The protesters clearly feel there is a form of Moses-style planning going on today, but rather than highways, it’s high-speed rail and transit, and compact, mixed-use, dense development, all of which are designed to bring about long-term sustainability. As one Florida Tea Party activist put it, "compact development aka smart growth, aka New Urbanism, aka Traditional Neighborhood Design, aka Transit Oriented Development, aka Livable Communities, aka Sustainable Development ... are all names meaning the same thing: they are anti-suburban, high-density dwelling design concepts that are part of the UN's Agenda 21 and will make single family home ownership for our posterity unattainable." Another summed it up this way: “We don’t want none of your smart growth communism."

The author concludes that responding feels futile, since these activists aren't interested in any form of compromise. But will angry Tea Partiers soon be showing up at Advisory Neighborhood Commission meetings?

Photo by Averain via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

Despite U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s willingness to talk about race in America and his pledge to end racial profiling, his Department of Justice hasn’t done much to dismantle Bush-era guidelines on national security; Those guidelines not only promote racial profiling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation but create justification for state and local law enforcement agents to do it too, the ACLU charges.

"Racial profiling remains a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the U.S., impacting the lives of millions of people in the African American, Asian, Latino, South Asian, Arab and Muslim communities," Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program and the main author of the report said in a press release. "The U.S. government must take urgent, direct action to rid the nation of the scourge of racial and ethnic profiling and bring this country into conformity with both the Constitution and international human rights obligations."

The ACLU made the charges in a report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. To read the press release or the entire report, click here.