Your daily dose of civil rights and related news A Nebraska law intended to stop the abandonment of newborn babies is now seeing parents drop off older kids — including teenagers — saying they can no longer care for them. The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh will decide whether to leave the national church in protest of its ordination of a gay bishop. GLBT voters in New Haven, Connecticut, got a chance to fire questions at the leader of the state Republican Party. Though he opposes most...

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news The former police chief of Gary, Indiana has been found guilty of civil rights violations after kicking a suspect during a raid. A Michigan commission has thrown out disciplinary charges against a member of the state’s board of canvassers who had opposed certifying a initiative that successfully banned affirmative action. The Supreme Court will not rehear its decision striking down the use of the death penalty in child rape cases. Large numbers...

Okay, here’s the scoop everybody. The civil rights roundup is back. But it will be on a significantly-modified schedule. For starters, this is likely the only Tuesday you’ll see it, as I have class with only a lunch break straight through from 9:45 – 4 that day. Most days, though, a probably-abridged roundup will show up by mid-afternoon. And with that, away we go! The trial of a South Carolina state trooper accused of ramming a fleeing suspect with his car has begun. A group of...

Outgoing Israeli PM Ehud Olmert says in an interview that Israel must withdraw from nearly all the West Bank and East Jerusalem in order to achieve peace, and says that the focus on maintaining control over particular “strategic” chunks of land as more important than reaching a permanent peace deal is misguided.

An Israeli peace activist was lightly wounded in an apparent assassination attempt that police believe was carried out by far-right Jewish terrorists. Police are raising protection for members of the group Peace Now after flyers at the scene offered a 1.1 million shekel bounty for anyone who killed a member of the organization. More background and information can be found here. Needless to say, these terrorists are repellent and need to be dealt with as the threat to Israeli society that they are.

ABC has posted excerpts. It’s basically entirely about foreign policy (except a brief digression on Palin’s religious beliefs in which Gibson was simply awful — as in, asking unfair questions with false assumptions awful), and most of it seemed pretty standard aggressive, blustering, conservative fare. Oh, and she seemed to commit us to going to war with Russia if they attack Georgia. That’s sort of important, I guess.

Some folks in the comments of my last post asked about whether homeless people have the right to vote, given that they don’t have a home (and thus, perhaps, a permanent address). Ask and I shall deliver. The National Coalition for the Homeless has a state-by-state chart detailing the rules. The verdict seems to be “theoretically, they can vote, but in some states there are higher practical barriers than others.” Incidentally, the NCH site is a great resource on the entire issue...

In Michigan, as in the rest of the country, many people are suffering from home foreclosures. Most of us feel bad for those individuals fighting to keep their home. Local Republican leaders, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to prevent people from voting. They’ve announced that they will deploy challengers on Election Day to prevent people whose addresses have been foreclosed from voting.

It’s a local judge so it doesn’t have value as a state-wide precedent, but it is a victory for equal rights all the same. At the moment, only Florida and Mississippi flatly prohibit gay adoptions, regardless of the normal best-interest-of-the-child standard.

Hey all. As I prepare to start law school, I’m doing a bit of traveling, and a lot of packing. As a result, I’m going to put the civil rights roundup on hiatus for the next couple of weeks. I hopefully will be able to get in periodic blogging as I cross-cross the country (well, the mid-west anyway), but there is no realistic way I’ll be able to keep up a regular enough schedule for something like the roundup. I’m not killing the feature — just giving it a little break...

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news The US Supreme Court is asking for briefs on whether it should rehear the Kennedy v. Louisiana death penalty case. The Court’s decision, which outlawed the use of capital punishment for child rape, had a factual inaccuracy in that it claimed that the US military did not allow such punishment. In a reversal, the V.A. will allow voter registration drives at veteran’s facilities. A Dallas suburb wants renters to get a “license”...

