Do not condemn the judgement of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong.

—Dandemis

I only have time to write this one thing: This goes to show that at least 286 Congressmen do not understand the fundamental principles that motivated the First Amendment and the structure of Constitution itself, or if they do understand the principles, they abandon them to pander to the extremists.

This is beyond stupid.

This is beyond partisan politics.

This is attacking the foundation of our freedoms.

I mean, this concept should be elementary. This should be American Citizenship 101...You can't burn the flag of the United States by burning a representation of it any more than you can burn the Declaration of Independence by burning a copy of it.

You can, however, incinerate the concept of freedom of speech in this country by making a constitutional amendment banning a form of expression for the worst possible reason: It upsets people. No other reason. No one's reputation stands to be defamed, no money lost. No child's delicate mind is going to be threatened from the sight. No panics from "fire" falsely cried in a crowded theater (indeed, nowadays the major challenge is finding a theater that's crowded.) There's no cover here. It's naked censorship, a throttling of free expression by the very governmental body that's sworn to protect it.

I got a call from the elementary school administrative assistant this morning.

"Mrs. Jaworski?" I could hear her tapping a pencil against the desk.

"Uh yes, and it's Ms., please."

"Your son, 8, has been suspended for the day. Come here and pick him up."

She didn't give me time to answer, to ask questions, her voice disappeared as if someone cut the line. I stood in the kitchen, my bare feet aching from yesterday's marathon, and I took a deep breath. My son can be a nut at times, but he's never done the kinds of things that troubled kids do. He doesn't talk back, he doesn't pick fights, and he's never destroyed property. I couldn't picture him doing anything scholastically evil. Maybe he stripped and ran around the school naked, I thought. I grabbed my keys and headed out the door.

The principal met me in her office. She closed the door tightly behind me and invited me to sit in a stuffed orange vinyl chair.

"Mrs. Jaworski, 8 has been suspended from school for one day." She wore an arctic blue power jacket over black slacks, and I self-consciously tried to pull my hooded sweatshirt further over my pink pajamas.

"It's Ms., please. And sorry for my attire, but I ran a marathon yesterday and I'm too sore to change this morning." I tried to infect her with my smile, but she wore a tight-lipped expression as frosty as her jacket. "So, anyway. What did he do?" I picked at the hem of my sweatshirt, looked just to the right of her face. I couldn't meet her eyes. I felt nervous. I felt underdressed. I wondered where 8 was.

So she told me what he did. And as she told me, I started to laugh. I didn't laugh a little, either, but I belly-laughed and grabbed my stomach. My son stood with his class this morning, put small right hand over heart, faced the American flag, and recited his own personal pledge of allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.

"Mrs. Jaworski. This isn't humorous. The Pledge is an extremely important and patriotic moment each morning in the classroom. I am ashamed of your son's behavior, and I hope you are, too."

Is George Bush likely to (a) save himself some grief and pick an easily confirmable conservative candidate or (b) pick the nastiest, most divisive, most polarizing candidate possible because he's hellbent on showing Democrats who's boss?

Conservative groups held a briefing last week at the National Press Club and promised to spend more than $20 million promoting whomever President Bush nominates... The liberal group People for the American Way countered with the threat of its 45-computer war room on M Street and a coalition of 70 other groups to fight back.

Caught in the middle was the White House, which had its own war plan but would not say so publicly for fear of looking ghoulish.

Republicans close to the preparations say that the White House has assembled research on some 20 Supreme Court candidates, with more intensive research on a handful of the most mentioned, all federal appellate judges and all conservative: J. Michael Luttig and J. Harvie Wilkinson III of Virginia, Michael W. McConnell of Colorado, John G. Roberts Jr. of the District of Columbia, Samuel A. Alito Jr. of New Jersey and Emilio M. Garza of Texas. The White House also plans mock hearings in which the nominee will field aggressive questions from a "murder board," or a phalanx of lawyers and administration officials playing senators on the Judiciary Committee. Such hearings were conducted for Mr. Thomas and have even been conducted for some of the current administration's appellate court nominees, like Mr. McConnell.

The White House plans to name a point person to manage the process and to create an additional war room on Capitol Hill, in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Specter or Senator John Cornyn, a member of the Judiciary Committee and a Texas Republican.

