I’m going to the Hill today, so the Civil Rights Roundup won’t go up until the afternoon. In the meantime, enjoy this piece on how Turkey’s military and supreme court are taking on each other’s roles.

Daily Roundup of Civil Rights and Related News A new study confirms that having gay members in the military doesn’t damage unit cohesion, or have any negative effects whatsoever. Elie Wiesel testifies in case of assailant. He feared he was being kidnapped — the perpetrator has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. A Turkish Studies Institute has been roiled by charges that its Turkish funders seek to suppress inquiry into the Armenian genocide. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales...

Several liberal bloggers are chiding President Bush for omitting a portion of a Thomas Jefferson quote he used during a 4th of July speech in Charlottesville. In a massive upset victory for non-partisanship, I not only defend the President, but argue that the omission was actually the right thing for him to do given the context of the speech.

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news An inspiring story in the Boston Globe of a graduate of one of Boston’s struggling public schools. The Globe also has the story of a teen mother from the same school who is heading off to college. Chicago is bracing for challenges to its gun ban in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision. The Washington Post reports a new surge in law students studying immigration. Anecdotally, when I’ve asked folks attending law school what...

Your morning roundup of civil rights and related news. The review will be off for July 4th, and will return to action Monday morning. TMV note: I still haven’t quite made a permanent decision on how I want to do this, but for now I think I will continue cross-posting this feature in full here at TMV. But if you don’t see it here, it may well be at my place. The NAACP has made its way to Utah to fight mortgage discrimination. A Texas death row inmate’s execution has been delayed...

One of the things I do for my job at the LCCR is help “clip” articles from around the country relating to civil rights and related areas each morning. The articles are saved into del.icio.us and come up in a feed on our website. So I figure: so long as I’ve got all this stuff in front of me, why not share it with you? All this is to announce what I hope to be a daily feature (at least through this summer): Civil Rights Roundup — a collection of news stories related to civil...

CNN reports that Israel has agreed to a prisoner swap with Hezbollah, which hopefully will bring home two Israeli solidiers abducted by the terrorist group when it sparked the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. Reports are sketchy, however, on whether the two solidiers are alive, and on the contours of the deal itself. CNN notes (accurately) that Hezbollah’s top priority in these negotiations has always been to secure the release of Samir Kuntar, currently serving a life-sentence for the...

Congress Introduces Bill Improving Access to the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s an issue I previously blogged about here, but this article you can find over at The Debate Link the website of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Expanding my online empire, one website at a time.

I had the great honor of attending this historic event. Here are my brief thoughts on the hearing. And if Glen Lavy represents the best the right has arguing against us on this point, we should win this one in a landslide. Talk about an utterly embarrassing performance.

How the intense stigmatization of such things as rape and racism actually help reify their presence in society.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of America’s most successful programs battling poverty. Originally passed in the Ford administration, the EITC supplements the wages of poor, working families, giving them a boost as they work their way up the economic ladder. Its innovative “plateau” formula means that it acts to promote, not discourage, work: the credit rises alongside income up to a certain level, then (after flat-lining for awhile), begins to phase itself out as families transition...

The question isn’t “is it ever justified”. Of course, sometimes it is — if America engaged in a massive genocide of the Jews, Jews would be justified in hating America. The question is, what would America have to do to an individual person for us to say, “that person is justified in hating America”? And more specifically, does years of extra-legal detention in an isolated prison where innocent people are tortured qualify?

Tomorrow is the 4th birthday of my blog, The Debate Link. But I likely will be distracted from celebrating. I began blogging the summer before I entered Carleton College. Which means today is a new chapter in the blog, but more importantly, in my life. For I have, as of 11:30 this morning, officially graduated from Carleton College, magna cum laude and with distinction in Political Science. But for once, I don’t want to talk about myself, but about my friends. The number of wonderful people...

I’ve written on several occasions about my favorite quote by W.E.B. Du Bois, responding to a student who asked: “Do you trust White people?” You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world’s you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on,...

I’ve been meaning to link to this Hilzoy post for awhile, because it gets at a very important point: If people want to redefine the word “racist” so that only actual slaveholders count, let them. I’m more interested in the “critical reflection” [Ta-Nehasi] Coates rightly says that the “I’m not a racist” move is designed to shut down; in asking: does race play a role in someone’s thought and action that it ought not to play? rather than in...

After I wrote my well-received post on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Black Conservatism, my former history professor contacted me and asked if I would like to lead a seminar on it for his African-American history class this term. I happily agreed. But when I met with him a few days ago, he said that we might have to change the topic. “Wright is old news,” he said. But it seems he spoke a bit too soon. While Obama’s resignation from the Trinity Church was not precipitated by Wright but...

I’m making dinner with my girlfriend at the moment, but I will have some commentary on Obama’s resignation from Trinity tonight.

It’s not as simple as being delightfully color-blind (is it ever?).

Why Barack Obama would be the most pro-Zionist President in American history. He managed to single-handedly disprove much of the argument I made alleging that non-Jews could not effectively advocate for Zionism as understood by Jews in the public sphere. Obama’s interview with The Atlantic is simply fantastic — it hits every base I could have asked for. He called Zionism “just”. He related it to anti-Semitism — not just as something in the past, but as something Jews...

The principal of Irmo High School in South Carolina (former debate foes of mine) has resigned after being told that he had to allow a gay/straight alliance club to form at his school. As I say in the linked post, as much as I find his arguments against the GSA repulsive, I think he did the honorable thing by resigning. I support a pretty broad array of religious accommodations — more than most Americans, I’d wager. But at the end of the day, if you feel like your religion prohibits you...

Zionism is, at its essence, the national liberation project for Jews as applied to creating a Jewish nation-state in Israel. Its object and purpose centers around Jews. Since Israel has been established, Zionism today means just that one thinks creating Israel was a pretty good move and it should stick around (a definition inspired by, if not outright plagiarized from by virtue of not being able to find a link, Phoebe Maltz). Consequently, being a Zionist doesn’t mean supporting any given Israeli...

A short while back, I predicted that Michelle Obama would become the latest target for GOP attackers desperate to slow her husband’s momentum. The Tennessee GOP quickly verified that hypothesis by running an attack ad questioning her patriotism. To their credit, both of Tennessee’s Republican Senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, have come out against the ad. Corker explicitly calls for it to be taken down, Alexander is more tepid, merely saying that “There are probably better...

Last time I reported on election results in the 1st Mississippi Congressional District, it was competing with the Pennsylvania Primary. The race went into a run-off, and today it competes for attention with the West Virginia Primary — which Clinton won handily to no effect whatsoever. Just to review: the Mississippi 1st is one of the reddest districts in the country — even more than the Louisiana 6th where Democrats scored an upset victory to flip a seat a few weeks back. In the first...

Some folks have been giving Barack Obama a hard time for his claim that the court’s should serve as a refuge and defender of the oppressed in America. This, they argue, is politics substituting itself for law. They gleefully point to John McCain’s statement on what he’s looking for in a judge — a position that is supposedly non-ideological and apolitical. Conservative judges go where the law takes them. Liberal judges go where they want to go, law be damned. Tragically, this...

All the flak over the Jeremiah Wright controversy notwithstanding, Obama seems to have pretty Teflon skin. Conservatives are banking that the same is not true of his wife. Also, I have Obama’s new campaign anthem. Tell me I’m wrong.