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A calm political protest quickly turned chaotic as anxious Denver police surrounded protestors peacefully marching toward the Democratic National Convention Center. After trapping the crowd between two buildings, hundreds of officers used pepper spray, batons and unwarranted aggression. After being surrounded for 20 minutes, two ANP producers managed to escape after recording the whole affair.
At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Iraq Veterans Against the War marched with thousands of peace activists amid high police presence to bring a message to Obama - pull out of Iraq now. AT&T thanks the Blue Dog Democrats with a lavish party

Last night in Denver, at the Mile High Station -- next to Invesco Stadium, where Barack Obama will address a crowd of 30,000 people on Thursday night -- AT&T threw a lavish, private party for Blue Dog House Democrats, virtually all of whom blindly support whatever legislation the telecom industry demands and who also, specifically, led the way this July in immunizing AT&T and other telecoms from the consequences for their illegal participation in the Bush administration's warrantless spying program. Matt Stoller has one of the listings for the party here.

Armed with full-scale Convention press credentials issued by the DNC, I went -- along with Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher, John Amato, Stoller and others -- in order to cover the event, interview the attendees, and videotape the festivities. There was a wall of private security deployed around the building, and after asking where the press entrance was, we were told by the security officials, after they consulted with event organizers, that the press was barred from the event, and that only those with invitations could enter -- notwithstanding the fact that what was taking place in side was a meeting between one of the nation's largest corporations and the numerous members of the most influential elected faction in Congress. As a result, we stood in front of the entrance and began videotaping and trying to interview the parade of Blue Dog Representatives, AT&T executives, assorted lobbyists and delegates who pulled up in rented limousines, chauffeured cars, and SUVs in order to find out who was attending and why AT&T would be throwing such a lavish party for the Blue Dog members of Congress.

Amazingly, not a single one of the 25-30 people we tried to interview would speak to us about who they were, how they got invited, what the party's purpose was, why they were attending, etc. One attendee said he was with an "energy company," and the other confessed she was affiliated with a "trade association," but that was the full extent of their willingness to describe themselves or this event. It was as though they knew they're part of a filthy and deeply corrupt process and were ashamed of -- or at least eager to conceal -- their involvement in it. After just a few minutes, the private security teams demanded that we leave, and when we refused and continued to stand in front trying to interview the reticent attendees, the Denver Police forced us to move further and further away until finally we were unable to approach any more of the arriving guests. MORE

ABC Reporter Arrested in Denver Taking Pictures of Senators, Big Donors

Denver Police Arrest 91, Fire Pepper Spray & Pepper Balls at Protesters

Its not THAT you're protesting. Its WHAT you're protesting


Pepperspraying protestors,

If you are a New York Times photog, try not to be mistaken for an anarchist,

What the Free Speech Zones looked like (most people completely ignored them)

The Republican War on Voting

Sharrard's cautionary tone was a response to the Republican Party's ongoing nationwide campaign to suppress the low-income minority vote by propagating the myth of voter fraud. Using various tactics -- including media smears, bogus lawsuits, restrictive new voting laws and policies, and flimsy prosecutions -- Republican operatives, election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have limited voting access and gone after voter-registration groups such as ACORN. Which should come as no surprise: In building support for initiatives raising the minimum wage and kindred ballot measures, ACORN has registered, in partnership with Project Vote, 1.6 million largely Democratic-leaning voters since 2004. All told, non-profit groups registered over three million new voters in 2004, about the same time that Republican and Justice Department efforts to publicize ?voter fraud? and limit voting access became more widespread. And attacking ACORN has been a central element of a systematic GOP disenfranchisement agenda to undermine Democratic prospects before each Election Day.
 
Revelations that U.S. attorneys were fired for their failure to successfully prosecute voter fraud have revealed how fictitious the allegations of widespread fraud actually were -- but the allegations haven't gone away. They live on in all the vote-suppressing laws and regulations that will likely affect this year's election, in GOP rhetoric and, most recently, in the arguments presented by champions of Indiana's restrictive voter-identification law in a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Voter fraud is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a person, according to data compiled by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. As Lorraine Minnite, a Columbia University professor, observed in the Project Vote report, The Politics of Voter Fraud, "The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American elections is itself a fraud." In October 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft launched an intensive "Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative" that required all U.S. attorney offices to coordinate with local officials in combating voter fraud. Yet even after the Justice Department declared the war against voter fraud a "high priority," only 24 people were convicted of illegal voting in federal elections between 2002 and 2005 -- and nobody was even charged by Justice with impersonating another voter. (The Justice Department declined to answer questions about more recent fraud prosecutions.) And despite the anti-immigrant frenzy fueling photo-ID laws, only 14 noncitizens were convicted of illegally voting in federal elections from 2002 through 2005 -- mostly because of their ignorance of election law.

