2,000 schools nationwide ask students to play informant. Now, there's at least one school that is paying kids in cash for snitching:

For a growing number of students, the easiest way to make a couple of hundred dollars has nothing to do with chores or after-school jobs, and everything to do with informing on classmates.

Tragedies like last month's deadly shooting at a Red Lake, Minn., school have prompted more schools to offer cash and other prizes - including pizza and premium parking spots - to students who report classmates who carry guns, drugs or alcohol, commit vandalism or otherwise break school rules.

Aside from our view that such programs teach the kids a morally bankrupt message, experts say the practice will destroy the students' sense of community.

Microsoft has faced an uproar since announcing it would not support a state anti-discrimination (gay rights) bill this year as it has in years past. Steven A. Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, tries to explain, but it's a crummy explanation.

The e-mail message came as company officials, inundated by internal messages from angry employees, withering attacks on the Web and biting criticism from gay rights groups, sought to quell rancor following the disclosure this week that the company, which had supported the bill in past years, did not do so this year. Critics argue that the decision resulted from pressure from a prominent local evangelical Christian church.

In his message... Mr. Ballmer wrote that he had done "a lot of soul searching over the past 24 hours." He said that he and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, both personally supported the bill but that the company had decided not to take an official stance on the legislation this year. He said they were pondering the role major corporations should play in larger social debates.

The AP reports that local police in many states increasingly are becoming involved in enforcement of immigration laws, an area traditionally left to the feds.

Frustrated by illegal immigrant criminals who slip their grasp, a growing number of state and county police agencies nationwide are moving to join a federal program that enlists local officers to enforce immigration laws. The federal government has already granted that authority in Florida and Alabama, and the program is under consideration in Connecticut, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

It's also in the works in Southern California - one of the nation's most ethnically diverse regions - where it would reverse a long-standing local police policy of avoiding questions about immigration status during criminal investigations.

This is bad policy.

Immigrant rights groups insist the move will discourage people from reporting domestic violence or other crimes for fear of deportation, and that it would lead to racial profiling and other abuses. "We're 100 percent against it," said Amin David, president of Los Amigos of Orange County. "It will have a chilling effect on our community."

There's a lot more reasons this is a lousy idea, as I set out here back in 2003 when some Republican congresspersons introduced the CLEAR Act (H.R. 2671.)

Journalist and author David Neiwert of Orcinus writes:

Well, the Minutemen apparently are running low on volunteers -- their Web site currently features an urgent plea for volunteers "on the border to the end of April." According to my sources, the project's numbers have been in precipitous decline in the past week, while the Project is officially supposed to last until April 30.

That hasn't prevented them from declaring victory anyway, even before they've officially wrapped up their three-ring anti-immigration circus.

Sounds like their publicity stunt has run out of gas. Good. They got their 15 minutes, time for them to go back to their cushy investment banker jobs. It's more than time for this self-syled citizen militia to disband, despite their protestations that they will expand.

The ACLU has teamed with other organizations to file the first lawsuit against the U.S. over detention of Muslim-Americans crossing the border. In this case, a group of American citizens of the Islamic faith were returning to the U.S. from a religious conference in Toronto.

The New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations in simultaneous news conferences in Buffalo and Brooklyn today announced a lawsuit charging that the Department of Homeland Security singled out and violated the rights of American citizens who were returning from a religious conference in Toronto. The lawsuit was filed to challenge the DHS’s policy of detaining, interrogating, fingerprinting and photographing American citizens who are Muslim, solely because they attended an Islamic conference.

“None of the citizens who were detained had done anything unlawful, nor were they charged with any unlawful act,” said Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the NYCLU. “It is very troubling that citizens who were exercising their First Amendment rights were singled out because of their faith and attending the conference.”

Complaints by Air Force cadets of religious intolerance are getting media attention today. Among the current crop of complaints:

• The Air Force is investigating a complaint from an atheist cadet who says the school is "systematically biased against any cadet that does not overtly espouse Christianity."

• The official academy newspaper runs a Christmas ad every year praising Jesus and declaring him the only savior. Some 200 academy staff members, including some department heads, signed it. Whittington noted the ad was not published last December.

