If you go to Chetly Zarko’s page, you can see video of an group called BAMN, (an acronym for By Any Means Necessary, which presumably includes violence) engaging in what the Detroit News called a “raucous, table-tumbling protest.”

Students chanted “no voter fraud” and “they say Jim Crow, we say hell no,” danced on chair seats and made obscene gestures at the board.

At one point, many of the protesters rushed toward the board members, overturning a testimony table. Lansing police officers were called to restore order.

The argument was about the Michigan Civil Right Initiative, a chance to let Michigan voters decide if they wanted racial quotas favoring African-American and immigrants, or not.

While the BAMN supporters were disrupting the meeting, shouting, and generally making nuisances of themselves, this is only to be expected, that’s their “means” that they think is necessary.

More serious lawlessness was observed in the actual Board of Elections itself, which defied two Court of Appeals judgements ordering it to put the MCRI on the ballot.

I experienced a feeling of disconnect when I saw this poston Hugh Hewitt’s site:

UPDATE: I was just thinking about my own memories of the Crips and Bloods. When I was a kid in North Carolina, the Crips and Bloods felt mostly mythological. I remember feeling the same way about them as I did the Killer Bees. Everyone kept talking about how they’d get here any day; they inspired a vague fear followed by certainty that they’d never actually get to our city.

By high school, things were different. I had a blue bandana snatched off my head by a group of local Crips while I was standing in line at the Food Court’s Orange Julius. I was lucky to get no worse than that.

By last year, there were gang wars at two of the area high schools. Thank you, Tookie.

The disconnect came from the fact that I thought it was Hewitt writing the post, and the timeline is all wrong for him, he’s an older…or rather mature man, old enough to remember the Communists.

My mistake, the signature on post was Mary Katharine Ham, a Southern girl who graduated from the University of Georgia in 2002, which makes more sense.

But the Crips themselves are having “Killer Bee” trouble of their own : they’re being pushed out by the Mexican and Salvadoran Gangs from south of the border. Roger McGrath has a big piece in the American Conservative on the clash between blacks and Hispanics in LA, and while this clash is what we call “displacement” or “dispossession“ in the workforce, and in local politics, in gang terms it means war in American streets.

I was watching the Congressional floor session yesterday on C-SPAN in which the Sensenbrenner (R-WI) immigration reform bill was discussed. Specifically, the discussion focused on a variety of amendments one of which would make illegal presence in the U.S. a felony. [bill text here]

Side note: It isn’t already a felony? Gee whiz, people…

In any event the part I want to share with you was in the testimony of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) who is of course, a former immigration lawyer. [email her: zoe.lofgren@mail.house.gov]

She opposed the felony part of the legislation because,

“In one shake, we’re subjecting the entire illegal immigration population to criminal prosecution.”

[House approves contentious border bill--Measure would build new fences and make illegal immigration a felony
By Michael Doyle / Bee Washington Bureau 12/17/05]

Yeah…note to Zoe: Generally speaking, that’s what happens when you break the law. Maybe you were absent the day it was covered in law school.

Here is the funny part: She referred to illegal aliens as ” people who are simply alive in the United States without documents.”

Oh Zoe! You are a master of euphemistic drivel and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, girl!