Unfortunately, the public hasn't heard just how nonexistent the voter fraud epidemic actually is. While progressives have successfully challenged some of the most restrictive laws in court, they're still playing catch-up when it comes to combating the glib sound bites of voter-fraud alarmists. Republicans and the Bush Justice Department have cloaked their schemes under such noble-sounding concepts as "ballot integrity." The GOP's vote-suppression playbook features everything from phony lawsuits to questionable investigations to authoritative-seeming reports, all with the aim of promoting restrictive laws. These tactics were first perfected in the hotly contested swing state of Missouri.

The roots of John Ashcroft's passion on this issue go back to the chaos of Election Day 2000 in St. Louis, when hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly inner-city voters were turned away from polling places because their names were not on voting rolls. The resulting last-minute court battle kept some polling places open for 45 minutes after their scheduled closing time of 7 P.M. Ashcroft, then the Republican U.S. Senate nominee, lost his race to the dead Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he died in a plane crash. At an election-night party, an infuriated Republican Sen. Kit Bond pounded the podium and screamed, "This is an outrage!" -- and subsequently charged that Republican losses were due in part to dogs and dead people voting. As one local government official observed, "In St. Louis, 'dogs and dead people' is code for black people [voting fraudulently]."

That election night gave birth to the new right-wing voter-fraud movement, while Missouri became a proving ground for the vote-suppression campaigns that later spread to other key states. Missouri's then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt, now governor, launched a trumped-up investigation that concluded that more than 1,000 fraudulent ballots had been cast in an organized scheme. A Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation, started before Ashcroft shifted the department's priorities, found no fraudulent ballots, however. Instead, it discovered that the St. Louis election board had improperly purged 50,000 voters from the rolls

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The War On Voting Rights: Voter Fraud Smears, Voter ID And Corruption At DOJ

Corruption and Politicization at the Department of Justice
In the wake of the scandal opened up with inquiries into the firing of David Iglesias, which eventually cost Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez his job, the full scale of the politicization and corruption at the Department of Justice came into view. Congressional oversight hearings examined the Department's role in voter suppression activities, including allegations of voter fraud, voter caging, and voter intimidation. Representative John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has tackled the voter caging issue and has started hearings on this and related issues through his Committee and its various sub-committees.
Hearings held recently in front of one of those House Judiciary subcommittees revealed how the Department, through the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "failed to investigate illegal mailers sent to African-Americans in Dallas" that threatened criminal punishments if they registered to vote through ACORN in the run-up to a 2006 Congressional election, Levine wrote.

"The FBI's decision not to investigate, critics say, is the latest sign that politicization appears to have compromised the nominally non-partisan law enforcement agency," Levine wrote. "That intimidation is a violation of the Voting Rights Act," said "former 21-year veteran of the Civil Rights Division" and election law expert, Gerry Hebert. Levine further notes that "President Bush's Justice Department hasn't brought a single prosecution or lawsuit in more than seven years on behalf of any African-American voters who faced direct voter intimidation threats and challenges – despite receiving, by some estimates, roughly 12,000 criminal civil rights complaints of all kinds annually." But the VRA is not the only federal law the Department failed to enforce as partisan political operatives such as Hans von Spakovsky took over key parts of the Department’s voting rights enforcement apparatus

"Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Voting Section has not enforced other federal laws, such as the requirement that state welfare offices offer public aid recipients a chance to register to vote," wrote Steve Rosenfeld in the Fall 2007 issue of Social Policy, referring to Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act. Instead, the Department has had a heavy hand at pushing detrimental voter purges, a procedure loosely mandated by another NVRA section. At a House hearing on equal enforcement of NVRA Tuesday, Project Vote deputy director, Michael Slater testified that "All Americans deserve an equal opportunity to register to vote and participate in our democracy...Many states, however, are undermining that promise and furthering inequalities."
Levine recounted the number of voters disenfranchised as a result of these purges and voter caging policies:

"In Ohio in 2006, 303,000 voters were purged in three major urban counties, while the Brennan Center reported that Pennsylvania's rigid database rules, later loosened, had excluded up to 30 percent of eligible registrants. Karl Rove aide Tim Griffin played a major role in state GOP voter 'caging' operations (that is, challenging the eligibility of registered voters) in such states as Ohio and Florida. These schemes, Project Vote reports, challenged the right of 77,000 mostly minority voters to cast ballots between 2004 and 2006, under the pretext that non-forwardable letters sent by GOP activists to their addresses were returned as undelivered."

