ACORN WINS AGAIN IN COURT

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, scored another victory in court Wednesday when a federal judge in Brooklyn reaffirmed her December decision that congressional efforts to cut off all federal funding of the embattled nonprofit antipoverty group were unconstitutional.
Responding to a government request that she reconsider her previous ruling, U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon made permanent her ruling that the attempted cutoff, done without establishing wrongdoing on the part of ACORN, amounted to an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.”
“The judge’s ruling is a complete rebuke of the right wing’s smear tactics that unfortunately Congress fell for,” Bill Quigley, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights told the Associated Press. “This is why we have checks and balances.”
As Metro Times previously reported (see this week’s News Hits section), the now discredited videos created by conservative activist James O’Keefe — who falsely implied that he showed up in ACORN offices dressed in an outlandish pimp outfit to seek tax advice from himself and a friend posing as a prostitute — prompted Congress to deny funding not just to ACORN but also to any groups affiliated or associated with it.
Detroit attorneys Julie Hurwitz and Bill Goodman assisted the Center for Constitutional Rights in representing ACORN.
“We are gratified that the federal judge in this case had the courage to see through this ultra-conservative legislative witch hunt, and to properly enforce the Constitution on behalf of our clients, even in the face of a growing right-wing movement to eviscerate all of our rights,” Hurwitz told the Metro Times.

MATTY GETS SLAPPED BACK; NEW BRIDGE SPAN HITS WALL

Big news today regarding the Detroit International Bridge Company and its attempts to build a new span adjacent to its Ambassador Bridge. In a letter dated Wednesday, March 2, the U.S. Coast Guard notified bridge company President Dan Stamper that it is returning the company’s permit application because it has failed to acquire a piece of city-owned property needed to build the new span.

The property in question is a section of Riverside Park just west of the existing bridge. The bridge company fenced off a swath of parkland shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and refused to relinquish it; the city took the company to court late in 2008 in an attempt to force it to tear down the fence and give the city back its property. After a protracted battle, 36th District Court Judge Beverly Hayes-Sipes last October ruled that the bridge company — owned by trucking tycoon Manuel “Matty” Moroun — had to tear down the fence and give the city back its property. The company appealed that decision, and, the last time we looked, the fence was still up.

The company claims the fence is needed to protect the bridge from terrorists. As this paper reported previously, that claim appears bogus since similar fencing is absent on the eastern (downtown Detroit) side of the span. Likewise, there is no such fencing along either side of the bridge over in Windsor.

What appears certain is that the company needs that piece of land if it wants to build the new bridge. The company has disputed that assertion, saying previously that, if need be, it could build the bridge without actually sinking piers into the parkland. However, the Coast Guard doesn’t seem to accept that claim.

According to the just-issued letter, the application process, which began more than three years ago, should not have even been initiated absent the bridge company’s legal control of the property.

“In fact, it is Coast Guard policy to not even accept permit applications unless and until all property rights issues have been resolved,” wrote Hala Elgaaly, administrator of the Coast Guard’s bridge program. “In this case, the Coast Guard accepted the application in June 2006 and continued to process it in the intervening 3.5 years in a good-faith effort, because of repeated DIBC assurances that acquisition of property rights was imminent. The Coast Guard has received no credible indication that the property rights issue is any closer to being resolved now than it was over three years ago.”

Any efforts by the company to acquire the property legally appear to be going nowhere.

“The City of Detroit has assured the Coast Guard that they have not, and likely will not, convey these rights to the DIBC,” Elgaaly wrote.

The Coast Guard is responsible for permitting on the American side because the bridge crosses a navigable waterway.

Likewise, state Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who represents the southwest Detroit neighborhood where Riverside Park is located, says that she has been told by a highly placed member of the Bing administration that the mayor has given no indication that he currently has plans to sell the property.

Even if Bing were inclined to sell, other hurdles would need to be overcome. Sale of city parkland would need to be approved by City Council. Also, because the parkland was originally acquired with federal grants, with the understanding that it remain open for public use, getting out from under that stipulation would, at best, be a time-consuming endeavor.

Tlaib, an outspoken critic of the bridge company and its heavy-handed tactics, hailed the Coast Guard decision, saying it represents a clear victory for the community she represents.

“What the bridge company is very good at is making people believe it has a viable project,” she says. “But we are beginning to see that crumble down.”

“What we are seeing is justice prevail over the outrageous illegal actions of this company,” she adds. “We don’t have the resources that this billion-dollar mega-corporation has, but, as I tell my residents, we have power in numbers. A lot of people of people have been working very hard on this issue.”

