“We have seen a shaken economy rise to its feet."

“U.S. hiring slowed significantly last month, the Labor Department reported today, dampening an economic outlook already clouded by lagging pre-holiday shopping by wary consumers.

"The November figure of 112,000 new jobs was well below forecasts for the month of 180,000 to 200,000 and not enough to keep up with population growth or to even approach the growth in October. In fact, the department revised downward the robust employment figures for October, cutting the job increase number to 303,000 from 337,000.

This is what the "liberal" media has come to. A disgraced and despicable televangelist is invited by the premier cable news network to co-host its daily debate show. Atrios asked yesterday how low we can go. The answer, I'm afraid, is not much lower than this.

Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.) sent a written apology this morning to GOP lawmakers whose transportation projects he stripped from the omnibus appropriations bill in retaliation for their endorsement of additional funding for Amtrak.

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The Hill reported last week that 21 House Republicans were punished for signing a letter in May that requested that Amtrak should be funded at $1.8 billion. In February, Istook warned his colleagues in a little-noticed letter that their transportation projects would be jeopardized if they pushed for funding hikes for Amtrak.

Several sources said that [Rep.]McHugh had to be physically retrained from Istook when he learned that his projects were struck from the bill.

Evidence gained by torture can be used by the U.S. military in deciding whether to imprison a foreigner indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an enemy combatant, the government concedes

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.

A rehabilitation center for underaged camel jockeys opened Thursday, providing medical care and education for 16 boys from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sudan, in the most recent effort by the Emirates to stamp out child abuse long associated with the popular sport.

Also, this story had the oddest headline I've seen all year: Center for underaged camel jockeys opens

The Save Darfur Weekend of Conscience begins on UN Human Rights Day, December 10. On that Friday, Saturday and Sunday, communities across the nation and around the world will be engaging in activities to raise public awareness about the horrific situation in Darfur.

Arab Janjaweed militia continued to rape women and girls in Sudan's Darfur region last month while authorities forcibly moved refugees.

With nearly 1,000 AU troops already on the ground, and the rest of the force expected in the next few weeks, violations of the cease-fire appear to be increasing. The attacks highlight what critics say are shortcomings of the AU's mission in Sudan: a too-limited mandate -- to investigate and report on cease-fire violations -- and a force too small to do it.

[M]ore than a million Darfurians, driven from their ancestral homelands by government-backed Arab militias, could lose their land if authorities invoke a little-known law that allows the government to take over land abandoned for one year, relief officials and human rights groups said.

That's what marriage is about and it is about nothing else. It has nothing to do with these hedonists, self-absorbed hedonists, if you will, that want to impose their particular sexuality on the rest of America. They don't need marriage because marriage was the protection of men and women, male and female, for the bringing forth of children. That's what it's about, nothing else, bottom line. And if America goes the other way we will be flying directly in the face of the clear word of the Bible.

"Of course, our guiding principle is to act always and forever to defend our nation's interests. France, like all its partners, has economic, strategic and political interests. We do not have a complex. Moreover, the others do not have any.

"But the hour of interdependent economies has arrived, what separates the external and internal is hardly an issue of direction.

"... the stability of French businesses is determined more and more by the external, by the dialogue and the negotiation with our European partners, those of the G-8 nations (including Canada and the U.S.).

"France is not great when it is arrogant. France is not strong if it is alone. I challenge you to ensure that our country, and, above all, its diplomacy, our diplomacy, expands its traditional culture of sovereignty to embrace a culture of influence and partnership.

"France has its own role to play, its own diplomatic actions to carry out, without ever erasing this role. But it also has, I think, more and more, a need for other nations and, to be stronger, it needs your efforts. And the first answer, I say it without avoidance, must be European. I know that assuming this evolving role is not written in the long and prestigious history of our ministry."

.... blogs can become an alternative source of news and commentary in countries where traditional media are under the thumb of the state. Blogs are more difficult to control than television or newspapers .... The Iranian blogosphere has exploded.

