Md. looks to repeal freedom riders law

A Maryland law meant to prevent civil rights-era “freedom riders” from encouraging blacks to protest segregation should be eliminated, legislators say.

The “Jim Crow” law, passed in 1964 at the height of the civil rights movement, was a response to race riots in the Eastern Shore town of Cambridge, Md. It outlawed Freedom Riders — protesters who traveled on buses into the segregated South — from giving bus fare or any other payment to local blacks who planned to participate in anti-discrimination protests, The Sun newspaper in Baltimore reported Sunday.

Although the law has never been enforced, Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler has said that courts would likely find that the statute is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Maryland legislative leaders told The Sun they plan to introduce legislation to repeal the law during the state General Assembly session that begins in January, and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has indicated he would support the bill.

Civil rights riots hit Cambridge in June 1963, and Gov. J. Millard Tawes imposed martial law on the city, the newspaper said. U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy called the Maryland parties to Washington to mediate a desegregation agreement.

UPI

Liberals to keep pressure on Obama for results

Barack Obama promises to steer the nation straight again. He better be ready for a strong force pulling left.

The president-elect drew plenty of support from moderates, but the liberal side of the Democratic Party followed him most resoundingly: labor unions, influential Internet blogs and legions of grassroots volunteers. He won almost 90 percent of the liberal vote, more than the previous two Democratic presidential nominees, John Kerry or Al Gore.

Now the same millions of left-leaning voters who worked relentlessly to get Obama elected want results. That means ending the war in Iraq, ushering in universal health care, halting harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists, making it easier to form unions and aggressively tackling global warming.

“We’ll see,” said Eli Pariser, executive director of the liberal powerhouse Moveon.org, about what Obama will deliver. “If they turn out to be all disappointments, we’ll have a good three years to storm the gates at the White House.”

Already, the liberal blogosphere is showing its influence.

John Brennan, Obama’s top pick to head the CIA, suddenly withdrew his name from consideration under pressure this past week. His potential appointment had raised a firestorm among liberal blogs that associate him with the Bush administration’s interrogation, detention and rendition policies. Within hours, blogs that raised concerns about Brennan’s career claimed victory about their successful exercise in free speech.

The debt is starting to come due on Obama’s promise of “change we can believe in.” Except he meant “we” in a broader sense.

He promised to lead with a bipartisan spirit, the kind that could unify a country and allow him to get deals through Congress. From the moment he won, he implored people: “Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship.”

And then he set out to take his own advice.

Obama’s courting of Republicans — for ideas, legislative support, and potential roles in his Cabinet — is drawing cautious attention from the liberal base of his Democratic Party. The concern, to the degree that it exists this soon, is that Obama’s emphasis on governing from the center may undermine the left.

He still pledges to wind down the war in Iraq, but everything comes second to fixing the staggering economy right now. He has stood up in defense for Sen. Joe Lieberman, a virtual Democratic outcast these days, and sought help from his Republican presidential foe, Sen. John McCain.

Obama is building a government with several Clinton administration faces, a move that has underwhelmed some liberal voices who are eager for a more dramatic sense of change.

In one posting that seemed to echo in the Internet community, liberal blogger Chris Bowers wrote, “I feel incredibly frustrated. … Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? Why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s Cabinet who will be advising him from the left?”

Christopher Hayes, the Washington-based editor of The Nation, offered his own lament about a lack of progressive candidates for prominent leadership spots. He said the left has been right about Iraq, financial deregulation and global warming, and yet “no one who comes from the part of American political and intellectual life that has given birth to all of these ideas is anywhere to be found within miles of the Obama Cabinet so far.”

Obama pushed back a bit this past week, saying his advisers will blend “experience with fresh thinking.”

Of course, he is not done picking his Cabinet, let alone occupying the Oval Office yet. Any rumblings of discontent at this point show that expectations for Obama are enormous within his party. Labor unions and liberal groups spent big money and knocked on countless doors to help get Obama elected.

The undercurrent of concern is not that Obama, granted the title of most liberal senator in one prominent ranking, will suddenly abandon the people who helped elect him or change course on core causes. Rather, it is that liberal side of his party may have to wait longer for victories, and accept smaller ones.

That is the reality of governance right now.

