You can't pick your battles, only your side

Federal Judge Rules That Students Can’t Be Barred From Expressing Support for Gay People:

“Standing up to my school was really hard to do, but I’m so happy that I did because the First Amendment is a big deal to everyone,” said Heather Gillman, a junior at Ponce de Leon High School and the plaintiff in the case . . .
According to students, problems began in September of 2007 when a lesbian student tried to report to school officials that she was being harassed by other students because she is a lesbian.
Instead of addressing the harassment, students say the school responded with intimidation, censorship, and suspensions . . .
Ponce de Leon High School’s principal David Davis admitted under oath that he had banned students from wearing any clothing or symbols supporting equal rights for gay people. Davis also testified that he believed rainbows were “sexually suggestive” and would make students unable to study because they’d be picturing gay sex acts in their mind. The principal went on to admit that while censoring rainbows and gay pride messages he allowed students to wear other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag.

Another example of the unsought battles that turn ordinary people into heroes.
These 16-year-old students didn't want to be adversaries with their school administrators, but once the battle was thrust upon them, they didn't back down. As I have said before, "You don't get to pick your battles, you only get to pick your side":

Great line of the day

Alison quotes Police psychologist Mike Webster:

I am embarrassed to be associated with organizations that Taser sick old men in hospital beds and confused immigrants arriving to the country. Frankly I find it embarrassing.

Disneyland? Forget it.

This is very frightening

After being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was taken to the Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Va., where he ended up in a barracks with 75 other men, including asylum-seekers who told him they had been waiting a year. . .
Luis Paoli, a lawyer hired by the Coopers, said there was no limit on detention while waiting for an asylum interview. But even after officials agreed the asylum issue had been a mistake, Mr. Salerno was not released.
“Now an innocent European, who has never broken any laws, committed any crimes, or overstayed his visa, is being held in a county jail,” Ms. Cooper wrote in an e-mail message to The New York Times last Wednesday, prompting a reporter’s inquiries.
Less than 24 hours later, immigration officials intervened and arranged to deliver Mr. Salerno to Dulles, where last Friday he flew to Rome.

But I guess injustice is OK as long as it happens to brown people:

“We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians,” said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper’s father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. “They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn’t happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans.”

Will people like this ever elect Barak Obama as president, knowing that he would put a stop to this kind of BS?

Shorter

Shorter Harper:

Welcome to Hurbris North

Ancient history

Anything that happened to your parents is history. If it happened to your grandparents, its ancient history. And if it happened to your great-grandparents, its palaeolithic.
Glenn Greenwald writes about John McCain's Vietnam-based view of war:

John McCain is the ultimate embodiment of America's hoary, Vietnam era 'stabbed-in-the-back' myth. We should fight wars with massive bombing campaigns and unleashed force, unconstrained by excessive concerns over 'collateral damage' and unimpeded by domestic questioning. That's how we could have (and should have) 'won' in Vietnam and how we'll 'win' in Iraq.

What McCain hasn't realized is that, to anyone under 40, Vietnam is history. To anyone under 20, its ancient history. By trying to re-fight this war, he's just demonstrating just how old he really is.
America hated Vietnam because they were sucked into fighting it. They hate the Iraq War because they were tricked into fighting it. In both cases the public was right, not wrong -- both these wars were criminal acts, illegal in international law, and the American people were right to be disgusted with what their government was doing.
Politicians like McCain and Bush prattle on about how they just love democracy, but when the public makes a judgment they don't agree with, it never seems to cause them to question their own position. Instead they just write off the public as stupid or cowardly or both.

The mom song

YouTube - The Mom Song Sung to William Tell Overture: \

Come the revolution?

I knew there was something euuhhh! with Matt Stoller's Obama Magic post and Chris Bowers' Obama Transformation post and then dday's Obama Nation post but the best I could think of was "Haven't I heard this tune before, about mandates and faith-based politics?"
There's been some pushback here and, indirectly, here, but nobody's listening to Hillary-bloggers just now.
Avedon has a sinking feeling that just won't stop sinking about:

...all the people trying to find ways to feel good about the way the progressive movement is being made irrelevant

and points us to Ioz:

...[Bowers] makes the error of any good Bolshevik foot soldier: he presumes that the revolution is designed to benefit people like him.