According to the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education’s Blog Census, Farsi is the fourth most widely used language among blogs worldwide. One service provider alone ("Persian Blog") hosts some 60,000 active blogs.

The weblogs allow young secular and religious Iranians to interact, partially taking the place of reformist newspapers that have been censored or shut down. Government efforts to impose filters on the Internet have been sporadic and only partially successful. Some reformist politicians have embraced blogs, including the president, who celebrated the number of Iranian bloggers at the World Summit on the Information Society, and Vice President Muhammad Ali Abtahi, who is a blogger himself.

Elite Iranian blogs ... have established links with the English-speaking blogosphere. When Sina Motallebi, a prominent Iranian blogger, was imprisoned for “undermining national security through ‘cultural activity,’” prominent Iranian bloggers were able to join forces with well-known English-language bloggers including Jeff Jarvis ("Buzz Machine"), Dan Gillmor ("Silicon Valley") and Patrick Belton ("OxBlog") to create an online coalition that attracted media coverage, leading to Motallebi’s release.

While a few anti-discrimination laws have survived challenges, a familiar bloc of five justices has unmistakably embarked on a program of restricting federal civil rights legislation. The renewed attack on Congress is the work of supposed "originalists" lauded for their "judicial restraint" (or, as President Bush puts it in citing Justices Scalia and Thomas as models for his own judicial appointments, not "legislating from the bench"). But the Court's states'-rights bloc rarely attempts to defend its interpretation by analyzing historical sources, such as the congressional debates, the statements of New Birth Framers, or the legislation they passed. This neglect contrasts sharply with the almost biblical reverence given to the records of the Philadelphia convention, the Federalist, and founding generation statutes like the Judiciary Act of 1789 in construing provisions of the 1787 Constitution. When it comes to the New Birth Amendments, the Court cites long-discredited decisions of its anti-equality predecessors rather than seeking anything approximating the "original understanding." As for "judicial restraint" and declining to "legislate from the bench," the Rehnquist Court has struck down federal statutes at a pace unprecedented in the Court's 200-year history.

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The claim of states'-rights jurisprudence to an originalist legitimacy can hope to succeed only through public ignorance: only those who have forgotten the Klan's court-abetted assault on Reconstruction can accept the Rehnquist Court's superficial version of history. The anti-discrimination movement must help restore the public's memory of Reconstruction and the New Birth Framers. Only education can challenge the historical basis for the judicial counter-revolution against the civil rights advances of the past 50 years. Distorting the history of Reconstruction and the New Birth Amendments was a deliberate and sustained project of racist historians and legal scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; it will take a deliberate and sustained effort to return accurate history to our schools and our public debate.

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We need to recover the accurate history of Reconstruction, to honor those who fought in the Civil War and sacrificed their lives afterwards in the struggle for civil rights. And we need to debunk the idea that contemporary "federalist" jurisprudence has a claim, or even a monopoly, on historical accuracy. One need not believe in a living constitution to oppose the Rehnquist Court's assault on federal civil rights legislation; the 14th Amendment as it was passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868 will do just fine.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the president is confident that his five-year plan to cut the deficit in half will succeed, even if Congress fulfills Bush's request and makes the recent rounds of tax cuts permanent.

"He is very serious about cutting the deficit," McClellan said. "As we move forward, we need to continue to show fiscal discipline."

Bush's budget proposal forecasts that the current annual deficit of $413 billion will be half as large by 2009. But real progress in shrinking the deficit would require the president to give up some of his major priorities and exercise a degree of spending restraint that he has rarely displayed during his first term, independent budget analysts say.

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Bush's forecasts do not account for expenses associated with military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could cost the government $70 billion next year.

Also ignored is a permanent reform to the alternative minimum tax, which Bush wants to change to prevent a middle-income tax increase. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said the reform would add an estimated $172 billion to the deficit through 2009.

In addition, Bush's budget forecast excludes some of the biggest items on his domestic agenda, including his proposal for manned missions to Mars and the moon as well as his call to privatize Social Security for younger workers. The latter proposal alone could cost the federal government as much as $2 trillion in the coming decade, to cover for contributions that would be funneled into private accounts instead of paying benefits to retirees, according to budget specialists.

