Three years later, the battle continues over affirmative action

Three years later, the battle continues over affirmative action in Detroit:

Arielle Bullard had every belief she could get into the University of Michigan. The senior at Cass Technical High School in Detroit mailed in her application during the 2006-2007 winter semester.

The 2.98 GPA student was told in the University of Michigan´s response letter that if she could get a 4.0, her application would be given "serious consideration."

Bullard, an African-American student, did just that and then scored a 26 on her ACT.

But that semester, Bullard´s school was forced to discontinue its program that gave additional admission points to black and Latino students. Her school ended the program because of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a ballot proposal voters adopted in November 2006. Proposal 2, as it was known, added to the state Constitution an end to all "racial preference" and affirmative action-type programs in taxpayerfunded institutions.

Bullard´s application was ultimately rejected. Was it because of Proposal 2? There´s no smoking gun, but the implication is certainly there.

"I feel that Proposal 2 will intensify segregation and close doors that have barely been opened to me and other black and Latino students," Bullard said.

Bullard and several other black students took action by signing onto a lawsuit against the University of Michigan to get MCRI removed from the state Constitution. It wasn´t the first suit against MCRI.

In fact, the long legal road MCRI has traveled began on March 25, 2004.

On that date, Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Paula Manderfield ruled that putting the affirmative action-killing initiative on the ballot "flies in the face" of the state Constitution. Michigan´s governing document guarantees "equal protection under the law." It ensures that no person can be "discriminated against" because of race or color. MCRI was a proposal to ban any racial preference program in any state-taxpayer entity — be it a city government´s female recruitment program or the University of Michigan giving extra admission points to an African-American applicant.

Manderfield questioned: How can the state ban "preferential treatment" programs and guarantee equality when society´s treatment of minority populations is not equal? Therefore, she concluded, MCRI and the state Constitution are in conflict.

The initiative — bankrolled by Ward Connerly, who successfully baked similar language into California law — should not be put before Michigan´s voters, she said.

Civil rights groups across the state cheered. MCRI was dead … for a few months any way. Long enough to push MCRI off the 2004 ballot and onto the 2006 ballot. Since then, it´s been very much alive in Michigan.

Today, MCRI has been a part of our state´s Constitution for three years. Opponents are still trying to kill it in court, but their options are running out and so are their arguments. It´s been five and a half years since Manderfield´s 19-page decision.

Affirmative action defenders in Michigan are still looking for their second judicial victory.

Latest stop: U.S. Court of Appeals

Civil rights attorney George Washington spent Nov. 17 in Cincinnati in front of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Joined by his legal partner, Shanta Driver, Washington laid out the argument that MCRI violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Washington argues Proposal 2 has made "second-class citizens" of blacks and Latinos. Michigan State University or Central Michigan University or any other state school of higher education can give special considerations to potential students based on their economic status, their military status or the names of their parents.

But not their race. That´s not right, Washington says.

"There are large numbers of Latinos and blacks scattered in school districts across this state and they are discriminated against just like the kids from Detroit," Washington said. "We should be honest about this. We have social problems. Our society has inequalities and we´ve had them for years. We need to deal with it."

Many legal observers believe Washington is tilting at windmills in Cincinnati. This "political process" argument didn´t work for affirmative action defenders attempting to repeal California´s Prop. 209, an initiative functionally identical to MCRI, or for anyone else.

Washington is keeping his head up. He said he believes at least two of the three judges were at least sympathetic to his arguments. It´s possible they agree that a majority of voters cannot take away rights of a minority in the United States, regardless of whether it was 58 percent of the voting population (like it was in Michigan) or not.

Look at the facts. Since this "legalized discrimination" was enacted, the University of Michigan has seen a 27 percent drop in undergraduate admissions of blacks and Latinos and nearly a 33 percent drop in law school admissions. Wayne State University has 64 percent fewer blacks and Latinos in its medical school, according to Washington.