States fail to offer Voter Registration to Millions of Low-Income Voters


Millions of low-income and minority voters are being denied opportunities to register to vote by state agencies that are violating a federal voting law, according to members of Congress and voting rights groups.
The ongoing failure has led to a nearly 80 percent drop-off in registering low-income applicants at state social services agencies over a decade, according to a recent report by the non-partisan voter advocacy research groups Project Vote and Demos.
"This noncompliance means the disenfranchisement of millions of low-income citizens, and a widening of the gap between the registration rates of high and low-income individuals," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., the chairwoman of a House elections subcommittee that held hearings this spring on the widespread violations of Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
The under-enforced 1993 law is better known the "motor voter" law. Minority citizens lag behind white voter registration by as much 10 percent for blacks, and roughly 20 percent for Hispanics and Asian-Americans, in part because they are disproportionately low-income.

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These disparities are worsened by other state and federal actions that limit access to voter registration and voting.
Battleground states such as Florida also impose draconian restrictions on voter registration groups seeking to register low-income voters. VA hospitals bar on-site voter registration drives of wounded soldiers. And states have toughened voter ID requirements, led by Indiana's photo ID law that was upheld by the Supreme Court in April.
In addition, some states, including Louisiana, are facing challenges to their efforts to hastily purge many thousands of often minority voters from their rolls. In response to these alarming trends, Project Vote declared last week, "Voter purges are one of several problems in the administration of elections that could not only bar legal voters from the polls, but could potentially influence the outcome of close races," including the tight Presidential race.


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Michigan, Louisiana and Kansas accused of Illegally purging Voters Lists

Election officials in a handful of states appear to be ignoring the federal law dictating the way registered voters may be purged from voter rolls, civil rights attorneys say.

National voting rights groups have contacted officials in Kansas, Michigan and Louisiana in recent weeks because those states appear to be purging registered voters after election officials found duplicate names and birthdays of people on their voter lists and in out-of-state databases, such as driver's license records.

The states are assuming that a more recent driver's license or voter registration in another state indicates that the voter has relocated, meaning the voter registration tied to their prior address is no longer valid. While purging voters who move, die or are imprisoned is a routine part of managing elections, the federal law governing purges -- the National Voter Registration Act -- lays out a multiyear process of trying to contact voters to confirm a change of address before deleting them from voter rolls.

The election attorneys say the NVRA process seeks to err on the side of protecting voting rights and cannot be circumvented by what appears to be a duplicate voter registration.

"The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) limits the circumstances in which a state may cancel a voter's registration," the Fair Elections Legal Network, a Washington-based voting rights consortium, said in a June 24 letter to Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh. "The NVRA does not permit cancellation based on a match alone."
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Last week, Project Vote, which is working in two dozen states to register voters in 2008, sent a letter to Dardenne saying his state appeared to be ignoring sections of the NVRA that require that voters be notified by mail over two federal election cycles before being removed. Project Vote's attorney said Louisiana Commissioner of Elections Angie LaPlace was treating apparently duplicate database listings as "cases of suspected fraud or some other irregularity."

Last year, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued Louisiana over the purging of registrations of refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Many people who applied for a driver's license in a neighboring state -- to quickly acquire an ID after losing their belongings in the storms -- also were registered to vote without their knowledge, NAACP attorneys said. Those new voter registrations resulted in 21,000 voters being removed from Louisiana voter rolls last August, the group said. While the NAACP suit was dismissed, Project Vote's recent letter suggests the state's voter list maintenance practices have not changed. Project Vote also wrote to the U.S. Department of Justice about the matter, as the agency oversees federal elections in most Southern states as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Louisiana election officials disagreed with Project Vote's assessment, saying the state has its own voter purge process that "supersedes" the federal law. Berry, the secretary of state's spokesman, explained that Louisiana updates its voter roll annually with multiple mailings to voters so the lists are accurate in state elections -- not just federal contests. He said that process is more rigorous than that outlined in the federal NVRA, requiring, for instance, that voters reaffirm their Louisiana voter registrations in person after receiving a final state notice. Berry said the process was approved by the Department of Justice. (THIS Dept. of Justice!!!)

"What we find is in the vast majority of cases the voter has moved out of Louisiana and registered in another state, not realizing that they will not automatically cancel their voter registration," he said.

