Blog hop

I've been woefully remiss in my reading and haven't done a blog check in a couple of weeks anyway so a quick review. Loretta Nall has a great year end review and a lot of other good items we missed, the most recent being a new campaign by Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation, the group that successfully passed the marijuana initiative in Denver. They are now trying to replicate that success on a statewide level. We of course wish them luck.

She also has news of a tentative settlement in the Goose Creek high school raid with the students receiving between $2,000 and $5,000 each for having had their civil rights violated. I think the town got off cheap. I wish it had been ten times as much so other towns would think twice before they teach their kids the lesson that they are not trusted and they are subject to humiliating searches at any time. No wonder kids are maladjusted these days.

If for some reason you haven't been to Drug WarRant, go there now and just keep scrolling for more on Morales and don't miss his post on the Bush secret surveillance story. He ties it to the drug war way better than I could.

At Flex Your Rights, Scott takes a civil libertian view of the spying scandal and gets quote of the day with this. "If the prospect of courts actually upholding these wiretaps doesn’t scare you, consider the possibility that this NSA controversy might not be the only story The New York Times has put on ice."

Scroll down for Steve's post on my pal John Gilmore and his impending legal challenge to the government's ID requirement in order to travel domestically. And lest you think this is a frivolous lawsuit, keep in mind that he's not challenging it just because it's a rule he doesn't like. He's challenging because it's a secret rule that the government will not produce.

It's an important point. How can you violate a rule you couldn't possibly know about? In fact how can a so called free country have secret laws at all? We'll be rooting for him.

And kaptinemo and I are having an interesting conversation at this post. The Kapt as always has some incisive insights. Please feel free to join in.