Paul Carroll, an 86-year-old World War II veteran who has lived in the same Ohio town for four decades, was denied a chance to vote in the state’s primary contests today after a poll worker denied his form of identification, a recently-acquired photo ID from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The poll worker rejected the ID because it did not contain an address, as required by Ohio law.

Carroll told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that he got the ID from the VA after his driver’s license expired because he doesn’t drive anymore:

“My beef is that I had to pay a driver to take me up there because I don’t walk so well and have to use this cane and now I can’t even vote,” said Paul Carroll, 86, who has lived in Aurora nearly 40 years, running his own business, Carroll Tire, until 1975.

“I had to stop driving, but I got the photo ID from the Veterans Affairs instead, just a month or so ago. You would think that would count for something. I went to war for this country, but now I can’t vote in this country.”

A local Veterans Affairs employee told the Plain Dealer that the decision not to include the address was likely made at the federal level, and because VA IDs are accepted at any location, “the actual address of a veteran isn’t as critical to us.” Carroll was offered a provisional ballot, but the type was too small for him to read and “I was kind of perturbed by then,” he said.

Republicans across the country have pushed voter ID laws to address a voter fraud “problem” that rarely, if ever, exists. Multiple laws have been challenged in court over claims that they disenfranchise voters, particularly minorities and the elderly. Carroll’s story isn’t altogether unique — Tennessee voter authorities denied a 96-year-old woman a voter ID last year because she didn’t have an original copy of her marriage license.

Rick Santorum often speaks about the importance of family, but in 1994, while his party was going after “welfare queens”, the then-second-term Congressman singled out single mothers. Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy and Andy Kroll report that at town hall meetings and TV appearances from the era, Santorum often said single parenthood contributed to crime, moral decay, and the welfare rolls:

“What we have is moms raising children in single-parent households simply breeding more criminals,” he said. When Santorum wasn’t comparing single mothers to animals, he still pressed the issue of out-of-wedlock births and crime. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994 that “we will never solve the crime problem unless we solve the welfare problem. They are deeply intertwined.” [...]

Santorum, who as a second-term congressman described his views as “moderate,” made single mothers a focal point of his welfare policy. He introduced legislation that would have required single mothers who had been on welfare for more than two years to work at least 35 hours a week in order to receive benefits. They would also be denied benefits if they could not identify their child’s father. “If they don’t give the name, they don’t get any welfare,” Santorum told the Inquirer. Under his plan, which did not pass Congress, unwed teen mothers would not be eligible for welfare at all.

Single-parent families made up just over a third of American families in 2010, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Under Santorum’s welfare plan, which didn’t go anywhere, “unwed teen mothers would not be eligible for welfare at all.” Of course, if Santorum had his way, they wouldn’t have have been able to obtain an abortion either. So it’s not clear what Santorum would do with a teenage mother who was forced to bring her baby to term, but then could receive no help from the government.

While Santorum and other conservatives have mostly learned that bashing single mothers is not particularly effective politics, a Republican lawmaker in Wisconsin proposed a bill last week that would require the state to declare that single parenthood is “a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.”

Protesters in Alabama are entering their second day, and eleventh mile, of a march to demand civil rights for immigrants and people of color. The march is a response to Alabama’s harsh new immigration law, among the toughest in the nation. But it also comes on the heels of the introduction of strict voter identification laws in many states that would make it significantly harder for people of color to vote.

The march follows the route Martin Luther King took during the historic Selma-to-Montgomery marches of the 1960s, and falls on the 47th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” a particularly gruesome day of beatings during those marches.

Among those attending this year’s march are many of the famous civil rights activists of the 1960s, including U.S. Representative John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and MSNBC host and former presidential candidate Reverend Al Sharpton.

Organizers have stressed unity for racial justice between these famous African American leaders and the Latinos who face discrimination from these laws. Citing both the immigration and voter ID laws, Sharpton yesterday called the bills the “largest affront to the Voting Rights Act since it was put into law 47 years ago.”

Nicole Cairns, the Online Communications Director for Reform Immigration for America, one of the groups participating in the march, explained to ThinkProgress how immigrants’ rights groups view the connection between the different groups involved in the march:

In Alabama, nearly every basic right is under attack – voting rights, reproductive rights, and now welfare. Alabama also passed the worst anti-immigrant bill into law last year, which legalized racial profiling and told an entire generation of immigrants they’re not wanted in this state. Through these bills, Alabama is attempting to disenfranchise low-income, black, and immigrant residents of the state. We’re marching to let them know we won’t stand for this.

Indeed, a study from the Brennan Center for Justice projects that voter ID laws could make it more difficult for over five million eligible voters to vote. Disproportionately, these voters are Black and Latino.

But these laws are not just an affront to civil rights. The immigration bill is also an affront to Alabama’s economy. As the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Alabama has projected, it could cost the state billions of dollars a year in lost agriculture– not to mention the automobile executives from Honda and Mercedes who have been apprehended under the new law.

