† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: Defying his superiors, Justice Department prosecutor Christopher Coates - who was removed from his position as Civil Rights Division section chief and transferred to SC after recommending that the department pursue a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party – testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, reports Politico:

Coates also said the downgrading of the case against the New Black Panther Party was evidence of a Justice Department culture which discouraged “race neutral” enforcement of civil rights laws, frowned on prosecuting minority perpetrators and folded under pressure from black and Latino rights groups. After President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder took office, the culture intensified, Coates told the panel, ultimately leading to his departure as chief of the voting rights section early this year. …

Coates’ highly-charged testimony before the Civil Rights Commission echoed … the testimony of J. Christian Adams, one of Coates’ colleagues in the voting rights section. However, Coates’s charges may carry greater weight because he worked decades ago as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, has won awards from civil rights groups and lacks the partisan GOP resume of the department’s harshest opponents.

In July, Adams told the commission that the pattern of prosecuting white suspects while ignoring minority ones was part of a “lawless” atmosphere, and the handling of the New Black Panther Party case led him to resign in 2009. Since leaving the department, Adams has been an outspoken critic on the right, appearing on Fox News and writing withering articles for conservative publications. …

Reading from a prepared statement, Coates – a 13-year civil rights prosecutor appointed by President Bill Clinton who also served under President George W. Bush – said he resisted department pressure to focus solely on prosecuting whites rather than blacks or other minorities accused of race-based voting violations. …

Coates accused the Justice Department of caving in to outside influence groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which he said demanded that prosecutors drop the case. “Many of these groups act…as special interest lobbies for racial and ethnic minorities and demand not equal treatment but enforcement of the Voting Rights Act only for racial and language minorities,” Coates said.

† Media Irrelevancy – A Self-Inflicted Wound: This vignette from a presser with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Stephens reveals the Fourth Estate in all their preening and craven glory:

It's a few minutes before eight in the morning on Tuesday, and the 30 or so journalists who have assembled to meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the conference room of a midtown Manhattan hotel are gorging themselves on lox and bagels and wondering whether the buffet is some kind of sly catering joke. A prominent TV personality seated next to me is approached by an Iranian film crew wanting to know her thoughts about their president. She says something cringingly obsequious about how gracious he is for making himself available to the media.

I suppose she's simply trying to be polite, and perhaps taking care not to say anything that could cause trouble for her or her colleagues down the road. But it dawns on me that the exchange also captures the central dynamic of the meeting. We get access to Ahmadinejad - and the feeling of self-importance that goes with that. In exchange, we pay him court. …

In the New York Times's account of the breakfast, reporter Neil MacFarquhar - who asked an opaque question about Cyrus the Great and was roundly mocked for it by Ahmadinejad - described the president's remarks as "standard talking points" plus "a little fresh bluster." Perhaps I haven't achieved the appropriate degree of jadedness, but my own impression of Ahmadinejad was that he was easily the smartest guy in the room. He mocked us in a way we scarcely had the wit to recognize. We belittle him at our peril.

Wanna bet MacFarquhar stayed up all night thinking about how to work Cyrus The Great into his question to show his colleagues what a smarty pants he is? But if it was such a great question, how come he doesn’t reference it, or Ahmadinejad’s response, in his article?     

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: The New York Times reports that after thieves have stripped a building of copper, aluminum and architectural elements, brick rustlers swoop in to steal the bare walls:

[B]rick thieves … deliberately torch buildings to quicken their harvest of St. Louis brick, prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.

“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.” …

“Cleveland is suffering from this,” said Royce Yeater, Midwest director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I’ve also heard of it happening in Detroit.”

Mr. Moore, who is drafting a bill that would increase the penalties for brick theft, said that while many thieves still used cables and picks to collapse a wall, arson had become the tool of choice. Thieves even set fire to wood-frame homes to create a diversion. Firefighters often knock down walls, making it easier for thieves to harvest the bricks.

“The whole block is gone - they stole the whole block,” Mr. Moore marveled as he drove his white Dodge Magnum through his ward’s motley collection of dilapidated homes and vacant lots. “They’re stealing entire buildings, buildings that belong to the city. Where else in the world do you steal an entire city building?”

[A] city ordinance requires a demolition permit to sell reclaimed bricks, but buyers do not always demand the permits . One brickyard owner tells The Times that “as many as eight tractor-trailer loads of stolen bricks leave the city each week for Florida, Louisiana or Texas, because “St. Louis brick is in such high demand.”

† For The Good Of The Children?: Part II: After the Supreme Court ruled Louisville’s school desegregation scheme unconstitutional in 2007, the city hired consultants and attorneys, redrew the boundaries of school districts and offered parents new school choices in an effort to keep classrooms integrated without assigning children to schools depending on their skin color. Now, the diversity of each school’s student body is based on socioeconomic factors, but the solution “has proven to be more complex and costly than the previous system, reports The Washington Post:

The impact of the decision, which directly involved schools here and in Seattle and set rules for school boards across the nation, already has been noteworthy. Seattle has mostly abandoned efforts to force diverse classrooms; it has returned to a system of neighborhood schools augmented by magnet schools and new educational programs scattered throughout the city.

