Democratic presidential hopeful Carol Moseley Braun said Wednesday she favors gay marriages:

Comparing laws against same-sex marriages to those that once barred blacks from marrying whites, Democratic presidential candidate Carol Moseley Braun said Wednesday that she favors gay marriage. She said it was preferable to civil unions that do not "carry the same prerogatives and legal rights as marriage does."

"People should not be discriminated against in the exercise of their civil rights, and the right to marry who you want to marry is one of those rights," Braun, 56, told USA TODAY's editorial board a day after Massachusetts' highest court recognized a right for gays to marry. The issue has potential to rival abortion as a dividing line in next year's elections.

Oliver Willis weighs in with a similar view. Legal experts say the ruling seems air-tight.

The National Security Archive of George Washington University has released the second of a two part report on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. It's called Justice Delayed is Justice Denied and is available here. Beginning on page 5, it lists the ten oldest unfulfilled FOIA requests, some of which were filed more than ten years ago.

In Alabama and Florida, local cops are now authorized to hunt down illegal migrants. If some in Congress have their way, a proposed bill called the Clear Act, H.R. 2671, will make the practice national:

With more than 8 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to government figures, and 5,500 federal agents available for enforcement in interior areas beyond the border, advocates of cracking down on illegal migration see more than 600,000 state and local officers as a "force multiplier" that could finally and irrevocably turn the tide.

In Congress, a bill known as the CLEAR Act would transform what until recently has been a low-key experiment with local enforcement of immigration laws into a national crusade along the lines of the war on drugs. By setting up a system of financial penalties and incentives — including seizure of illegal immigrants' property — it aims to induce cities and states to take on immigration enforcement.

CLEAR Act stands for the Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal Act. It is the brainchild of Charlie Norwood (R-Ga) and has 110 sponsors in the House.

The bill would make civil immigration infractions — such as overstaying a visa — criminal violations. States that fail to pass legislation authorizing police to enforce immigration laws could lose federal funding for jailing criminal immigrants. Additional money would be allocated to states that embrace the program. And local police departments could be rewarded with the proceeds of assets seized from illegal immigrants, including homes, bank accounts and vehicles.

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights is calling for an investigation into the Maher Arar case:

It is a clear violation of international law and of United States policy not only to commit torture, but also to send someone to a country where they would face torture.

Article 3 of the Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a party, states:

No State Party shall expel, return ('refouler') or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.... For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

In this interview in Columbia Journalism Review, Mark Silverman, editor and publisher of the Detroit News, tells why his paper filed suit against Ashcroft in 2002 to obtain access to the secret deportation hearings. Here's the background:

In January 2002, the Detroit News filed a lawsuit in federal court in Michigan to obtain access to the Rabih Haddad deportation proceedings. Haddad, a Lebanese citizen, was arrested in 2001 for violating his tourist visa. He was also suspected of funneling money to al Qaeda through an Islamic charity he had helped to found. As a prominent member of the Detroit-area Arab community, Haddad's story was of great interest to the Detroit News. But the Creppy Memorandum issued four months previously barred the newspaper-and all newspapers-from attending Haddad's deportation hearing (see "The I.N.S. Test") . Mark Silverman, editor and publisher of the Detroit News, talks about why his paper filed suit to be there.

Thanks to Agonist for the link.

Nine of the 250 undocumented workers who were arrested October 23 as part of a national raid on Wal-Mart stores have filed suit against the giant company. Among the claims are:

...failing to pay overtime, withhold taxes and make required workers' compensation contributions.

The plaintiffs are seeking $200,000 in back pay for overtime.

The nine say they worked seven days a week, at least 56 hours a week, and were not paid time and a half for overtime hours, those over 40 a week. The immigrants say they were paid $350 to $500 a week.

The lawsuit said that Wal-Mart, "knowingly and with the intention to defraud the United States government and the plaintiffs and in order to save money on cleaning service contract contractors," employed certain cleaning contractors, "with full knowledge" that these contractors would pay the illegal immigrants far less than they would have paid legal workers.

The plaintiffs, who face deportation for being in the country illegally, also accuse Wal-Mart and its contractors of discriminating against them by giving them lower wages and fewer benefits than other workers because of their national origin.

Wal-Mart's reaction? Essentially, the company says the lawyers representing the plaintiffs are hungry vultures preying on unfortunate immigrants. We don't think so.

Gabriel Gasave has a thoughtful new article opposing transit visas over at The Independent Institute.