The issue of whether states are heeding the National Voter Registration Act reveals how the implementation of the nation's election laws often turns on a patchwork of local or state policies. In the absence of litigation, whether a state or election jurisdiction is following the NVRA often remains a question of local interpretation.

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(From April this year)House Panel Launches Probe: Did FBI Ignore Threats To Jail Black Voters?

Moreover, the Justice Department's response was part of a striking pattern of indifference to alleged intimidation violations. In fact, The Huffington Post has learned, President Bush's Justice Department hasn't brought a single prosecution or lawsuit in more than seven years on behalf of any African-American voters who faced direct voter intimidation threats and challenges -- despite receiving, by some estimates, roughly 12,000 criminal civil rights complaints of all kinds annually.

Indeed, part of what amounts to a wide-ranging GOP disenfranchisement strategy is attacking the non-partisan low-income advocacy group ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The organization has been a favorite target of Republicans promoting the myth of widespread voter fraud because of its success in registering Democratic-leaning minority voters since 2004, according to reports by McClatchy Newspapers, The American Prospect, and other outlets. The drumbeat of voter-fraud hype is then used to justify a host of GOP-backed laws and policies, from restrictive photo ID voting laws to the Justice Department' promotion of mass purges of registered voters. Yet voter fraud, in fact, is so rare that even an intensive, four-year anti-fraud initiative by the Justice Department couldn't even find one person in the country to charge with impersonating another voter -- out of nearly 215 million votes cast in federal elections.


The Dallas incident, it turns out, perfectly symbolizes the no-holds-barred Republican politics of voter fraud. The intimidating flier was part of a brazen vote-suppression and smear campaign designed to undermine a Democratic candidate, Harriet Miller, in a tight local race in 2006 to challenge Texas House Rep. Tony Goolsby in a racially mixed North Dallas district.
The frightening and deceptive mailer, highlighted with ACORN's trademark red and black colors, was sent to thousands of black residents a few days before the election: "Beware: A national political group suspected of voter fraud [i.e., ACORN] is currently working in your neighborhood to bring people to the polls on election day...Don't be a victim of voter fraud -- it could result in jail time for you."
The flier appeared to have its intended effect of intimidating some black voters. Lawrence Jones, a 63-year-old retiree and an active ACORN member, vividly recalls how it affected registered voters and other ACORN members. "They were dumbfounded and shocked," he says. It caused some members to doubt the group's integrity, while other residents, he says, "just feared to vote." He adds, "A lot of people said they don't think ACORN is powerful enough to protect them -- I'm not going to fool with the federal government."
That anonymous mailer followed a spate of public attacks, ads, and mailers by the Goolsby campaign -- and even a letter to the local district attorney by the county Republican chairman -- all accusing Miller of engaging in voter fraud during her first campaign against Goolsby in 2004. The Republican smears, now the subject of a pending defamation lawsuit aimed at Goolsby and other local Republicans, also claimed she had illegally "retained the services of ACORN," while tarring the organization with flimsy claims that it deliberately engaged in voter fraud.


The district attorney never responded to the Dallas GOP's allegations, but the local CBS affiliate, CBS 11 News, jumped on the story to ballyhoo the bogus charges filed by Republican County Chairman Kenn George with the D.A.
The real fraud involved George's inflammatory letter to the prosecutor, which blatantly misrepresented election returns from 2004 in order to file the false voter fraud complaint against Miller. The letter claimed that as a Democrat running for a state House seat, she suspiciously won more votes than the Democratic candidate for Congress in black districts, when, in fact, there was no Democratic congressional candidate opposing the Republican, just an obscure independent.

"Republicans then used the [CBS] news coverage as a prop for mail to Anglo voters alleging Harriet Miller was engaged in a criminal enterprise," says Matt Engle, director of the pro-Democratic legal advocacy group, the Lone Star Project, which supports Miller's lawsuit against local Republicans. "Another part of the Republican effort was sending the illegal fliers to black neighborhoods to convince African-American voters not to show up."

After the CBS 11 News story ran, the Republicans' specious claims of voter fraud became the basis of at least four pieces of direct mail and one doorhanger charging that Miller was "under investigation" for voter fraud. The mailers cited as a source the same CBS story that Kenn George himself had generated with his fake voter fraud claim to the D.A. All this, in turn, was followed by the menacing flier warning black voters who registered with ACORN that they'd be arrested at the polls.

