevino, latinalist.net

June 14, 2007


Today, nationally syndicated radio talk show host Eddie Sotelo, better known to his legions of Spanish-speaking fans as Piolin, delivered
one million letters to the steps of Congress today from immigrants and citizens across the country who don't want the Senate to postpone the debate on immigration reform any longer.


Boxes containing one million letters in support of immigration reform.
(Source: statesman.com)

Throughout this debate on immigration reform, congress has been chided for their lack of will to get things done.

Well, where Congress lacks the will, the Latino community is making up for it tenfold.

In addition to Piolin's caravan, there is a train speeding towards DC carrying people with their family stories of coming to America as immigrants and realizing their dreams.

There are several carloads of young people who are heading to our nation's capitol throughout the summer to show Congress they have every intention of qualifying for higher points in any immigration classification system because of higher skills, if only Congress passes the Dream Act to let them realize their dreams of attending college and working after they graduate.

If nothing else, the critics of the immigration reform bill need to recognize the courage of these groups for pushing Congress to act, since no outcome is guaranteed to be completely in favor of the undocumented immigrants.

Yet, there are signs everywhere that the everyday undocumented immigrant has the will to obey the law.

More and more are on waiting lists to learn English, and more are applying for citizenship instead of waiting for mañana.

The undocumented immigrant has always been known for his/her exemplary work ethic, and now they can be known for exercising their will to do what is asked of them - even if Congress won't.


search warrant for North Portland Raids  http://blogoregonlive.com/breakingnews/delmonte.pdf
 


Click here to comment   Here to blog  Or here to discuss

Education DREAM Act + Military Component = A Deadly Nightmare
Raza Educators Say No to Dream Act Latinola.com, 7.24.2007
The Association of Raza Educators fully supports the educational component of the DREAM Act. We support higher education for all students, both documented and undocumented. However, as Raza Educators, who work with undocumented students on a daily basis; we denounce the military component of the DREAM Act. ..   "In Essence, the Dream Act will create a de facto military draft for our undocumented youth. We say de facto because although students are given a "choice," the fact is that the deplorable and inadequate conditions of Latino schooling will make military enlistment the only "choice" for our undocumented youth."  We have been working for the betterment of our communities long before the DREAM Act and we will continue to do so if it passes or hopefully, after it fails. We propose that all persons and organizations who have been actively supporting the DREAM Act join forces and continue to push for a DREAM Act without military provisions. When we remove the military provision, A.R.E. will work with you in this struggle. The DREAM Act's education component is a wonderful dream that we share with you.
DREAM Act + Military Component = A Deadly Nightmare.  
More information on the Association of Raza Educators can be found at our website www.razaeducators.org or you can email us at: razaeducators@aol.com

Environment Controversy erupts over Endangered Species Act:  Congress and the Interior Department investigate whether the Bush administration undermined federal protections.  By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 25, 2007 edition

Subtle Songs of Protest
Where you fall in poll of U.S. reading habits
Women Build Groundwork in Makeshift 'Colonias'   Run Date: 08/23/07

Fired U.S. Attorneys: Justice 'declined' under Gonzales

 
 
By: Kara Briggs, Indian Country Today
June 13, 2007
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Three former U.S. Attorneys fired by the U.S. Justice Department last December told tribal leaders attending the National Congress of the American Indian convention that the potential for justice in Indian country had declined under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

''Alberto Gonzales doesn't know anything about crime in Indian country,'' Paul Charlton, the former U.S. Attorney from Arizona, told leaders. ''And the Justice Department doesn't care.''

Speaking as on the same day in which Gonzales survived a no confidence vote the U.S. Senate, Charlton, former U.S. Attorney from the Western District of Michigan Margaret Chiara and former U.S. Attorney for Nevada Dan Bogden stopped short of saying that they were fired because of their attention to crime on reservation land.

Yet five of the eight fired attorneys, including Charlton, Chiara and Bogden, were appointed by President Bush to the U.S. Attorneys' Subcommittee on Native American Issues in 2001. Another attorney, Tom Heffelfinger, former U.S. Attorney from Minnesota, was chairman of the subcommittee for five years until he quit last year. Only later did he learn that he was on the list slated for firing.

Heffelfinger learned more about his firing in late May when Monica M. Goodling, the department's former liaison to the White House, told the House Judiciary Committee that Heffelfinger had been criticized for ''spending an excessive amount of time'' on Native issues.

Officially, the firings were over performance problems, an assertion that has been largely discredited in media reports and in Congress. Still, Chiara said, in her first public appearance since she was forced from office, ''It has been a time of public humiliation and negative notoriety. We really want you to understand, it's Indian country that brought us back into the public forum.''

The attorneys urged tribal leaders to take concerns about lack of funding to support law enforcement, prosecution and crime prevention in Indian country, without which, the attorneys said, even the best efforts were set up to fail.

NCAI leaders were drafting an emergency resolution June 12 to raise the issues of funding and of federal inattention to Indian country under Gonzales, said John Dossett, NCAI general counsel. The resolution will go to delegates for a vote June 13.