We were going to shoot in Beirut, but when the war broke out, the insurers would not let us go. So we decided to shoot Beirut in Havana, while we were there shooting the Havana scenes. We had to shoot Havana in the Dominican Republic, because as an American, Joan Allen couldn't travel to Cuba.

But we obviously couldn't take all the extras into Cuba, so we went to the Arab Union in Havana, and I think the entire Arab population of Cuba was in one scene.

"We are all concerned for the future of Egypt's reforms when peaceful supporters of democracy -- men and women -- are not free from violence. The day must come when the rule of law replaces emergency decrees, and when the independent judiciary replaces arbitrary justice," she added.

In Saudi Arabia, [Rice] criticized the kingdom for jailing three activists last month after they petitioned for the monarchy to move toward a constitutional model, saying appeals for reform were not a crime.

"In Saudi Arabia, brave citizens are demanding accountable government," she said in a major policy speech on Middle East democracy delivered in Cairo.

Was President Bush really trying to trigger a wave of America-loving popular reformist revolt in Iran? Or was he just trying to bolster flagging public confidence here at home in the clumsy democratization experiment currently underway in Iraq?

Well, whatever his intentions were (not trying to be too mysterious here), the President was rewarded with large increases in the turn-out among Iran's conservative base. As Brian Murphy of the AP reports,

The sharp barbs from President Bush were widely seen in Iran as damaging to pro-reform groups because the comments appeared to have boosted turnout among hard-liners in Friday's election -- with the result being that an ultraconservative now is in a two-way showdown for the presidency. "I say to Bush: `Thank you,'" quipped Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi. "He motivated people to vote in retaliation."

The first-round elections on Friday yielded two candidates: the mild reformer and former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and the hard-line conservative Mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The populist Ahmadinejad -- running on a platform of reducing poverty -- finished a surprising second.

there's a dogged determination to view each autocracy not as a monolith but as a mosaic of individuals with conflicting interests of their own, some of whom are identified as "friends" of the tobacco industry and others as "threats" or "opponents." In this respect, [the Big Tobacco lobby group]'s behavior in Cairo, for example, has been similar to that of some of the more relentless lobbying groups in Washington today.

The reality is that these people are on to something, though perhaps not a viable legal claim. Given that lactose intolerance actually seems to affect most of the world's population (a minority of white folks, but most non-whites and non-whites outnumber whites pretty badly) there actually is something a bit odd about the tone and omnipresence of pro-milk propaganda.

Gov. Jeb Bush said Friday that a prosecutor has agreed to investigate why Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, citing an alleged time gap between when her husband found her and when he called 911.

Bush said his request for the probe was not meant to suggest wrongdoing by Michael Schiavo. "It's a significant question that during this ordeal was never brought up," Bush told reporters.

DJW and I are currently in Fort Collins, Colorado reading AP exams...We eat breakfast, then grade for two hours. Then they provide us with a tasty snack. We grade for two hourse, then go to lunch. We grade for two hours, then receive another tasty snack. We grade for two hours, then go to dinner. After that, many of us drink beer. It is a simple life.

The best exams, the ones that lighten our day, are those of the students who just don't care. Some students get to take the exams for free. Many of these haven't the faintest about the topic at hand. A subset of these spend their 100 minute period writing about their lives. Writing for people you'll never meet seems to be liberating. I've read bitter tirades directed against the entire male gender. I've read multiple loss-of-virginity accounts. I've read about drug use, crushes, future plans, baseball, football, cats, parents and whatever else you can imagine seventeen year olds caring about. All of these get zero points, but I always read them with great care.

I will not insult your intelligence by saying why Whitehaven was named as it was, just outside the city limits of Memphis, Tennessee, in that turbulent era.

Such was the environment in which I was raised.

The year before I graduated high school, signs appeared around town telling of a KKK meeting in the grounds behind the Jaycee building, an intense irony if you know of the mission of the Jaycees.

This isn't to condemn the Jaycees, however. I want to give an indication of the tenor of the times, even in 1980, in a supposedly more enlightened age that supposedly followed in the South upon the heels of the racist 1960s.

"A cowboy was holding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses, YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formula. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a consultant for the Democratic party," says the cowboy.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don't know anything about my business.

