The dirty hiring practices at the Justice Department, when it was under Alberto Gonzales' leadership, of course, were revealed weeks ago — basically, if your resume included any hints of Democratic (or homosexual) leanings, you didn't have a chance in hell. Employees at the department might have been surprised to learn that this is completely illegal, not to mention unethical, but I'm pretty sure they knew when they were doing it. A recently-released internal report concludes that Gonzales' senior aides were responsible for the corruption and offered some incriminating details:

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Although it might seem like federal agents pretty much do this already, there are reports that the Justice Department is "considering" letting the FBI conduct investigate Americans based solely on racial, religious, and ethnic traits. Knowing the ideological makeup of the Justice Department, it's easy to guess how things are going to turn out after the department brass is done "considering."

Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons _ like evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated _ to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

Among the factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

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The fresh-faced, newly-minted JDs who graduated from law school this decade with a hankering for a career at the U.S. Justice Department might have proudly listed some of extracurricular activites — say Greenpeace, the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, or the American Constitution Society — on their resumes without knowing that they were actually screwing themselves out of a job interview. How, exactly?

A very damning report on the attorney-hiring practices at the Justice Department shows that aides used liberal "buzzwords" in applications and resumes to weed out lawyers with Democratic leanings. It's been happening since 2002, but it apparently became markedly worse around 2006 (yay, Alberto Gonzales!).

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Ah, hate. In one sense, it's talked about way, way too much. In another, it's not talked about enough.

In the wake of last week's march to protest the Justice Dept.'s handling hate crimes, the FBI has released a report that indicates hate crimes were up almost 10 percent.

Police across the nation reported 7,722 criminal incidents in 2006 targeting victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability. That was up 7.8 percent from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005…

Only 12,600 of the nation’s more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006 and neither Jena nor LaSalle Parish, in which the town is located, were among the agencies reporting.

This stats don't include Jena, and they also don't include any of the acts of hate that have occurred in 2007, which might win the prize for being the most hateful year we've experienced in the 21st century. Although, I'll have to check the stats on how Arabs fared around 2002-ish to be sure. [MSNBC]

As do most ranking government officials in the Bush administration, John Tanner, Chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, seems to be working opposite his organization instead of along with it.

At the National Latino Congreso in LA earlier this month, Tanner, in response to a question about whether or not laws requiring voters to show photo IDs are discriminatory, had this to say:

"It's probably true that among those who don't [have Photo ID], it's primarily elderly persons. And that's a shame. Of course…our society is such that minorities don't become elderly. The way that white people do. They die first."

Right. Well, um… That's some sound logic there, and I don't think it matters whether you agree with photo ID laws or not. I'm glad he's in charge of such an important office. But guess who's not? Barack Obama!

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For the Justice Department to dare come at the beloved the New York City Fire Department with anything but praise, the FDNY must have done something really bad. If you consider using recruitment exams that discriminate against blacks and Latinos bad, then yes, they did.

A complaint filed in federal court in Brooklyn alleges that the Fire Department of New York administered exams in 1999 and 2002 that failed to fairly measure the applicants' ability to do the job.

"The city's testing practices … do not select the firefighter applicants who will best perform their important public safety mission, while disproportionately screening out large numbers of qualified black and Hispanic applicants," said Wan J. Kim, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division in Washington.

Of the roughly 11,000 firefighters, only about 3 percent are black and 4.5 percent Hispanic, the complaint said.

Those stats are particularly damning when you consider the fact that we're talking about NYC here. Three percent and 4.5 percent barely make a dent.

[WNBC]