The White House is considering larger Social Security personal investment accounts than the 2 percent plans often linked to President Bush's proposals to overhaul the New Deal era retirement system, according to advisers who have attended administration briefings.

[edit]

Participants in these closed-door policy-making briefings say that Vice President Dick Cheney's office has become a player in the meetings and that senior officials are considering plans that would allow investments of up to 4 percent of payroll taxes, one of the three options proposed by the president's Social Security reform commission in 2001.

"I don't think they are limiting themselves to the commission's proposal. I think there is a strong possibility that the White House is considering larger accounts," said Michael Tanner, director of Cato's Social Security privatization project and one of the advisers who has participated in the White House briefings.

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.
...
Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. [Rep. Henry A.] Waxman's staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula -- those used by at least five programs apiece.

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman's investigators:

• A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person."

• HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.

• Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

One curriculum, called "Me, My World, My Future," teaches that women who have an abortion "are more prone to suicide" and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.

"I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases," Waxman said. "I don't think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts."

When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teenagers are HIV-positive. The assertion regarding gay teenagers may be a misinterpretation of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that 59 percent of HIV-infected males ages 13 to 19 contracted the virus through homosexual relations.
...
President Bush has enthusiastically backed the movement, proposing to spend $270 million on abstinence projects in 2005. Congress reduced that to about $168 million, bringing total abstinence funding to nearly $900 million over five years. It does not appear that the abstinence-only curricula are being taught in the Washington area.
...
Alma Golden, deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that Waxman's report is a political document that does a "disservice to our children." Speaking as a pediatrician, Golden said, she knows "abstaining from sex is the most effective means of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, STDs and preventing pregnancy."
...
Some course materials cited in Waxman's report present as scientific fact notions about a man's need for "admiration" and "sexual fulfillment" compared with a woman's need for "financial support." One book in the "Choosing Best" series tells the story of a knight who married a village maiden instead of the princess because the princess offered so many tips on slaying the local dragon. "Moral of the story," notes the popular text: "Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess."

A federal judge today dismissed a Minnesota family's wrongful death lawsuit against former Rep. Bill Janklow (R-S.D.) clearing the way for the family to pursue an administrative claim against the government.

The family of Randy Scott — who was killed in 2003 when his motorcycle collided with Janklow's Cadillac — will instead file an administrative claim with the General Counsel of the House seeking monetary damages, the family's lawyer said today.

The family had originally tried to sue Janklow in his personal capacity. They were denied that option, however, after a U.S. attorney and two federal judges in Minnesota concluded that the Congressman was working in his official capacity as a federal employee at the time of the crash and was therefore covered under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

As a result, the federal government, and not Janklow, will ultimately be responsible for paying any monetary award to Scott's family.

"From 3pm until 8pm they left me there under the tree. Then I had to sit and they tied my legs to my body, my hands on the back and put a stick under my legs. They hung me upside down to the tree, on the stick under my knees and then they swung me back and forth. I was beaten with sticks and whips at my feet. They were maybe 15 Janjawid. They took all my clothes off and I was naked. They left me hanging upside down with another person under this tree until morning. They read the names of 97 Tora Bora from Andra Gro to me and they called me bad names. For three days this continued, they beat us every day and at night they hang me under the tree upside down. They did not give us food and only a little water. They rubbed pilipili (hot pepper) in our eyes and nose. They put a blanket around our head and tied it very tight. On the fourth day they told me and another local leader to dig a well for them. They would pour cold water over our hot bodies and refused us to give us water to drink, they made us work for them and sometimes they would fire gunshots at us."

• In the lead case over the indefinite detention of Guantanamo prisoners, the government's lawyer had some interesting answers for Judge Joyce Hens Green.

  Under detailed questioning by a federal judge, government lawyers asserted Wednesday the U.S. military can hold foreigners indefinitely as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, even if they aided terrorists unintentionally and never fought the United States.

