The Debate Link

Everyone in Sweden speaks English.

This is not an exaggeration -- English is part of the school curriculum in Sweden, so essentially everyone learns English (and can speak it flawlessly).

As an American tourist, this is actually a little awkward, because it feels like the height of entitled American-ness to be in a country where English is not the primary language and just assume everyone speaks English. But I'm here for a conference, and that was exactly what I was instructed to do! Cab driver, hotel receptionist, shopkeeper -- just start speaking in English! The keynote lecture I'm giving? Also in English. No translation, no nothing. Just straight English.

Sweden is an extreme case. But I don't think Americans quite realize just what a ridiculous privilege it is that English is the closest thing to a global lingua franca right now. I was walking through the Amsterdam airport for my connection to Stockholm, and the signs were all in English, and the various airport employees just naturally spoke to people in English. It's incredible, and utterly taken for granted.

I wonder, as American hegemony recedes (due to our own stupidity, mostly) whether this will stop being the case in my lifetime. If so, it will be a tremendous loss for Americans and other English speakers (obviously, there is no injustice in something replacing English as the global common language, but from a purely selfish standpoint it's still a loss).

Anyway, Sweden is quite lovely, even though my travel schedule is brutal -- I left for Stockholm on Monday, did not arrive until Tuesday afternoon, had my conference today, then leave for Chicago tomorrow morning for another conference Friday and Saturday before finally going home on Monday. But crippling jet lag has not dimmed my appreciation for this city or its wonderful people one bit. Yay Sweden!

A few years ago, I wrote about how much I liked crack (the word). The basic reason why was that it has a wide range of definitions that cover a lot of seemingly unrelated territory, without many clear indicators of how the different definitions might be connected to one another.

In that post, I listed off many such definitions, from "crack" as in "fissure" to "crack" as in "a joke". But one slangier usage I didn't talk about is "cracked" in gamer-speak, where it means something like "awesome" or "unbeatable" ("That strategy is totally cracked!").

In fairness, I did talk about "crack" is in "elite" -- "crack troops guarded the valley" -- which is pretty close to the slang usage.

But I would bet significant money that, despite their similarity, "cracked" in gamer lingo doesn't derive from this adjacent "crack" dictionary definition.

Rather, my guess is that the gamer meaning comes from "cracked" as in "unlocked", possibly as in saying that the awesome player "solved the puzzle of the game", but more likely from an older hacker usage: a game is "cracked" when a pirate successfully removes the DRM and distributes it. Doing this successfully was considered quite a praiseworthy achievement in some gaming circles, and it seems likely that it migrated from there to the slang usage today.

But isn't that interesting? A contemporary slang usage of a word, that is at least adjacent if not identical to a "regular" dictionary definition of that same word, but whose entrance into the lexicon probably has nothing to do with this parallel definition.

That's cracked!

An inevitable event every new parent dreads is the first time their baby gets sick. But a less remarked on, but almost as frightening prospect is the first time you, the parent, gets sick while caring for a baby.

This past week, my keratoconus has been acting up. Looking back on my chart notes from the last time this happens, it appears I have corneal hydrops, which starts manifesting as dry eyes and quickly progresses into significant eye irritation, light sensitivity, and extreme tearing (the other day tears literally started jetting from my eyes when I woke up). In my case, these symptoms also come alongside sinus symptoms on my left side -- so my left nostril is running and I have pain in my left orbital socket and along the teeth the upper left part of my jaw.

Being "sick" (I'll address the quotation marks in a moment) is never fun, but it is far less fun when you have an infant in your care. When it's just you and/or your fellow adult companion, you can kind of slough off your responsibilities temporarily until you're feeling better. No reasonable person will hold it against you if you push back a deadline or skip out on making dinner. In most cases, your loved ones will be able to shuffle some of their responsibilities around to help you. You get taken care of.

But an infant is, of course, quite needy, and it can't press pause on its needs to accommodate yours. If I need to tap out of my evening care shift, my wife has to take it, and then she isn't getting the sleep she needs. If we need to go to the doctor's and I'm not up to driving, then she has to drive, which means he has to come and she has to be up to driving, which, again, is harder when she's getting even less sleep than normal because I'm out of commission. The normal feeling of bodily vulnerability is accentuated because one also feels a little more trapped than usual. There's an extra layer of emotional unpleasantness that is a poor complement to the physical unpleasantness.

