Blogging or reporting on the web can be a risky endeavor in some countries. Many have lost their liberty because they told the truth or expressed their opinions.

The number of journalists jailed worldwide for their work increased for the second consecutive year, and one in three is now an Internet blogger, online editor, or Web-based reporter, according to an analysis by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

About half of the world's imprisoned journalists are print reporters (including editors and photographers), but web-based journalists are increasingly losing their freedom.

China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Ethiopia were the top four jailers among the 24 nations who imprisoned journalists.

Howard Dean took up Cristine Jennings' cause today, calling for a new election in the Florida House race:

State officials certified Buchanan as the winner by just 369 votes. But Jennings claims that touch-screen voting machines in Sarasota County malfunctioned in the U.S. House District 13 race and possibly cost her the election.

More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters who marked other races didn't have a vote register in the House race, a rate much higher than the rest of the district.

'There are 18,000 people who may have voted, and we don't know what happened to their votes. You can bet that if the Republicans were 500 votes short they'd be calling for a new election, and they'd be right,' Dean said.

This is the seat formerly held by Katherine Harris. The winner has been declared to be Republican Vern Buchanan.

Sometimes we focus more on prison abuses abroad than we do at home. The first is not more important than the second as Ira Robbins points out in the Baltimore Sun.

While the alleged human rights abuses of prisoners detained in Guantánamo Bay and the Middle East have sparked widespread criticism and debate in this country and abroad, surprisingly little attention has been focused on the treatment of citizens imprisoned within our borders. Each year, approximately 7,000 Americans die in U.S. prisons and jails. Some of these deaths are from natural causes, but many more result from mental disorders left undiagnosed and diseases left untreated.

The abhorrent quality of correctional health care not only violates prisoners' constitutional rights, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars and threatens the general health of communities surrounding these facilities. Understanding why prisoners die is an essential first step in identifying the major pitfalls of our health care system. Passing legislation to correct these problems is the crucial next step. Therefore, Congress should extend and strengthen the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act, or DICRA, before it expires at the end of this year.

Say Hello to Dicra:

Leslie Vaughn Prater will be the last person who needlessly dies in police custody if his mother has her way. Prater suffocated as four Chattanooga police officers held him face down on the ground.

Prater negotiated a settlement of her wrongful death lawsuit that helps educate the city's officers.

Loretta Prater, a Southeast Missouri State University administrator, will teach three classes at the Chattanooga police academy about the death of her 37-year-old son, Leslie Vaughn Prater, said Sgt. Tom Layne Wednesday. She said her sessions with police recruits would give them a "sense of how important their role is when they are out there on the street."

The facts surrounding Prater's death aren't pretty.

The House of Representatives today rejected the Republican-sponsored bill that would have required notice to women getting abortions that the fetus might feel pain.

In the House, Republican leaders gave its anti-abortion base one final shot at abortion legislation before Democrats take over control of the agenda.

The House rejected a proposal that would have required abortion providers to inform women at least 20 weeks pregnant that abortions cause pain to the fetus. The vote was 250-162, short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate.

The bill defined a 20-week-old fetus as a "pain-capable unborn child." That's a controversial threshold among scientists, who don't agree on whether a fetus at that stage of development feels pain or reflectively draws back from stimuli. Abortion has been legal in the United States since a 1973 Supreme Court ruling.

Two worth noting:

Sen. Russ Feingold on Countdown (Crooks and Liars has the video):

The fact is this commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that's who is doing this report. Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism. So this is really a Washington inside job and it shows not in the description of what's happened - that's fairly accurate - but it shows in the recommendations. It's been called a classic Washington compromise that does not do the job of extricating us from Iraq in a way that we can deal with the issues in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, and in Somalia which are every bit as important as what is happening in Iraq. This report does not do the job and it's because it was not composed of a real representative group of Americans who believe what the American people showed in the election, which is that it's time for us to have a timetable to bring the troops out of Iraq.

Al Gore on the Today Show:

Apprentice 6 will be filmed in LA instead of New York this year. That's not the only change. It will focus on the haves vs. haves nots:

In a compelling social experiment of haves and have nots, contestants this season will have to earn the right to live like Trump.

Each week, the contestants on the winning team will get to live in a luxurious mansion. But contestants on the losing team will have to sleep outside in tents in the back yard of the mansion with outdoor showers and port-a-potties, giving contestants more incentive than ever to win their tasks each week.

By a vote of 95 to 2, Robert Gates was confirmed Wednesday as our new Defense Secretary.

Senate Democrats and Republicans lauded Gates's frankness after a day of testimony Tuesday in which he acknowledged that the United States is not winning in Iraq, and said that historians would have to judge whether the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 was correct. He also pledged to take a fresh approach to Iraq in which "all options are on the table."

Who voted against him? Two Republicans, Jim Bunning (Ky.) and Rick Santorum (Pa.)

One of the many examples of Right Wing distortion and disingenuousness comes when the concept of church-state separation is discussed. You have all heard this one -- "The separation of Church and State does not appear in the Constitution." The argument is that Thomas Jefferson invented the concept in an 1802 letter to a church group. This is, in a word, false. The First Amendment states expressly that the State can not be involved in religion:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

Did anyone miss that? Congress (which means all government through the incorporation doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment) shall make NO LAW respecting establishment of religion. One more time, NO LAW. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Any ambiguity there? Is the plain meaning of the text in doubt?

But where does it say church/state separation? Repeat and rinse. NO LAW. The fact that the State can make no law on establishment of religion separates the State from religion absolutely and entirely. That is what the text plainly and unmistakably says. Now we all know the Supreme Court, in acts of activism that please the Right, decided that NO LAW did not really mean NO LAW. And we live with the Lemon test, more or less, today. But make no mistake, the First Amendment expressly separates that State from religion by prohibiting all laws regarding establishment of religion.

More.

A federal indictment has been handed down in Miami against former Liberian Chief Charles Taylor's son, Chuckie Taylor, also known as Charles McArthur Emmanuel.

The son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor was indicted Wednesday on U.S. charges of committing torture as chief of a violent paramilitary unit during his father's regime, marking the first time a 12-year-old federal anti-torture law has ever been used, U.S. officials said.

The decision-makers at CNN must be disappointed to learn that appealing to right wing extremism hasn't helped the Headline News ratings:

As mentioned last week, six months ago Headline and MSNBC were running neck and neck, now it isn’t even a horse race. The addition to Headline’s primetime lineup of the outrageous Nancy Grace and the slightly demagogic Glenn Beck has done nothing to close the gap.

Slightly?

Perhaps the ratings will force CNN to notice that viewers would rather enjoy a mix of rationality, humor, and solid reporting than vicious attacks and unsubstantiated innuendo.

The bad news from Iraq keeps coming:

Ten American service members were killed from improvised explosive devices in Iraq on Wednesday. The news came hours after a mortar attack killed at least eight people and wounded dozens in the Sadr City Shiite district of the capital, police said.

In the 10 American deaths, five troops were killed in the north, and five were killed in Anbar province, a U.S. military official told NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski. No further details were immediately available.