  Could a "little old lady in Switzerland" who sent a check to an orphanage in Afghanistan be taken into custody if unbeknownst to her some of her donation was passed to al-Qaida terrorists? asked U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green.

  "She could," replied Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle. Green asked if a hypothetical resident of England who teaches English to the son of an al-Qaida leader could be detained. Boyle said he could because "Al-Qaida could be trying to learn English to stage attacks there...."

  Green asked if detainees are told how long they might be imprisoned. "When will this end?" she asked. "Can hostilities last as long as Muslim fundamentalists vow attacks on the United States?"

  Boyle replied that was "a question for the president," not judges.

• Meanwhile, the Supreme Court (whose June decision about Guantanamo detainees set the stage for the current litigation) was busy with a case that asks whether IRAs are exempt from seizure by creditors of bankrupt individuals, as are some other retirement assets.

  The stakes in the case are high. Last year, more than 1.6 million people filed for personal bankruptcy, compared with 875,000 a decade earlier. Experts say much of that is being driven by people 55 and older who lose their jobs and cannot pay off debts.

  Chalk one up for the Ownership Society; thanks, George.
• Finally, the Japanese government is reportedly thinking of a special birthday present for 3-year-old Princess Aiko, the only child of Crown Prince Naruhito: repealing the law that permits only male heirs to ascend the Crysanthemum Throne. If Naruhito has his ancestors' longevity, the issue won't arise for decades, but given his wife's age and depression, and the difficulty they had in conceiving Aiko, there is considerable worry that Naruhito will become Emperor and eventually die without a son. 80 percent of the Japanese public favors the change, according to polls. Hard as it is for me to believe this myself, I'm actually friends with Aiko's uncle, so I'm pulling for the kid to succeed (no pun intended).

• Free speech is for fag-haters only. A school that has permitted students to wear clothes with anti-gay messages suspended a gay student who wore a pro-gay T-shirt, and the ACLU has sued to defend the student's First Amendment rights. The principal said he punished the student because he thought the student's message might offend other students. Yesterday, a dozen fellow students were disciplined for wearing T-shirts supporting the suspended student; their T-shirts said, “If this shirt offends you, look the other way.”
• Free speech is definitely not for lesbians and their kids. Via Atrios. A seven-year-old's classmate asked him about his mother and father. The child said he had no father; he has two mothers. The classmate asked why, and the child said his mother was gay. The classmate asked what that meant, and the child said, “Gay is when a girl likes another girl.” The teacher sent the child to the principal's office; he was forced to come to a “behavioral clinic” at 6:45 the next day and write repeatedly, Bart Simpson-style, “I will never use the word ‘gay’ in school again.” The child brought home a “behavior contract” telling his mother that: “He explained to another child that you are gay and what being gay means.” The 7-year-old was required to fill out the contract, and he defined his misconduct as: “I sed bad wurds.” In a space for “What I should have done,” he wrote, “Cep my mouf shut.” So you can guess why this is in a post about litigation, right? The teacher sued the child's mother for defamation. Oddly enough, no word has come yet from: (a) conservatives who fulminate against frivolous lawsuits and cry out for “tort reform”; or (b) conservatives who stand up for free speech by widely publicizing (false) stories about a student's being punished for praying at school.
• Keep your loving, monogamous relationship out of my church. Proving that my studies of ecclasiastical courts were not completely anachronistic, the United Methodist Church is having yet another trial of a witch lesbian pastor. The First Amendment cuts clearly the other way here: if Methodists believe that God doesn't want them to have gay pastors, they have a Free Exercise right to act on that belief. I don't have to admire the UMC for it, though, and the notion of going through a “trial” about your relationship with the person you love sounds pretty horrific.

Watch this space for further episodes of Gays in the Courts.

BUSH: "I haven't seen his comments. I'm hesitant to talk about something that I haven't seen -- his quote. But I would tell you that, like I said in my opening statement, I appreciate the efforts of President Kwasniewski of Poland to lead a delegation into the country to help resolve the differences among the parties in a peaceful way. It's very important that violence not break out there, and it's important that the will of the people be heard.

