The ACLU has launched a campaign to restore habeas corpus. In addition to traditional avenues such as lobbying Congress and arguing before courts, it's trying something new.

....a new online campaign built around the search for "Mr. Habeas Corpus" - unflagging champion of justice and due process of law. He's been looking out for us for years, now he needs us to look out for him.

....On October 17, 2006, he went missing without a trace. Last seen in Washington, D.C., his current whereabouts are unknown. Where is he? We don't know. But we do know Habeas Corpus needs our help. What can you do? Get involved and help us restore Habeas Corpus to his rightful place in our Constitution!

The RSS feed is here. It provides code for a button to put on your own sites and is asking that My Space members make Mr. Habeas their friend.

There's even a TalkLeft page on the site.

Journalist, author and TalkLeft pal Dave Cullen, who is writing the definitive book on Columbine, A Lasting Impression: The Definitive Account of Columbine and Its Aftermath (to be published this year) has posted a diary on TalkLeft, The Myth of the School Schooter.

The loner myth has been going on all day. CNN was talking about it all morning--how these shooters all turn out to be outcasts and loners. No, what actually happens is that the media got the loner/outcast narrative down years ago, and always jumps to that conclusion, so the repetition convinces them that it's true. In the Virginia case it's looking like it was true--however, in Columbine, and two-thirds of the other cases, it was a wild misconception.

The larger point is that the media does the public a major disservice by trying to convince us that there is such a thing a particular profile that these shooters fit. They try to fit all these ghastly events into a single personality type that we can be afraid of, but it's just not so.

Go read the whole thing, and I hope you'll click the "recommend diary" button so more people will read it.

Of special interest in today's SCOTUS decision upholding a late term abortion ban is that the mantra "leave abortion to the States" has been utterly abandoned by the Republican Party and anti-choice forces. This is a federal ban. This line from Justice Thomas' concurrence is ironic:

I also note that whether the Act constitutes a legitimate exercise of the Congress' Commerce Power is not before the Court.

For those of you who might have thought the conservative Justices were conceding the point.

From Justice Ginsburg's dissent:

One wonders how long a line that saves no fetus will hold in the face of the Court's "moral concerns." . . . The Court's hostility to the right Casey and Roe secured is not concealed. Throughout, the opinion refers to obstetrician-gynecologists not by the title of their medical specialties, but by the pejorative label "abortion doctors."

These Senators voted to not filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court:

Akaka (D-HI) Alexander (R-TN) Allard (R-CO) Allen (R-VA) Baucus (D-MT)Bennett (R-UT) Bingaman (D-NM) Bond (R-MO)Brownback (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY) Burns (R-MT) Burr (R-NC) Byrd (D-WV) Cantwell (D-WA) Carper (D-DE) Chafee (R-RI) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Coleman (R-MN)Collins (R-ME) Conrad (D-ND) Cornyn (R-TX)Craig (R-ID) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) DeWine (R-OH) Dole (R-NC) Domenici (R-NM) Dorgan (D-ND) Enzi (R-WY) Frist (R-TN) Graham (R-SC)Grassley (R-IA) Gregg (R-NH) Hatch (R-UT)Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK) Inouye (D-HI) Isakson (R-GA) Johnson (D-SD) Kohl (D-WI) Kyl (R-AZ) Landrieu (D-LA) Lieberman (D-CT) Lincoln (D-AR) Lott (R-MS) Lugar (R-IN) Martinez (R-FL) McCain (R-AZ) McConnell (R-KY) Murkowski (R-AK) Nelson (D-FL) Nelson (D-NE)Pryor (D-AR) Roberts (R-KS) Rockefeller (D-WV) Salazar (D-CO) Santorum (R-PA)Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Smith (R-OR) Snowe (R-ME) Specter (R-PA) Stevens (R-AK) Sununu (R-NH) Talent (R-MO) Thomas (R-WY) Thune (R-SD) Vitter (R-LA) Voinovich (R-OH) Warner (R-VA)

Via AdamB, the SCOTUS upheld a federal ban on late term abortions. SCOTUSBlog reports:

Dividing 5-4, the Supreme Court on Wednesday gave a sweeping -- and only barely qualified -- victory to the federal government and to other opponents of abortion, upholding the 2003 law that banned what are often called "partial-birth abortions." Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the first-ever decision by the Court to uphold a total ban on a specific abortion procedure -- prompting the dissenters to argue that the Court was walking away from the defense of abortion rights that it had made since the original Roe v. Wade.

. . . Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking out in the courtroom for the dissenters, called the ruling "an alarming decision" that refuses "to take seriously" the Court's 1992 decisions reaffirming most of Roe v. Wade and its 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart striking down a state partial-birth abortion law.

Ginsburg, in a lengthy statement, said "the Court's opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman's health." She said the federal ban "and the Court's defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court -- and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives. A decision of the character the Court makes today should not have staying power."

Kennedy's vote with the majority; Roberts and ScAlito joined Scalia and Thomas, makes clear that those of us who fought against both the Roberts and Alito nominations were right to expect this from those nominees. Roe and Casey will not survive if this Court gets to decide the issue.

New York has settled a lawsuit brought by advocates for mentally ill prisoners. Among the practices the state has agreed to stop: 23 hour a day isolation and feeding them a diet of bread and cabbage.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan in 2002 by several prisoners’ rights groups against the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, claimed that the state had failed to provide the treatment the prisoners needed and that solitary confinement had led to severe psychiatric deterioration, self-mutilation and suicide.

The agreement with the administration of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, which still requires court approval, means that the mentally ill who are confined to special housing units will get at least two hours of treatment outside their cells each day and as many as four hours’ additional recreation time. As attorney general, Mr. Spitzer represented the Pataki administration in the case, but he said last year that he would not hesitate to change course as governor.

Bread and cabbage? Shameful.

Charges against one of the Marines in the Haditha killings have been dropped, but it's not because he wasn't involved.

Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz, 24, had been charged with premeditated murder and making a false report in the November 19, 2005, deaths, which damaged U.S. prestige and led to international condemnation.

``Charges against him were dismissed on April 2 after the government balanced his low level of culpability in the alleged crime against the potential value of his testimony,'' a Marine Corps statement said.

Two dozen Iraqi men, women and children were killed in this raid.

Three Marines remain charged with murder and four others are charged with dereliction of duty for failing to properly report and investigate the shooting deaths of the two dozen Iraqi men, women and children.

Was this deal really necessary? Why not make Dela Cruz plead to the dereliction of duty count? Why reward him with a complete dismissal? How trustworthy will his testimony be?

TalkLeft's prior coverage of the Haditha killings is accessible here.

The Washington Post has some new details on Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter, including statements by Nikki Giovanni, a poet and teacher who warned others about him when he became a problematic student that scared others in the class.

Days later, seven of Giovanni's 70 or so students showed up for a class. She asked students why the others didn't show up and was told that they were afraid of Cho. "Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something," she said.

She approached Cho and told him that he needed to change the type of poems he was writing or drop her class. Giovanni said Cho declined to leave and said, "You can't make me." Giovanni said she appealed to [Professor] Roy, who then taught Cho one-on-one.

...Roy said she warned school officials. "I was determined that people were going to take notice," Roy said. "I felt I'd said to so many people, 'Please, will you look at this young man?' "

The Smoking Gun has posted one of his "plays." It's predictably ugly.

Defense Secretary Bob Gates must be on thin ice with the President tonight. Via Kevin Drum:

...."The debate in Congress ... has been helpful in demonstrating to the Iraqis that American patience is limited," Gates told Pentagon reporters traveling with him in Jordan. "The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact ... in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment."

So if you are against the Dems' Congressional pressure on Bush over the Iraq Debacle you are for the terrorists right?

Don't miss this amusing comment on Dr. Phil's assertion that video games are responsible for the violence at Virginia Tech.

Predictably, the networks are still milking the gun control debate for all its worth. At least Sen. Harry Reid isn't buying it.

Guns effected, but did not cause the killings. They were the means by which an unbalanced, disturbed individual carried out his rage.

I also think the arguments to increase guns on college campuses are a bad idea.

We should never enact laws as an emotional response to a single tragedy, no matter how horrific. Cooler heads are needed.

Rather than playing the blame game, look to what made Cho Seung-Hui want to kill people and himself. Maybe there's a lesson in there.

If he couldn't buy a gun, he would have stolen one. Or used explosives, in which case the death toll might have been higher.

This was an isolated event that was neither predictable nor preventable.

We elected a Democratic Congress to get us out of Iraq, provide universal health care and preserve Social Security. I hope they don't get diverted by a simplistic non-cure.