The Westboro Baptist Church, a radical anti-gay Christian organization, tried to argue that Fred Thompson “saw eye to eye” with their views on homosexuality. A Thompson campaign spokesperson shot them down right quick. Bob Jones University, which has issues with interracial dating (and really, Black people in general) and whose leaders have called both Mormonism and Catholicism “cults” endorsed Mitt Romney. He appears to have greeted the endorsement with open arms.

Sam Brownback is introducing a resolution formally apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow. I title the post “genuinely crazy” because I think that’s an apt description of Brownback. He may be crazy, but at least he’s genuine. And sometimes, it leads him to do surprising and moral things. Good for him. Such a resolution — which imposes no costs on the “innocent” but may be a critical psychological balm for the victims — is long since overdue.

As the Democratic ascendancy continues, many Republicans are beginning to defect across the aisle to join the new majority Party. Many of these are excellent, devoted public servants who recognize that their Party has left them behind. But not every person who joins our side is worth welcoming, as a recent Colorado state representative’s switch exemplifies.

A House committee just passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide. Turkey has threatened to go berserk if it passes the full House. Why we should let them do their worst.

Cross-posted to The Debate Link In my post on dead civil rights leaders, I noted that even the scion of light, Dr. Martin Luther King, was the subject of vigorous and vicious attacks from the mainstream right at the time of his activism. These attacks take very similar forms to the contemporary assaults the right regularly lobs at modern-day civil rights activists, which should be grounds for suspicion. Apropos of that, I happened to be assigned an old National Review article written in the aftermath...

The following is publicly available information that nonetheless was rejected from being heard in the legal system because it might compromise “state secrets”: On occasion, the US has been known to pluck random people off the street, hold them incommunicado, beat them up for several months, then, realizing they’ve got the wrong guy, drop them off blindfolded on a hillside in an unknown country. But remember: This Country Does Not Torture.

While I am largely uninformed about the inner-circle of foreign policy wonks and thus have to resort to simply making fun of people named “Slaughter”, Fletcher School professor Daniel Drezner does not share my shortcomings and thus is able to offer some half-baked predictions matching foreign policy advisers to their respective positions in their chosen candidate’s cabinet.

Having to defend another vulnerable open seat obviously isn’t a good thing for the GOP, but candidate-wise they’re doing much better than the Dems thus far, a rarity in of itself this cycle.

Cross-posted to The Debate Link As you may have guessed, these are taken from whatever random academic book I’ve picked up off my desk at the moment. This one is from a volume giving psychoanalytic responses to Black/Jewish tensions. Educational programs against white racism, including Jewish racism, have usually been based on the assumption among pedagogues and social engineers that the most effective way to combat racism and prejudice is to expose students to information and values that contradict...

The Washington Post put up a list of what foreign policy eminences are currently affiliated with which candidates. I note what catches my eye. Unfortunately, it being well past midnight here in Minnesota, “what catches my eye” was not interesting political or philosophical angles; what I jotted down were what nicknames were the most ironic, telling, or just awesome. Oh, and a purely by the numbers count of whose got the most military figures in his or her camp. So, if you’re looking...

Cross-posted to The Debate Link The release of Clarence Thomas’ new book has led to a spurt of interesting blogging on the quietest and most conservative Supreme Court Justice. No comments from me, just a round-up of the variety of posts out there. Sherilynn Ifill, a law professor at UMD blogging at BlackProf, takes issue with Thomas’ lynching metaphor (“an insult to the nearly 5,000 black and men and women who were lynched in the last century”) and urges Thomas to “get...

The wife of a US sailor, about to leave for his third Iraq tour, is facing deportation. The wife came to America as a political refugee at age five and was granted asylum, but due to bureaucratic delays and mazes, she hasn’t been able to secure her status. I don’t know what’s more terrible: that’s mostly our own fault that she’s not legal yet, or that the rabid right-wingers supporting her deportation can’t distinguish her from someone who actually broke the law...

The Supreme Court is taking aim at one of the most important elements of our civil rights laws. I have a simple solution that will forestall all the expected legal wrangling: preempt the ruling. Nobody seriously believes that retaliation shouldn’t be included in anti-discrimination laws. So, although I don’t particularly like it when the Supreme Court decides to split with every single lower court and an acre of precedent to eviscerate our civil rights laws, an easy way to avoid that...