"I'm aware what the Prime Minister of Canada said yesterday about foreign involvement, and he had a very strong statement to -- for countries to make sure that the process is fair and open, and that's what we're dedicated to.

"And I want to again thank the President of Poland, Kwasniewski, for taking the lead ... And hopefully, this issue will be solved quickly, and the will of the people will be known."

MARTIN: "... What I said yesterday was that the essence of democracy is that elections be free and open and transparent, and that they be elections in which people can have confidence. And if you can't have confidence in the elections, then obviously, that there's a major flaw in your -- in their democracy. I also said that I absolutely agree that elections within Ukraine have got to be free from outside influence, and that includes Russia."

President Paul Kagame confirmed that Rwandan troops will launch an operation in pursuit of Rwandan Hutu rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as UN troops spotted about 100 soldiers in the explosive region.

In a letter to the African Union (AU), seen late Wednesday by AFP, Kagame wrote that he hoped the operation would not last longer than two weeks and that it would only target the rebels.

"I trust that within a period not exceeding fourteen days from the start of the envisaged operation, a solution will be found that will allow for the speedy return of Rwandan troops to the confine of her borders," said the letter, dated November 25.

This paper offers a critical analysis of recent Supreme Court "federalism" jurisprudence, which purports to justify rollbacks of civil rights by appeal to the original intent of the Constitution. The authors demonstrate that the Court's "states' rights" agenda is inconsistent with the extensive federal power exercised in the pre-Civil- War era and would be unrecognizable to the Framers of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, who sought to harness that power to effectuate Lincoln's promise of a "new birth of freedom."

Two Virginia Tech football players raped freshman Christy Brzonkala in 1994. University administrators and other state officials failed to punish the athletes, and Brzonkala dropped out. Despairing of protection from the state, she took charge herself, suing her assailants under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). But six years later, when Brzonkala’s case reached the Supreme Court, the conservative majority struck down VAWA’s civil remedy, holding that Congress had no power to punish private violence motivated by the victim’s sex. In spite of Congress’s extensive investigation showing that state authorities often failed to protect women from sex-based attacks or to punish their attackers, the Court held by a 5-4 vote that the federal government could do nothing about it.

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Whether she knew it or not, Christy Brzonkala’s fate was linked to that of more than 100 blacks murdered in Colfax, Louisiana in 1873 for defending their right to vote. The Supreme Court threw out the ringleaders’ convictions in 1875, saying Congress could not criminalize private violence, even when the violence was motivated by the victims’ race, even when it was designed to prevent them from exercising their constitutional rights, and even when the states did nothing to punish the offenders. According to that Court, the 14th Amendment "adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another." One hundred twenty-five years later, the Rehnquist Court quoted that very sentence in throwing Christy Brzonkala out of court in a case called United States v. Morrison.

The sentence came from United States v. Cruikshank, a case that should be as infamous as Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson in the sordid history of nineteenth century Supreme Court decisions on racial questions. Yet it is not; while no modern Court would ever cite Dred Scott or Plessy approvingly, hardly anyone noticed when Chief Justice Rehnquist quoted Cruikshank’s immunization of the Colfax murderers.

City orders removal of giant condom

Nijmegen Council ordered the removal on Monday of a giant condom that had been placed over a city monument at the weekend. The condom is believed to have been placed over the upright pillar by someone wanting to draw attention to World Aids Day on Wednesday. A red ribbon — the international symbol for the campaign against AIDS — was attached to the condom. Despite admitting the culprit's actions were playful, the council decided against allowing the condom to remain because . . .

. . . it had been placed over the monument without the necessary permit.

Don't tell me about 9/11, baby: this graph starts at Feb. 1, 2002. It seems the dollar has lost more than 1/3 of its value against the euro since then, and it's plunging further at the moment. (If you want to make it sound even worse, you could also--accurately--say that the euro has gained more than 50% against the dollar in less than two years, which is the same thing as saying the dollar has droped by more than 1/3).