"It´s like many years ago when James Meredith couldn´t get into the University of Mississippi because of open desegregation," Washington said. "Now it´s a more subtle version. Now, it´s accomplished through test scores, where you went to school, who your parents are. The results are the same. We just need a court order to let these programs resume."

But Washington´s legal team has bounced this type of argument off the federal courts before in separate motions and hasn´t been able to get any traction. The courts at all levels have ultimately said (in the simplest form) that MCRI guarantees legal equality regardless of gender and race. So do the state and U.S. Constitution.

If there´s a chance for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which includes By Any Means Necessary, the ACLU and the NAACP, it´s this three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Two of the three judges — Martha Craig Daughtrey and Guy Cole — are two Bill Clinton appointees. The third, Julie Smith Gibbons, was appointed by George W. Bush.

Clinton, however, also appointed the federal judge, David Lawson, who sided in favor of MCRI on March 18, 2008. And even if affirmative action supporters are successful, the decision can be reviewed by the full 14-member Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The panel has an 8-6 Republicanappointed majority.

Michael Rosman, the lead attorney for the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative public interest law firm in D.C., thinks its chances are "pretty slim."

The appellate court will have to rule that the Michigan Constitution and the U.S. Constitution are in conflict, and toss MCRI into the trash. If it were to do that, the court would be taking the opposite road of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld California´s Prop 209.

In that scenario, Rosman said it´s highly likely the U.S Supreme Court will want to take a look at this MCRI case, titled Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. The University of Michigan.

Washington likes the case´s chances at the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Anthony Kennedy, universally considered to be the court´s swing vote, does not agree that the U.S. Constitution is color blind.

"He recognizes that there are racial disparities in education and that government has a right to take that into account," Washington said.

Rosman is not of the same mind. Does he think affirmative action defenders are bringing forth a flimsy case?

"Flimsy is a strong word. I just don´t think it´s going to Rosman win," he said.

Killing MCRI an ´uphill climb´

In a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals, Rosman pointed out that in denying an earlier motion in the case, this same court said affirma- Cox tive action supporters "face an uphill climb" in "contending that the Equal Protection Clause compels what it presumptively prohibits."

In other words, the 14th Amendment bans discrimination based on race and gender. MCRI reads that everybody Manderfield regardless of race, sex and ethnicity should be treated the same. Arguing that the two goals are different is difficult.

If it can be done, the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action would need to argue that MCRI is hurting, not helping, establish equal protections, Washington said Wayne State University Professor Robert Sedler.

In the last 40 years, the U.S. Supreme Court decisions has twice thrown out state laws singling out minorities as a demographic group under the cover of creating equal situations. This happened, Sedler said, in a 1969 fair housing case in Akron, Ohio, (Hunter v. Erickson) and a 1982 busing case from the state of Washington (Crawford v. Board of Education).

Sedler declined to make a prediction on what the Sixth Circuit would do, but said he could see a scenario where MCRI could fall.

Rosman disagrees. He said both cases Sedler quotes made it more difficult for minorities to obtain protection from discrimination through a political process of law making. In this case, Proposal 2 of 2006 makes it more difficult for minorities to obtain racial preferences through a political process of law making.

To prove his point, Rosman quoted Lawson´s ruling.

"Admission at elite universities is a zero-sum enterprise, and programs that prefer some students on the basis of race must do so necessarily at the expense of other applicants not of the preferred race.

"The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something when applied to a person of another color," Lawson wrote.

Cox leading the charge

Technically, the University of Michigan is the defendant in the case, but Attorney General Mike Cox is riding herd for the defense in court. As it turns out, Cox is the only one of the five Republican gubernatorial candidates to have openly supported MCRI when it was put before the voters in 2006.

Cox spokesman Nick DeLeeuw said that regardless of where the attorney general came down on Proposal 2 in 2006, there´s no political motivation here.

More than 2.1 million Michigan voters legally voted to make MCRI a piece of the state´s Constitution. Cox views it as his role to protect the Constitution.

