TalkLeft wishes all of you a wonderful Thanksgiving.

If you're around at noon (Mountain Time) KBCO FM Boulder plays the long version of Alice's Restaurant. They replay it at 6 pm. You can listen live online here.

Or, you can enjoy it anytime here, story included.

It's a movement, "The Alice's Restaurant Let's Give Thanks and Remember Why We Started Doing This and Why We Keep On Keepin' On Movement." Religious Studies Professor Ira Chernus at the University of Colorado at Boulder explains why.

It's never too late to rehabilitate yourself, to start creating enough of a nuisance and sing loud enough to end war and stuff. If you've been doing it for 25 years, or more, I bet you are prepared to do it for another 25 years or more. I bet you're not proud, or tired.

Unfortunately, though, the world will keep doing all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things, at least for a while. And we'll all be just having a tough time here, on this road of activism. It may be a good idea to remember the comfort and rejuvenation we can get from an old familiar ritual now and then. So don't forget to sing along when it comes around on the guitar.

Because it is, indeed, a movement: The Alice's Restaurant Let's Give Thanks and Remember Why We Started Doing This and Why We Keep On Keepin' On Movement.

The disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba was big news a couple of years ago. Obsessive media coverage provoked reasonable complaints about distorted priorities and poor judgment in television news departments. Has the public's interest been sated, or will new arrests of old suspects trigger another round of 24 hour Natalee Holloway coverage?

Notwithstanding the determined efforts of New York City law enforcement, stopping to chat with another pedestrian is not a crime.

The New York Court of Appeals decided Tuesday to overturn the conviction of Matthew Jones, who was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest on June 12, 2004. Police said other people "had to walk around" him, he wouldn't move when asked and he flailed his arms.

Standing rooted to a spot while hanging with friends is not the kind of conduct New York's disorderly conduct statute prohibits.

"Otherwise, any person who happens to stop on a sidewalk — whether to greet another, to seek directions or simply to regain one's bearings — would be subject to prosecution under this statute," the opinion said.

People who block the sidewalk are annoying, but if being annoying were a crime, few would be free to guard the jails.

Good news from Georgia.

Georgia's top court overturned a state law Wednesday that banned registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches and other areas where children congregate.

"It is apparent that there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being ejected," read the unanimous opinion, written by presiding Justice Carol Hunstein.

The Southern Center for Human Rights has been instrumental in fighting this law. Background on the law is here.

The text of the opinion is here (pdf.) The sex offender statute is here (pdf.)

If you're online this afternoon and evening, here's some stuff to check out:

• Christy at Firedoglake on Judge Brinkema's order in the al-Timini case threatening to toss the conviction over state secrets and the NSA wiretapping progam.

• TPM on yet more of Rudy's business deals.

• Instapundit Glenn Reynolds' op-ed in the New York Post on the Supreme Court decision to review the D.C. gun control law.

• Taylor Marsh on tomorrow's anniversary of the assassination of JFK, He Couldn't Get Elected Today.

• Sentencing Law and Policy has a big variety today, from the GA. Supreme Court striking down sex offender restrictions to attempt to end the New Jersey death penalty to Judge Nancy Gertner's most recent sentencing break for a crack defendant.

What are you reading?

Call for prison reform are finally drawing attention from policy makers and members of the law enforcement community. Via the Scout Report at the University of Wisconsin:

• U.S. Prison system a costly and harmful failure
  about recent JFA report.
• California a leader in number of youths in prison for life
• Crack cocaine sentence cut is stalled by retroactivity
• NPR: Should Sentencing Reform Be Retroactive? [Real Player]
• Unlocking America [pdf]
• Bureau of Justice Statistics

Within the vast world of pressing policy problems, system-wide prison reform in the United States has been a subject that has vexed even the most dedicated experts and committed activists. Over the past four decades, the prison population has risen eight-fold, and people have laid the blame on everything from mandatory sentencing laws to economic restructuring in America's manufacturing regions.

More....

Booman:

The non-stop shilling for Clinton continues at Talk Left where Armando is at it full-time.

Have whatever opinion of the actual Bill Clinton Presidency, but you have to deal with the fact that Bill Clinton remains extremely popular and his Presidency remembered fondly.

It's funny, but I don't remember Bill Clinton's presidency all that fondly. The first two years could only be described as a total disaster.

Funny, I do not recall writing that BOOMAN remembered the Clinton Presidency fondly. I cited an article which stated:

Bill Clinton enjoys a 66 percent approval rating in a Washington Post/ABC News Poll released last month.