“I think he’s moving center-left, rather than left-center. It’s fair to call him pragmatic,” said Paul Light, a public policy professor and presidential historian at New York University. “I think labor is going to get a lot from him. I think his liberal supporters are going to get a lot from him. But they’re going to be disappointed if they want all liberal all the time.”

The economy is in such remarkably dreadful shape that Obama may get a pass on other matters while he tries to fix that one.

An early test will be how Obama’s team works with congressional leaders and appropriations committee chairmen on his first priority, a massive bill to stimulate the economy. If Democrats go too far left on it, they may lose some conservative members of their own caucus and give Obama some fits.

The left could get early legislative victories on expanded health care for children from poor families, and looser restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research. Obama’s stimulus plan is bound to include spending and jobs supported by labor.

As for the anxious anti-war crowd, which helped propel Obama’s campaign in its early days, Obama adviser David Axelrod said the new president will not renege on winding down the conflict in Iraq.

Obama says the challenges are simply too huge for the politics of labels; Democrats and Republicans must work together. Pragmatism rules.

“I think what the American people want more than anything is just common sense, smart government,” he said. “They don’t want ideology.”

BEN FELLER, AP

Nigerian army takes over riot city

The Nigerian army took over the stricken city of Jos on Sunday to enforce calm after two days of Muslim-Christian clashes that left hundreds dead.

“The situation this morning is gradually returning to normal. There has not been any cases this morning of any destruction or violence,” Brigadier Emeka Onwamaegbu told AFP.

Residents reported troops patrolling the streets and calm returning to the city. Offering the first official toll, Plateau State’s information minister Nuhu Gagara said about 200 people died during fighting on Friday and Saturday between the rival communities over the results of a local election in the Plateau State capital.

Other sources have given a toll twice the official figure.

“This figure is just preliminary, as a search and rescue committee has been inaugurated by the government to go around the city and recover dead bodies,” Gagara told reporters. He did not give a figure for the injured.

Police arrested 500 people on Saturday alone, carrying “all sorts of lethal weapons,” Gargara said.

A Plateau State government spokesman was quoted in newspapers as saying that 1,500 youths had been arrested over the two days in connection with the violence.

Jos was under tight police and army surveillance Sunday, military spokesman Onwamaegbu said, while declining to say how many troops had been deployed in the city.

“There’s been no reports of violence this morning, the army has taken over the capital but the only fear is what might happen at the outskirts of the town,” Muslim cleric Adamu Tsoho told AFP.

Relief workers and observers offered markedly higher death tolls than the government’s preliminary estimates.

“Well over 300 people have been killed in the last two days of violence,” one Nigerian Red Cross official told AFP, asking to remain anonymous.

Khaled Abubakar, an imam from the central mosque in Jos said Saturday that “close on 400 bodies” had been laid out in the mosque.

“Muslim prayers were observed on 351 dead bodies at the central mosque and then taken to the cemetery where they are being buried,” Tsoho, the other cleric, said.

Another 30 bodies had been removed from the mosque Saturday night by relatives and had been buried.

Earlier that day a local journalist said he counted 381 bodies in the mosque.

The Nigerian Red Cross reported as early as Friday night that 300 people had been injured and that more than 10,000 people forced to flee their homes, had sought refuge in churches, mosques and army and police barracks.

The clashes were triggered by a rumour Friday that the majority-Muslim All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) had lost in a local election to the mainly Christian Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), according to a police spokesman.

State governor Jonah Jang imposed a 24-hour curfew in four districts and ordered police to fire on anyone who broke it.

While Muslims and Christians for the most part cohabit peacefully in Nigeria.

But Jos, lying in the country’s “middle belt” between the predominantly Muslim north and the mainly Christian south, witnessed violent clashes between the two religious groups in 2001. Hundreds of people were killed.

Another town in the same state, Yelwa, was hit by similar violence in 2004.

Hundreds of people also died in religious-based clashes in north-central Kaduna state when it tried to impose Sharia law in 2000.

AFP

Obama to name 4 more Cabinet posts

President-elect Barack Obama plans to announce longtime advisers and political foes alike as his picks for top administration jobs at a Monday news conference, nominating one-time political nemesis Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state.

Obama’s announcements include members of his national security team and beyond, completing the nominations for one-third of his Cabinet as he moves quickly to assemble the country’s new leadership in times of war and a troubled economy.

