Staff Blaahg
The Best of The Week At Campus Progress
What a week! We managed to stay away from the Weiner jokes, but there was still plenty to talk about here at Campus Progress.
Monday. Yana Kunichoff wrote about Alabama's draconian new anti-immigration law. Forget Arizona's SB 1070 -- Alabama is going even further:
Among the bill’s litany of punitive measures: imposing penalties on employers who hire undocumented immigrants, forcing public schools to check the immigration status of students and parents, allowing police to arrest anyone they suspect of entering the country without valid immigration documents, making it illegal to rent housing to an undocumented immigrants, barring undocumented immigrants from enrolling in or attending public colleges or universities and prohibiting them from applying for or soliciting work.
Tuesday. CP intern Jeffrey Boxer is keeping track of voter ID measures states are designing to keep young (progressive) people away from the polls.
Both Rachel Maddow and Hardball's Chris Matthews expressed indignation at this trend. “The people who have the least trouble with the ID cards, the people who drove to the polling station, have an ID right in their pockets called their driver`s license and they are middle class people with enough money to own a car,” said Matthews. “And [if] they`re young enough to drive and old enough to have enough money to own a car, they are probably able to vote. It`s the younger person and older person who might be disenfranchised.”
Wednesday. Scott Meslow explains why the (terrible) new Green Lantern movie should have featured John Stewart, the groundbreaking black GL, instead of Hal Jordan.
If you look at seemingly endless list of superhero franchises launched over the past decade—Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, Iron Man—a striking pattern emerges: in every case, the central character is white, male, and American. Of course, the argument could be made that studios are simply depicting these characters as they’ve always been; that Batman and Iron Man are, and always have been, white American men, and that their WASPiness is just out of fidelity to the original comic books. But that argument doesn’t hold up for Green Lantern.
Thursday. Frustrated by a court decision to overturn a sexual assault conviction because the victim lacked visible injuries, Dahlia Grossman-Heinze writes:
West Chester County District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll called the decision "the worst legal reasoning I have ever seen in an appellate court opinion." Carroll is particularly concerned that the ruling brings into question the extent of the woman’s injuries as proof of her consent because essentially the panel concluded that "a sexual assault victim is not to be believed unless her injuries are severe enough to meet some Stone Age standard of proof of resistance.” The District Attorney’s Office has asked the entire Superior Court of Chester County to review the new decision.
Friday. James Cersonsky explains why the arrest of Tanya McDowell, a homeless woman fined for sending her child to an out-of-district school, opens up a can of worms:
McDowell is the homeless, unemployed, single mother from Bridgeport, Connecticut, who was arrested and charged with first-degree larceny for sending her five-year-old son to kindergarten in the neighboring, more affluent city of Norwalk. If convicted, McDowell faces up to twenty years in prison and a $15,686 penalty for the cost of her son’s year of out-of-town education.In some 25 similar cases, Norwalk schools have simply (and cheaply) removed the students in question. But in McDowell’s case, the city has pursued criminal charges. The logic behind the prosecution is partly budgetary, in line with national trends. “This now sends a message to other parents that may have been living in other towns and registering their kids with phony addresses,” Norwalk mayor Richard Moccia has said. But it also draws on McDowell’s record of drug-related arrests and convictions (a mounting sideshow this past week). “This is not a poor, picked-off homeless person,” Moccia told FOX CT. “She has a checkered past at best.”
Shani is the associate editor of CampusProgress.org. You can reach her at shilton@americanprogress.org.
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