The Coast Guard letter states that the company’s application can be re-submitted, but not before it can offer “definitive proof of the resolution of the property rights issue.”

A representative of the bridge company acknowledges receiving the letter, and says a response is still being formulated.

We’ll keep you posted.

Bobb report: Detroit schools still in crisis

Within the next few months, the emergency financial manager of Detroit Public Schools said on Wednesday, there will be announcements about new school design, new teaching strategies, more investigations and updates about the troubled district’s finances.

“Let’s make no mistake about it. This is a school district in crisis,” Robert Bobb told a crowd of a couple hundred at a Wayne State University Alumni Affairs-organized event.

Bobb reviewed his first year at the district, describing how he and his team reviewed thousands of documents before coming and the steps they’ve taken to audit, restructure and budget for the district since he’s been here.

Many in the crowd were supportive, applauding Bobb’s calls for better parental support and higher student achievement as well as his descriptions of how he revamped financial, personnel and other systems in the district.

But others did not applaud, even as he finished his hour-long speech.

Bobb took spontaneous questions from some of the two dozen people who lined up to ask about district issues ranging from why hasn’t he better engaged alums of some high schools to efforts at collaboration between the district and local businesses, universities and cultural institutions.

When asked what’s fun about his job, Bobb described meeting with two 5-year-old students he’s tutoring, putting his weekly time with them permanently on his calendar. “I’m sticking with those kids. Those children will be academic stars,” he said.

Brought in a year ago by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, his contract has been extended by one year; he says he’ll stay through February 2011. He said he intends to leave a plan for both finances and academics that future boards of education, superintendents and other district administrators can follow.

He also said he intended to pursue legislation that would have “trigger points” if the district has budgetary issues after he leaves. “There would be a return of an EFM,” he said. —Sandra Svoboda
 

RIDDLE: ‘MISUSE OF CHARISMA’

Sam Riddle (with microphone, of course) during U-M administration building protest in 1975.

Like Larry Gabriel, who reflects on Sam Riddle in his Stir It Up column this week, I’ve followed Sam Riddle since college days at Michigan State University, when I was student and he was a radical BMOC. Erudite, charming in a roguish way, Riddle was always quick with analysis boiled to a soundbite.

But his recent courtroom saga — the jury is still out as I write this — sent me to my basement the other day in search of something I’d written about him back then.

I dug through boxes of memorabilia to get to a 1975 issue of Grapevine Journal, a black student newspaper at MSU that I was the editor of. By that time Riddle had left MSU for law school at the University of Michigan and had become deeply involved in protests pressing for increased minority enrollment and related issues. A group named Black Action Movement II had disrupted nursing and law school classes, and when I heard hundreds of minority students had seized the administration building, I hopped in my car and drove to Ann Arbor to check it out. The cops hadn’t stopped folks from coming and leaving the occupied building, and I walked inside to find a scene of confusion. Why were demands still being hammered out after the occupation? Who was in charge? Tensions rose. Leaders were off holding discussions with administrators. Where was this headed? Some of the phone lines were cut off. There was the looming possibility of police action. And, late that night, the leaders convened a meeting to explain how this had all happened.

Riddle told of how he and two other protest leaders had intended to stage an “agitational action” — chaining themselves to the building doors — while other students were to rally in support and witness them getting hauled off to jail. It hadn’t worked out that way:

“We had been up three-and-a-half to four days. We had done more work [in the earlier disruption/demonstrations] than had been done in the last couple of years. We had less than five hours of sleep the whole time, and we had spent $50 to $80 of our own money for chains, and we were to move at quarter of seven [6:45 a.m.]. Oscar [Hearn] sat on the floor, I sat on the couch and Aubrey [Verdun] sat in a chair and the three of us went to sleep. We had the chains and the walkie-talkies with us. If people were pissed, they were rightly pissed.”

And thus, the leaders overslept for their own protest and showed up late, to find their supporters, after standing around in the cold, had started the revolution without them and streamed into the building.

After noon of the second day, the occupation was called off. Talks with the administration were to continue, but the occupation had hardly disrupted the operations of the university since office staff and administrators had continued to work despite the crowd of students clogging the building.

In the aftermath, according to my story in the Grapvine, Riddle and another leader from the takeover, were “exiled” from the Black United Front, an umbrella group for black organizations on campus. The exiles then said they had a new group, the Black Liberation Front, to take their cause and actions statewide. In his characteristic manner, Riddle vowed to up the ante: “If we don’t organize and agitate, we will be what we have historically been in times of crisis — victims.”

And it was telling the way Riddle described one of the charges that led to his exile. One of the allegations, he said, was “misuse of charisma.”