An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

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Allen said no state funds should be used to pay for materials that foster homosexuality. He said that would include nonfiction books that suggest homosexuality is acceptable and fiction novels with gay characters. While that would ban books like "Heather has Two Mommies," it could also include classic and popular novels with gay characters such as "The Color Purple," "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "Brideshead Revisted."

The bill also would ban materials that recognize or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama. Allen said that meant books with heterosexual couples committing those acts likely would be banned, too.

His bill also would prohibit a teacher from handing out materials or bringing in a classroom speaker who suggested homosexuality was OK, he said.

My thesis is that courts should take greater account of the Constitution's democratic nature when they make both constitutional and statutory decisions. That thesis encompasses well-known arguments for judicial modesty: the judge's comparative lack of expertise; the importance of assuring that "the people" themselves develop "the political experience and the moral education that come. . . from correcting their own errors;" an understanding of that doubt, caution, and prudence, that not being "too sure" of oneself, which Learned Hand described as "the spirit of liberty" itself. But my thesis goes beyond these traditional arguments. It finds in the Constitution's democratic objective not simply a restraint on judicial power or a counterweight to its protection of individual liberty but also a source of judicial power and an interpretive aid to making protection of that freedom more effective.

• I'm very uneasy about Roe v. Wade and the contraception cases that preceded it. As a matter of policy, I think laws against contraception are, as Justice Black's famous dissent put it, "uncommonly silly," but I'm not sure that judges ought to be striking them down. (I'm even more troubled by the current conservative drive to overturn a much broader category of democratically adopted laws concerning everything from civil rights to the environment). Obviously, if Justice Breyer shares this unease, it hasn't shown in his votes on the few (two?) abortion cases that the Court has reviewed during his tenure. It may be that, considerations of stare decisis aside, he views Roe and the contraceptive cases as defending women's right to full participation in society; thus, the "interpretive aid" he finds in promoting freedom and democratic self-governance might support Roe's holding, even if that wasn't the basis of the Roe opinion.
• I think the Warren and Burger Courts were more clearly justified in intervening to protect citizens' right to participate in the political process (e.g., one-person-one-vote and the desgregation cases), which I don't view as in much tension at all with a general view that courts usually ought to leave policy up to the democratic branches. That certainly seems to be at the heart of Breyer's thesis.

A state legislator is trying to cut the funding of South Carolina Educational Television’s budget after it aired a documentary on gays in the South. “I thought it was just social, leftist propaganda that they had no business airing,” said state Rep. John Graham Altman, R-Charleston. “They were actively promoting homosexuality as an OK thing to do.”

Tim Russert is a great journalist, but he made a mistake last weekend. He included Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton in a discussion on religion and public life.

Inviting these two bozos onto "Meet the Press" to discuss that issue is like inviting Britney Spears and Larry Flynt to discuss D. H. Lawrence. Naturally, they got into a demeaning food fight that would have lowered the intellectual discourse of your average nursery school.

This is why so many people are so misinformed about evangelical Christians. There is a world of difference between real-life people of faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are selected to represent them. Falwell and Pat Robertson are held up as spokesmen for evangelicals, which is ridiculous. Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored.

“One of the saddest cases of Gulf War Syndrome I saw involved an ordinary president called George Bush,” said the inquiry chairman. “So determined was he to avenge his father’s humiliation in the first Gulf War that he decided to invade Iraq all over again, despite the country being no threat to him.

“You only have to look at the illnesses and deaths that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqis since that day to realise how debilitating this syndrome can be.”

On Election Day in San Diego, more citizens went to the polls to vote for Donna Frye for mayor than for incumbent Dick Murphy. Nonetheless, when all the votes a judge ruled could be counted were counted, it was Murphy who declared victory this week. That is a travesty.

All the claims about mandates and values notwithstanding, the very fact that one-fifth of voters cited moral values means that four-fifths didn't. In fact, we heard much the same talk about the rise of conservative social values in the Reagan '80s, yet scholars who have studied attitudes in that period have found little evidence to suggest any reversal of the social liberalism that began in the '60s, particularly on issues involving family, women, morality, sexuality and overall tolerance. We must be careful not to confuse election results with cultural trends.

