Mother Jones reports on the Top 10 Activist Campuses:

Number one is the University of Tehran, followed by California community colleges, NYU, Howard University and the University of Michigan. Berkeley is number nine and Yale is number 10.

[link via Hamster.]

Attorney General John Ashcroft is coming under increasing fire as critics and those in Congress move forward with legislative proposals to scale back the Patriot Act.

A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation last week that would gut major provisions of the Patriot Act, including the "sneak and peek" provision, which allows federal investigators to delay notifying terrorism suspects about search warrants. The House effectively voted to do the same thing to the provision, in an amendment attached to an appropriations bill in July.

Critics applauded the attempts at scaling back the Patriot Act, saying that Ashcroft has used the act to push a conservative agenda, politicize his office and curtail civil liberties. As they see it, Ashcroft is the very embodiment of the Patriot Act.

That's our view too. We recommend the whole article, particularly these comments by Sen. Richard Durbin:

Bill Lockyer, a Democrat, and the Attorney General for California, issued free-speech guidelines to the states' law enforcement officers this week. They aren't exactly in sync with those of the FBI:

California law enforcement officers should not spy on citizens exercising their constitutional rights of speech, religion and association unless they have reason to think a crime has been or will be committed -- no matter what John Ashcroft says.

That's the gist of one of a series of legal guidelines that state Attorney General Bill Lockyer sent to every police chief and sheriff in the state this week in the form of a book titled, "Criminal Intelligence Systems: A California Perspective."

Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, an immigrants advocacy group, held their national conference Saturday. It was attended by many top state Democratic officials. Among the top issues: how to save California's new law allowing undocumented residents to obtain drivers' licenses. Among the ideas under consideration: a work stoppage.

``We're building a movement to show the economic strength of the immigrant and Latino community until these types of adverse right-wing referendums or legislative proposals come to a stop,'' said Nativo Lopez, the group's national director.

The bill is scheduled to take effect January 1. Governor-elect Schwarzenegger has promised to try to repeal the legislation, but he may not have to do much. Already, conservative Republicans have collected 40,000 signatures to get the matter on the March, 2004 ballot. But it's not over yet as they need 375,000 signatures. Check out Calpundit, who says it's time for an intitiative to end initiatives. We're not quite ready to jump on that bandwagon.

Meanwhile, here are reasons to keep the driver's license bill:

Don't miss GW Law Professor Jonathan Turley's op-ed in the LA Times, "Students, Nuns and Sailor-Mongers, Beware: Ashcroft is pulling out all the stops to prosecute protesters."

Turley takes Ashcroft on for the Miami prosecution of Greenpeace under an obscure law (last week we wrote about the details of the case ). Turley opines:

The Greenpeace case is particularly chilling because of the extraordinary effort to find a law that could be used to pursue the organization. The 1872 law is a legal relic that must have required much archeological digging through law books to find.

The extraordinary effort made to find and use this obscure law strongly suggests a campaign of selective prosecution — the greatest scourge of the 1st Amendment. Greenpeace was engaged in a classic protest used by countless organizations, from those of the civil rights movement to anti-abortion groups. It is a way for citizens to express their opposition by literally standing in the path of the government.

...Unless deterred by Congress or the courts, Ashcroft will continue his campaign to protect Americans from the ravages of free speech. If he succeeds, it will not be sailors but free speech that will be shanghaied in Miami.

Bump and Update: The Judge has taken himself off the case.

Since the hearing, nine people in Omaha asked to meet with Reagan to discuss possible cultural bias in his courtroom. State Sen. Ernie Chambers filed a complaint with the state Commission on Judicial Qualifications, calling the ruling discriminatory.

A great example of Protest in action.

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Original Post 10/14 10:22 pm

In what strikes us as an incredible violation of free speech and parental rights, a court has ordered a father to speak to his daughter in English rather than his native Spanish when he exercises his visitation rights.

Since when does a court have the right to dictate how people converse in the privacy of the home? We hope there is a groundswell of protest lodged against this ruling.

Last April, we wrote about Choice Point, a company hired by the U.S. to collect data on hundreds of millions of citizens of Latin American countries.

During the past 18 months, the U.S. government has bought access to data on hundreds of millions of residents of 10 Latin American countries --apparently without their consent or knowledge --allowing myriad federal agencies to track foreigners entering and living in the United States.

A suburban Atlanta company, ChoicePoint Inc., collects the information abroad and sells it to U.S. government officials in three dozen agencies, including immigration investigators who've used it to arrest illegal immigrants.