Now give me back my dog."

By 1976, Republicans had given up and didn't even nominate a sacrificial lamb for Byrd to slaughter.

So if Republicans are 0 for 15 in senate elections since 1960, during which time a third of the gubernatorial elections went to the GOP, why is history about to change?

You can direct that question to Karl Rove.

Ghawar, a uniquely gigantic field which all by itself accounts for more than half of Saudi Arabia's output, has been in production since 1951. A massive water injection program was begun in the early '60s, and today more than 7 million barrels of seawater are required daily to keep Ghawar going. Even at that, though, the best evidence indicates that Ghawar's production may have already begun declining.

A white man sells guns, no problem. But a black rapper even says the word gun—congressional hearing.

—Chris Rock

Board member Dale McNamara, who voted against the proposal [to add a biblical account of creation exhibit], agreed. "I do not like the idea of scripture at the zoo," she said.

Zoo officials had argued that the zoo does not advocate religion and that displays like the [Hindu elephant God Ganesh] statue are meant to show the animal's image among cultures. The same exhibit includes the Republican Party's elephant symbol.

As expected, Howard Dean continues digging his own political grave ever deeper, taking the DNC with him. Oddly, the lefty blogosphere is revelling in it as if he is some kind of heroic revealer. ... Perhaps Dean should stick around after all. Dean's troubles are allowing our presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton, to look utterly reasonable, while sucking up all the attention and attack that Republicans would surely otherwise aim at her. At some point, perhaps Hillary will really cash in by calling on him to resign. Surely the political wind will eventually force her hand on this point. Until then, I'm sure she's happy to watch him twist in the breeze.

Howard Dean: It's Okay—He Isn't Actually Running for Anything

Obviously crime pays, otherwise there'd be no crime.

—G. Gordon Liddy

WASHINGTON -- Senator John F. Kerry, ending at least two years of refusal, has waived privacy restrictions and authorized the release of his full military and medical records.

The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service.

A desert town that used to hold about 25,000 people, Labado was attacked in December by the Sudanese military and the militia known as the janjaweed. For several days, the army burned huts, looted shops, killed men and raped women.

For months, Labado was completely deserted and appeared destined to become a ghost town. But then African Union forces, soldiers from across Africa who have been dispatched to stop the slaughter, set up a small security outpost of 50 troops here. Almost immediately, refugees began returning to Labado, followed by international aid groups.

Today there are perhaps 5,000 people living in the town again, building new thatch roofs over their scorched mud huts. The revival of Labado underscores how little it takes to make a huge difference on the ground. If Western governments help the African Union establish security, if we lean hard on both the government and the rebels to reach a peace agreement, then by the end of this year Darfur might see peace breaking out...

In 1999, Madeleine Albright traveled to Sierra Leone and met child amputees there, wrenching the hearts of American television viewers and making that crisis a priority in a way that eventually helped resolve it. Ms. Rice could do the same for Darfur if she would only bother to go.

Harvard [divested] earlier this year, and other major universities are being pressured to follow suit. Last month, ICG’s John Prendergast and Harvard’s Samantha Power sent a letter to 100 university presidents urging them to examine their portfolios for links to Sudan and divest. Student groups have sprouted up and have done good work (the group STAND — Students Taking Action Now: Darfur — has 80 chapters nationwide), but with school out for the summer, progressives should work to pick up the slack.

And a few weeks ago, the Illinois legislature took this one step further: it passed a law to make Illinois the first state to prohibit doing business with Sudan. Illinois’ five pension systems have about $1 billion invested in 32 companies that work in Sudan, which this bill will put an end to. It will also prohibit the state from investing in foreign government bonds of Sudan and investing in companies doing business in or with Sudan.

Illinois might be the first, but it is not alone: A related measure has passed the New Jersey House but is bottled up in the Senate, California’s legislature has a version bouncing around, and just last week, legislation was offered in Ohio’s state Senate proposing something similar.

How many Americans go to church regularly?

If you listen to the answers provided by major opinion research firms, the answer usually hovers around 40%...But in recent years this consensus has been challenged. It seems that it’s more accurate to say that 40% of Americans claim to attend church regularly.