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news Hopefully, the Senate will fast track the passage of the ADA when it returns from recess. Students registering to vote on college campuses is confusing registrars. The DOJ is widening its investigation after an Asian student with perfect SAT scores was rejected from Princeton University. The student says that he was rejected based on race, the school notes that there is more to a candidacy than SAT scores. Some cities are turning to civil injunctions...

She’s in favor of teaching kids about condoms. Good for her — one of the few times I’ll say that about her, I wager (as you’ll gather if you follow the link).

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news What are Gov. Sarah Palin’s views on race and civil rights? Her Alaska record leaves a mostly-blank slate. California politicians are looking to challenge the LPGA’s new English proficiency rule — the only one of its kind in professional sports. Federal officials could not agree on whether a Muslim Imam from New Jersey had terrorist ties or not, and now an immigration judge has ruled he can gain permanent residency. Supporters of...

I went from “I’m not watching” to “I’m liveblogging” in the space of a minute. Let’s see what ol’ Straight Talk has for us. Catch it over at The Debate Link. UPDATE: My verdict? It was good. Very good. Far superior to Palin’s nasty attack speech, a great motion to the center, surprisingly policy oriented, and very evocative of what drew many moderates to McCain in the first place.

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) is the perp.

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news This is a little late, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a fascinating story about an area police officer who found out recently that she was intersex. A judge has ruled that the ADA applies to airlines. My home county is posting a decline in test scores and an increase in the racial achievement gap. Mounting economic diversity is to blame, claims the school superintendent. A Texas woman is fighting back against predatory lenders, saying they...

I can, but that’s because Gov. Palin’s speech only delved into substance on the topic of energy. Which makes sense — it is the one national-caliber issue on which she has any expertise. And she definitely sounded like she knew what she was talking about — though I’m not entirely convinced that the Republican Party wanted “drill, baby drill” to be the defining chant of its convention. But other than that, I thought the speech was a net negative for Governor...

I would hesitate to jump to conclusions about Sarah Palin’s pastor and what it says about her. For one, we don’t really have any way of knowing what views of his she echoes. For two, I don’t know enough about the evangelical community to know if there is any contextualization of what happened in her church that dissipates the more inflammatory statements (such as the implications that Jewish deaths in Israel represent God’s judgment against us). But since she is a newcomer...

Google sure picked some interesting inspirations for its new browser logo.

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news Backlash over the Postville raid may be prompting the government to change its immigration enforcement tactics somewhat. Orange County Register: The diversity given by immigration is a source of strength, not weakness, to our nation. Same-sex marriage: good for the economy. How long until “pro-family” groups start up their victim complex by railing against “Big Marriage”? Also on the marriage front, a New York court has thrown...

CNN reports that evangelicals are rallying around Bristol Palin. And I’m glad to hear it. I’m glad that nobody is portraying her as a slut or whore. I’m glad that the evangelical community is reacting to the news with compassion given that they believe her to have engaged in what they see as immoral behavior, and I hope that they would demonstrate that compassion to all other women who have engaged in similar behavior — both on a micro-level (in personal relations) and a macro-level...

We have no idea and, thanks to the Bush administration, we legally can’t find out: A federal appeals court has ruled that the government can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease. Because the Agriculture Department tests only a small percentage of cows for the deadly disease, a Kansas meatpacker, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to test all of its cows, but the government says it cannot. Larger meat companies worry that if Creekstone is allowed to perform...

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news I wasn’t planning on doing this today, but tomorrow I’m taking my girlfriend to the airport and likely won’t have time to post. So tomorrow will be my holiday, and today you get a roundup. In a whole new level of cattiness, Republican lawmakers in California tried to block courthouse improvements in retaliation over the judiciary’s gay marriage rulings. The anti-affirmative action forces in Arizona have admitted defeat. The...

Often-times, when Democrats run a candidate for office who is not a White male, Republicans unleash with a familiar refrain. “He’s an affirmative action candidate”, to Barack Obama. “She only got there because of her husband”, to Hillary Clinton. And when these candidates do well, it’s not evidence of any merit on their part, or that voters critically evaluated them and decided they were best for the job. It’s because of “identity politics”: Blacks...