I'm not in a particularly upbeat mood this Thanksgiving. I know we just won an election and hopefully have started on a path to end the War in Iraq and take back our country from the right-wing extremists who have ruled since 1994. I'm thankful that the days of appointing right-wing ideologues to our federal courts and the Supreme Court may be behind us.

But I live in a peculiar world, one that is filled with days spent visiting mostly non-violent prisoners in jails, and it saddens me that for them and their children and parents, I see little hope.

O.J. Simpson's price for his book with a hypotheical confession was $880,000. Of that, $100k went to the ghost writer and the rest to his children.

His rationale: He had bills (including taxes) to pay.

His gripe: He has received more criticism that News Corp.

One final note: He tells the AP his book was not a confession. He didn't write the hypothetical chapter nor select the name of the book.

'It's all blood money and unfortunately I had to join the jackals,'' Simpson told The Associated Press, referring to authors of books about him. ''It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead.''

In Northeast Atlanta, near Georgia Tech, police made a drug buy from a house and came back with a search warrant, raiding the house. They shot dead a 92 year old woman who had a gun defending her house. The Atlanta police involved seemed, to me, particularly cavalier about the entire matter. "'This seems like another tragedy involving drugs,' [ADA] Howard said."  

How much of this is attributable to flawed Supreme Court policy statements?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this story today: Questions surround fatal shooting of woman, 92:

What's cooking at your house today? Are you home or away for the Thanksgiving holiday? And what are you most thankful for this year?

There's no cooking at my house, I'm going out to friends tomorrow evening for Turkey this year. I've also got clients all afternoon and the TL mom went back into the hospital yesterday afternoon, so it will be my second Thanksgiving Day in a row spent with her and the medical personnel who spend their day taking care of others.

I'll be blogging a bit through the holiday, so if you're on line, stop on by, add some good thoughts, and have a great holiday.

Don't forget to tune in to your local radio station tomorrow which is bound to be playing Arlo Guthrie's Alices' Restaurant about the draft way back when....and check out the Wall St. Journal today ( link) which profiles Alice and what she is doing today.

(link fixed)

It didn't matter to Kenneth Foley's jury that Luke Gaumond testified to committing the burglary for which Foley was on trial. After all, the prosecutor had God on his side.

Despite Gaumond's testimony, a jury convicted Foley and a co-defendant at the urging of Deputy District Attorney Charles Slone, who told jurors he was "sickened" by the "fraud" of the defense: "I'm not here trying to convict innocent people," he assured jurors. "I believe in God."

Foley got 25 to life for breaking into a truck. The sentence would be unjust even if Foley were guilty, but Gaumond admitted that he committed the burglary while using Mashelle Bullington's car. Foley had the bad luck to borrow Bullington's car twelve hours later. Police were able to connect the car to the burglary, and then they connected Foley to the car. They apparently didn't believe Bullington when she said she'd let a man named Luke use her car, particularly after the truck's owner picked Foley out of a photo array.

Prosecutors in Santa Clara County have a history of ignoring evidence of innocence while they pursue questionable prosecutions. Here's an example and here's another. The Mercury News documented the problem is a series of articles entitled "Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice."

Six imams attending a conference in Minneapolis took time to pray at the gate before boarding a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix. A passenger handed a note to a flight attendant pointing out the "6 suspicious Arabic men" on the plane. Disturbed by their "unsettling" behavior -- which apparently consisted of praying and asking for seat belt extensions -- the crew told the police that the imams needed to be removed. They were escorted from the plane in handcuffs and detained for five hours before authorities conceded that they posed no threat.

U.S. Airways refused to book the imams on another flight to Phoenix. According to the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Muslims (both passengers and airline employees) have more complaints about U.S. Airways than other airlines. The incident prompted the Council and the NAACP to ask for Congressional hearings on racial profiling in airports.

Can you imagine the outcry from the religious right if six Christian pastors were removed from a flight because they prayed together at the gate? U.S. Airways would be deservedly out of business in a week.

The Washington Post has an article today criticizng Georgia's new sex offender banishment law.

The roughly 10,000 sex offenders living in Georgia have been forbidden to live within 1,000 feet of a school, playground, church or school bus stop. Taken together, the prohibitions place nearly all the homes in some counties off-limits -- amounting, in a practical sense, to banishment.

Here are some of those affected by the law: A man with alzheimers and another who is 100 years old. A third is living in a nursing home where he is dying of heart disease.

The stupid law makes no distinction between those who are dangerous and those who are not. Even those who are not may be forced to move or expelled from their hospices.

Via the AP:

Nearly all air travelers entering the U.S. will be required to show passports beginning Jan. 23, including returning Americans and people from Canada and other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The date was disclosed Tuesday by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in an interview with The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department plans to announce the change on Wednesday.

This includes Americans traveling to Mexico, Bermuda and Canada, countries where birth certificates or drivers' licenses have always sufficed.

The cost of a passport? $97.00. For a family of four planning a trip, that's not cheap change. HSA says currently only 1 in 4 Americans have a passport.

What's next? Requiring infants to register for a social security card before the age of three? DNA testing at birth? This is just the kind of overkill that shows that the terrorists have won Bush's War on Terror by causing us to diminish our way of life and the degree of mutual trust we citizens have maintained with our government.

In ten years, will we even recognize our own country? I'll bet Osama will be sitting in his cave giggling it up with five or six of his number two henchman about how easily we fell into his scare scheme.

John Mellencamp, Eddie Van Halen, Bryan Adams, Richie Sambora, Max Weinberg, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, Steve Winwood, Don Henley, and Paul Shaffer performing "I Fought the Law and the Law Won"

Added bonus: Gloria.

Our new Democratic leaders have come to their senses and said Charlie Rangel's draft bill will be D.O.A. in the next Congress.

Others, however, aren't so sure.

It's about time. Finally, a judge has stepped in to the mess that has become the criminal justice system in New Orleans and ordered that more public defenders be hired.

The order, issued Monday by judges in the Criminal District Court, said mismanagement of the Orleans Parish Indigent Defender Program has denied poor defendants their 6th Amendment right to proper legal representation. "Day to day, defendants are in jail that just aren't getting the representation that they should be getting," Chief Judge Raymond Bigelow said.

Under the order, the public defender's office must hire 12 public defenders one for every courtroom by Dec. 1, which will double the number of public defenders in each section of criminal court. Currently, there is one attorney in each of the 12 sections.

Statistics show that 90% of New Orleans defendants rely on public defenders.

Here's more, more and more on the city's problems since Katrina. Although, getting justice in Louisiana was no picnic before Katrina either.

Not all Americans are xenophobic. That's the good news from the latest Quinnepac poll, in which 59% of Americans say they favor some sort of guest worker plan for undocumented residents.

Most of those polled also favor more stringent attempts to close the border. But at least they recognize that those who are here, working and lawfully paying taxes, should be allowed to stay here.