His selections include some of his most loyal campaign advisers and notably some who were not, including Democratic primary rival Clinton and President Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, staying in his current post.

Obama also planned to name Washington lawyer Eric Holder as attorney general and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as homeland security secretary, according to Democratic officials. He also planned to announce two senior foreign policy positions outside the 15-member Cabinet: campaign foreign policy adviser Susan Rice as U.N. ambassador and retired Marine General James L. Jones as national security adviser.

The Democratic official disclosed the plans on a condition of anonymity Sunday because they were not authorized for public release ahead of the news conference.

Those names had been discussed before for those jobs, but Obama was going to make them official Monday in his hometown.

Last week, he named key members of his economic team, including Timothy Geithner, president of Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as treasury secretary. Obama is not yet ready to name his intelligence advisers, one Democratic official said.

Clinton’s nomination is the latest chapter in what began as a bitter rivalry for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Obama defeated her, Clinton backed his general election campaign against Republican Sen. John McCain, and she now has agreed to give up her Senate seat to be his top diplomat.

To make it possible for his wife to become secretary of state, party officials said, former President Clinton agreed:

_to disclose the names of every contributor to his foundation since its inception in 1997 and all contributors going forward.

_to refuse donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Global Initiative, his annual charitable conference.

_to cease holding CGI meetings overseas.

_to volunteer to step away from day-to-day management of the foundation while his wife is secretary of state.

_to submit his speaking schedule to review by the State Department and White House counsel.

_to submit any new sources of income to a similar ethical review.

Bill Clinton’s business deals and global charitable endeavors had been expected to create problems for the former first lady’s nomination. But in negotiations with the Obama transition team, the former president agreed to several measures designed to bring transparency to those activities.

“It’s a big step,” said Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who said he plans to vote to confirm Clinton.

Lugar said there would still be “legitimate questions” raised about the former president’s extensive international involvement. “I don’t know how, given all of our ethics standards now, anyone quite measures up to this who has such cosmic ties, but … hopefully, this team of rivals will work,” Lugar said.

Obama and Clinton clashed repeatedly on foreign affairs during the primary. Obama criticized Clinton for her vote to authorize the Iraq war. Clinton said Obama lacked the experience to be president and she chided him for saying he would meet with leaders of nations such as Iran and Cuba without conditions.

Advisers said Obama had for several months envisioned Clinton as his top diplomat, and he invited her to Chicago to discuss the job just a week after the Nov. 4 election. The two met privately Nov. 13 in Obama’s transition office in downtown Chicago.

Clinton was said to be interested and then to waver, concerned about relinquishing her Senate seat and the political independence it conferred. Those concerns were largely resolved after Obama assured her she would be able to choose a staff and have direct access to him, advisers said.

Remaining in the Senate also may not have been an attractive choice for Clinton. Despite her political celebrity, she is a relatively junior senator without prospects for a leadership position or committee chairmanship anytime soon.

Clinton “is known throughout the world, very smart, a little harder line than Senator Obama took during the campaign,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close McCain friend and adviser who is on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, said the Clintons will have to tread carefully to avoid the appearance of conflicts.

“The presumption will be that both Secretary of State Clinton and former President Clinton will be very judicious in what they take on because there’s a new dimension here,” Reed said. “I think they’ve put up a good framework. This disclosure, this transparency is the right way to go.”

Lugar and Reed both spoke on ABC’s “This Week.” Graham was on “Fox News Sunday.”

NEDRA PICKLER, AP

Resignation Raises Issue of Minorities in Coaching

PETE THAMEL, New York Times

- Mississippi State Coach Sylvester Croom resigned on Saturday, ending his tenure as the only African-American head football coach in Southeastern Conference history.

The number of African-American coaches in the Football Bowl Subdivision has dwindled to three among the 119 teams, the fewest since 1993. There are 10 open jobs, which means the number of African-American coaches could grow before the start of next season. But the issue looms large over the sport.

“This is a serious issue on the athletic landscape,” said Floyd Keith, the executive director of the Black Coaches’ Association. “Any rational person has to be offended.”

Croom is the third African-American coach to exit his job this season, joining Washington’s Tyrone Willingham and Kansas State’s Ron Prince. Randy Shannon at Miami, Kevin Sumlin at Houston and Turner Gill at Buffalo are the only remaining African-American coaches in major college football.

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