The attorneys said they've watched a decline in commitment to prosecutions in Indian country since Gonzales was appointed in 2005. The decline was startling after the support his predecessors gave Indian issues.

Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, Native issues were a priority, Bogden said. In Janet Reno's tenure, the chairman of the subcommittee had open door access to Reno, Paul Charlton said. Yet under Gonzales, the Native American subcommittee lost its seat in the monthly meeting of other subcommittee leaders with the attorney general.

''Even though we asked, we were not included,'' said Margaret Chiara, who was chairman of the subcommittee when she left office. ''Almost all other subcommittees had access. It would appear that Native American issues were not viewed as a priority for the leadership.''

The subcommittee worked with tribes and victim advocates on addressing issues such as violence against women, homeland security and gangs on Indian lands.

In 2003 the subcommittee released its plan to fight sexual violence on reservations, which identified many of the same objectives set forth in Amnesty International's 2007 report ''Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA.'' But the Department of Justice shelved the recommendations, the attorneys said.

Yet working in her own district, Chiara put in place measures, including dedicating two full-time staff, that would increase prosecutions from the 11 reservations in western Michigan by 85 percent in two years. Bogden, who had worked 11 years as an assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting many crimes on Indian land before becoming U.S. Attorney, increased prosecutions from Nevada reservation crimes by 50 percent, even as budget cuts eroded his office.

Neither Chiara nor Bogden was told a reason for their firing.

But Charlton was told in his December phone call from the Justice Department that he was being forced to resign because of a stand he'd taken on behalf of tribes in his district.

One involved the law enforcement practice of taping confessions, a practice which the FBI discourages. Charlton said the FBI's stand hindered prosecution of violent crimes on reservation.

Charlton also had taken a stand against the death penalty, saying that he wouldn't seek it in cases involving some of the 20 of the 21 tribes in Arizona that oppose it. He said this stand was mentioned to him as one of the reasons for his dismissal.

Since the firings, some of the districts have experienced a shift in staffing and resources away from justice in Indian country, the attorneys said. But Chiara said neither the Department of Justice nor U.S. Attorneys' offices have any excuses for backtracking on justice on tribal lands.

''The Department of Justice has a legal and ethical obligation to prosecute crime in Indian country,'' Chiara said. ''U.S. Attorneys have a legal and moral obligation as the chief law enforcement officers in their regions to prosecute crimes in Indian country.''
 

Thurgood Marshall Showed What `Justice' Means

Alen Jenkins, Hartford Courant   June 13, 2007   Alan Jenkins, who served as law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun from 1990 to 1991, is executive director of The Opportunity Agenda.
 
Forty years ago, on June 13, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson strode into the Rose Garden for a news conference, accompanied by a tall, distinguished black man.

"I shall send to the Senate this afternoon," Johnson said, "the nomination of Mr. Thurgood Marshall to the position of associate justice of the Supreme Court. ... He is best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall was then best known for his role as an architect of Brown v. Board of Education and the effort to overturn legal segregation.  

But what both Marshall and Johnson understood was that that struggle was never only about blacks but about the soul and future of our country.

During his quarter-century on the court, Marshall advanced a jurisprudence of freedom, opportunity and justice that improved the lives of all Americans. He understood that our Constitution was intended to unite us through a common set of rights and responsibilities. His opinions on criminal justice and education - as well as civil rights - illustrate his vision of the Constitution as a unifying force.

In Benton v. Maryland, for example, his decision for the court held that the double jeopardy clause of the Constitution - which outlaws prosecuting the same person twice for the same crime - applies to the 50 states. "The double jeopardy prohibition," he said, "represents a fundamental ideal in our constitutional heritage, and ... it should apply to the states through the 14th Amendment."

Even Marshall's dissents often influenced the development of the law in ways that benefited our country.

In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, a majority of the court held that grossly unequal public school conditions arising from an inequitable state finance system did not violate the Constitution. But Marshall dissented: "The right of every American to an equal start in life, so far as the provision of a state service as important as education is concerned, is far too vital to permit state discrimination on grounds as tenuous as those presented by this record."

While the U.S. Supreme Court has held to the idea that education is not a fundamental right under our Constitution, many states have since found such a right under their own constitutions, sending new resources to underfunded urban and rural schools and students around the country.

Marshall's vision and legacy remind us how important a president's choice of Supreme Court justice can be.

As we approach another presidential election, we must move beyond the often perfunctory questions that candidates generally receive about their plans for the court: Who is your model Supreme Court Justice? What's your favorite Supreme Court decision?

We must instead ask them about their own constitutional vision and about the vision they'll promote through their judicial nominees. Platitudes about seeking nominees who will interpret laws instead of "legislating from the bench" must give way to real insights about the constitutional values that nominees will bring to that interpretive task.

Presidential candidates often view judicial nominations as a chance to reward political constituencies and interest groups. But we must insist on a higher standard for the most lasting decision that most presidents will make.

In 1991, when Marshall announced his retirement, reporters asked him whether blacks were better off then than when he joined the court. Justice Marshall replied: "All Americans are better off since I joined the court. All of them."

He was right.  Marshall's legacy is not only about blacks or civil rights, but about all of us.

 

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