Booman's hatred of Hillary is so blinding that he denies the obvious - Bill Clinton is popular, whether Booman likes Bill or not. He sounds like a Republican now. Denying obvious facts. That is quintessential Hillary Hate. Makes people idiots.

Breaking from Huffington Post....

Senator Hillary Clinton, D-NY, announced today that she will forgo CBS News' upcoming presidential debate unless the network can reach a resolution with its striking employees.

"The workers at CBS News have been without a contract for close to two and a half years," the Senator said. "It is my hope that both sides will reach an agreement that results in a secure contract for the workers at CBS News but let me be clear: I will honor the picket line if the workers at CBS News decide to strike."

I hope the other candidates follow her lead on this.

Today President Bush reaffirmed his support for Pakistani President Musharraf:

President Bush yesterday offered his strongest support of embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying the general "hasn't crossed the line" and "truly is somebody who believes in democracy."

But of course. Anyway, remember this?

mentioned Dr. Shazia briefly in June when I wrote about General Musharraf's quasi-kidnapping and house arrest of Mukhtaran Bibi - the Pakistani rape victim who used compensation money to open schools and start a women's aid group.

And another of our major allies:

A Saudi court on Tuesday more than doubled the number of lashes that a female rape victim was sentenced to last year after her lawyer appealed the original sentence. . . . Her case has been widely debated since the court sentenced her to 90 lashes a year ago for being in the same car as an unrelated man, even after it ruled that she had subsequently been raped. For a woman to be in seclusion with a man who is not her husband or a relative is a crime in Saudi Arabia, whose legal code is based on a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law.

They hate us for our freedoms.

He keeps bringing up this "issue":

The former president's intervention . . . raised the second, and largely unspoken, issue identified by my friend from the Clinton administration: the two-headed campaign and the prospect of a dual presidency. In his view, which I share, this is a prospect that will test the tolerance of the American people far more severely than the possibility of the first female president -- or, for that matter, the first black president. As my friend says, "there is nothing in American constitutional or political theory to account for the role of a former president, still energetic and active and full of ideas, occupying the White House with the current president."

As I understand Broder's theory, the prospect of former President Bill Clinton being again in the White House and likely being Hillary Clinton's chief advisor is a political problem for clinton and the Dems. Is the man insane? Have whatever opinion of the actual Bill Clinton Presidency, but you have to deal with the fact that Bill Clinton remains extremely popular and his Presidency remembered fondly. Broder is either a fool or a shill on this.

Via Atrios. An interesting phenomenon has emerged - taking on Krugman is not a smart thing for a public pundit to do. First, Krugman is usually right. Second, Krugman does a great job of defending his positions, usually making his critic look foolish (see Brooks, David.) And now a new reason, Krugman's views gets defended by a lot of smart people. Today, Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post discovers this:

Ruth Marcus shows two things in her commentary today, "Krugman vs. Krugman". First, she hasn't a clue about Social Security financing. Second, she has no problem at all presenting a distorted picture to rationalize her clueless position.

. . . [H]ad Ruth Marcus included this quote from Paul Krugman's 2005 piece in her editorial (or quotes from other pieces of the vast amount Krugman has written about Social Security after 2001), it would have changed the interpretation of the quotes she includes in her article. Here, Paul Krugman explains why the future of Social Security was at issue at that time:

Four years ago, I and many other economists urged policymakers to think about the future cost of Social Security benefits, not because we thought there was anything wrong with Social Security itself, but because we regarded the future costs as a compelling reason not to cut taxes even if the overall budget was in surplus.

Keep that quote in mind, i.e. that the worry was that the Bush tax cuts would eat away at the accumulated Social Security surplus, as they did, as you read Ruth Marcus' desperate attempt to justify her doom and gloom about the future of Social Security . . .

MORE.

Glenn Greenwald explains:

For the sake of its own credibility, Time Magazine needs immediately to prohibit Joe Klein from uttering another word about the eavesdropping and FISA controversy. He simply doesn't know what he's talking about and he publishes demonstrably false statements.

And he has for quite a while on this issue:

Joe Klein has been getting a lot of attention of late for his rip of Dems’ criticism of Bush’s NSA domestic surveillance program. It makes you wonder if Klein understands how untruthfully and how shamelessly the Bush Administration will do anything it can get away with. He certainly seems to know nothing about the Constitution, or to value it in any event. But his contempt for the Constitution and the law did not start with the FISA Scandal. And apparently he assumes we are as lazy and clueless as he is. But we are not. . . .