by TChris

They didn't quite apologize, but the members of Washington's state legislature passed a resolution expressing their "deepest sympathy" to the descendents of Louie Sam for a lynching that occurred 122 years ago.

Sam, who belonged to the Sto:lo First Nation whose homelands lie in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver, was falsely accused in the 1884 murder of a shopkeeper near Sumas, Wash.

A mob rode across the border, snatched Sam from Canadian police custody and hung him from a tree.

Canadian investigators later determined that he never committed the crime and was framed by two white Americans who stirred up the mob.

by TChris

Let's hope Walter Cronkite, writing for Huffington Post, can persuade the country to accept the obvious: the war on drugs is a failure.

The federal government has fought terminally ill patients whose doctors say medical marijuana could provide a modicum of relief from their suffering - as though a cancer patient who uses marijuana to relieve the wrenching nausea caused by chemotherapy is somehow a criminal who threatens the public.

People who do genuinely have a problem with drugs, meanwhile, are being imprisoned when what they really need is treatment.

And what is the impact of this policy?

It surely hasn't made our streets safer. Instead, we have locked up literally millions of people...disproportionately people of color...who have caused little or no harm to others - wasting resources that could be used for counter-terrorism, reducing violent crime, or catching white-collar criminals.

Where's Osama? No one knows, but Bush is confident he'll get him.

"It's not a matter of if they're captured and brought to justice," Bush said at a news conference with Karzai at the war-battered presidential palace. "It's when they're brought to justice."

Maybe if he hadn't used so many of our military resources for an unnecessary war in Iraq, we'd have found him by now. I hope someone does a poll on how many Americans believe this lastest statement. I'd be it's fewer than the 34% who approve of his performance.

The New York Observer has an article about discrepencies between Nancy Grace's version of her fiance's murder and the version told by the documents and trial participants.

I'm all for criticizing Nancy Grace's point of view and her "fry 'em" mentality and even her sometimes overly melodramatic delivery style, but I have to say, aside from misrepresenting, perhaps unknowingly, the prior record of the man who killed her fiance, there's very little here.

I'd much rather see an article that takes her to task for her program format, the show's failure to journalistically inform and her one-sidedness in favor of victims, than for minor details in how her fiance got murdered, even if she does claim it was the hook in deciding to go to law school and become a prosecutor.

The real problem is that guilt sells in this country while innocence doesn't. Grace takes advantage of that phenomenon to the utmost, but then so do many other tv personalities.

The third annual blogads survey is up. It is a survey only of readers of politically influential blogs. If you'd like to be included, head on over and read.

For question 23, asking which blog referred you to the survey, it would be helpful if you'd answer "TalkLeft" so that later Blogads can break down the answers on TalkLeft readers.

The point of the survey, as stated by Henry of Blogads:

Even though the results will be severely unscientific, the project helps us all better understand blogs and where we all fit in the infosphere. Stuff like this also helps with evangelism -- headlines notwithstanding, too many pundits, advertisers and journalists are still blind to the political bloggers' radical force.

Again, the survey is here and only takes about five minutes.

Before you order from Domino's pizza again, you may want to think twice:

If Domino's Pizza founder Thomas S. Monaghan has his way, a new town being built in Florida will be governed according to strict Roman Catholic principles, with no place to get an abortion, pornography or birth control.

The pizza magnate is bankrolling the project with at least $250 million and calls it "God's will."

Update: There may be no need to hold Monaghan's views against Dominos. A Talkleft reader points us to Snopes which reports Monaghan sold his interest in the company in 1998 and he receives no dollars from pizza sales.

by TChris

Susan Wood, a former assistant commissioner of the FDA, explains why conservative opposition to over-the-counter sales of emergency ("Plan B") contraception to adult women is irrational. Her broader point: "our federal health agencies seem increasingly unable to operate independently and ... this lack of independence compromises their mission of promoting public health and welfare."

by TChris

The City of New York finally agreed to widespread reforms designed to end the abuse of jail inmates by prison guards.

Settling a 2002 lawsuit by the Legal Aid Society, the city agreed to revise its guidelines on when and how guards may use force, post hundreds of new video cameras in the jails, overhaul its procedures for investigating violent episodes and provide more training for guards in how to restrain inmates.

The city will also pay a total of $2.2 million to 22 inmates who were injured in clashes with guards. Inmates in the suit had suffered shattered cheekbones, ruptured eyeballs and split eardrums after officers threw punches at their heads instead of using less damaging control methods.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee clarifying his Feb. 6 testimony on Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance activities. I call it backtracking.

In a letter yesterday to senators in which he asked to clarify his Feb. 6 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales also seemed to imply that the administration's original legal justification for the program was not as clear-cut as he indicated three weeks ago.

The Senate is expected to vote today on the Patriot Act renewal legislation . It's a bad bill, and besides Sen. Russ Feingold, no one else is standing up to say so. We don't need:

• a national federal police force. Here is the text to Section 605 which would create one.
• the anti-Meth Act
• New drug crimes and death penalty eligible offenses
• Sneak and Peek searches that are more about the drug war than the terror war. Sen. Feingold's statement on this is here.

It's time to show Sen. Russ Feingold some heart. He's the only one sticking out his neck and calling the Patriot Act renewal authoriztion bill for what it is: a bill that will not make us safer, only less free.

The Wisconsin Democrat is crusading against the bill, and he finds himself in a familiar place. He has almost no support - and some outright hostility - from his colleagues, just as he did after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he provided the sole vote against the original Patriot Act, just as he did when he was one of the few clear voices against the war in Iraq, and just as he did when he was first in the Senate to call for a reduction in U.S. troops there. As he surveys the debate, Feingold sounds dismayed by fellow Democrats who have given up opposing the bill as an invasion of civil rights.

"If Democrats can't stand up on something like this when the president's poll numbers are 34 percent, I just wonder how much right we have to govern this country," Feingold said in an interview Tuesday. "You've got to show people you believe in something, not just that you're gaming the issues."

It was 79 degrees in Denver today, way too nice to stay indoors working or blogging. Here's some things I would have blogged about had I been around. If you'd rather discuss other things, this is also an open thread.

• Rikki Lee Jones writes an anti-Joe Lieberman letter to Howie Klein (via Firedoglake.)

• Dan Froomkin's column in the Washington Post asking about President Bush, How Low Can He Go (make sure you make it to the last page where he cites me and TalkLeft, twice -- thanks, Dan!)

• Instapundit has quotes of Karl Rove commenting on the blogosphere. And don't forget to buy Glenn's excellent book, Army of David. just click on the ad on the right side of TalkLeft.