DeLeeuw batted away any insinuation that Cox was riding herd on MCRI to bolster his conservative credentials with the conservative base in the months leading up the Republican gubernatorial primary next August.

"It´s his job as the state´s top law enforcement officer," DeLeeuw said. "The people wanted Proposal 2, and when it´s challenged, the attorney general needs to step in and defend it."

That may be true, but that doesn´t mean the rest of state government needs to follow. The Department of Civil Rights and the Governor´s Office are two that are not.

Much of the court´s focus on MCRI has been over the black or Latino student whose admission into the University of Michigan hinges on whether extra admission points are given based on race, said Dan Levy, law and policy director of the state Civil Rights Department. The focus, he said, needs to shift to making sure entire university classes are adequately represented.

Major corporations are hiring from diverse university campuses because they see a benefit from it. Likewise, if a university see a benefit in attracting more minorities into its student body, it shouldn´t be deterred from making its own decision, Levy said.

"We believe that when you´re talking about those few students on the cusp, you´re ignoring the students who are choosing a university," he said. "The majority should not be the ones telling the minorities which rights they should have, and we don´t believe ´the majority´ should be making universities´ decisions. The universities should make the determination on its own."

The Department of Civil Rights and its governing body, the state Civil Rights Commission, has been involved since California’s Connerly, former state Rep. Leon Drolet and Jennifer Gratz first started talking about bringing MCRI to Michigan in 2004. Gratz, who had been denied admission to the law school at the University of Michigan, was one of the two plaintiffs in Gratz v. Bollinger, the 2003 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that the school’s point system aiding minorities was unconstitutional. The body took a more active approach in late 2005 when Civil Rights commissioners began receiving complaints about how MCRI petition circulators were allegedly misleading folks in Detroit and elsewhere into signing the petition.

The commission held several public hearings on the issue in 2006. They concluded Proposal 2 supporters had fraudulently collected signatures by telling registered voters the initiative permitted affirmative action when the opposite was true.

As a result, The state Board of Canvassers tried to keep MCRI off the ballot, despite an order from the Michigan Court of Appeals, which then bypassed the board and ordered the secretary of state to put it on the ballot anyway.

Likewise, when MCRI succeeded at the ballot box, affirmative action defenders asked the courts to keep the initiative from going into effect until they had exhausted all of their legal remedies. The courts, again, shot them down.

But supporters are hoping this time will be different. They feel like this time it has to be different.

The courts, once again, will need to come to the aid of the minority populations after being dealt a tough break by the majority. At this point, they have no other choice but to hope they hit a bull´s eye with their last arrow.

"I think we´re going to win," Washington said. "I don´t have a crystal ball, but I believe we will prevail. … We can´t have universities that are a majority white. It makes no sense. It´s not fair. It´s not equality."

by Kyle Melinn
from CityPulse

Octavio Solis, "Lydia"

Fantastic play!

"In reality, Octavio Solis mines a new vein"

The family drama 'Lydia' is 'the kind of play that I said I would never write.'
Octavio Solis

Playwright Octavio Solis has become an overnight sensation, and it took only 25 years. Long respected in theater and Latino arts circles, the writer is having breakthrough success with his play "Lydia."

Set in El Paso in the 1970s, "Lydia" portrays the saga of the Flores family, whose teenage daughter, Ceci, has been disabled in a horrific accident. Into this household of troubled souls and buried secrets enters an undocumented caretaker who shares a mysterious connection with Ceci.

With recent productions at Denver Center Theatre Company, Yale Repertory Theatre and Marin Theatre Company, the drama opens Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum, directed by Juliette Carrillo. "Lydia" has also been submitted for consideration for the Pulitzer Prize and is a finalist for the 2009 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award.

"Lydia" is a breakthrough and a departure for Solis, known for poetic, lyrical language in plays typically not tied to any one setting. The heightened language is still present in "Lydia" but so too is realism.

