by TChris

The morality police are on the job in Texas, represented by a state legislator who wants to protect Texans from salacious high school cheerleaders.

His bill would order state education officials to investigate any school-sponsored performance that is "overtly sexually suggestive."

What constitutes "suggestive" cheering no doubt depends on the imagination of the observer. Perhaps Texas legislators who are nagged by impure thoughts at the sight of a pom-pom squad would be better served by averting their eyes at halftime.

This commentator suggests that Texas should regulate cheerleaders in the manner it regulates steriod use among high school athletes: leaving it up to each school to decide what (if anything) to do.

Weatherford lawmaker Phil King tried to file a bill demanding steroid testing for playoff athletes. School officials lobbied against it.

Nice to see that the Texas legislature has priorities.

What's up with Greenwich High School? They disinvited TalkLeft pal, Mickey Sherman, from being the graduation speaker because...he's a defense lawyer.

The Greenwich Time takes the school to task, calling the school's action shameful.

It's difficult to decide which is the worse message to send to graduating seniors -- that school officials will topple like tenpins under a wisp of parent pressure, or that they will countenance the implication that defending unpopular clients disqualifies a lawyer from respect. GHS has done both. No one put school officials under the obligation to invite Mr. Sherman. But once extended, the invitation should have been honored.

At its best, Greenwich is the kind of community that nourishes people like Mr. Sherman, who as a youngster was educated in the town's schools and went on to success in a demanding profession. This incident represents the worst side -- equating the avoidance of controversy with the attainment of respectability, and sacrificing principle for appearance's sake.

Cartoon of the week. [hat tip T. Kindlon]

The Real ID Act is not law yet. Read some more objections, and then contact your representatives in Congress and tell them to vote now. The bill deserves full debate and should be a stand alone measure, not tacked on to the spending bill. The drivers' license provisions are overburdensome and the immigration provisions strip habeas corpus rights.

• Rep. Ron Paul
• Mac Raven
• Rex M

Congress is moving toward requiring states to verify whether applicants are in the U.S. legally before issuing driver's licenses.....The real story here isn't security, or even drivers licenses. It's the Federal government imposing yet another "unfunded mandate" on the states. This is where Congress sets a policy, and then demands that a lower level (state, county, city) government implement and pay for it. It amounts to a hidden Federal tax increase.

[hat tip: AOL Blog Zone]

On a related note, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is launching a big campaign to support immigration reforms, in challenge to President Bush.

We've hogged the discussion the past few days, it's now your turn.

The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that where racial profiling resulted in criminal charges, the charges can be dismissed.

This would seem like a no-brainer, but the law has been that so long as police could establish that a traffic violation occurred, their reason for making the stop was irrelevant.

Justice Andrew Hurwitz wrote in the unanimous decision that a state can neither write laws that apply only to people of certain races, nor selectively enforce the law according to race, a practice commonly referred to as racial profiling. A state can no more make 'driving while Black' a crime by means of its enforcement than it could by express law," he wrote.

50 years later, there may be justice for Emmett Till. The FBI has agreed to exhume the body of the brutally murdered 14 year old to determine his cause of death.

Emmett, who was raised in Chicago, was kidnapped, beaten, shot to death and dropped in the Tallahatchie River in 1955, reportedly after he whistled at a white woman in Money, Miss., while visiting relatives. Two white men who were acquitted in the case by an all-white jury and later confessed to the crime in a magazine interview. Both are now dead.

Major credit for the FBI decision goes to documentary filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, whose film and life were the subject of a lengthy New York Times article that I quoted here.

Beauchamp grew up in Lousiana and when he was 10 or 11, he found a picture of the mutilated body of Emmett Till. He has been obsessed with the case ever since, spending the last six years filming and tracking down witnesses.

The trial took place in Tallahatchie County which at that time only had all white juries even though the population was two-thirds black.

Why is Congress about to authorize umpteen millions more for Iraq when the Bush administration can't account for $100 million? Is $100 million now considered pocket change?

$96 million is said to be lost from fraud, and another $7 million simply unaccounted for.

U.S. civilian authorities in Iraq cannot properly account for nearly $100 million that was supposed to have been spent on reconstruction projects in south-central Iraq, government investigators said Wednesday.

There are indications of fraud in the use of the $96.6 million, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. A separate investigation of possible wrongdoing continues. More than $7 million of the total is unaccounted for, the report said. An additional $89.4 million in payments do not have the required supporting documents.

Can you spell corruption?

May 4, 1970. Four students killed by the National Guard during anti-war protests at Kent State University in Ohio. See the Guard lined up to shoot. View the pictures of the four who died. Listen to a clip of the song.

From our archives:

A memorial was held last night and today at Kent State University to honor the four students killed and nine injured at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970:

Jackson Trial Update
Wednesday May 4, 2005

The prosecution rested today in the Michael Jackson trial. Every reporter I've seen (except one I muted because she's been overly biased since day 1 and isn't really a journalist, she just plays one on tv) has said the prosecution fell way short of what it needs to get a conviction against Michael Jackson.

My view: Terrible job by the prosecution. They didn't fulfill the promises they made in opening and just about every one of their witnesses had enough baggage to sink the Titanic. If there's a "man overboard" here, it's DA Tom Sneddon, not Michael Jackson.

The only thing that could redeem this case from the garbage dump is if Michael Jackson testifies and comes across poorly. Earth to Michael: Stay off the stand.

A few people have remarked that they have to re-log in every time. TalkLeft's webmaster Mike Ditto has provided this suggestion:

In the Firefox preferences under Privacy, make sure that it is set to accept cookies and to keep them until they expire. You can also add talkleft.com and typekey.com to the cookie exception list, setting them to "always allow".

The login cookie will still expire after 20 minutes of inactivity, that's just how Typekey works. But the username and password will always be put in automatically if you have Firefox set to remember passwords.

Other suggestions are welcome.

Crooks and Liars has the link to the video of the "Bright Eyes" performance on the Tonight Show last night. "Bright Eyes" sang a song, "When the President talks to God." It's more than a little surprising NBC allowed it to air. Check out the lyrics at Daily Kos.