by TChris

Update: The NY Times explores the Discovery Institute's impact on the Intelligent Design debate:

Pushing a "teach-the-controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.

*****

Original post:

Pandering once again to religious extremists (perhaps to make up for his flip-flopping position on stem cell research), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist echoed the president today by arguing that "intelligent design" should be taught in public schools. Frist thinks students need to be exposed to "different ideas." Of course, some ideas (like "people are born with a particular sexual orientation") haven't made the list of ideas to which Frist thinks students should be exposed.

Great post by Nathan Newman on the border as the new color line. Here's a snippet:

Similarly, a politics of national "citizenship" and exclusion of immigrants may juice electoral coalitions in the short term -- although I'm not even convinced of that -- but in the long run such politics of nationalist politics does nothing to address multinational corporations moving jobs around the globe like a chessboard, pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom. And such nationalist rhetoric just feeds a politics that will likely block the creation of international institutions that can restrain corporate power.

by TChris

Parents -- not public schools, and certainly not judges -- should decide what, if any, religious beliefs should guide their children. Religious extremists may be disappointed with the Indiana Court of Appeals, but it made the right call in reversing a divorce court decree that ordered a custodial parent -- a practicing Wiccan -- to shelter his son from "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals." The boy's mother, also a Wiccan, joined the father in urging the appellate court to reverse this judicial interference with their choice of religion.

by TChris

A confidential Army report concludes (or so we’re told) that California’s National Guard “hadn't collected information on American citizens and hadn't designed a little-known intelligence unit to do so,” despite concerns that TalkLeft reported here. Is the report’s conclusion based on an unbiased and thorough probe of the available evidence? We don’t know, because the Army won’t tell us. We don’t even know what conclusions were drawn, because the precise findings of the investigation, like the rest of the report, have been shielded from public view.

Congressional eyebrows have risen in response to the Army’s invitation to “take our word for it”:

“Frankly, as someone who did not start out suspicious, getting the runaround doesn't make you feel any better about it,” said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose. “If the Army wants to be believed, they need to be more open. If there's nothing to hide, why are they hiding?”

"Trust us" isn't a credible response, particularly from this administration. Rep. Lofgren says she'll ask the Army to produce the report. The Army needs to hear that request echoed a thousand times.

How do the ticket agents keep a straight face when stopping parents from boarding a plane with an 11-month old because the baby's name matches one on the no-fly list? If we ever needed more reasons that these lists are feel-good measures that don't make us any safer, this article supplies it.

The TSA supposedly instructs ticket agents not to deny boarding to children. It happens anyway.

The TSA has a "passenger ombudsman" who will investigate individual claims from passengers who say they are mistakenly on the lists. TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark said 89 children have submitted their names to the ombudsman. Of those, 14 are under the age of 2.

Mark Green writes an excellent piece at Huffington Post on the danger of racial profiling.

....every time civil liberties have been suspended, the result has been a humiliation not only for the targeted community but also ultimately for the United States. Besides the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War Two, for which the government issued an apology and reparations, Bush’s deferral of constitutional procedure for Guantanamo detainees drew a Supreme Court rebuke. Indeed, they make the further suspension of the rights of Middle Eastern-looking folk on New York’s subways that much more gruesome. You’re stopped at Columbus Circle on your way home from work, and you may wake up in Cuba without your family ever getting a phone call.

ACLU interns this summer have been counting the proliferation of cameras taking photos - many by businesses who do so with the approval of law enforcment.

At last count in 1998, the New York Civil Liberties Union found 2,397 cameras used by a wide variety of private businesses and government agencies throughout Manhattan. This time, after canvassing less than a quarter of the borough, the interns so far have spotted more than 4,000. The preliminary total "only provides a glimpse of the magnitude of the problem," said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman. "Nobody has a clue how many there really are."

But aside from sheer numbers, the NYCLU says it's concerned about the increasing use of newer, more powerful digital cameras that - unlike boxy older models - can be controlled remotely and store more images.

by TChris

Harry Knox, director of the religion and faith program at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, on tomorrow's broadcast of Justice Sunday II, starring Tom DeLay and James Dobson:

"There is always a great sadness whenever faith leaders call for a theocracy," Knox said during a telephone interview. "They want to impose their particular brand of religion on the country. It is so limiting that it is very disappointing to all of us, and dangerous because what they are calling for is a limitation on the right of GLBT people and the rights of women to control their own bodies and approaches to international relationships tending toward war and not peace."

Knox's op-ed "Injustice Sunday" is here.

by TChris

Tom Sneddon, whose vendetta against Michael Jackson led to a questionable prosecution and a well deserved acquittal, has been sued by a criminal defense lawyer who contends that Sneddon and other Santa Barbara prosecutors violated his civil rights.

[Gary] Dunlap maintains that prosecutors went to extraordinary and unconstitutional lengths to gather evidence against him.

"An injustice was done and the district attorney's office refuses to acknowledge, investigate, or refer it for investigation because their employees were involved in committing it," Dunlap said.

A jury found Dunlap not guilty of six felonies, including suborning perjury and intimidating a witness. Lawsuits stemming from failed prosecutions often get booted out of court before trial, but judicial criticism of Sneddon's office provides strong support for Dunlap's belief that his rights were violated by the government's outrageous behavior.

David Neiwert exposes the extremism of the Minute Men with a rally photo in which one of the attendees is holding a Nazi flag.

At a recent anti-immigrant rally in Laguna Beach, the connection was made explicit. The rally was held July 30. It apparently was a follow-up of sorts to a similar rally held in the same locale on July 16, in which a local anti-immigration activist decided to protest a local arts festival's financial support for a day labor center for undocument workers. This rally drew the participation of the Save Our State campaign (an ostensibly mainstream anti-immigration organization) and the Minutemen's Jim Gilchrist. It also drew a contingent of neo-Nazis.

....What's going on, of course, is that the Minutemen provide an ideal opportunity for white racists to "mainstream" their agenda, using the relatively benign "average citizens" that Lou Dobbs exclusively observes in their ranks as just so much cover.

posted by Last Night in Little Rock

The New York Civil Liberties Union sued the City of New York on Thursday for random suspicionless searches of backpacks, bags and briefcases in the subway as reported here.

As a Fourth Amendment buff I'll be watching closely. NYC lost cases last year over its searching protestors around the Republican National Convention.

Crackberries beware. If your phone is being wiretapped by the feds, or at the state level in California, Arizona and Illinois, to name a few places, your text messages are being read as well.

Chicago Police will start intercepting text messages during their investigations now that Gov. Blagojevich has signed a bill expanding state-authorized wiretaps beyond "oral communication."

Lt. John Rowton of the Chicago Police Narcotics and Gang Investigation Section said the department will dismantle computer software that blocks text messages that are retrieved during state-authorized wiretaps of phones. The feds already have the capability to intercept text messages, but Illinois law had lagged behind other states such as California and Arizona, Rowton said.

"This is a great tool," Rowton said of the new law. "We have done wiretaps where you get a text message at a crucial time and are in the dark. You don't know what you are missing."

This is just another step down the road of intruding on our private conversations in the name of fighting crime. With a wiretap, the listening agents are required to minimize (stop listening) to the call once they determine it is not pertinent to the matter they are investigating. How do they do that with a text message?