In 1998, sociologist Stanley Presser at the University of Michigan—whose "research focuses on questionnaire design and testing, the accuracy of survey responses, and ethical issues stemming from the use of human subjects"—co-authored a study entitled: "Data Collection Mode and Social Desirability Bias in Self-Reported Religious Attendance," American Sociological Review, v. 63 (1998): 137-145 (with L. Stinson). Comparing diaries with actual attendance, they made the estimate that the actual percentage of Americans attending church from the mid-1960’s to the 90’s was about 26%.

The closely watched case was an appeal by the Bush administration in a case involving two seriously ill California women who use marijuana. At issue was whether the prosecution of pot users under the federal Controlled Substances Act was Constitutional.

Under the Constitution, Congress may pass laws regulating a state's economic activity so long as it involves "interstate commerce" that crosses state borders. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines.

"The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined by two other states' rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.

And last week, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and more than 500 other economists endorsed a report that said state and federal coffers could reap a net gain of $13.9 billion if marijuana were legalized.

The study by Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron estimated that law enforcement would save $7.7 billion, while taxes on the drug could amount to $6.2 billion. Miron's study was largely funded by the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C., lobbying group that supports liberalizing marijuana laws.

"My big worry is that if you tell a 14-year-old that if you smoke pot, you're going to become psychotic, and then he tries it and nothing happens, you lose credibility," said Earleywine, author of "Understanding Marijuana." "So when you tell him that using meth will make your brain smaller, which it absolutely will, he'll think, 'You lied to me about the marijuana, so I think I'm going to smoke this meth.'"

Biden did not agree with [Amnesty's] description, but said the facility was doing the United States more harm than good.

"The bottom line is I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence than if there were no Gitmo," Biden stated.

Doctors Without Borders issued an excellent report in March noting that it alone treated almost 500 rapes in a four-and-a-half-month period. Sudan finally reacted to the report a few days ago - by arresting an Englishman and a Dutchman working for Doctors Without Borders.

It's too early, of course, to say anything with much conviction about the future. But you can confidently say that Hillary has prepared herself with a discipline and intelligence that has prompted some of her critics, including me, to take another look. She has the money, she has the beginnings of a centrist appeal, she'll have a Democratic party desperate to win back the White House. Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton?

In the strange nepotism that has always bedevilled American politics weirder things have happened.

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

The Darfur mission is highlighting the AU's weaknesses in terms of capabilities, equipment and funding. The most obvious short-term solution is a hefty NATO backstop to an AU force, likely going beyond the logistics, transport and training they are providing today to include actual troops in country (over the long-term, we ought to be thinking about measures like those outlined here, including a long-term investment in developing capable military leadership for a standing AU force). This is what Derek, Madeleine Albright and others have been urging. A large amount of U.S. energy has been expended over the last decade in sustaining and expanding NATO in preparation for a post-Cold War role. With Europe chaotic but essential secure and peaceful, right now its hard to imagine a better use of the capabilities amassed than Darfur. It's also a chance for the many European countries that are not entangled in Iraq to share some of the burden of keeping the global peace, something they profess willingness to do. Building consensus for a robust NATO mission won't be easy, but the U.S. is obligated to try.

Rehnquist will step down in the next four weeks: I don't think this news will come as a surprise to anyone, but I just received a phone call from an extremely reliable source who tells me that it's a done deal.

At a press conference on Tuesday, President Bush, speaking about detainees who had complained of being abused, said they were "people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble - that means not tell the truth." Mr. Bush meant, of course, to say dissemble, which really means to deliberately mislead or conceal. Nevertheless, he knew what he was talking about. The president may have stumbled over the pronunciation, but he's proved time and again that he's a skillful practitioner of the art.

(hat tip: Christiana)

WASHINGTON, DC—During a recent press conference, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued another warning to North Korea, escalating the U.S. empty-threat campaign against the nation. "Make no mistake, if Kim Jong Il does not put a stop to the manufacturing of plutonium in his nation, we will come down on him quite hard," Rice said. "We demand compliance, and if we don't get it, then watch out." Rice went on to say that noncompliance would result in some action that "would be very bad indeed," adding that North Korea does not want to know what it will be in for.

I can understand that he may have had some moral reservations
about what was happening.

—Chuck Colson, on Deep
Throat