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Civil rights leaders Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall -- whose names appear on schools, libraries, streets and parks across the U.S. -- are given too much attention in Texas social studies classes, conservatives advising the state on curriculum standards say.

"To have Cesar Chavez listed next to Ben Franklin" -- as in the current standards -- "is ludicrous," wrote evangelical minister Peter Marshall, one of six experts advising the state as it develops new curriculum standards for social studies classes and textbooks. David Barton, president of Aledo-based WallBuilders, said in his review that Chavez, a Hispanic labor leader, "lacks the stature, impact and overall contributions of so many others."

Marshall also questioned whether Thurgood Marshall, who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, should be presented to Texas students as an important historical figure. He wrote that the late justice is "not a strong enough example" of such a figure.MORE

What's happening now is that legal processes have been instituted that are all but guaranteed to cause a rapid outflow of those poor blacks from the eastern interior, while at the same time a new wave of commercial developers will float in on a cloud of government largess. The mechanism here is an uneven application of new safety guidelines for residential homeowners, passed quietly alongside a colossal tax break for commercial investors. It's a high-stakes hand of real-estate poker, and the casinos, the condo developers and contractors like Halliburton are the ones drawing extra cards.
The scam in East Biloxi centers around flood maps, and it mirrors what is likely to be a similar fiasco in New Orleans. New guidelines called Advisory Base Flood Elevations, or ABFEs, issued quietly and unilaterally by FEMA late last year, place the average suggested elevation above sea level for house construction in most of peninsular East Biloxi at eighteen feet. In order to qualify for any federal assistance in rebuilding your home, you must rebuild according to these guidelines.
Currently, most houses in the neighborhood are at about nine feet or less. [...]
Around the time that FEMA was issuing its ABFEs for East Biloxi, Congress was passing the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, colloquially known as the GoZone Act. When President Bush signed the law on December 21st, he made it sound like a relief program for the little guy. "It's a step forward to fulfill this country's commitment to help rebuild," he said. "It's going to help small businesses, is what it's going to do."
Well, not exactly. GoZone does an important thing. It provides a first-year bonus depreciation of fifty percent for commercial real-estate investors within the designated areas, which include East Biloxi and most of the lower parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and western Alabama. What this means, essentially, is that investors who bought into large projects after August 28th, 2005, will pay a fraction of the usual taxes in the first year of the investment.
The GoZone law is just another hand job for the rich, of the sort that has become a staple of the Bush administration's post-Katrina strategy. If the strategy for keeping public money from reaching the poor is to force people to first stand upside down and sing "Come On Eileen" backward and blindfolded, the strategy for giving money to the rich is a little more subtle. First, you give them tax breaks for indulging in the same activity you told the poor was dangerous, then you issue aid packages that only find their way down to needy recipients long after the value has been torn from the package's spine by a string of rapacious subcontractors, each taking their cut, who of course never had to enter into a competitive bid for their trouble. Carrying charges, my boy, carrying charges!MORE

Lori Phanachone, a senior at Storm Lake High School in northwest Iowa who's spoken English all her life, has been suspended from school for refusing to take an English-language proficiency test.

Phanachone found the English Language Development Assessment, a test required annually of all students considered by the state to be non-English speakers, both "insulting and degrading." This sample question from Iowa's guide for teachers administering the ELDA suggests that her assessment of the test is right:

Lori Phanachone could have aced questions like this in first grade. She says that making her answer them as a high school senior is insulting and degrading.

Phanachone, who told the Storm Lake Pilot Tribune, "I could have aced it in first grade," actually passed the proficiency test as a sophomore, when her family moved to Storm Lake, but after she was told to retake the test the following year she began to see it as discriminatory and answered questions randomly. When she was told to take the test again this year, she refused outright.

....

Phanachone was born in California and speaks and writes English with native fluency. However her mother is a Laotian immigrant, and she chose to honor that heritage by putting down on her school entrance forms that her first language was Lao. (Even though that is the case, she was able to read those forms in English, and fill them out in English as well – Iowa has no Lao version of the entrance forms, though they are available in Bosnian.)

But Storm Lake administrators are insisting that all students whose first language is not English are required by the federal No Child Left Behind law to take an English proficiency test every year.

Racist liar, pants on fire

Yet the Feb. 20 Homer incident was not an isolated case. Across the nation, in four cases in recent months, white police officers have been accused of unprovoked shootings of African Americans in what civil rights leaders say are illustrations of the potentially deadly consequences of racial profiling by police.

In the mostly white Houston suburb of Bellaire, a 23-year-old black man sitting in his own SUV in the driveway of his parents' home was shot and wounded on New Year's Eve by police who mistakenly believed he had stolen the vehicle. The case is under investigation.

In Oakland, a transit police officer has been charged with murder for allegedly shooting an unarmed black man in the back while he was restrained and lying face down on a train platform on New Year's Day.

In New Orleans, nine police officers are under investigation in the New Year's Day death of a 22-year-old black man who was struck by 14 bullets after an undercover team stopped his car. The police say the man raised a gun and fired at them, but the man's family disputes that.

"All the anecdotal information demonstrates that African Americans are the most frequent victims of zealous, inappropriate police activity that often winds up in a shooting," said Reggie Shuford, a senior attorney with the racial justice program at the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's a shoot first, ask questions later approach to policing."

The evidence is not merely anecdotal. The most recent national analysis from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that blacks and Hispanics were nearly three times as likely as whites to be searched by police—and blacks were almost four times as likely as whites to be subjected to the use of force.


...


"People here are afraid of the police," said Terry Willis, vice president of the Homer NAACP branch. "They harass black people, they stop people for no reason and rough them up without charging them with anything."

That is how it should be, responded Russell Mills, Homer's police chief, who noted the high rates of gun and drug arrests in the neighborhood.

"If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names," said Mills, who is white. "I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested. We're not out there trying to abuse and harass people—we're trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear."MORE

The following, from Justice Scalia’s opinion in Hudson, is an absolute joke:

Another development over the past half-century that deters civil-rights violations is the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline. Even as long ago as 1989, we felt it proper to “assume” that unlawful police behavior “would be dealt with appropriately” by the authorities, but we now have increasing evidence that police forces across the United States take the constitutional rights of citizens seriously. There have been “wide ranging reforms in the education, training, and supervision” of police officers (cite omitted).
[...]
Moreover, modern police forces are staffed with professionals; it is not credible to assert that internal discipline, which can limit successful careers, will not have a deterrent effect. There is also evidence that the increasing use of various forms of citizen review can enhance police accountability.

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LaTanya Haggerty was catching a ride home with her friend when they were pulled over for double parking. Within minutes she lay dead when the officer confused her cell phone with a gun. Though her family received 18 million in a settlement I am sure they would have preferred to have their daughter in their lives. Caroline Sue Botticher, an unarmed African American woman, died after police in West Charlotte, N.C., fired 22 rounds at the car in which she was a passenger when it failed to stop at a police checkpoint in April 1997. There was no evidence to suggest that anyone in the car was armed. Sandra Antor was lucky enough to escape with her life after being pulled over for speeding. She was however yanked out of her car, and wrestled to the ground by Lance Corporal W. H. Beckwith. MORE