Civil Rights Roundup: 07/01/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news from around the country.

Here's a convoluted story: Eli Lilly and Co. will pay $64,400 to settle a lawsuit accusing the company of withholding severance pay to force a longtime employee to withdraw a discrimination charge.

Disgusting: Blacks given "ghetto" names in SoCal yearbook

It's heading to the courts: group sues to keep anti-affirmative action measure off the Arizona ballot. The group claims the signature-gatherer's pitch "led potential signers to believe it would further the cause of civil rights, in some cases saying it would actually preserve affirmative action."

Mississippians are celebrating Voter Registration Day at the Medgar Evans library. This being Mississippi, the focus of the event is on the state's recently expanded felon disenfranchisement law.

The charge of "judicial activism" is so frequently hurled from the right that it's easy to forget that it was once conservatives whose stranglehold on the judiciary was what blocked the democratic will from being achieved. With what appears to be an Democratic wave cresting, E.J. Dionne wonders if the judges appointed by Reagan/Bush/Bush will have the same effect in the years to come.

It's official: the evidence for holding some Gitmo detainees is comparable to something out of Lewis Carroll (writer of "Alice and Wonderland"). Of note: David B. Sentelle, one of the more high-profile conservative judges in the country, was on the panel (and in the majority).