In Chicago, prostitute-activists are urging social services over arrests.

Whatever their childhood aspirations, each of the women -- ranging in age from their late twenties to their early fifties -- ended up selling their bodies to strangers for money. They sometimes were beaten and cheated by customers, served time in jail and were run out of neighborhoods by residents who said the women's behavior destroyed property values.

Now, in face-to-face meetings set up by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, the women have begun telling their hard-knocks life stories to those same neighbors who once shooed them away. Their goal is to get society to focus less on criminal prosecution and more on solving the underlying problems that lead women such as them -- and some men, too -- to the streets in the first place: sexual abuse, drug dependency, poor job skills and low self-esteem.

We agree with providing social services instead of jail time. In fact, we think prostititution should be decriminalized altogether.

A bill introduced in Texas to release Tulia drug bust prisoners pending a ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals , which could take months, is advancing. Two special prosecutors working on the cases are backing it. The bill was introduced by Houston Sen. John Whitmire who said,""I want these folks out is the bottom line, like yesterday."

It's a travel day for us, so we won't be posting again until late tonight. In the meantime, check out our weekend additions, as well as the great sites on the right and our newsfeed on the left.

Justice Antonin Scalia spoke at a conference in Alaska Friday. When asked about the Patriot Act, he responded,

Scalia said the more irresponsible and violent a society becomes, the more citizens' freedoms will be restricted. He said that U.S. citizens tend to interpret the Constitution as giving them more power than the document provides.

The shape of things to come?

Bump and Update: We're glad to see this is still in the news--3 days running now. Here's today's article.

Here's more from NPR on the The Innocents, a new book by Taryn Simon that tells the stories of people wrongly imprisoned for years before proving their innocence.


Buy the Book Today!

**************
Originally posted May 9:

The Innocence Project and the DNA Identification Technology and Human Rights Center of Berkeley, Calif., are forming a much needed new project to assist exonerated prisoners after their release from jail.

"We were getting all these people out of prison, but we found most of them were having tremendous difficulty with life on the street," said Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, which provides legal assistance to prisoners seeking to prove their innocence through DNA testing.

The Life After Exoneration project will create a national network to provide support services such as "housing assistance, job training and mental health services" to the newly exonerated.

To date, $75,000 has been raised to fund the initial phase of the project, which will inlude " evaluating the exonerated to determine the services they need and recruiting social service agencies from across the nation to participate in the project. "

An additional $300,000 to $500,000 will be needed "to get the project up and running. "

It comes as news to us (if not to you all) that included in the Bush Budget are billions of dollars to refurbish and enhance our nuclear weapons facilities and capabilities. It appears we are about to get back into the nuclear bomb business big time. Congress has been debating the proposals, and committees resume meeting this week.

Proposals in President Bush's 2004 budget would refurbish virtually every facet of the nuclear weapons complex, ranging from the nuclear test site in Nevada to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina.

There has been intense opposition in Washington to some aspects of President Bush's nuclear weapons policies. The Democrats have fought, for instance, a proposal to build a new generation of smaller warheads, which cleared a Senate committee last week. But there has been virtually no congressional dissent or debate over the president's proposed multibillion- dollar resuscitation of America's nuclear infrastructure.

....The Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday approved $15.5 million for research into the bunker-busters, officially called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. It set aside an additional $6 million for research into advanced nuclear concepts, and approved a repeal of the 10-year-old ban on the development of low-yield warheads. Democrats say there is little hope of halting the initiatives.

Our states are going bankrupt, social services are cut to the bone, the economy is in deep trouble, and Bush wants to build nuclear bombs?

Even worse, outside his perceived military success, his re-election campaign is apparently going great guns. One democratic strategist referred to him as "John Wayne in the Oval Office." Norman Mailer says we are in a "pre-fascist atmosphere" and about to become a "megabanana republic."

So where are the Democrats? Why can't even one of the nine contenders in the crowded field of announced candidates generate some excitement--or at least genuine interest?

San Francisco party activist Jeanette Gitler says "... the unfortunate thing about Democrats is, they haven't taken a proactive approach. They've slid into the woodwork." GOP strategist Sean Walsh likens the democratic contenders to a first grade soccer game.

They're running all over the place and yelling at each other, and they've had to backtrack and apologize on comments" -- from Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's quip about a "regime change" to Dean's attack on Kerry for lack of "courage." "It's driving them absolutely insane that (Bush) won't engage on their level, and he's flying high above them," Walsh said.