After the ruling, the Bush administration, which supported the challenges to the plans in Seattle and Louisville, warned other local school officials to be wary of assignment plans that relied on race. School attorneys advised their boards that such plans were sure to be challenged. The message was reinforced when conservative legal groups forced changes in school assignments in places as diverse as New York City and Beaumont, Tex.

The decision was cited when courts struck down teacher-assignment plans based on race in Memphis and Cincinnati.

But Louisville, along with a number of other like-minded systems across the country, is betting that using socioeconomic factors, not just race, will help maintain diverse schools and meet the Supreme Court's requirements.

Those who have battled the school system here say it is nothing more than an end run around the court's decision, a misguided experiment by school officials who should be focused on the bigger goal of improving education.

Tiffany Arnold is among the parents who sued the board of education in Jefferson County - which includes Louisville - when her child was initially assigned to a school she did not want.

"I still haven't heard of a benefit for any child being put through this," Arnold said recently at a lunch with her fellow challengers, just after a judge ruled that state law does not guarantee them a spot in the school closest to home. "We live already in a neighborhood that is diverse. If they could shed some light on how this helps anyone, maybe we wouldn't be as angry as we are."

Having been a victim of forced busing herself, The Stiletto thinks all children should be assigned to the school closest to home and that pedagogues should dedicate themselves to giving all children an excellent education, no matter which neighborhood the school is located.

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: One of the most startling statistics in the new documentary “Waiting for Superman,” is that in IL one in 57 doctors loses his medical license and one in 97 lawyers loses his law license but thanks to union rules just one in 2,500 teachers loses his credentials. So you can’t get rid of the incompetent ones. And a three-year study conducted in the Nashville school system by Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives shows that merit pay doesn’t improve teacher performance, either. The Associated Press reports:

[S]tudents whose teachers were offered bonuses of up to $15,000 a year for improved test scores registered the same gains on standardized exams as those whose teachers were given no such incentives.

"I think most people agree today that the current way in which we compensate teachers is broken," said Matthew Springer, executive director of the Vanderbilt center and lead researcher on the study. "But we don't know what the better way is yet."

The study comes as the Obama administration encourages school systems to link teacher pay and tenure to how students perform on tests and other measures of achievement.

The researchers looked at fifth- through eighth-grade math teachers from 2007 to 2009. A group of about 300 teachers started out in the study; half were eligible for the bonuses, the other half were not.

The bonuses were given out based on improvements in scores on Tennessee's standardized exam, which is used by the state as part of the federal No Child Left Behind requirements. …

Teachers unions have historically opposed merit pay, arguing that test scores are not an accurate measure of student achievement, that financial rewards could pit teachers against each other, and that administrators could use bonuses to reward favorites and punish others.

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: In broad daylight and in full view of several people, a man relieved himself on the wall of the Royal Oak police station then went inside to file a police report on an undisclosed matter, reports The Detroit Free Press. PO’d witnesses fingered him as the peeing perp and he was issued a citation for public urination.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Employers Hiring Forged Documented Aliens Are Lawbreakers In Other Ways, Too): More evidence that employers hire forged documented aliens because they can exploit them. The New York Times reports that “[i]n a time of widespread joblessness, Mexicans in New York have proved unusually adept at finding and keeping work” and that they “are more likely to hold a job than New York’s native-born population,” but that “many are illegal immigrants, and less likely to report workplace abuses to the authorities for fear of deportation”:

 “Illegal immigrants are very convenient,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. “Employers are quite interested in employing people who are willing to work and to overlook some labor laws.” …

Across the country, immigrants in general are more likely to be employed than the American-born. They tend to be more willing to move in pursuit of jobs and to take any job they can find, especially if they lack access to unemployment benefits. …

Many Mexican men in New York left their wives and children behind when they came in search of jobs. Some of them say the absence of families makes it easier to endure the hardships they have faced, like poor living conditions, and to focus on work.

“Employers love them because they want to work as many hours as they can,” said Robert C. Smith, a professor at Baruch College and a leading expert on the Mexican diaspora in New York. “Americans expect accommodations to be made in their personal lives. But these guys have no personal lives.” …

In New York, Mexican immigrants are most heavily concentrated in occupations that involve food preparation, according to data collated by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in New York. About 28 percent of all working-age Mexicans are in food-service jobs, while some 20 percent work in construction, the institute found.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Never Mind Marxism. Will An Obama Administration Be Totalitarian?: Part II): President Barack Hussein Obama may think that alternative media is  “distracting” voters, but The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan quotes Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) who says that thanks to the Internet voters are more knowledgeable about the issues than ever before:

Washington is being revealed in a new way. The American people now know, "with real sophistication," everything that happens in the capital. "I find a much more knowledgeable electorate, and it is a real-time response," Ms. Blackburn says. "We hear about it even as the vote is taking place." Voters come to rallies carrying research—"things they pulled off the Internet, forwarded emails," copies of bills, roll-call votes. The Internet isn't just a tool for organization and fund-raising, it has given citizens access to information they never had before. "The more they know," Ms. Blackburn observes, "the less they like Washington."