News that wasn't

This week we've have non-news from Iraq -- the captured-Iranian-weapons-in-Iraq that weren't and the the captured-Leader-of-Al-Quaeda-In-Iraq who wasn't.
But here's something real, from Iraq Today:

Iraqi boy cleans up his home in southern Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, May 11, 2008. US troops fired at the house with a shoulder rocket launcher during an apparent search mission in the area. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

Cervantes writes:

This is yet another of those incidents that is only reported in a photo caption. One wonders how often U.S. forces do this sort of thing, that we never hear about.

Oh, and Happy Mothers Day to the family that used to live there.

Great line of the day

The Editors writes about whether torture memo writer John Yoo should be investigated at Berkley:

...A matter of little consequence to the average American: whether Prof. Yoo picks up his paycheck from Berkeley or Liberty University, or whatever Home for Temporarily Inconvenienced Wingnuts would happily scoop him up. But probably a matter of consequence to the administration, who - unless they want to rebrand their university as Liberty West Coast Satellite Campus - might not want their most recognizable faculty member having as his primary field of expertise “concocting legal sophistries to undermine the foundational values of western civilization.” Perhaps also of concern to alumni, who might feel less inclined to cut large checks to their alma mater if their Golden Bears sweatshirts started inviting questions about whether they played home games at Abu Ghraib (football fans can be very cruel). The student body might have an interest in this matter, as would, I imagine, faculty and staff at other UC campuses, and even the taxpayers of California, who might wonder if they wanted to be so openly associated with a person who scuttled around the dark corners of an administration whose human rights record invited comparisons to the Soviet Union - asserting, for example, that the President had the right to crush the testicles of children in order to compel or punish their parents. So it could matter to more people than you might think whether Prof. Yoo gets to practice his craft in decent society, or whether he has to join the other crackpots and undesirables in the shadow reality of wingnut academia, where Jesus rides a dinosaur and the Moonies pick up the tab and the vast liberal fascist secularist conspiracy doesn’t give a fuck what utter bullshit you get up to so long as you stay down in your fucking hole. The thing about the Universe is that it likes to align itself harmoniously. I suspect there’s a way of putting things in order here.

Emphasis mine.

The "harm reduction strategy" is actually reducing harm

Is the Conservative government's drug war ideology worth the death of one drug addict a year? I guess we'll find out soon.
The Gazetteer alerts us to the likely closure of Vancouver's safe injection site, called InSite, because the federal conservatives just can't allow such a progressive approach to dealing with drug addicts.
Nope, illegal drug users should have to shoot up by themselves in dirty alleys, like they've always done. Its the Conservative way.
The government's report on InSite says they have dealt with hundreds of overdoses and haven't lost anyone. The report also indicated that statistical analysis of overdose deaths demonstrated the safe injection site likely saved the life of one drug addict a year.
So that will be the cost of closing the site. But it's pretty clear that Health minister Tony Clements is gearing up to toe the party line against the "harm reduction" strategy represented by projects like InSite -- conservatives have been trashing the harm reduction approach for years with no evidence.
In his National Post interview Clement said:

....the government's new drug strategy is focused on stopping drug use, rather than just ensuring it occurs in a safer way.
"Our harm reduction is accomplished through enforcement, our harm reduction is accomplished through prevention, our harm reduction is accomplished through treatment," said Mr. Clement.
"The best way to reduce harm is to get addicts off drugs and to provide the supports for that addict."

Well, well, quel suprise -- that's exactly what the drug injection centre does.
In the government report, buried in the tables at the end, there's a fascinating little nugget:

Among a sample of 1031 service users recruited between Dec '03 and March '05,185 (18%) reported that they began a detoxification program during a follow-up period with a median duration of 344 days. More rapid entry into detoxification programs was associated with at least weekly use of the service and contact with the facilities addiction counsellors (Wood et al., 2006c). Further analysis using retrospective and prospective database linkages with local detoxification services and residential programs indicated that the opening of INSITE was associated with a 30% increase in detoxification service use and a subsequent increase in rates of initiation of long-term addiction treatment and a decreased injecting at INSITE (Wood et al., 2007)

In other words, the InSite drug injection service has resulted in a signficant increase in the number of drug users trying to get off drugs -- at least I think a 30 per cent increase in detox admissions is pretty darn significant. This is exactly what the safe injection site was supposed to do.
Isn't that what Harper and Clement want?