We're still waiting for a candidate who excites us. We wish a hard left-of center candidate would emerge to give the voters a real choice. Right now it's Bush vs. Bush vs. Bush, and what that adds up to is a Bush/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld win in November.

Monica Lewinsky has written a serious op-ed article in the Los Angeles Times for Mother's Day, Tell Mama All About It? Not Without a Lawyer, in which she argues for the creation of a parent-child privilege.

Few people are aware that, in our country, parents can be forced to testify against their children and vice versa; there is no parent-child privilege under the aegis of the federal government. We have a husband-wife privilege, a doctor-patient privilege, an attorney-client privilege and even a privilege between priest and penitent. But no comparable confidential boundary is recognized for parent and child.

All of these existing privileges place value on certain relationships in order to foster and then protect them. Their inviolability is deemed more important than the truth-finding function of the courts. Isn't the parent-child relationship every bit as important, if not more so?

Monica is right. Parent-child communications should be legally protected in the same way as communications between a person and her religious advisor, psychiatrist, attorney or spouse. The need for trust and open communication between parent and child is one of the most basic and fundamental values in our society.

Courts have traditionally held that it is up to the legislature to enact a parent-child privilege. Congress and state legislatures need should enact a statute that protects a parent from being forced to testify in any official proceeding as to what his or her child told the parent in confidence, unless the child expressly agrees to the disclosure. Similarly, the law should protect a child from having to testify against his or her own parent.

Exceptions should be built into the statute where the communication was made in the presence of others (and therefore not confidential,) or in furtherance of a crime by both parent and child or in any case in which the child is a victim of violence or abuse.

Thanks, Monica.

On June 2, the FCC is planning to relax rules designed to keep the nation's media from being controlled by just a few owners. This is bad. The bottom line will be a media that is owned by very few -- and the likelihood of their corporate agenda reflecting the liberal ideology is nil. There is still time to register your protests.

At the Wednesday, May 7, 2003 City Council meeting, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution 50-0 calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to "protect the public's right to diversity in media content, ownership and employment" by prohibiting further media consolidation. The resolution cautions that media consolidation results in lost jobs, reduced diversity in programming and ownership, and less commitment to the local community.

From Sunday's Chicago Tribune, here are the rules as they now exist (although many have already been avoided by grandfathering or waivers):

"Medical marijuana patients may be able to protect themselves from harmful toxins in marijuana smoke by inhaling their medicine using an electric vaporizer, according to initial results of a study by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and California NORML."

The full report, released April 15, 2003, is available here. [thanks to Hit and Run for the link]

At least one of the FBI's prior Chinese spy investigations is going to be re-examined as a result of the Katrina Leung/ Agent Smith arrests.

From 1991 to 1997, a physicist named Peter Lee was investigated by the FBI, under the direction of FBI agents James J. Smith and William Cleveland, Jr, the two agents with whom accused double agent Katrina Leung had romantic affairs. The operation lasted six years and was called "Royal Tourist."

The Third Circuit has issued an opinion saying that attorneys can keep a client's fee, even if the money was illegally obtained by the client, so long as the attorney has a good faith reason to believe the fees were legal. The case arose in the context of a bankruptcy case. The court ruled,

The issue is whether the facts known to the firms and the reasonable inference to be drawn from those facts would affirmatively suggest to a reasonable person in their position that they were receiving assets of the estate. If not, there would be no duty to investigate."

The Toronto Star reports that the Canadian Government is backing off plans to decriminalize marijuana.

The decision was made just days after the U.S. threatened increased border crackdowns if the plan went into effect.

Under the new plan, possession of small amounts of pot would still be a criminal offense, but the offender would not "register a criminal record" and the penalties will be fines, not jail.

Also, under the new plans, penalties for drug trafficking will be doubled and more money will be spent at targeting traffickers.

Last week, U.S. drug czar John Walters suggested border traffic would slow to a crawl because the U.S. would increase inspections to stop smugglers from illegally shipping "poison" south.

Will Glaspy, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency spokesman, told The Detroit News yesterday that talk of decriminalizing pot in Canada would mean "more customs, more border patrols, more DEA.

What a bully the Bush has become. He seems determined to interfere in everybody else's business. We wish someone would tell him to just butt out.