The saving grace right now is that I don't have an infection or anything else that could be transmitted to my baby. So at least I don't have to worry about that.

But in classic me-form, that got me thinking about linguistics. How do I generically (but not too generically) describe my condition? Stipulate that "not feeling well" is the umbrella generic term covering all health related reasons why one might, well, not feel well. Under that umbrella, there are some more specific terms.

For example, saying I'm "sick" feels wrong because sickness, to me, refers to an infection. If I told people I was "sick", they'd immediately assume I had some sort of bug. Perhaps more broadly it can include being made unwell by any foreign substance (hence why food poisoning or, for that matter, regular poisoning still to me qualifies one as being "sick"), but it still wouldn't fit what's happening here.

Likewise, Jill suggested "injured". But that for me suggests some discrete moment of trauma that I endured. If I got hit in the eye with a baseball and it felt like this, then I'd be injured. A flare-up of a chronic condition, not triggered by anything particular I'm aware of, doesn't seem to fit.

So -- if your chronic condition does develop a novel complication that makes one feel especially unwell, what are you. Not sick, not injured. "Ailing" also works, but feels too Victorian. Is that the best we can do?

I was thankful on Thanksgiving, but now the holiday is over and I'm back to being misanthropic.

* * *

The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles Kate Manne (congrats on her baby, by the way!).

I'd find these complaints about how the right is rewriting Mizrahi history to suit its political agenda more compelling if the left hadn't completely abandoned this arena for years (with occasional exceptions for hopelessly idealized histories that are equally political, just with different motivations).

A new survey on British antisemitism is out and making waves. I think several of their methodological choices are questionable, to say the least, which prevents me from endorsing its conclusions without reservation. That's unfortunate because there is some interesting data in there, but it's occluded by the authors' own manifest ideological biases. I might write separately on this.

Shocking-not-shocking, part one: A Jewish member of the McGill student government was given an ultimatum to either withdraw from a trip to Israel or resign (she's doing neither, and daring the body to impeach her). Shocking-not-shocking, part two: A non-Jewish student government member going on the same trip was weirdly overlooked and given a pass.

Ohio legislators introduce bill threatening life imprisonment for any woman, girl, or doctor who has or performs an abortion. "Abortion", here, includes not reimplanting an ectopic pregnancy, which is currently not medically possible.

Anti-Vaxxers make headway in Samoa; dozens of people die of measles in Samoa.

Is there a word -- presumably, a German word that's four words smashed together -- for the distinct feeling of anger one gets at a person or object precisely because one knows one can't reasonably be angry at that person or object? Inquiring minds would like to know.

I am an admitted skeptic of English as a discipline; particularly when it seeks to intrude on other (e.g., my) academic domains and argue that literary theory is the key to understanding some legal dilemma or constitutional controversy. But I have to say that today I attended a fantastic workshop featuring UCLA Law Professor Samuel Bray and his forthcoming article "'Necessary AND Proper' and 'Cruel AND Unusual': Hendiadys and the Constitution." It actually did a great job of making me rethink a number of knotty problems of constitutional interpretation.

The underlying paper is excellent, not the least of which is that it taught me how to pronounce "hendiadys" (actually, pretty much as it's spelled: "hen-DIA-u-dus"). A hendiadys is special case of the written construction "X and Y". Normally, that's a conjunction referring to two separate things. So if I ask for "eggs and milk", I want two items purchased. If I write that an applicant must be "college educated and have four years of relevant experience," I've put down two qualifications.

In a hendiadys, however, "X and Y" refers to a single concept. If I say that my steak is "nice and juicy", I'm not giving two characteristics ("nice" and "juicy"), I'm giving it one -- "nice and juicy" refers to a single attribute. Likewise with common expressions like "rough and tumble" or "high and mighty." These refer to one thing rather than two.

As the title suggests, Bray applies this concept to two "X and Y" constructions in the Constitution which have typically been given the standard conjunctive read. Under this view, to be unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment a punishment must be both "cruel" AND "unusual" -- two criterion , of which both must be met. More recently the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision did a similar thing with regard to "necessary and proper" -- Chief Justice Roberts' opinion indicated that the law might have been "necessary" to effectuate Commerce Clause ends, but it separately analyzed whether it was "proper" and concluded it was not.