"It's my first real true family play inside a house," the writer says during a recent visit from his Bay Area home. "This is one where everything is happening inside four walls and within a compressed period of time, often real time. I've written the kind of play that I said I would never write.

"This is probably my most personal work," adds the soft-spoken playwright. "I felt compelled to write about a family in the realistic language that I grew up with."

"Octavio Solis strikes a beautiful balance in writing from his head and his heart," says Bill Rauch, Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director, who has commissioned Solis to write an adaptation of Cervantes' "Don Quixote." "His work is smart and passionate."

That combination of the emotional and the intellectual, the intimate and the dramatic, is what some feel gives "Lydia" its power. "It's a domestic drama, but the language and the theatrical idiom are anything but domestic -- the way the combination of Spanish and English in the play is both comforting and jarring; the shifts in tone and mode are exhilarating, and the mysteries of the story stay with you long after you've read or seen it," says James Bundy, dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre. "It's one of the most important plays of this decade."

The writing bug

Considering the stylistic divide between Solis' earlier works and the giants of American realism, it's easy to understand why the playwright might be puzzled by some of the response to "Lydia." And yet, writing intimately about a family's domestic life as well as the darker side of the American dream, Solis does share a thematic kinship with great U.S. dramatists of generations past.

Opining about the play's Colorado premiere, Denver Post theater critic John Moore described "Lydia" as "very much the Latino cousin of 'Death of a Salesman.' " And actor David DeSantos, who has performed in Solis' "La Posada Mágica" at South Coast Repertory, seconds the analogy.

"I can only compare Octavio Solis to a modern-day Arthur Miller," says DeSantos, currently acting at OSF. "His unflinching take on the human condition, as Miller embraced, is one of Octavio's strongest assets." In "Lydia," says DeSantos, Solis "found a story so dark and tragic. It is desperate and painful but layered with so much love."

From an actor's point of view, another similarity is the psychological richness. "Octavio gives actors a road map to a truth that is terrifying and exhilarating in the same breath," DeSantos says. "In the same way that you open up Odets, Miller or Williams and find a treasure chest of layered honesty, when you open an Octavio Solis play, we actors have a raw, visceral experience."

Yet even among those who have worked with Solis for years, there is disagreement over whether "Lydia" is a new type of play for the writer. To Carrillo, who also directed the Denver and Yale outings of the play, "Lydia" is less of a departure than a continuation.

"It certainly brings in many of the themes he's been working with -- broken relationships, violence, secrets, passionate love, death," says Carrillo, who first worked with Solis in the late '90s, when she was running SCR's Hispanic Playwrights Project. "But what is profoundly special about this play is how close to the bone he is cutting. It comes from a very deep, personal well."

That personal well is, in many respects, where "Lydia" is set; Solis grew up less than a mile from the Rio Grande, near El Paso. "So the border has always been a presence in my life and my psyche," he explains. "It looms large in most of my works that I set in Texas.

"There will always be that dichotomy between the first world and the Third World, right there in our backyard. For it to be poignantly expressed as a body of water, a river, where I lived, just makes it more mysterious to me."

Solis, 50, was born in El Paso to Mexican-born parents. He attended college in San Antonio and received an MFA in acting at the Dallas Theatre Centre, when Trinity University had its graduate program off site there. Fresh out of school, he was cast in a production of Eric Overmyer's "Native Speech" in Dallas. It proved a turning point. "Instead of thinking I wanted to act in plays like this," Solis says, "I started to think I wanted to write plays like this."

Solis produced some experimental writing at a bar where he was then bartending -- when he wasn't teaching high school. That situation lasted until the late 1980s: "My wife made me quit those jobs and said, 'Look, we'll live on my income.' She's an attorney."

In 1988-89, Solis was accepted into a workshop with playwright Maria Irene Fornes as well as South Coast Repertory's Hispanic Playwrights Project, then run by playwright Jose Cruz Gonzalez.