It's not just anti-war sites receiving house calls from the FBI. At least one software engineer has also, one with a connection to the electronic voting machine issue. A software engineer named Jonathan Inskeep of CASE Consulting writes on a Yahoo electronic voting message board:

Jonathan Inskeep here, from Crofton, Maryland which is approximately in
the middle of the triangle formed by Washington, DC, Baltimore, and
Annapolis. I'm a software engineer. My personal view is that every line of computer code used in any capacity to count votes should be made public. Any company that intends to claim their software as proprietary or a trade secret should be prohibited from bidding on contracts. Once the system is complete,
it should be put up and hackers worldwide should be invited to break it. As each flaw is exposed, it should be corrected and the process begun again.

The toughest issue I see, other than the fact that the Republicans have been and currently are actively cheating, is privacy versus verification. How can an individual make sure his or her vote is counted while maintaining a "secret" ballot? I would like to see some sort of paper trail.

He goes on about problems with the machines in his precinct, then says,

This system is about to be replaced by our Republican governor with
some sort of paperless touch screen system based on untested software
that has no audit trail.

Also, two FBI agents came by my house last week asking for names of radicals and organizations. My email is being monitored. Anyone on
this board should assume the same.

Is this an anomoly or does this mean that if you dig too far into the problems with electronic voting systems you might get a visit from the FBI?

[comments now closed]

Wal-Mart has acknowledged receiving a target letter from the Government advising that a federal grand jury will be investigating accusations that it violated immigration laws. The New York Times reports:

...two federal law enforcement officials said in interviews that Wal-Mart executives must have known about the immigration violations because federal agents rounded up 102 illegal immigrant janitors at Wal-Marts in 1998 and 2001. In the October raid, federal agents searched the office of an executive at Wal-Mart's headquarters, carting away boxes of papers. Federal officials said prosecutors had wiretaps and recordings of conversations between Wal-Mart officials and subcontractors.

The use of illegal workers appeared to benefit Wal-Mart, its shareholders and managers by minimizing the company's costs, and it benefited consumers by helping hold down Wal-Mart's prices. Cleaning contractors profited, and thousands of foreign workers were able to earn more than they could back home.

But the system also had its costs — janitors said they were forced to work seven days a week, were not paid overtime and often endured harsh conditions. Foreigners got jobs that Americans might have wanted. And taxpayers sometimes ended up paying for the illegal workers' emergency health care or their children's education in American schools.

On the human side, the article has the story of Pavel, one of the undocumented workers:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford University's Cyberlaw Clinic have filed suit in federal court seeking a temporary restraining order against Diebold, maker of electronic voting machinery. The issue is free speech. The suit seeks a cease and desist order against the company to stop it from sending threatening letters to websites and groups that publish company documents obtained by a hacker.

Voting activists who have received the cease-and-desist orders, including students from at least 20 universities, claim the documents raise serious security concerns about Diebold Inc., which has more than 50,000 touchscreen voting terminals nationwide.

....A hacker broke into Diebold's servers in March using an employee's ID, and copied thousands of company announcements and internal e-mails. [company spokesman] Jacobsen said the documents might have been altered afterward. The hacker e-mailed the data to voting activists, some of whom published stories on their Web logs. A freelance journalist at Wired News also received data and wrote about it in an online story.

The ACLU announced today that it will assist Michael Schiavo in his attempt to have the new Florida Law preserving feeding for his mentally disabled wife declared unconstitutional.

In the Nov. 6 issue of the New York Review of Books, Ronald Dworkin makes a compelling case for demanding that the Bush Administration adhere to civil liberities protections for the Guantanamo detainees. Here's part:

The Guantánamo detainees are also being held indefinitely and in secret, with no access to lawyers, under circumstances that would be intolerable even if they were convicted criminals. But they have not been charged with crimes or given the benefit of legal advice or process. If the detainees are prisoners of war, they must be treated as such. If they are suspected criminals, they must be treated as such. The government must choose, once again, not because it is required to do so by treaties but because its failure to do so treats the lives of the detainees with impermissible contempt.

Rights would be worthless--and the idea of a right incomprehensible--unless respecting rights meant taking some risk. We can and must try to limit those risks, but some risk will remain. It may be that we would be marginally more secure if we decided to care nothing for the human rights of anyone else. That is true in domestic policy as well. We run a marginally increased risk of violent death at the hands of murderers every day by insisting on rights for accused criminals in order to keep faith with our own humanity. For the same reason we must run a marginally increased risk of terrorism as well. Of course we must sharpen our vigilance, but we must also discipline our fear. The government says that only our own safety matters. That is a counsel of shame: we are braver than that, and have more self-respect