Say hello to Moving Ideas. Org, formerly known as the Electronic Policy Network. It is a project of American Prospect. From its "about page":

Our goal is to improve collaboration and dialogue between policy and grassroots organizations, and to promote their work to journalists and legislators. Moving Ideas posts the best ideas and resources from leading progressive research and advocacy institutions, as well as promotes high-quality websites and publishes original content. We hope to strengthen democratic participation by providing a more inclusive and intelligible debate about the issues that shape our world.

Here's one article of particular interest to us:

by TChris

Concerned that protestors might exercise their First Amendment rights during an economic summit that President Bush will attend with world leaders at Sea Island on the coast of Georgia next month, the City of Brunswick and Glynn County enacted laws designed to inhibit demonstrations.

Brunswick and Glynn County approved laws in March requiring permits for groups of six or more people gathering on public property for any purpose aimed at attracting the attention of bystanders. The laws require groups to put up deposits equal to estimated costs for clean-up and police protection. They also prohibit participants from carrying signs larger than 2 feet by 3 feet, or on sticks that could be used as weapons.

The ACLU filed suit today asking a court to declare the laws unconstitutional. The ACLU has recent precedent on its side.

The lawsuit in federal court comes 18 days after a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a similar law in Augusta. The ACLU filed that suit on behalf of women's activist Martha Burk, who fought with the city last year over her right to demonstrate at the Masters golf tournament.

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, married to former CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose identity was outed by journalist Robert Novak who reportedly got it from senior White House officials, has a new book out, The Politics of Truth.

In it, he names three possible leakers of the information, among them, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Our copy of the book arrived today. The book charges that the White House crossed the line from promoting policy to willful deceptions and possible violations of federal law. Wilson says this Administration has become a danger to the nation.

Get your copy now.

The Politics of Truth
by Joseph Wilson

Marcus Dixon, the black high school honor student serving a ten year sentence in a Georgia prison for consensual sex with his nearly-16-year-old white girlfriend, has had his conviction reversed by the Georgia Supreme Court.

The state's highest court ruled 18-year-old Marcus Dixon should have been prosecuted just on the lesser charge of misdemeanor statutory rape rather than aggravated child molestation for having sex with a 15-year-old in February 2003. Dixon had claimed he was targeted because he is black and had sex with a white girl. His case drew protests from the NAACP.

Dixon was acquitted on felony rape charges but found guilty of aggravated child molestation, which comes with a mandatory decade-long sentence, as well as statutory rape. Monday's ruling lets the statutory rape conviction, which carries a maximum sentence of one year and a $1,000 fine, stand.

Dixon was 18 at the time of the offense with a 3.96 grade point average. His football scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University was revoked after his arrest. His case drew national publicity and strong criticism from the NAACP. Dixon is African-American; his victim is white.

More details are available in this article, Was it a Lynching or Justice?

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by TChris

States are rethinking the "lock 'em up" approach to crime as they notice a correlation between soaring prison populations and rising deficits. A report by the Justice Department should fuel the demand for reform.

The number of arrests rose only to 13.7 million in 2001 from 12 million in 1982, and the number of court cases grew only to 92.8 million in 2001 from 86 million in 1984, the report found. But the number of state and federal prison inmates jumped to 1.3 million in 2001, up from only 488,000 in 1985. At the same time, the number of inmates in local and county jails tripled, to 631,000, the report said.

The pricetag for fighting crime reached $167 billion in 2001. Realizing that they can't afford to continue funding an unduly harsh response to crime, states have started to rethink their sentencing philosophies.

In the last year, more than half the states took legislative steps to modify tough sentencing laws they passed in the 1990's, like scrapping mandatory minimum terms or requiring treatment instead of prison for first-time drug offenders, said Dan Wilhelm, director of the state sentencing and corrections program at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York.

Professor Michael Jacobson says that the policy changes have been "minor reformist efforts, just nibbling around the edges," and argues that this is a good time "to take a new look at how we use mass incarceration."

One big savings could come from a revised parole policy, he said, returning fewer parolees to prison for minor infractions like being late for an appointment with a parole officer or failing a drug test. This would be particularly helpful in California, the state with the largest number of inmates and where almost two-thirds are in prison for parole violations.

Seven more 7 G.I.'s have been sanctioned for abusing Iraqi prisoners at Al Ghraib prison raising the total number of penalized soldiers to 13. The commander of the prison, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, maintains she had no idea the abuse was occurring. She is trying to blame it on the military intelligence unit. Whatever happened to "The buck stops here?" We're tired of her excuses. It happened on her watch. She should go.

Say hello to Media Matters, the new website headed up by former conservative journalist David Brock, since turned progressive. The New York Times explores the new site which it says will monitor conservative websites and radio and tv programs.

The site is well funded--to the tune of $2 million--by the folks at American Center Progress Report and other wealthy liberals:

Among Mr. Brock's donors is Leo Hindery Jr., the former cable magnate; Susie Tompkins Buell, who is co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and is close to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and Ms. Buell's husband Mark; and James C. Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist whose appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg was delayed for a year and a half in the late 1990's by conservative lawmakers protesting what they called his promotion of a "gay lifestyle."