Ain’t it the truth.

The other Riddle memory that I keep coming back to of late was from a day he came through the Freep’s City Hall bureau when I worked there in the ’80s. After a stint on the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign — Riddle was in on the Rainbow Coalition’s upset win in the 1988 Michigan primary — he was off to write a novel, as I recall, about a “hypocritical black preacher who runs for the presidency.”

After many years as a political gun for hire, Riddle himself has admitted he’s taken on some questionable clients. From what we’ve seen in his trial — regardless of how the jury weighs the claims of his informant-accusers — misguided charisma and hypocrisy will be the least of the clouds on his name. And, of course, we can expect his trademark flamboyance in his own defense.

O’CONNOR SEES INDEPENDENT JUDICIARY IN JEOPARDY

She drew applause, two standing ovations and laughs for throwing in, among other quips, a “Who Dat?”

Speaking at Wayne State University on Tuesday, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wasn’t shy in sharing her opinion about the need for a more independent judiciary.

Judges needs to be free of politics and the perception that they are influenced by outside forces, said O’Connor, a Ronald Reagan appointee and the first woman to serve on the high court. She also equated the escalating spending, especially in statewide judicial elections, to the arms race of the Cold War.

The importance of judicial independence can be traced to this country’s founders, who set in place a system of lifetime appointments for federal judges.

 “There had to be a place where being right is more important than being popular or powerful, where fairness triumphs strength. In our country, that place is supposed to be the courtroom,” she said.

Public opinion, she noted, ran heavily against interracial marriage in 1968 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Virginia statute outlawing it.

“It’s tough to imagine that judges easily removed through the political process would have issued an opinion striking down that statute,” O’Connor said.

The Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, which led to the desegregation of public schools, would have been a similarly difficult case for elected judges, she said. “I think these examples show that in order for judges to dispense laws without prejudice, the judges need assurance that they’re not going to be subject to political retaliation for their judicial acts and decisions.”

State governors originally selected judges for state courts, but following a 19th-century wave of populism led by President Andrew Jackson, most states switched to popular elections.

(Jackson, O’Connor noted, was the general who led the U.S. troops to victory against the British when they were seeking to regain control of New Orleans in 1814 and 1815. “Who dat?” she asked to laughter and applause.)

O’Connor appeared as the keynote speaker at the day-long seminar titled “Options for an Independent Judiciary in Michigan” sponsored by the Wayne State University Law School and the American Board of Trial Advocates.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision last month in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which in part removed campaign spending limits for corporations, unions and other groups, the mix of money and politics becomes even more of a concern in regard to electing judges now that powerful special interests have been handed even more clout.

“The threat to judicial independence is only getting worse,” she said.

PROTESTERS BLAST COUNTY, SCHOOLS ON CUTS

Outside the Guardian Building in downtown Detroit on Thursday, a charged-up crowd of at least 150 pickets had no shortage of targets for its ire: Detroit Mayor Dave Bing,  Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano and Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb.

 “Hey hey, ho ho, _____ [fill in one of the above] has got to go.”

County workers, DPS employees and other demonstrators circled for at least an hour on the sidewalk in front of the county’s new headquarters at the art deco-style building. Of particular issue, the forced furlough days for county workers, Bobb’s reduction of teachers and other school district employees and Bing’s support of both.

“No layoffs, no cuts, Detroit won’t move to the back of the bus.”

Wayne County Commissioner Keith Williams stopped by but declined to take the microphone.

“The commissioner is next,” the crowd chanted its warning to him.

Chuck Lidenmuth, a 16-year county maintenance worker — he salts I-275 from Monroe County to I-94 during snowfalls — says more demonstrations are planned.

“How much more can they cut?” he asks.
 

Remembering Howard Zinn

The word “hero” gets tossed around a lot, but we’ve just lost someone who was the real deal. Historian, author, playwright, teacher and social crusader Howard Zinn is dead at the age of 87.

Best known for his groundbreaking book A People’s History of the United States, Zinn was both an academic and activist. Having served as a bombardier in World War II, he was an early and important opponent of the war in Vietnam.

Talking to The Boston Globe about the death of his friend and fellow left-wing intellectual, Noam Chomsky said, “He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions and his writings, for 50 years he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement.”

Back in 2006, I did an interview with Zinn before he came to town to accept an award from the Cranbrook Peace Foundation, placing him in the company of such notable lefties as John Kenneth Galbraith, South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu and folk singer Pete Seeger.

Two the things I remember most about that interview — and the subsequent speech Zinn gave upon receiving the award — were the intellectual acuity and vigor he displayed well into his 80s, and his persistent good humor. Looking back at our interview again this morning, I see reference to him laughing a few times during a fairly short conversation.