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Harriet Miller and her district's black voters, though, are hardly the only people victimized by false voter fraud claims and intimidation schemes. For instance, as chronicled by leading civil rights groups in an "Election Protection" coalition, such threatening incidents include black-shirted, gun-toting thugs thwarting Latino voters in Tucson, Arizona in 2006, and fliers from a fake "Milwaukee Black Voters League" distributed during the 2004 election in Milwaukee inner-city neighborhoods warning people that if anyone in their family had been convicted of a crime, "you can get ten years in prison" if you dared to vote. Unfortunately, such cases don't seem to have been deemed worthy of serious investigation by DOJ, and certainly no prosecutions or lawsuits have resulted.

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Needed Now: A Constitutional Amendment Ensuring the Right to Vote

Most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that there is no provision of the Constitution or federal law that affirmatively guarantees all citizens the right to vote. Neither the U.S. Constitution nor the 1965 Voting Rights Act nor any other federal law explicitly ensures such a right. Even the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution do not explicitly guarantee the right to vote to all citizens.

Now is an ideal time to ensure the right to vote for people of color, who are disproportionately disenfranchised, and all Americans. In this heated election season, state legislatures throughout the nation are considering bills that would complicate the process by requiring photo identification and citizenship documents in order to vote.

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The absence of an explicit federal provision conferring this fundamental right has left Americans at the mercy of state constitutions, state legislatures, local bureaucrats, and the judiciary. The states determine who is qualified to vote and establish the rules and conditions for holding elections. Not surprisingly, the combination of unduly burdensome procedures, underfunded bureaucracies and partisan officials has created a patchwork of arbitrary practices tending to contract, rather than expand the franchise. The result, as documented by scholars, is that more than nine million Americans are known to be disenfranchised by idiosyncratic legal restrictions on who is qualified to vote. Millions more are excluded by unnecessary hurdles to registration and voting and by election administration errors.

According to one academic researcher, the U.S. is one of only 11 democratic countries that do not explicitly provide the right to vote in their constitutions. According to Professor Jamin Raskin, one of the leading academic authorities on voting rights, constitutional silence on a basic right to vote leaves the United States in miserable, backward company with such regressive nations as Iran, Libya, and Singapore ... "

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A. The Real ID Implementation Review: Few benefits, GREAT costs


B. 17 states passed legislation against Real ID last year


C. Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.


C1. Blogger Emptywheel from firedoglake provides analysis of the above article.

C2. Blogger Digby weighs in

D. China's all-seeing eye: With the help of American defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

D1. Blogger Tristero provides analysis

E. Total Information Awareness

F. Remember the Fusion Centers?


People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Via:The Ohm Project

From:The Avalon Project at Yale Law School


The Avalon Project at Yale Law School
Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789

Approved by the National Assembly of France, August 26, 1789

The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the Social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected, and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen:
Articles:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.

4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.

6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.

7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.

8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.

9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner's person shall be severely repressed by law.

10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.

11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.

12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.

13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.

14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.

15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.

16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.

17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.

For me, at least, the modern struggle for civil rights has to encompass everyone who has been denied their rights and their equality because of status, because of who they are instead of what they do or do not do. This is a fight against limitations on mobility, against the idea that if you are born as one kind of person you have a certain "place" in society, that you shouldn't "get uppity" or try to inject yourself into the realms of high politics and finance because of some accident of birth. It's a fight against the notion that you have to give up who you are in order to join the mainstream, rather than behaving in a manner consistent with the mainstream while still retaining awareness of and pride in yourself. A fight against the notion that any of us can be reduced to some asinine label: the black guy, the angry feminist, the queer. All of us are more than that, both individually and collectively.

Please read the whole thing.

Go here for video to see what exactly she was wearing: http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=67297&provider=top

http://www.charlotte.com/nation/story/449146.html

Muslim athlete disqualified over uniform
The Associated Press
School Athlete Muslim Clothing
AP Photo
Juashaunna Kelly recovers from a 5K race during a cross-country meet Oct. 5, 2007, in Washington. Kelly has been disqualified from an indoor track and field meet because officials said the custom-made outfit she wears to conform to her Muslim faith violated competition rules.

* Video from the Associated Press Muslim athlete disqualified over uniform

WASHINGTON --
A high school track star has been disqualified from a meet because officials said the custom-made outfit she wears to conform to her Muslim faith violated competition rules.

Juashaunna Kelly, a senior at the District of Columbia's Theodore Roosevelt High School, has the fastest mile and 2-mile times of any girl runner in the city this winter. She was disqualified from Saturday's Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet.

Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt's cross-country and track teams. The custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard covers her head, arms, torso and legs. Over the unitard, she wears the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.

The outfit allows her to compete while adhering to her Muslim faith, which forbids displaying any skin other than her face and hands.

( Read more... )