What's wrong with this? Sometimes the conjunctive reading leads to perplexing results, or doesn't seem to match our understanding of what the text means, or just seems awkward. Consider "necessary and proper". Bray observes first that, at the time of the founding, the term "necessary and proper" was almost always treated and discussed as a single term -- there are very few contemporaneous sources that sought to disaggregate them into two distinct qualifications. Moreover, "necessary" is a pretty hard word -- while people have tried to argue that it can mean "convenient" or "useful", that's far from the natural reading. Yet if necessary does means something closer to "indispensable", what non-superfluous work could "proper" do -- presumably any law which is unavoidably required to achieve a licensed congressional power is also a "proper" law? It'd be a weird thing to write (and weirder still since the man who inserted "and proper" into the clause, James Wilson, was a fierce proponent of a strong national government and would have been unlikely to have sought a further limitation on congressional power beyond "necessary").

As a hendiadys, however, "necessary and proper" modulate each other, creating a single hybrid requirement that evokes attributes of each. "Proper" tempers "necessary", suggesting that it is something  closer to "useful" or "convenient". But "necessary" in turn alters "proper", suggesting that a law must have some non-trivial bearing on an articulated congressional power to be valid. Bray has fuller arguments for this in his paper, and I encourage you to read it.

Another potential example of a constitutional hendiadys which springs to my mind is "advice and consent" -- as in the President's power to appoint Supreme Court Justices "by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate." This has obviously become quite timely with the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and the position of many Senate Republicans that they will refuse to even consider his (or any other) nomination in favor of whomever the next President selects.

Liberals have, of course, cried foul, and some have tried to argue that the Senate has breached its "advice and consent" obligation (these are, as you might expect, arguments whose partisan affiliations tend to hew closely to who's sitting in the Oval Office). These arguments, as a formal matter, strike me as a weak (Michael Ramsey at the Originalism Blog gives a good rundown why). Yet I do think the controversy helps illuminate some surprising ambiguities in "advice and consent", which I do think is best read as a hendiadys.

Of course, it is perfectly grammatical to read it conjunctively: for a judicial appointment to be confirmed, the Senate must provide (a) its advice and (b) its consent. But this duo of obligations rings very odd when you think about it: we seem to pay very little attention to the "advice" part. If the President selects his nominee with zero input from the Senate and the Senate proceeded to immediately confirm the nomination by unanimous vote, would the constitution have been violated? I'm highly skeptical. "Advice" seems superfluous.

"Consent", for its part, is like "necessary" -- it's a hard word. It denotes agreement, and it does not suggest any restriction on the bases for which the Senate can withhold its approval. If the Constitution simply said "the President, with the consent of the Senate, shall appoint" justices of the Supreme Court, it would seem to place the two branches on equal footing with respect to judicial nominations -- the President and the Senate must come to a mutual agreement on who goes on the Supreme Court, with both branches possessing equally legitimate authority to veto the choice.

Yet this doesn't track the norms of judicial nominations at all. For nearly all of American history, the Senate has never acted as if it could withhold consent to a presidential nominee simply because there was someone else they liked better, or because they'd rather their party was in control of the White House. Their confirmation role has been much weaker -- withholding consent only for unqualified nominees, or perhaps nominees so ideologically extreme as to demand an exception. The default was heavily titled in favor of the President -- the Senate will not reject judicial nominees simply because, on balance, it'd prefer someone else to be making the choice; it acknowledges a default presumption (and a relatively strong one at that) that the President should be able to appoint the nominee of his choosing. And it is the breach of that historical practice that is why today's liberals are so aggrieved: the Senate's position right now (refusing to confirm any nominee while it waits a year for a new president to take office) is, as a historical matter, an unprecedented deployment of the "advice and consent" power.

Reading "advice and consent" as a hendiadys helps put some constitutional muscle behind that instinct. Just as "necessary" and "proper" modulate each other, the term "advice" tempers "consent." It suggests that the consent power the Senate possesses ought to be an advised consent -- not an automatic consent, not an unconsidered consent, but still a consent that places the Senate in a subordinate, advisory position. This tracks well with the historical practice identified above, wherein Senators have not acted as if they can simply withhold consent for no other reason than the preference for a different candidate. The Senate, historically, has treated "advice and consent" as a hendiadys; they have voluntarily agreed to exercise the power in a way that acknowledges the president's superordinate position in the nominating position.