Solis thus became part of a budding movement that would change American regional theater. The late 1980s saw the blossoming of multiculturalism: a proliferation of culturally and ethnically specific workshops, playwriting labs and other development initiatives, supported by government and private sources.

"I'm lucky in the sense that I was a product of that," Solis says. "I think the artistic directors who embraced it all believed in it, and they had tremendous funding for it. But when the money dried up, it became very hard for the theaters to continue."

A planned trilogy

Sustained by personal and institutional sources, Solis has finally made it to the A-list of regional theater. His current commissions include Denver Center Theatre, SCR, Yale Rep, OSF and California Shakespeare Festival.

"Don Quixote" will mark Solis' third play at OSF and the first since Rauch was appointed artistic director in 2006. "As a language-based theater, we embrace writers who use language in extraordinary, fresh and beautiful ways," says Rauch, formerly of L.A.'s Cornerstone Theater.

Yale Rep will get the sequel to "Lydia," Part 2 of a projected trilogy, currently titled "Yolanda." The play takes up the story of Alvaro, one of the minor characters in "Lydia," 30 years later. Says Dean Bundy: "He's a good writer for the Rep because he has a distinctive voice and an adventurous aesthetic." And the third play of the trilogy might go to Denver.

Yet Solis is not immune to the recession. His "La Posada Mágica," which has been staged as a holiday season event at SCR for the past 15 years, has been canceled for the first time.

Still, Solis' star is rising fast. "In these hard times, I have to admit I'm doing well," he says. "I've always had a backup of five commissions. And most theaters have said, 'Write what you want to write,' which gives me the artistic freedom to explore. I have to count my blessings."

By Jan Breslauer

Suspect charged with murder in slaying of gay teen in Puerto Rico

San Juan, Puerto Rico (CNN) -- The suspect in the brutal slaying of a gay teenager in Puerto Rico was charged Wednesday with first-degree murder and four other counts, the prosecutor in the case told CNN.

Juan A. Martínez Matos was arrested late Monday in connection with the slaying of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, whose decapitated, dismembered and partially burned body was found Friday afternoon on a road in central Puerto Rico.

In addition to murder, Martínez Matos was charged with three weapons violations and one count of hiding evidence, prosecutor Yaritza Carrasquillo said.

Prosecutors are weighing whether to recommend that Martinez Matos be charged under federal hate crimes law, Carrasquillo said. That decision was not expected to come Wednesday.

The U.S. gay community is asking authorities to investigate whether the slaying was a hate crime, said Pedro Julio Serrano of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

"The brutality of the slaying and the fact that he was openly gay leads us to believe it was very possibly a hate crime," Serrano said Tuesday.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, which means federal agencies have jurisdiction.

The U.S. Attorney's Office, in consultation with local officials and other agencies, would determine whether the slaying will be prosecuted as a hate crime.

"It's at a very preliminary stage," Lymarie Llovet, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in San Juan, Puerto Rico's capital, said Tuesday. "There's the potential for a federal investigation."

Martinez Matos, 26, was arrested late Monday at his home in the Mogote de Cayey neighborhood, said Wilson Porrata Mariani, another spokesman for the Guayama police district.

Police impounded two cars and also are investigating a home in another neighborhood, Huertas del Barrio Beatriz de Cidra.

Lopez Mercado's body was found on Puerto Rico Road 184 in another part of town, Barrio Guavate de Cayey, police said.

Authorities are investigating whether the killing involved sex, Hector Agosto Rodriguez, police commander in the town of Guayama, told CNN affiliate WLII TV.

In footage aired on Telemundo-Puerto Rico, Martinez Matos was asked by a reporter if he was gay, to which he replied no, and added, "(Lopez Mercado) tried to kill me."

According to Telemundo and other local reports, Martinez Matos confessed to authorities that he picked Lopez Mercado up from the street, thinking that he was a woman.

When he realized that Lopez Mercado was a man, Martinez Matos said he regressed to an incident when he was sexually assaulted during a prison term, Telemundo and local reports said.