As survey after survey of contemporary social attitudes demonstrates, social conservatives no more represent the mainstream or the future than Prohibitionists did in the 1920s. If anything, it's the baby-boom sensibility spawned in the 1960s that has become mainstream in America today. As conservative columnist George Will lamented a few years back, politics "seems peripheral to, and largely impotent against, cultural forces and institutions permeated with what conservatives consider the sixties sensibility."

How little the "moral values" voter represents the future is evident in surveys of today's youth, who may be the most inclusive, tolerant and socially liberal generation in our nation's history. From the media we hear all about the controversies of the so-called culture war, such as the occasional school superintendent who shuts down all school clubs to keep gay and straight high school students from forming "gay-straight" clubs. But what we don't hear is that these clubs have quietly formed in about 2,800 schools nationwide. In fact, research on young people confirms that they have little patience for intolerance, that they have no problem accepting homosexuality, that most even support the right of gay people to marry.

Indeed, today's youth reject many of the social rigidities, prejudices and orthodoxies of old. As many as half of all teens say they've dated across racial or ethnic lines, including more than a third of white teens, and most of these are "serious" relationships. On race, homosexuality, premarital sex, gender roles, the environment and issues involving personal choice and freedom, younger Americans consistently fall on the liberal and more tolerant side of the spectrum.

If younger voters were the only ones with these attitudes, social conservatives might be able to lay claim to a "moral values" mandate for a very long time. But younger voters represent the mainstream much more than the initial exit polling would indicate. The illusion of a predominant "moral values" voting bloc has much to do with the fact that the most traditional and socially conservative Americans, pre-baby boomers, are living much longer lives and voting in very large numbers -- skewing exit polls and thus our image of the mainstream. Once younger voters begin to replace them, the socially conservative vote will return to the margins of American life.

There's a good reason why young people feel the way they do, and that's because their baby boomer parents overwhelmingly agree with them. So forget any talk of a generation gap between boomers and their children. On a wide range of social and cultural issues, they are united in their attitudes of tolerance and inclusiveness. The only generation gap that remains is the same one that began in the '60s, between pre-boomers and the rest of us. What we have today is a pre-baby boom cohort that's steadfastly conservative, with the vast majority of everyone younger leaning the opposite way. (bold mine)

"Cass wants a U.S. Supreme Court that will outlaw abortion and gay marriage. 'Do you want to take your children to a National League baseball game for instance and have homosexuals showing affection to one another? I don't want my kids to see that,' he said. "

People who are concerned about the influence of Christianity "have never really surrendered their life to God and submitted themselves to his commandments -- and if they did that they wouldn't have so much concern about some court saying again that it's wrong," he said.

Asked about the millions of Americans who are not Christian, or have a different interpretation of Christianity, Kennedy said with another laugh: "I couldn't care less. It's true."

A majority of Americans say President Bush's next choice for an opening on the Supreme Court should be willing to uphold the landmark court decision protecting abortion rights, an Associated Press poll found.

The poll found that 59 percent say Bush should choose a nominee who would uphold the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. About three in 10, 31 percent, said they want a nominee who would overturn the decision, according to the poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs.

"The justices hold office year after year," said Opal Bristow, an 84-year-old Democrat and retired teacher who lives near San Antonio. "Some of them are old codgers who need to get out of the way and let the younger folks with fresh ideas come in."

Weymouth: "It is said Iran will get a bomb within a year."

Sharon: "As a result of monitoring, it will take longer, but the Iranians are working and they may achieve it. This is a very dangerous development, not only for Israel . . . But the world is quiet."

Weymouth: "Reportedly, you gave Secretary of State [Colin] Powell secret information about Iran's nuclear program."

Sharon: "We had a very good meeting with Secretary Powell. It's a very friendly administration. Maybe we've never had such a friendly administration."

Weymouth: "How do you envision the upcoming Palestinian elections?"