None of this means I think there is any actionable case against Senate Republicans for refusing to utilize their consent power in an "advised" fashion (if for no other reason than it's an obvious political question). But I do think reading this clause as a hendiadys better gets at how the executive and Senate have generally conceptualized their respective roles in the nomination process across American history, and so gives some credence to the idea that liberal objectors to the blanket obstructionism of Senate Republicans are appealing to a norm with genuine constitutional roots.

Of course, these are my thoughts less than 24 hours after reading Professor Bray's paper. His argument, with respect to the two clauses he focuses on, is much more polished than mine. And, as I say, it is an article well worth reading.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has an interview with Michael Quinn, the retired police offier who was the main source for Pointergate. It's ... not as awful as it could have been. That isn't to say it's good, by any means. He remains adamant that this was a gang sign, which is just transparently ludicrous at this point, and completely dismisses any racial overtones to the story. That said, his discussion about the role of racism in the criminal justice system is definitely above median. Anytime I hear a cop state that racial divides in arrest rates is both "evidence of racism individually and certainly of racist policies" I have to give a little nod of my head. Ditto with "There is something really wrong with law enforcement policies and criminal justice polices that puts that many people at risk." This is an unusual combination, to be honest -- acknowledging systematic racism in the abstract but denying it in what seems to be a really clear cut case (normally, one acknowledges the obvious case but dismisses it as an aberration). So, I dunno -- 3.5/10? Maybe 4/10 if I'm feeling generous.

But the best part of the interview -- and this is on the transcriber -- was when Quinn was asked whether this would have been a story if Hodge's photo-mate had been White:

"This isn't about the race of the gang. We've got white gangs within the state of Minnesota that are every bit as viscous as any black gang on the street."

While I'm sure Quinn actually said "vicious", I do like to think that the primary problem with gangs in Minnesota is that they're so damn sticky.

An ongoing linguistic dilemma I have is how to generically refer to females of my rough age. "Girl" is inappropriate because they're adults. "Woman" seems overly formal and like they're middle-aged. For men, "guy" works really well, and I'm generally a proponent of converting "guy" into a gender neutral term (e.g., "the guys in my law school class" referring to everyone in the law school class, not just men). But others object to this. "Gal" is the obvious feminine counterpart to "guy", but I can't take "gal" seriously -- I feel like I'm in a Western movie.

So my co-clerk and I decided to go on Thesaurus.com and look for synonyms. Here's what we got for "gal":

babe, bimbo, chick, dame, dish, doll, doxy, female, floozy, gal , girl, honey, lady, lassie, miss, moll, skirt, sweet thing, tootsie.

By contrast, here's "guy":

bird, bloke, boy, brother, bud, buddy, cat, chap, chum, dude, feller, fellow, gentleman, individual, male, person.

So a "guy" is a "person," but a "gal" is a "bimbo." Okay then.

At an Iranian demonstration, a banner which reads in Farsi as "America can not do a damn thing" is rendered in English as "America can do no wrong."



It looks like the problem was with Google translator (that's how it renders the Farsi phrase into English).

Whoops!

Alejandrina Cabrera, s city council candidate in heavily-Spanish-speaking San Luis, Arizona has been removed from the ballot after a judge ruled her English ability wasn't good enough to qualify. This was in accordance with Arizona's state law establishing English as the official language.

I have to think that, particularly as applied to this case, the law has to be unconstitutional. The hook would be the Equal Protection Clause (though it is times like this when my hostility to Luther v. Borden shines brightest), but in general it is fundamentally undemocratic for the state to impose substantive barriers to keep certain types of candidates off the ballot. The whole principle of a democracy is that the people get to decide what sort of person represents them, and if the people want to elect someone whose primary language is Spanish but whose English fluency is (in the candidate's own words), about a 5 out of 10, that's their prerogative.

When you compare that to the view of the City Attorney, who said that the decision was correct because a vote for Cabrera "would have been wasted, because [voters]c could have voted for someone better prepared to be an elected official," and the fundamentally authoritarian nature of the law becomes clear. The state is preventing a candidate from running for office because -- regardless of what the voters might think -- the state thinks that other people would be a better elected official. This is, more or less, how Iran conducts its "democracy", and it remains a sham even when it makes its way to one of the fifty states.