The Miami Herald has new details and says the Governments of these countries are not happy with the plan and have opened investigations into the practice:

Prosecutors in Nicaragua, Mexico and elsewhere across Latin America have opened investigations into the business of private information mining after discovering that the U.S. Justice Department hired a Georgia company [Choice Point] to collect personal information on up to 300 million people throughout the region without their knowledge.

....The project is part of the U.S. government's attempt to expand its intelligence sources in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. U.S. officials say the data are being used by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to verify the identities of foreign-born criminal suspects, illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists.

Great Britain is backing off plans to require its citizens to obtain a national identity card. New research shows the cards are "close to useless in the fight against terrorism."

Here are five reasons to reject national ID cards, provided by the ACLU.

Another example of the Justice Department's out-of-control prosecution policy: A typical Greenpeace protest has resulted in a federal prosecution that, if successful, will have an extreme chilling effect on the right of all protest groups to aggressively exercise their First Amendment rights.

Here's the facts:

Three miles off the Florida coast in April of 2002, two Greenpeace activists clambered from an inflatable rubber speedboat onto a cargo ship. They were detained before they could unfurl a banner, spent the weekend in custody and two months later were sentenced to time served for boarding the ship without permission.

It was a routine act of civil disobedience until, 15 months after the incident, federal prosecutors in Miami indicted Greenpeace itself for authorizing the boarding. The group says the indictment represents a turning point in the history of American dissent.

Here's what it means:

Update: Congratulations to Human rights activist Shirin Ebadi, winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.

[Ebadi] won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for her work fighting for democracy and the rights of women and children, the first Muslim woman and the first Iranian to receive the accolade.

Ebadi, 56, the first female judge in Iran who also was jailed on charges of slandering government officials, was praised by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for promoting peaceful, democratic solutions in the struggle for human rights.

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original post:

The Nobel Peace Prize winner will be announced shortly. Candidates include the pope, the former Czech president, Brazil's new leftist leader ...and former Illinois Governor George Ryan, who emptied Illinois's death row before leaving office.

What are Ryan's chances? 12-1, according to one bookmaking odds service.

Former Gov. George Ryan and rock star Bono have something in common beyond just their Irish heritage. Both have decent odds of winning the coveted Nobel Peace Prize, which will be awarded Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

Centrebet, an online Australian bookmaker, looked over some of the 165 nominees for the peace prize and ranked Ryan at 12-1 odds and U2's lead singer at 10-1.

Others say Ryan is "running neck and neck with the Pope."

We hope Ryan gets it.

This just in from the folks at NIRR.org:

Free Danny Sigui – Stop Sigui’s Deportation

Danny Sigui was a key witness in a murder trial who helped win a conviction. He was turned over by the prosecutor’s office to the Department of Homeland Security one year before the trial ended for being undocumented.

For doing his civic duty, Danny Sigui is now being held in a maximum-security prison awaiting deportation. Please call the Department of Homeland Security and Rhode Island’s Congressional Delegation demanding Danny Sigui’s release. Why?

Today is the 101st day since Danny Sigui was put into immigration detention and deportation proceedings for the “crime” of doing his civic duty: providing key testimony that led to a conviction in a murder trial.

Danny Sigui is a Guatemalan who has worked as a mechanic and lived in Rhode Island for many years. He is a father of three children and was set to get married to his fiancée Mary Cordero, in August.

Pat M. Holt, former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writes in Tuesday's Christian Science Monitor, that John Ashcroft is the worst Attorney General in the nation's history, save for A. Mitchell Palmer, who held the office during the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Holt says its a tossup as to who is worse.

One of the duties of the attorney general as head of the Justice Department is to protect the Constitution. Both Mr. Ashcroft and Palmer found that the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, got in their way more than it protected anything. It has gotten in Ashcroft's way in his pursuit of terrorists after Sept. 11, especially those who dress differently and practice a different religion.

Palmer's crusade was the pursuit of communists, in the aftermath of World War I. He especially went after people with what to him were funny names from Eastern Europe. He tended to equate liberals with communists.

Ashcroft's vehicle is the USA Patriot Act, which Congress, abdicating its own duties of vigilance, passed with a whoop and a holler in the days after Sept. 11. Even the name of this odious legislation is offensive. It implies that the purpose of the act is to promote patriotism and that those not cooperating with it are somehow less patriotic.