That's when a conflict started between the two, authorities said, leading to the teen's death.

The slaying has reverberated through the gay and lesbian community in the United States, where supporters started a Facebook page called "Justice for Jorge Steven Lopez -- End Hate Crimes." The group demands an investigation by Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno and prosecution of the case under the federal hate crime law.

The Federal Hate Crimes Law was enacted in 1969 to guard the rights of any U.S. citizen who is targeted because of race, color, religion or national origin, or because of an attempt to engage in one of six protected activities, such as voting, going to school or attending a public venue.

President Obama signed into law last month the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which extends federal protection to illegal acts motivated by a person's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

If Martinez Matos is charged under the hate crimes provision, it is believed it would be the first such case under the latest addition to the law.

Journalist Nuria Sebazco contributed to this report.

Gay Puerto Rican Teen Decapitated, Dismembered, and Burned

From Towerload

Over the weekend the brutalized body of gay teen Jorge Steven López Mercado was found by the side of a road in Puerto Rico. The police investigator suggested that he deserved what he got because of the "type of lifestyle" he was leading.

Mercado According to an iReport by Chrisopher Pagan: "On November 14 the body of a gay 19 year old was found a few miles away from the town in which he was residing in called Caguas. He was a very well known person in the gay community of Puerto Rico, and very loved. He was found on the site of an isolated road in the city of Cayey, he was partially burned, decapitated, and dismembered, both arms, both legs, and the torso. This has caused a huge reaction from the gay community here, but its a difficult situation. Never in the history of Puerto Rico has a murder been classified as a hate crime. Even though we have to follow federal mandates and laws, many of the laws in which are passed in the USA such as Obama’s new bill, do not always directly get practiced in Puerto Rico. The police agent that is handling this case said on a public televised statement that 'people who lead this type of lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen'. As If the boy murdered Jorge Steven López was asking to get killed..."

Jorge Here's a report on the murder (in Spanish) from PrimeraHora.com. Said activist Pedro Julio Serrano: "It is inconceivable that the investigating officer suggests that the victim deserved his fate, like a woman deserves rape for wearing a short skirt. We demand condemnation of this investigator and demand that Superintendente Figueroa Sancha replace him with someone capable of investigating this case without prejudice." (my translation, please suggest a better one if you can).

Latinos and Education: Explaining the Attainment Gap

Latinos and Education: Explaining the Attainment Gap

by Mark Hugo Lopez, Associate Director, Pew Hispanic Center
Report Materials


Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number-48%-say that they themselves plan to get a college degree, according to a new national survey of 2,012 Latinos ages 16 and older by the Pew Hispanic Center conducted from Aug. 5 to Sept. 16, 2009.

The biggest reason for the gap between the high value Latinos place on education and their more modest aspirations to finish college appears to come from financial pressure to support a family, the survey finds.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) of all 16- to 25-year-old survey respondents who cut their education short during or right after high school say they did so because they had to support their family. Other reasons include poor English skills (cited by about half of respondents who cut short their education), a dislike of school and a feeling that they don't need more education for the careers they want (each cited by about four-in-ten respondents who cut their education short).

Latino schooling in the U.S. has long been characterized by high dropout rates and low college completion rates. Both problems have moderated over time, but a persistent educational attainment gap remains between Hispanics and whites.

When asked why Latinos on average do not do as well as other students in school, more respondents in the Pew Hispanic Center survey blame poor parenting and poor English skills than blame poor teachers. The explanation that Latino students don't work as hard as other students is cited by the fewest survey respondents; fewer than four-in-ten (38%) see that as a major reason for the achievement gap.

This report was prepared for the Latino Children, Families, and Schooling National Conference sponsored jointly by the Education Writers Association, the Pew Hispanic Center and the National Panel on Latino Children and Schooling. The conference was held on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2009 at the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C.