The Alabama march will continue over the next week, totaling 50 miles. Protesters will gather at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church on March 9 for a final rally.

Following the state general assembly’s passage — mostly along party lines — of a bill to require medically unnecessary ultrasounds for women seeking abortions, hundreds of Virginians assembled Saturday for a peaceful protest march on the state capitol in Richmond.

Police forces — including state police, under the control of Republican governor Bob McDonnell’s administration, wearing riot gear — arrested 31 protesters for ignoring an order to confine the demonstration to the corner of the Capitol grounds for where they had a rally permit.

Watch the video:

Virginia Democrats objected to the disproportionate show of force. Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax County) said the on the state senate floor “Not since the massive resistance days in the 60s have I seen such a disgraceful display of excessive police presence in my state.” Sen. Chap Petersen (D) noted that though “there was no indication that anyone was in any harm,” the police showed up dressed “for a bar brawl.”

The response from the McDonnell administration? Blame the Democrats.

McDonnell:

I understand today, on the floor of the Senate, we witnessed something that I haven’t heard in the 21 years I’ve been up here, and that is legislators taking to the floor of the Senate of Virginia and essentially attacking our law enforcement officers for doing their job.

And his lieutenant governor, Bill Bolling (R) said the Democratic critics “owe an apology to Virginia’s law enforcement professionals.”

According to the state police, there were 19,033 violent crimes in Virginia in 2010. Perhaps they would be better off focusing on preventing those?

Black students, and particularly boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to data gathered by the Department of Education about civil rights and education. One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out of school suspension, and black students were three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

And the Civil Rights Data Collection statistics from 2009-10, covering 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts serving about 85 percent of U.S. students K-12, showed that Hispanic and black students make up 45 percent of the student body in schools with zero-tolerance policies, but they accounted for 56 percent of students expelled under those policies. And more than 70 percent of the students involved in school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement were Hispanic or black:

“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”

The department began gathering data on civil rights and education in 1968, but the project was suspended by the Bush administration in 2006. It has been reinstated and expanded to examine a broader range of information, including, for the first time, referrals to law enforcement, an area of increasing concern to civil rights advocates who see the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline for a growing number of students of color.

“The harsh punishments, especially expulsion under zero tolerance and referrals to law enforcement, show that students of color and students with disabilities are increasingly being pushed out of schools, oftentimes into the criminal justice system,” Deborah J. Vagins, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office, told the New York Times.

Outside of discliplinary actions, the Education Department’s data showed a wide range of racial and ethnic disparities. For example, high schools with more minority students were less likely to offer calculus, but Hispanic and black students were still much less likely to take it. And black and Hispanic students made up 44 percent of students in the survey, but only 26 percent of students in the gifted and talented programs.

Duncan will announce the full results from the civil rights data this afternoon. After the data is available, it will be available here.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard the “mother of all corporate immunity” cases, a case that literally presents the question of whether oil companies that engage in torture are immune from a federal law holding the most atrocious human rights violators accountable to international norms. After last week’s oral argument, it was clear the case did not go well. The Court appeared poised to hold that corporations — all corporations — are immune from this law altogether.

Now, however, it could be much worse. Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued an order asking for additional briefing in the case and opening up the possibility that they could go much further than simply immunizing corporations from following this law:

This case is restored to the calendar for reargument. The parties are directed to file supplemental briefs addressing the following question: “Whether and under what circumstances the Alien Tort Statute, 28 U.S.C. §1350, allows courts to recognize a cause of action for violations of the law of nations occurring within the territory of a sovereign other than the United States.”

To translate this a bit, when the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case, they normally announce which “questions presented” they will decide. Originally, the primary question presented in this case was whether or not corporations can be held accountable for “violations of the law of nations such as torture, extrajudicial executions or other crimes against humanity” in U.S. court. Yesterday, however, the Court expanded this inquiry into whether anyone can be held accountable for major human rights violations abroad. The Court could very well hold that corporations are immune from accountability under the law holding human rights violators accountable — and so is everyone else.

To be fair, there is a narrow ground that would allow the justices to dispose of this case without causing as much harm to international human rights standards. The case involves a foreign corporation that committed its alleged actions on foreign soil, so it is not entirely certain that American courts can reach its actions anyway. Yet, even if the Court were to kick the case on this relatively narrow ground, it might only delay a future when American corporations that torture foreigners abroad would also be free to go about their business. Even as the Court is considering how to dispose of this current case, another, very similar case was recently decided by a lower court that also involves allegations of mass atrocities perpetrated by a corporation. Unlike the current case, however, this other case involves Exxon — an American corporation.

In other words, the Supreme Court could immunize foreign corporations from the law today, and then use Exxon’s case to immunize American corporations tomorrow.