Elliott’s Law posits that: As an online discussion concerning race grows longer, the probability of a person referencing Martin Luther King, Jr. as a means to justify their racist and/or ignorant attitudes approaches one. It’s certainly something I’ve observed. But why Martin Luther King? Because he’s dead, that’s why. And being dead, he poses no threat to the “splitting” meme that tries to discredit the current generation of civil rights activists from their...

Some bullet pointed thoughts. I didn’t think anything ground-breaking occurred. ….Grr. Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to write an update to a post, only to see that Blogger has crashed. Especially when said update includes correcting a particularly inane typo (“route” written as “root”).

Immigration Law Profs exclusive interview with the candidate is now available.

When someone is accused of moral wrongdoing, they have the right to procedural protection and a fair hearing, and should not be presumed guilty of the act without cause. When someone has been morally wronged, they have a right to compensation and restitution, and should not be assumed to be lying about the wrong in absence of specific evidence to that effect (e.g., if I say I’ve been robbed, the first instinct of the police shouldn’t be “insurance fraud!” unless there is specific...

Give him a mic, let him make a fool of himself, laugh him off stage. Watching Columbia students literally start giggling when he tried to argue there are no homosexuals in Iran was a priceless moment — but getting him in a high-profile position in front of international cameras where he tried to argue that there were no homosexuals in Iran is a major diplomatic coup. When powerful men with maniacal views get put in forums where they’ll be aggressively challenged, we win. Ahmadinejad got...

An unidentified Bush administration official said Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama exhibited “intellectual laziness.” It’s kind of a ridiculous charge, given Obama’s background (and given the source). But a few liberal bloggers also complained that the charge itself was reminiscent of racist stereotyping in which Black people were seen as academically weak and, to be blunt, stupid and lazy. Brendan Nyhal inquired, can we please “talk about Obama without...

I always thought Mitt Romney’s anemic head-to-head poll numbers against Democrats were simply a function of low name recognition. But were that the case, would he really be lagging eight to fourteen points behind Fred Thompson, who also doesn’t have the relative profile of a Giuliani or McCain? Or am I under-estimating the Law and Order effect?

The good folks at ImmigrationProf (Kevin Johnson, Bill Hing, and Jennifer Chacon — all professors of law at UC-Davis) have managed to score an exclusive interview with Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama, which they will post on Tuesday morning. The questions will be across a range of immigration issues, “including immigration reform, undocumented immigration, family immigration, deportation and immigration raids, local (anti-)immigration ordinances, integration of immigrants...

A brief primer. Originalism is not a unitary category — there at least three separate originalist approaches, which obviously sometimes overlap but sometimes differ from each other rather drastically. Folks who talk about originalism, pro or con, need to know about these differences. And adherents to “originalism”, especially, need to clarify which of the three schools they consider themselves to be a part of. ….I should add that the three schools (intent, meaning, and understanding)...

Angela’s post on Jesse Jackson calling Obama out on “Acting White” on the Jena Six issue inspires a few of my own musings. I don’t like the specific rhetoric, but would it really be a bad thing if the Black leadership and community started building in a concern for social justice and concern for those who “haven’t made it” into the idea of Blackness? Certainly, if Black folk are going to chide their compatriots for certain behavior via the “acting White”...

Shorter MD Sup. Ct.: “We admit that reading the text ‘literally’ would require a plaintiff’s victory, but with a little judicial creativity, we can do anything we want to do! Fortunately, the TMV comment threads are full of people who hate when judges rule based on what they want the law to be, rather than what it says, so when the Court admits that a “literal” reading of the relevant law and text would point to a gay rights outcome, but votes against it anyway,...

Maryland’s Highest Court, in a 4-3 ruling, has held that my state’s prohibition of same-sex marriage does not violate the state constitution. The opinion is here, it’s 244 pages, so more comment later. I will say that if there is any state where gay marriage might make it through the legislature, Maryland strikes me as a good bet. The State Senate is 33/14 D-R, and the House of Delegates is a whopping 104/37 D-R, giving them a veto-proof majority they shouldn’t need because...