New Jersey State Police Seem to be Contradicting CNN Host Lou Dobbs' Account of a Gunfire Incident, ¡Qué lástima!

New Jersey state police seem to be contradicting CNN Host Lou Dobbs' account of a gunfire incident near his Sussex County, New Jersey, house.

On Monday on his radio show, Dobbs stated that "my wife has now been and I have been shot at." The alleged incident, which Dobbs had reported to the New Jersey State Police, took place three weeks prior to the October 26 broadcast of the Lou Dobbs Show, and Dobbs told his listeners that it had "followed weeks and weeks of threatening phone calls." Dobbs' discussion of the incident during his radio show also included mention of both longtime critic and FOX host Geraldo Rivera and the immigrant advocacy organizations calling for his removal from CNN including the National Council of La Raza, America's Voice and other "ethnocentric interest groups."

Without specifying who he suspects of making the alleged threats, he also said on his radio show that "They've threatened my wife, they've now fired a shot at my house while my wife was standing next to the car." Concluding with a call for "truth, justice and the American way," Dobbs cautioned "if anybody thinks that we're not engaged in the battle for the soul of this country right now, you're sorely mistaken." And during an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Thursday, Dobbs spoke again about the gunfire incident, linking it to "threatening phone calls tied to the positions I've taken on illegal immigration."

Interviews with the New Jersey State Police yielded a rather different assessment of the events described by Dobbs. In a phone interview conducted yesterday, Sgt. Stephen Jones, a NJ State Police spokesperson, chuckled out loud after he heard about Dobbs' account of the gunfire incident. Jones commented that he "wouldn't classify it [the gunfire incident] as very unusual." He also confirmed that there are hunters in the area, and stated that, "at this time of year hunter [shooting] complaints go up."

He observed that in the ongoing police investigation sparked by Dobbs' complaint, "nothing has been determined [regarding] what the intended target for this bullet was." Nor did Jones confirm whether the shots near Dobbs' house appeared to be an accident or intentional.

Another New Jersey State Police spokesperson, Sgt. Julian Castellanos, noted that "it's a wide open area and there are hunters in the area." Castellanos explained that the bullet had hit the house in vicinity of the attic; it "hit the vinyl siding and fell to the ground" without penetrating the vinyl, he said.

While Lou Dobbs' wife, Debi Lee Segura, was standing outside the house at the time of the gunfire, the bullet did not come close to her; it "struck at the apex of the house, near the roof," and thus considerably higher than a standing person, Jones observed.

Jones says he had not seen any mention of death threats in the reports about this incident. As Dobbs stated on his October 26 radio show, the CNN host had "decided not to report" "threatening phone calls" he says he has received.

The New Jersey police made no mention of the immigration reform groups Dobbs discussed in connection with the incident.

When asked to comment for this story, Dobbs disputed the New Jersey State Police's account, saying in an email that "there was no hunting season underway three weeks ago." However, an official at the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife Bureau of Law Enforcement confirmed in a phone interview that state hunting seasons were underway at the time of the gunfire incident three weeks ago.

Asked what he thought of Dobbs' version of the gunfire incident, Sgt. Jones stated, "I'm really going to leave Lou Dobbs' assessment to himself."

Bullet hits Lou Dobbs' NJ Home with Wife Nearby

Police in New Jersey are trying to determine who fired a bullet that struck CNN commentator Lou Dobbs' home as his wife stood nearby. State police Sgt. Stephen Jones says Dobbs' wife and driver were outside the home Oct. 5 when they heard the gunshot. Jones says the bullet didn't penetrate the siding and fell to the ground outside.

Dobbs mentioned the bullet earlier this week on CNN and his radio show.

Dobbs says he had been receiving threatening phone calls for weeks. On his radio show, he connected the gunshot to his advocacy for a crackdown on illegal immigration and to his opponents' rhetoric.

The home is on a farm in Wantage, about 50 miles northwest of New York City.

It is small-game hunting season, but no hunters were seen in the area.