• The academy commandant, Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, a born-again Christian, said in a statement to cadets in June 2003 that their first responsibility is to their God. He also strongly endorsed National Prayer Day that year. School spokesman Johnny Whitaker said Weida now runs his messages by several other commanders.

• Some officer commission ceremonies were held at off-campus churches. In a letter dated April 6, Weida said the ceremonies would be held on campus from now on.

Here's some background, where we include more incidents, like the school's use of a "Team Jesus" banner and a dust-up over cadet support for Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.

by TChris

Is it out of bounds to ask a Supreme Court Justice about his private sexual conduct? Is it acceptable to ask the question of a Justice who supports governmental regulation of private, noncommercial, sexual activity between consenting adults? Without repeating the provocative question that NYU law student Eric Berndt posed to Justice Scalia during a Q&A session -- Justice Scalia didn't answer, and NYU turned off Berndt's microphone -- it's worth directing your attention here, to Berndt's explanation for his confrontational question.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Edith Jones, has walked over the First Amendment issues involved in Louisiana's "Choose Life" license plates and instead, by declaring the fee paid for license plates a tax, has referred the case back to the state courts.

This is a bad decision. Our pal Bill Rittenberg, who represented the freedom of choice activists in the case, says that in effect, Judge Edith Jones (who also once ruled it's okay if the defense lawyer sleeps through his client's death penalty trial) has decided that the state courts should decide first amendment rights that the state legislature denied. He says the Court sidestepped the real issue as to whether the plates profide the the state a device to discriminate based on viewpoint. I'm surprised Judge Edward Prado joined the decision.

Our view: "Choose Life" license plates are fine, provided they include the tag line "End the Death Penalty."

On a related note, yesterday the Ohio Senate authorized license plates that say "one nation under g-d" for an extra 10 bucks. Our source quips: "I guess it could be worse - they could have offered - "Jesus died for our sins." That bill now goes to the Ohio House.

by TChris

Last September, TalkLeft reported the arrest of 1,000 protesters at the Republican National Convention in New York City. It turned out that 1,806 people were arrested during the Convention, including a guy who was busted while he was on his way to pick up sushi.

The first arrestee to take his case to trial, Dennis Kyne, was charged with inciting a riot and resisting arrest. The arresting officer testified that Kyne had to be carried away "because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own." The officer didn't know, however, that the arrest was captured on a video recording that would expose his perjury.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

The charges were abruptly dismissed. And what about the poor guy who just wanted to get his sushi?

by TChris

An auction of Ku Klux Klan memorabilia, scheduled to take place today in Mason, Michigan, was cancelled after white supermacists distributed KKK recruitment fliers throughout the town.

David Feintuck, owner of the Mason center, said he decided to cancel the auction as soon as he became aware of the fliers. "We don't want to be associated with whatever scum comes into the community," Feintuck said. "Auctioning history and condoning present-day Klan activities is not the same thing, and we don't want the auction used for Klan promotion."

Auctioneer Gary Gray, saying he doesn't want to be "a pawn for the Klan," isn't sure what he'll do with the Klan artifacts. Here's an idea: burn them.

Marc Cooper, writing in LA Weekly, says the Arizona Minutemen are far less in number and impact than they make themselves out to be:

The Minutemen were basically a flop. Despite organizers’ claims that 450 people showed up the first day (befittingly on April Fools’ Day), reporters visibly equaled or outnumbered the actual participants. At no point could any reporter see evidence of more than 150 Minutemen gathered in one place — even though the first two days of activities were all about concentrating their forces in a pair of protest rallies.

But the bulk of the coverage continued to play along with the fiction that a mass of American citizens had come down here to stand against the immigrant hordes.

Not only that, but this militia is not really a militia. Most of the men aren't even armed.

Could the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement be gaining a heart?

Ming Kuang Chen, the Chinese delivery man who got trapped for three days in a Bronx elevator will not face deportation proceedings according to an ICE official:

``Getting locked in an elevator for three days doesn't make you immune to removal proceedings,'' said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Marc A. Raimondi. But top priority, he said, goes to aliens ``who pose the greatest threat to public safety and homeland security.''

No one should have asked Mr. Chen about his immigration status to begin with, let alone leaked it to the world: