Mamaroneck is a suburb of New York City, near Larchmont and New Rochelle, in affluent Westchester County. Last week, in a 72 page opinion, a federal judge ruled the village discriminated against Latino day laborers.

The ruling cited evidence that following the Mamaroneck Village Board’s resolution earlier this year to close a day labor hiring site in Columbus Park, police applied a “virtual zero tolerance policy” to contractors seeking to hire Latino day laborers near the park but issued no tickets to parents dropping off children at the nearby day care center and schools, even if they blocked traffic. Police were observed ticketing Latino drivers for not wearing seatbelts, but merely gesturing at white drivers to buckle up.

The New York Times has a terrific editorial today on the case.

You cannot abuse people through selective enforcement of the law. You cannot single people out for special punishment without cause. You cannot instruct the police to harass people for being Latino and poor. Cities and towns across the country have overlooked these basics in their eagerness to punish those they presume to have violated federal immigration laws. But thankfully for all of us, the Constitution still has the final say.

The full text of the ruling is here (pdf).

Vis Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerrilla:

• Maxspeak, you listen.

• Atrios and the best Thanksgiving post ever.

• The full 18 minute version of Alice's Restaurant on YouTube.

War, Children, is just a shot away.

The Rolling Stones live in Twickenham Stadium, England with an amazing solo by the incredible Lisa Fischer (she starts rocking about 2:12 in.)

I saw them perform this live in Denver on Thanksgiving night last year and was just blown away.

Steve Clemons is a very smart man and he wrote a very stupid post on Marshall Wittman of all people. Steve needs to get out of Washington more if he believes this:

What those heaping scorn on Wittman are missing, however, is what his employment by Lieberman really means. When political giants tie up, it's not an accident.

Lieberman's acquisition of Marshall Wittman, who is very close to John McCain, signals a calculation by some that McCain and Lieberman might tie up for the 2008 Presidential run. The progressive left will start choking at this point, coughing and convulsing uncontrollably -- but reason needs to be gripped for a moment.

McCain and Lieberman would be a formidable challenge for any Democratic opponent because even though both are now self-described neoconservatives and strongly supported America's botched war against Iraq, to many pundits they would "seem like" the very epitome of centrism.

John McCain is having enough trouble convincing the GOP base he is one of them. Marshall Wittman does not help. And neither does Joe Lieberman. David Broder does not decide who the GOP nominee will be. And I guarantee you that McCain is not a fool who will run as an independent. Lieberman and Wittman may be stupid enough to believe he will. It surprises me that on this narrow point, Clemons seems as obtuse as they.

The rest of Clemons fluff piece on Wittman is frankly embarrassing to Steve. I think the less said the better. I'll prefer to forget Steve wrote this clunker.

Who deserves the thanks of Iraqis for this?

Three suicide car bombs and two mortar rounds struck the capital's Shiite Sadr City slum Thursday, killing at least 150 people and wounding 238, police said. The attack by suspected Sunni Arab militants was the deadliest in the sectarian bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq since last winter. Shiites responded almost immediately, firing 10 mortar rounds at the Sunnis' holiest shrine in Baghdad, the Abu Hanifa mosque in the Azamiya neighborhood, killing one person and wounding 14. Fighting also flared in another part of Baghdad when 30 Sunni insurgents armed with machine guns and mortars attacked the Shiite-controlled Health Ministry.

More.

Ok, I won't repeat my numerous posts about how Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant is the national Thanksgiving anthem on radio stations across the country.

The Boston Globe today does it for me.

And if you are in New York Saturday night, you can hear Arlo sing it live:

ARLO GUTHRIE. So it's the Saturday after Thanksgiving: Do you think the Guthrie fanatics went to Alice's Restaurant on Thursday? Ah, to be a hippie. (8 p.m., Isaac Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall, 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, 212-247-7800. $35-$60.)

Where's Alice? You can find her here (link fixed.) But she's also been in my kitchen for 30 years, where her cookbook from 1969 is prominently displayed and always in use.

I'm not in a particularly upbeat mood this Thanksgiving. I know we just won an election and hopefully have started on a path to end the War in Iraq and take back our country from the right-wing extremists who have ruled since 1994. I'm thankful that the days of appointing right-wing ideologues to our federal courts and the Supreme Court may be behind us.

But I live in a peculiar world, one that is filled with days spent visiting mostly non-violent prisoners in jails, and it saddens me that for them and their children and parents, I see little hope.

O.J. Simpson's price for his book with a hypotheical confession was $880,000. Of that, $100k went to the ghost writer and the rest to his children.

His rationale: He had bills (including taxes) to pay.

His gripe: He has received more criticism that News Corp.

One final note: He tells the AP his book was not a confession. He didn't write the hypothetical chapter nor select the name of the book.

'It's all blood money and unfortunately I had to join the jackals,'' Simpson told The Associated Press, referring to authors of books about him. ''It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead.''

In Northeast Atlanta, near Georgia Tech, police made a drug buy from a house and came back with a search warrant, raiding the house. They shot dead a 92 year old woman who had a gun defending her house. The Atlanta police involved seemed, to me, particularly cavalier about the entire matter. "'This seems like another tragedy involving drugs,' [ADA] Howard said."  

How much of this is attributable to flawed Supreme Court policy statements?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this story today: Questions surround fatal shooting of woman, 92:

What's cooking at your house today? Are you home or away for the Thanksgiving holiday? And what are you most thankful for this year?

There's no cooking at my house, I'm going out to friends tomorrow evening for Turkey this year. I've also got clients all afternoon and the TL mom went back into the hospital yesterday afternoon, so it will be my second Thanksgiving Day in a row spent with her and the medical personnel who spend their day taking care of others.

I'll be blogging a bit through the holiday, so if you're on line, stop on by, add some good thoughts, and have a great holiday.

Don't forget to tune in to your local radio station tomorrow which is bound to be playing Arlo Guthrie's Alices' Restaurant about the draft way back when....and check out the Wall St. Journal today ( link) which profiles Alice and what she is doing today.

(link fixed)

It didn't matter to Kenneth Foley's jury that Luke Gaumond testified to committing the burglary for which Foley was on trial. After all, the prosecutor had God on his side.

Despite Gaumond's testimony, a jury convicted Foley and a co-defendant at the urging of Deputy District Attorney Charles Slone, who told jurors he was "sickened" by the "fraud" of the defense: "I'm not here trying to convict innocent people," he assured jurors. "I believe in God."

Foley got 25 to life for breaking into a truck. The sentence would be unjust even if Foley were guilty, but Gaumond admitted that he committed the burglary while using Mashelle Bullington's car. Foley had the bad luck to borrow Bullington's car twelve hours later. Police were able to connect the car to the burglary, and then they connected Foley to the car. They apparently didn't believe Bullington when she said she'd let a man named Luke use her car, particularly after the truck's owner picked Foley out of a photo array.

Prosecutors in Santa Clara County have a history of ignoring evidence of innocence while they pursue questionable prosecutions. Here's an example and here's another. The Mercury News documented the problem is a series of articles entitled "Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice."

Six imams attending a conference in Minneapolis took time to pray at the gate before boarding a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix. A passenger handed a note to a flight attendant pointing out the "6 suspicious Arabic men" on the plane. Disturbed by their "unsettling" behavior -- which apparently consisted of praying and asking for seat belt extensions -- the crew told the police that the imams needed to be removed. They were escorted from the plane in handcuffs and detained for five hours before authorities conceded that they posed no threat.

U.S. Airways refused to book the imams on another flight to Phoenix. According to the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Muslims (both passengers and airline employees) have more complaints about U.S. Airways than other airlines. The incident prompted the Council and the NAACP to ask for Congressional hearings on racial profiling in airports.

Can you imagine the outcry from the religious right if six Christian pastors were removed from a flight because they prayed together at the gate? U.S. Airways would be deservedly out of business in a week.