Now, to be sure, some set of neutrally-applied procedural hurdles -- such as attaining a set number of signatures, may be okay. But notably, such laws only effect persons who by virtue of their failure have already demonstrated themselves unlikely to obtain substantial, much less majority, support. Here, by contrast, the target of the law seems to be someone who could plausibly be elected -- and the insistence on trying to force Cabrera off the ballot seems to imply that she poses a real threat to her political opponents in San Luis. Well, that's democracy -- sometimes the voters vote for someone other than you. The solution is to be more appealing to the electorate, not rig the system so your opponents can't get on the ballot.

(And we won't even get into the nauseating nature of the comments on CNN's piece. I have to remind myself that internet commenters are not a representative cross-sample of America lest I despair of this whole national project altogether).

Peter Tatchell is promoting this year's International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia as an opportunity to pressure Commonwealth countries (Tatchell is British) to drop their regressive and often brutal anti-gay laws. This is obviously timely, what with Uganda's "kill the gays" bill back on tap. But all I can think of is Tatchell's acronym: IDAHO. International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. Shouldn't it be IDAHoT? Or IDAHT? Or you're all hung up on pronounceability, switch "homophobia" and "transphobia": IDATH. Yes, it means you no longer evoke America's 43rd state, but trust me, it's less evocative than you think.

SEK in the comments to this post: "If I learned one thing in grad school, it's that if it's longer than it is wide, it's a penis."

On the noble adverb:

Yet somewhere in the past decade or so, the adverb has fallen out of style. Become passé. They’re too flowery, too squishy. Real authors don’t say someone delivered a line archly, they leave it to their reader to puzzle it out from the way they wrote it, like God and Ernest Hemingway intended.

Read it. Quickly.

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 profeciency 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 Mohammad Qatanani say he is a moderate who helped build bridges between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, as well as Muslims and law enforcement officers after 9/11. Opponents say he was linked to Hamas, citing his detention by Israel (where Qatanani claimed he was physically and mentally abused).

Pro-equality advocates in Maryland are trying to keep an initiative off the Montgomery County, MD ballot that would overturn county regulations protecting transgender individuals.

Chicago students -- mostly from the South Side -- boycotted their first day of classes and instead showed up at wealthy suburban New Trier High School in protest of massive educational inequalities in the area.

Another Texas execution is on the ropes following allegations that the judge and prosecutor were having an affair.

An open letter to Sarah Palin by National Advocates for Pregnant Women argues that her anti-abortion stand also threatens the liberty of women who take their pregnancies to term.

The Agriprocessors kosher meat plant is being attacked again for slaughtering practices that seem to violate both American and Kosher laws.

The same plant is also fighting desperately to prevent its workers from unionizing, despite an NLRB ruling requiring them to recognize one.

RNC police are denying they're using excessive force on protesters,

All-boys charter schools are causing controversy in Philadelphia.

The Treasury Department has to get cracking on making paper money accessible to the blind.

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

The LPGA (woman's international golf organization) is requiring all of its players to be able to speak English if they want to compete. The Tour has been dominated in recent years by foreign-born players, and there are questions about whether this requirement violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

A Filipino man convicted of sending threatening communications to a variety of Black and biracial public figures was sentenced to over three months in prison.

Nebraska women still feel that discrimination is in front of them.

The Orlando Sentinel doesn't think Florida has done enough to notify ex-felons that their civil rights have been restored.

There once was a police department from Nantucket/that was sued for illegally detaining and using excessive force against some Black teens.

As Washington State gets more diverse, it has to deal with more bias crimes.

Good Magazine has an interesting profile of Ward Connerly.

HBO's new "Black List" documentary takes a look at the changing contours of Black culture.

Five rules for Black owned advertising companies.

Local Texas law enforcement officers are pledging to try and reduce the number of mentally ill and drug addicted inmates.

A disabled Florida woman is suing a local non-profit for discrimination, alleging that her supervisors forced her to do jobs beyond her physical capabilities.

The Justice Department filed a retaliation lawsuit against the city of Ft. Pierce, Florida, on behalf of a Black officer who was protesting racial discrimination.

Great Britain is adding study of the Atlantic slave trade to its mandatory secondary school curriculum.

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

An auto parts store in Houston is being sued by the EEOC for tolerating harassment of Black employees and passing over them for promotions.

