In the wake of the teacher having her students persecute a kindergartener who possibly has Asperger's Syndrome by ostracizing him, it must be open season on schoolchildren near the end of the school year.

Middle school students aren't necessarily going to do whatever the teacher tells them, no matter what.  So to enforce often-arbitrary school rules (in this case, a dress code that would ban someone wearing an American flag t-shirt), the principals had them arrested.

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.

Indiana and North Carolina are just counting their votes today, but thanks to mail-in voting, Oregon voters have their ballots now.

Remember, your ballot has to be RECEIVED by 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 20 to be counted.  If you haven't mailed your ballot by the afternoon of Friday, May 16, take it in to the county election office, a public library, or the drop boxes in Pioneer Courthouse Square.  

What are things like in your neck of Oregon?  (Signs, chatter, and the like?)

As the Pennsylvania primary approaches, the Clinton campaign will need to come up with more attacks from surrogates and tangential claims of unfitness about Barack Obama.

I'm a former Pittsburgher of Eastern European ancestry.  Bowling is part of my culture; my grandfather used to always take me to Princess and Village Lanes in Whitehall and Carrick Classic Lanes in Pittsburgh.  Bowling was something fun that you could do your entire life, and not boring to watch on TV, unlike golf.

But Obama did something very, very bad on camera.  More after the jump.

You've seen the speech on YouTube, now see the phenomenon LIVE!

Barack Obama will be in Portland and Eugene this Friday, March 21 - Portland in the morning, and Eugene in the evening.

Information over the jump...

Looky what I saw on the Oregonian's website....the girl in Hillary's infamous "3 A.M." commercial is an Obama supporter.  

(I'm not the first one to catch this, though....sorry.  But the Obama campaign has contacted her about a future, and probably original, commercial.)

I was discussing Bill O'Reilly and his inane ramblings last night with a friend during commercials in the Steelers-Rams game.  We came to different conclusions: I say he's a communist; my friend said O'Reilly was an idiot.

District of Oregon Federal Public Defender Steven Wax has confirmed the freedom of Sudanese hospital administrator Adel Hassan Hamad in a phone call to his family in Khartoum.

Hamad was working as a teacher and administrator of an orphanage/hospital on behalf of an Islamic charity in Afghanistan five years ago when he was captured by U.S. troops and spirited away to Gitmo.

No charges were ever brought against Hamad, and Hamad was never linked to actually funding or supporting terrorism, merely being associated with an organization that had a convoluted paper trail.

Portland Tribune article here.

This is a link (KABC news story) to a disturbing incident that shows both racism at work and what's wrong with the police and quasi-police forces nationwide.

16-year-old student Pleajhia Mervin was eating birthday cake in the cafeteria at Palmdale (CA) Knight High School when she dropped a piece of cake on the floor.  She attempted to clean it up, but when she didn't clean it up to a shaven-headed white security guard's satisfaction, Mr. Skinhead went into action.

Sunday, December 7, 1947

Dear Diary,

I remember six years ago if it were yesterday......everyone huddled by the radio to check the news from the Hawaii Territory to see what was happening, and knowing that I'd have to leave my life and enlist, soon.  Three months later, I was in San Diego helping to load ships, and eventually I was a cargomaster.

Now those ships are coming back to the steel mill I work at as scrap.

On August 22, 2002, George W. Bush came to Portland, Oregon to raise money for Gordon Smith's Senate re-election campaign.  

The day before, the Portland Police Bureau informed potential protesters that they would be allowed to parade and then protest one-half block from the Portland downtown Hilton, located at SW 5th Avenue and SW Taylor Street.

Hundreds of protesters marched from the North Park Blocks in Portland, eventually stopping at a barricade on SW Taylor Street halfway between SW 5th and 6th Avenues.

What happened next was typical of Bush's America and the DINOs in charge of many major cities whenever political protests occur.

Republicans are all agog over Fred Thompson - he's an actor!  Remember what happened the last time we had an actor run for President!  He has a beautiful (trophy) wife!  He is a tall MANLY MAN, unlike Dennis Kucinich!  

However, Fred Thompson may just have lost Florida with his latest crack.  See it here.

Michael Moore's new film "SiCKO" will premiere this week - (Portland residents - it will be at the Fox Tower cinemas downtown, and Eastport Plaza on 82nd Avenue).

I'm not one who should complain.  I have private health insurance through my law practice, so I'm covered....in theory.  

My wife and I pay $711 per month for "coverage" that has a $750 deductible per person per year, then 80/20 after that, and $20/40/60 prescription coverage.....so I propose this protest:

The Right-Wing Noise Machine is still all a-flutter with the tales of John Edwards' $400 haircut, as if Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich go to Supercuts.

But there's a cure for that, as well as a way to campaign in less-urban states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina - The John Edwards Barbershop Tour.

Sam Brownback is known as a social conservative, and until recently, the State of Kansas officially rejected the primacy of the theory of evolution as an explanation as to how today's animals assumed their present form.

Little did we realize that evolution is not the only scientific theory Christian fundamentalists disapprove of.

Yes, someone posted a blog entry denying heliocentrism (Earth going around the Sun, rather than the Earth staying fixed, like it says in the Bible) as an atheistic plot.

John Derbyshire's idiotic blame-the-Virginia Tech-victims column has been thoroughly savaged by everyone with an IQ above room temperature.  But it deserves to be pulled out from under the rock it's hidden under.

Why?  Because a friend of a friend of mine was murdered Sunday by another madman in Kansas City.

The best thing about the Internet is that anyone can publish to it.  The worst thing about the Internet (and self-publishing) is that anyone can publish to it.

A very good example, based on his ad in this month's Atlantic is Daniel Mark Cohen's book Unhappy Anniversary: Fifty Years Since Roth v. United States, arguing that obscenity is not protected speech not because of any particular act portrayed, but because the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment only applies to speech and publications, not any technological advances since the adoption of the Constitution.

Sick of those freakin' robocalls, especially Rethug distortions and push polls commissioned by Christofascists?  

The Oregon Legislature has introduced a bill (SB 863) to ban the use of prerecorded phone calls for all purposes except legitimate business, public safety, or school-related purposes.

Since the Oregon Constitution has nearly absolute free speech protections, the Legislature has also included a referendum to amend the Oregon Constitution to allow the ban on robocalls.

Oregonian article here.

Yes, another Ann Coulter diary - we haven't had very many of them the past few days, haven't we?  But there's an opportunity here - an opportunity to contrast the "The adults are in charge" meme of the Dubya administration with the reality - the administration and its cheerleaders are as mature as a bunch of middle-schoolers.