Here's how Media Matters describes itself:

At the behest of Mass. Governor Mitt Romney, a panel of appointed experts have submitted a death penalty bill for the state. The proponents of the bill argue that under its provisions, the death penalty will be applied fairly and innocent persons are unlikely to be executed. Poppycock.

Nationwide, more than 100 death row inmates have been exonerated in recent years. Former Illinois governor George Ryan ® commuted 167 death sentences in January 2003, saying his state's system was "haunted by the demon of error." A University of Michigan study published last month said it was likely that thousands of wrongfully convicted people were incarcerated in the United States.

Joshua Rubenstein, northeast regional director for Amnesty International, which opposes capital punishment, said that the reforms proposed by Romney expose the shortcomings of existing death penalty laws and that those sentenced to long prison terms for murder or other crimes deserve the same high standards Romney seeks for capital cases. Even with higher standards in place, Rubenstein said, mistakes will continue, because even scientific evidence has been proven fallible. "The system is simply too flawed to fix," he said. "We are still relying on the vagaries of human nature, and there's nothing Governor Romney can do about that."

The Commission did not start from the proposition of asking whether the death penalty should be reinstated. It assumed it should:

The 11-member committee was not asked to make a recommendation about whether the penalty should be reinstated but rather to determine how best to administer it.

Massachussetts has not had a death penalty for 20 years. No one has been executed in the state in 57 years. Our view: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Romney will hold a press conference and release the Commission's report Monday.

51 Vietnam vets gathered in Utah this weekend and discussed, among other things, whether Iraq has turned into another Vietnam.

Through two days of bring-your-own-wine receptions and lingering breakfasts in the downtown hotel here where the veterans had gathered, the answer was rarely a simple yes or no. For every 10 similarities, these veterans said, there are 10 subtle ways that Iraq seems different. Still, every answer was rooted in something that most Americans lack: intimate, vivid knowledge, much of it still raw despite the years, of the Vietnam War experience.

Iraq is charged with religion, some said, while Vietnam was more about the politics of nationalism. Some said the lack of an exit strategy from Iraq made Vietnam a parallel, while others argued that global terrorism had changed everything and comparisons with the 1960's were not possible.

Others said they thought the United States was getting in deeper every day in the Middle East and that Mr. Bush must take the blame. "Doing something that you know instinctively is wrong and continuing to do it is the height of folly — I fear that's where we are," said Robb Ruyle, who was in charge of patient records for the 71st Evac. Mr. Ruyle, now a small-business owner in Montrose, Colo., is married to a triage nurse he met in Pleiku, the former Lynn Morgan, and has a son, Thomas, who is now serving in Iraq as an infantry intelligence specialist.

Louis Pepe was a federal prison guard at MCC Manhattan in 2000 when he was brutally attacked, stabbed in the eye, and more by two of the defendants in the case involving the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. One of the attackers, Mamdouh Mahmud Salimm, was reputed to be an associate of Osama bin Laden.

Salimn gets sentenced Monday and Pepe plans to be there. He is outraged that Salimn will only get 17 to 21 years for the assault, even though he is facing trial and a possible life sentence on conspiracy charges for the 1998 attack. We can't say we blame him, if you read the account of the attack, it sounds horrific.

But what's up with Pepe's claim that the U.S. Government has downplayed the attack and cast him in a role that suggests he was careless in allowing the attack to happen? This is one sad story, here's some of it.

In the interview Sunday with The Associated Press, Pepe sat in his wheelchair in a small room in the Queens house where he lives with his parents. Pepe said the government and Salim have combined to sanitize what happened on Nov. 1, 2000, portraying the assault as quick and almost entirely Salim's doing after the guard failed to handcuff the inmates.

Pepe said he will tell the judge how he properly handcuffed the inmates before they slipped free, blinded him with hot sauce, beat him repeatedly and even tried to rape him before stabbing him to get his keys in a bid to free other suspected terrorists. "Both of them did it, not just one," Pepe said excitedly, his right eye wide open and a piece of gauze resting in the socket where the left eye used to be....Pepe said the attack lasted an hour, rather than the 20 minutes that prison authorities maintain it took for help to arrive from less-isolated parts of Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center.

by TChris

Federal authorities visited the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court 1,727 times during 2003 to ask for secret warrants in terrorism or espionage investigations. All but three requests were at least partially approved; two of those three were approved after the requests were modified.

The warrants authorize electronic interception of communications as well as physical searches. Requests for secret warrants have doubled since 2001, an increase that some find troubling.

Civil liberties advocates maintain that the sharp rise in the government's use of the secret warrants, made easier by the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, represents a worrisome trend because the authorities are held to a lower standard of proof in spying on suspects than they are in seeking traditional criminal warrants.

The increased requests are reportedly "overwhelming the ability of the system to process them and to conduct the surveillance."

by TChris

A hundred people met today in Pinehurst, North Carolina to discuss the need for a moratorium on the state's death penalty. Attending the meeting were Darryl Hunt, who spent 19 years in prison before DNA evidence that prosecutors had withheld from him proved he didn't commit the crime, and Alan Gell, who spent nine years on death row before his lawyers uncovered witness statements, again withheld by the prosecution, that proved his innocence.

The state Senate passed a bill last year calling for a two year moratorium. The state House is now considering the bill.