PETA wants to put ads up on the Mexican side of the border fence, warning potential Mexican immigrants about the effects of fatty, meat-filled diets.

The ACLU is not thrilled with Hartford for imposing a juvenile curfew.

A Florida cop who was caught on tape beating a suspect has resigned.

Conservative groups in California will likely try to oust the current Chief Justice of the state supreme court over his role in the state's landmark gay rights ruling.

Hartford passes an ordinance prohibiting police from asking about immigration status; as well as arresting people solely for immigration violations.

A huge wave of immigrants who applied for citizenship last year should be naturalized in time to vote in this election.

I think I've come across this case before, but the Florida court which quashed a principal's outrageously anti-gay policies made the right move.

Innocent Black women shot by police; victim blamed. Not only is that title not hyperbole, but it goes downhill from there. Sickening.

On that same case, local Black leaders are furious that the officer was acquitted and are pressing for federal charges to be brought.

Word is that some of the workers building the border fence might not be documented.

A Greenville teenager beaten by a since-fired police officer has filed a civil rights lawsuit.

Florida continues to make strides towards restoring the civil rights of ex-offenders.

Three Hispanic families are suing over a Kansas school district's policy of requiring students to only speak in English while on school grounds (what if they're taking a foreign language?).

It's hard out there for a wheel chair bound individual.

Minneapolis immigrant teens, citing the importance of education, are lobbying to increase educational opportunities (particularly routes to college) for their peers.

Notaries are giving bad legal advice to immigrants (which they're not licensed to do anyway), resulting in screw-ups.

Town divided over brutal murder of immigrant, the Chicago Tribune reports. Presumably, the division is between its human beings and its psychopaths.

California court rules that Prop. 8 can be described as "Changes California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry"; on the grounds that "There is nothing inherently argumentative or prejudicial about transitive verbs."

Via Amp.

Your morning dose of civil rights and related news

The American Medical Association is set to apologize for its racist past, including excluding Black doctors and largely sitting out the civil rights movement.

The NAACP alleges that Nashville's new zoning plan will alter the racial dynamics of the city so much that it actually re-establishes segregation.

A performing arts charter school in LA with a focus on hip-hop is probably going to be shut down after its charter expires.

You're saying "Asian" is too broad a description to accurately capture a coherent, unified set of people with regards to educational achievement? Whoa!

The San Francisco Chronicle has an editorial exposing how ridiculous the fears surrounding the demise of the English language are.

In related news, though I personally am awful with foreign languages, I can still recognize that if I were able to learn one it'd be a valuable skill. That apparently qualifies as progressive in today's political context.

Police officers in Maryland also see the benefit of foreign language knowledge.

The Washington Post writes on how the declining Latino population is affecting Prince Williams County, Virginia.

Is progress against pay discrimination and the "glass ceiling" (or as the author calls it, porthole) stalling out?

Republicans are investigating voter fraud in largely Black Alabama counties. Maybe there is a there there, but it remains true that voter disenfranchisement is a far, far worse problem than voter fraud.

On the front of trying to encourage more engagement, not less, the We Are America Alliance (WAAA) is kicking off a huge campaign to encourage immigrants to become citizens, citizens to register, and registered voters to get to the polls.

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 and minority rights, all in one easy location. I hope to have it up each morning by 11:00 AM, but it might be earlier or later depending on my schedule.

So, without further ado....

The Boston Globe has an op-ed urging the creation of more English language classes to assist immigrants attempting to assimilate. They report 14,000 names on the waiting list for state-sponsored English programs.

L.A. Judge OKs Cops' not Asking Crime Victims, Witnesses About Immigration Status

Researchers are looking into reports that subprime mortgages were targeted at minority communities.

In "Flag City, USA", it's tough for Obama to break through the swamp of rumors surrounding him.

Thomas Atkins, a key civil rights leader in Boston who became the cities first black at-large city councilor, has died at age 69.

From the AP: "A police officer who body-slammed an unarmed woman and broke her jaw during a medical call to a suburban restaurant last year was arrested by the FBI on Friday and charged with violating her civil rights."

Affirmative Action: Not a quota system, not judicial activism, not anti-meritocratic.

This is an interesting case: Authorities are investigating whether San Francisco is giving illegal immigrants taxpayer financed trips home -- without formally deporting them.