Harped!

Countdown has a regular feature called "Bushed" which gathers up all of the Bush adminstration scandals. Now Galloping Beaver's Boris pulls all the Harper outrages together for us -- I guess you could say we're Harped:

1. Attacks on the very institutions that support democracy and public safety in this country. Elections Canada, CNSC, etc.
2. Legal attempts to neuter the Official Opposition outside of parliamentary means.
3. Attempts the legally enshrining the consolidation of immigration control into the PMO.
4. Attempts empowering the PMO with regulation of cultural expression.
5. Directing populist, inflamatory, and fundamentally dishonest accusations of anti-Semitism at the Opposition.
6. A party with a membership linked to all manor of extreme religious and social conservative groups.
7. Public Safety Minister. Title, proto-Orwellian.
8. Public Safety Minister with past associations with far-right fascists.
9. Attempts at rigid information control.
10. Message control in extremis. Firing of any civil servant that could potential counter party propaganda.
11. Party styles itself as party of the armed forces.
12. Pursues policies that put the armed forces at centre stage.
13. Frames debate over foreign policy in nationalist, militarist terms.
14. etc.

Well, as least there is one thing that people are laughing about -- the $100 a month Harper daycare benefit.

Great post of the day

Lance Mannion talks about what he wants to see happen by 2016:

....Look at what FDR did and look at what he did wrong and look at all he wasn't able to do.
Now tell me.
What did you think President Hillary Clinton was going to be able to do?
What do you think President Barack Obama will manage to accomplish?
I'll tell you what. I won't be satisfied but I will be glad (and amazed) if at the end of eight years these things are done:
The war in Iraq is over.
We have a federal regulatory system that doesn't let tainted meat into the supermarkets and allow poisoned toys to wind up in the hands of our children.
Our Justice Department is a department of justice and no longer the legal legbreakers for the Republican Party.
We have at least one more even moderately liberal judge on the Supreme Court.
We have something close to affordable, universal health insurance.
We have made some strides towards reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and slowing global climate change.
. . . more than it matters which one is in the White House, Clinton or Obama, it matters who is in running the show in Congress. . . . We don't need a great sailor at the helm.
Just a captain who can follow his own nose and a crew willing to put their backs into it.
We're the crew.

The only thing Mannion missed that half the crew wants the boat to sink.

Great line of the day

I can agree with all of Egalia's statement:

She is the women's candidate. She represents us. She is opening doors for us. In the short span of her historic presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken a lifetime of venomous misogyny and she has taken it for all of us. If she has not reawakened the long dormant feminist movement, no one can. If she wins, we win.

Except for the very last sentence:

If she loses, we lose.

Nope, not even close. Hillary Clinton is an admirable woman and a fine candidate, and I am sad to see her going down to defeat. But women have lost before and will lose again and there is no larger defeat here. It's not "women" who are losing the nomination, its just Hillary.
Still, I know how Egalia feels -- I remember when Flora MacDonald lost ...

Her turn

Yeah, I figured it would be her turn next. Oh, well, maybe she can go on Oprah or Ellen or Jon Stewart or something and talk about her cookie recipies.
UPDATE: I am being derisive of the American media here, not of Michelle Obama, who is an extremely impressive person.
Hey, if Barak Obama gets elected president, maybe Michelle will run for Senate in 2016 and then for President herself in 2024!
DOUBLE UPDATE: And they're after his dog, too.

Stupid questions

Sask politician quits as premier's legislative secretary after sexist comment

Mike Chisholm of the Saskatchewan Party quit that position Thursday after referring to NDP member Deb Higgins as "dumb bitch" during debate in committee. ..."I'm certainly sorry that I said it. I'm sorry that I even thought it and I apologized to the member and I apologized to the house. I don't know why I said it."

Then he offers his own explanation:

"I guess I'm just human."

Nope, it's because you're an asshole.