Another item of interest in that interview is his response to a question about the U.S. economy, asked two years before the meltdown, when the stock market was still booming.

“What we saw in the 1920s was a constantly widening gap between the rich and the poor, and a kind of false prosperity with huge fortunes being made on one hand and the buying power of the population not keeping up with that, and the collapse of the economy,” he said. “I think that, although it’s not exactly the same situation, the American economy is heading for a fall right now. One difference is that we were a creditor nation in the 1920s and we’re a debtor nation now. That adds to the economic danger we face. We owe huge sums of money to the Chinese and other people. I think we’re on an economic bubble. You hear people gloating about the Dow Jones average as people gloated about the stock market in 1929 until it exploded.”

Rooted in history, he also proved to be a prophet.

It is a voice that will be surely and sorely missed.

POT EXPO IS STILL A GO, BUT CONTEST ON HOLD

The judges for this weekend’s canceled medicinal marijuana contest at the Caregivers Cup will wait until October to decide which Michigan grower produces the best “medicine” for their condition, says Anthony Freed, executive director of the Michigan Marijuana Chamber of Commerce.

A second Caregivers Cup is planned for then — the time of year when the harvest is better — and organizers will better formulate the contest format to avoid legal questions, Freed says.

“I don’t consider having to postpone the main event a failure. I’m doing it so I can make sure everyone can still come and enjoy this great event,” he says.

The judges — people with valid state cards for medicinal marijuana use — are being offered refunds of their $250 judges’ fees, but Freed says those that have been contacted have opted to wait until the October event.

Up to 8,000 people are expected at the three-day event in Ypsilanti this weekend that features seminars and exhibits about legally growing, dispersing and using medicinal marijuana. Tickets are $15 for a day pass, and exhibitors paid $1,000 for their space. Organizers expect to make tens of thousands of dollars and will, in part, use proceeds to fund a hospice center for cancer patients, as well as other events this year. Metro Times is a media sponsor of the event.

Freed announced earlier this week that the marijuana contest would be canceled after Deputy Chief Assistant Washtenaw County Prosecutor Steve Hiller publicly questioned its legality. Freed asserts that his attorneys and staff believe the contest is legal, but he doesn’t want to push it with Hiller, though the two men have not spoken.

“It just seems like he doesn’t have a full understanding of the law. I believe he is totally wrong,” Freed says.

One of the issues, Freed says, has to do with marijuana that a grower doesn’t sell to his five allowed customers.

“What’s he supposed to do when there’s leftover medicine, throw it away? When there’s people with cancer who can’t afford it? I don’t believe that’s the intent of the law. If it is, there’s some dramatic changes that need to be made to it,” Freed says.

JUDGE MAY GET TOUGH OVER MISSING POLICE FILES

Defense attorneys are asking for sanctions and a Wayne County Circuit Court judge says he may get tough with the Detroit Police Department over a set of missing files in a murder case.

Calling it an act of “last resort,” Wayne County Circuit Judge Tim Kenny told defense attorneys Wednesday that if Detroit police don’t produce missing files, he’ll step in.

“If there is a problem with you being ignored by the Detroit Police Department,” he said during a motion hearing, “then I would intervene.”

Kenny did not make clear what he would do were he to “intervene” except to ask that police show up at a hearing later this year if the files are not found. Police representatives were not in court to give their side.

But attorneys and law students from the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic have asked that if they do not receive information from the files, that a jury be instructed to assume the missing evidence proves their client did not commit the crime.

“The court has discretion to grant a remedy for the prosecution’s failure to comply. The court has the discretion to order the exclusion of testimony or evidence relating to that discovery request or order,” they wrote in a motion asking for sanctions.

The attorneys and students from the law school clinic want to review Detroit investigators’ files from the two murder cases because they believe they could contain information that could help clear their client, Dwayne Provience.

Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Bob Stevens says he hasn’t seen the files either, despite asking that they be located in the department’s storage facility in the Upper Peninsula.

“That’s the police department’s problem, not mine,” he said.

Provience  was convicted in 2001 of shooting Rene Hunter on Detroit’s northwest side and served nearly nine years before Kenny last year granted him a new trial, ruling that information that should have been turned over to his then-defense attorney was not.

Stevens maintains Provience will be retried and says he is preparing his case against him.

But Provience’s attorneys and law students working with them have found records that were not turned over to Provience’s defense before his 2001 trial that they say help clear him.

Among them is a statement from another Detroit man that two other men shot and killed Hunter, and motor vehicle records that show one of those men owned a vehicle that matched the description that witnesses to the shooting gave police including three digits of its license plate.