Abbas: "The elections will take place for the presidency on Jan. 9."

Weymouth: "You're going to run unopposed for the presidency?"

Abbas: "Until now, I'm the nominee of the central committee. But there will be many independent candidates."

Weymouth: "There was widespread dismay that, after Oslo, the Palestinian Authority failed to fight Hamas."

Abbas: "We fought Hamas in 1996. Now things have changed and we have to deal with them delicately."

There are competing theories about the defeat of Amendment 2, the measure that would have taken "colored children" and segregated schools out of Alabama's constitution.

One says latent, persistent racism was to blame; another says voters are suspicious of all constitutional amendments; and a third says it was not about race but about taxes.

The amendment had two main parts: the removal of the separate-schools language and the removal of a passage -- inserted ... to counter the Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregated public schools -- that said Alabama's constitution does not guarantee a right to a public education.

Leading opponents, such as Alabama Christian Coalition President John Giles, said they did not object to removing the passage about separate schools for "white and colored children." But, employing an argument that was ridiculed by most of the state's newspapers and by legions of legal experts, Giles and others said guaranteeing a right to a public education would have opened a door for "rogue" federal judges to order the state to raise taxes to pay for improvements in its public school system.

Giles was aided by a virtually unparalleled Alabama celebrity in his battle against the amendment, distributing testimonials from former chief justice Roy Moore … (who) defied a federal court order to remove a two-ton granite Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court. They were joined by former Moore aide Tom Parker, who handed out miniature Confederate flags this fall during his successful campaign for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court.

… The state constitution … is so riddled with antiquated wording that some high school students in Birmingham make an annual trip to the city library for a project known as the search for "the loony laws."

"The show is nothing but sex, sex, sex," said Sharp. "We're really looking hard at it."

Today the Aegis Trust will publish a report showing that the crisis in Darfur has its roots in racism; an Arab supremacist ideology going back decades. Does the record so far suggest this is a racism with which we are complicit?

It takes the death of 3,000 Americans to start a war on terrorism. It takes the killing of nine French peacekeepers to destroy an air force. It is time we knew: how many black Africans must be killed before the UN will even enforce a no-fly zone or arms embargo? A hundred thousand, it seems, is not enough.

For the past month, Halima Ali's home has been a patch of sand under the shady branches of an acacia tree. Before that, it was a twig and grass hut in a makeshift camp eight miles north. Before that, it was a bush draped with a charred blanket.

Five times in the past 14 months, this slight girl of 10 has stuffed her belongings -- frilly pink dress, teapot, straw prayer mat -- into a burlap sack and fled, along with her family, to temporary refuge. Repeatedly, they have put down roots, only to hurriedly yank them up and flee just ahead of marauding militiamen and rebels.

"She's small, she doesn't know anything yet," said Halima's mother, pausing to comfort the despondent girl as the family set up camp in this sandy field.

"I do know," Halima said quietly, and began to tell their tale.

• We'd already known that one incumbent Texas Republican was going to ask his House of Representatives buddies to throw out the election in which he lost to a Democrat, but now we learn via Ed Still that there may be two other GOP losers who try the same stunt. I wonder if any of the Brooks Brothers Rioters are available for a reunion in Austin.
  


• Also via Ed Still, we learn that corporate PACs gave 10 times as much money to Republicans as to Democrats in the 2004 election cycle. Corporations aren't allowed to donate money directly to candidates, but they may set up PACs to which executives, shareholders, and employees can contribute, and the people who run the corporation may decide how the PAC distributes its largesse. One of the jokes of the anti-campaign finance reform movement was the claim that the ban on direct corporate giving violated corporations' free-speech rights; this was a joke because, as the Supreme Court's opinion in the McCain-Feingold case pointed out, many large corporations gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in soft money to both parties. The corporations weren't expressing any point of view, in other words, but were just buying influence (or access, to put it more politely). But in this election, it seems, corporations were willing to put their money on the party that's delivered so much to them over the past four years.
  


• Finally, if you don't get the joke in this excellent cartoon, go see The Incredibles and then look at it again.