“Every time we shake a file, something exculpatory falls out,” said Bridget McCormack, co-director of the Innocence Clinic.

Because Provience’s defense attorney at the time did not have the information — as required by court rules — he could not question another witness about discrepancies between his testimony and the other people who saw the shooting.

That witness, Larry Wiley, an admitted crack-user, was the prosecution’s main witness against Provience, but Wiley has since said police forced him to testify.

Kenny also ruled Wednesday that transcripts of Wiley’s testimony could not be introduced at Provience’s new trial in lieu of his actual testimony in court.

That will give Provience’s attorneys the opportunity to question him about his conflicting testimony.

Kenny set a hearing for March 5 where attorneys will advise him if police have found and shared the files.

Provience, meanwhile, is free on bond and on a tether. He must be at his mother’s house when he is not at one of his two jobs.

NEW BOOK CALLS BONIOR ‘CLUELESS’ IN 08 CAMPAIGN

Game Change, a behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 presidential campaign, has already made the news several times over in recent days:
• For Sen. Harry Reid’s comments about then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama as electable because he’s “light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one” — prompting a Reid apology this week.
• For its portrayal of John and Elizabeth Edwards that’s far at odds with his public image at the time (some advisers saw in him “a burgeoning megalomania”) and hers now (insiders supposedly saw her as an "abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending, crazywoman"). As to the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair, the book also claims the “dysfunctional” power couple even fought about the issue in front of staffers.
• For recounting a meeting between Bill Clinton and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in which Clinton allegedly said of Obama: "A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee."
• For its contention that Sen. Hillary Clinton’s staff set up a secret “war room within a war room” to deal with potential allegations that Bill was philandering, and that the group had concluded he was in "a sustained romantic relationship" with someone other than Hillary.
Our search of the book online hasn’t found enormous news involving Michigan politicos, but a few tidbits we’ll pass along.
Former U.S. Rep. David Bonior is depicted as coming into the Edwards camp just at the point where, following her cancer flare-up, Elizabeth Edwards was shifting the power arrangement with John in the campaign: she was becoming more powerful, he, more deferential.

Former Congressman David Bonior, the campaign’s new manager, had no experience running a presidential operation and struck much of the staff as an extremely nice but very clueless guy. Elizabeth seemed to love having Bonior nominally in charge, because it meant that, in effect, she was in charge. On everything from hiring to advertising, her influence was singular.

Meanwhile, Gov. Jennifer Granholm — who the book somehow fails to note is a former thespian — is given high marks for her role as a stand-in for Sarah Palin to prep Joe Biden for their impending vice-presidential debate. Granholm devoured YouTube videos of Palin’s past Alaska debates.
“The result was perfect Palin: charming, folksy, disciplined — and mean,” write the authors. And she was particularly good at goading Biden so that “he turned scornful and chauvinistic.” (If only she could study up on the role of decisive leader for Michigan.)
We’ll also note that the book by journalists John Heilemann (New York magazine) and Mark Halperin (Time) has been described as dishy and gossipy as well as an important look at the machinations of the 2008 campaign. Although the book is said to be the result of hundreds of interviews, in our scanning of excerpts, we’re seeing, as others have noted, a paucity of named sources and specific attribution.

John Bennett ready to make waves (air waves, that is)

Detroit Police Officer John Bennett has been making waves ever since he took to the Internet in a big way to call attention to the problems he saw with former Chief Jerry Oliver. That exercise in free speech cost Bennett his job — at least until the courts ordered that he be reinstated. Along the way, Bennett changed the name of his blog to DetroitUncovered (from Firejerryo), became an outspoken critic of the Kwame Kilpatrick administration and made an unsuccessful run for City Council last year.

Still on the police force, and still using his blog to keep close tabs on Detroit’s newest police chief (Warren Evans) and other issues of import, Bennett will be taking to the airwaves this Saturday to launch a weekly one-hour program on radio station WCHB-1200 AM.

For those of you unfamiliar with his website, it’s a place where a lot of insider scuttlebutt gets slung around, and the feet of public officials regularly get put to the fire. One thing for sure, Bennett isn’t shy about expressing his opinions. It’s an attitude he intends to carry over onto his radio program, which will air from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m.

“My slogan is, ‘Give it to ’em straight with no chaser,’” Bennett says. “I haven’t pulled any punches in the past, and I don’t intend to start now.”

The format of the show will allow for listener calls, and Bennett, who will be working alongside radio vet Harold Sullivan, says he’s looking forward to a freewheeling exchange of views.

Sounds like fun.

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