Trouble in the ranks at the California GOP convention:

But immigration was the issue of passion Saturday, and Kaloogian was the candidate capturing it at his rally with Tancredo in a crowded white tent outside the convention hotel near San Francisco Airport. Next to the stage, two boys wearing Kaloogian T-shirts carried posters reading, “No Terrorist Driver’s License.” The signs showed a driver’s license bearing a photo of Osama bin Laden. Tancredo, who flew in from Colorado for the rally, said that America had taken “rabid, overstated multiculturalism” too far.
“People are still coming across our borders with the intent to do terrible things to us,” he told the cheering crowd. He called Bush’s proposal “lousy, lousy policy.”
Gloria Irwin, the Glenn County Republican Party chairwoman, said she agreed that Bush’s plan was “terrible.”

There are valid reasons for people to oppose immigration. But this “terrorist driver’s license” bit is basically a scare tactic. No U.S. terrorist has snuck into the country through the Mexican border. They haven’t needed to; there’s easier ways to get in.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like the Bush immigrant work plan is going over so well among the faithful.

The Knoxville News Sentinel has an article on a proposal in the state legislature intended to “depoliticize” the license plate issue.
You have to read 3/4 of the article before you discover what the proposal is, and even then it’s not very clear:

The bill, in essence, would take the Legislature out of the decision-making process and allow issuance of a specialty plate for any organization meeting minimal qualifications, provided it can sign up 1,000 people in advance who pledge to purchase the new plates at $35 each.
The minimum criteria, [Rep. Jamie] Hagood said, would specify that the plate’s content “not be obscene,” that it not closely resemble another plate already issued and that the design “could not interfere with law enforcement.”

This is an improvement over the Legislature having total control of license plate speech; presumably both sides will be able to speak on an issue.
Still, I wonder why we need this fuss. It seems the non-profits have become so dependent on state-assisted fund raising that they are now calling the shots. It wasn’t so long ago that groups managed to get by without specialty plates.

Wow:

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’
The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.
The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Climate change ‘should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern’, say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.
An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is ‘plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately’, they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.
. . .
Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office – and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism – said: ‘If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.’
Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon’s dire warnings could no longer be ignored.
‘Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It’s going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush’s single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,’ added Watson.

It’s hard to know how much to make of this without reading the report. It could be a worst-case type scenario; I presume the Pentagon is into that kind of thing. Even I, who am concerned about climate change, find it difficult to believe wars could erupt over it in 15 years. (More of the report’s predictions are here.)
But it will be have some impact, and we should dealing with the problem now. The Bush administration has been AWOL on environmental protection and it’s time for Americans to demand accountability.

Resonance reader jeff-perado (e-mail: stutz[at]unlv.nevada[dot]edu) has been monitoring discussion of religion’s role in government and e-mails the following:
If you happened to catch the Feb 17 edition of the 700 Club you heard Pat tell his audience that the best thing that could happen in Iraq would be for them to adopt a secular constitution that allowed freedom of and freedom from (Islamic) religion. But not 5 minutes later, Pat is ridiculing England because they want to make their schools more secular. So which is it Pat? Do you want true secularism or true theocracy as a country’s governing principle? (Hint: Secularism means freedom from religious pressure in ANY direction — not freedom from any religion EXCEPT Christianity) If anyone is unclear of the meaning of secular, check here.
For those of you with a strong stomach, and are willing to watch an actual 700 Club broadcast, head here and select the Feb 17 show.
I could write an entire book chopping Sean Hannity off at the knees, but it is really unnecessary, as his “logic” is self-destructive. He defends Bush and castigates liberals in one fell swoop by saying that Bush went to war with “evil” in Iraq, whereas liberals try to reason with evil. The failure in his logic is twofold: first, why then is Bush not invading Cuba and its bloody tyrant Castro, or China their bloodthirsty regime, or any of the dozen evil dictators of African countries?
The answer is: Hannity’s theory on fighting evil is fundamentally flawed. Bush himself says some dictators must be reasoned with and not destroyed by bombs and bullets (North Korea and Iran).
Second if this Hannity were serious he would advocate using the atomic bomb to destroy all evil in the world by bombing all evil regimes. Since we have seen the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq as acceptable to conservatives, then there should be no problem with using American atomic weapons of mass destruction in Hannity’s screwy (and completely frightening) logic. Please, for the safety of this planet, ignore these repulsive conservatives, and bring sanity back into the world. Peace is a good thing, as no one dies needlessly from bullets and bombs. War kills children, as we have seen in Iraq, and how can anyone justify killing children as being a good (and moral) thing?
You may ask why I insist on watching Pat and his propaganda, but I find it very useful in keeping an eye on what they are thinking and how to best expose their tripe. Because I insist on logic and reason above their form of derision, I must be able to provide valid counteragruments. This is why I find it necessary to learn what their passions are. So now you know why I hit so hard on subjects such as allowing homosexuals the decency of having the same rights as heterosexuals, keeping prayer in the church and in the home but out of schools, keeping the ten commandments out of taxpayer’s public facilities, and keeping religious teaching out of U.S., state, and local law. These things are what Pat fights for and I must keep up on, so I can defend our U.S. Constitution from his onslaughts, and protect the rights of all Americans from his destructive agenda. As I have pointed out, the worst human-created disasters in American history were all religiously motivated, so we all must fight to keep religion out of our government, or we will suffer more 9-11’s.
The gods of all religions belong in their respective churches, not in our halls of Congress.
Remember nothing else of Pat’s, but this statement, “Government should be secular.” He was referring to Iraq, but it is just as crucial here in our most cherished land, The United States of America.

This time organizers of the Democratic National Convention are to blame:

Under a preliminary plan floated by convention organizers, the “free-speech zone” would be a small plot bounded by Green Line tracks and North Washington Street, in an area that until recently was given over to the elevated artery. The zone would hold as few as 400 of the several thousand protesters who are expected in Boston in late July.
“The area looks a little silly, to be honest with you,” said Urszula Masny-Latos, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild’s Massachusetts chapter. “People will not be able to express their concerns with whatever will be happening, because no one will have access to delegates. No one will be heard, and the area is just too small.”
Officials with the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU of Massachusetts plan to meet with Boston Police Department representatives in the weeks to come to ask that the plan be changed. Boston police say no final decisions will be made for months, and stressed that they’re open to input.

I don’t know why these organizers are trying to adopt Bushesque-type tactics, but there’s still an opportunity for more reasonable voices to prevail.
An interesting tidbit from the legal battle which preceded the 2000 Democratic convention:

Relegated to a parking lot blocks from the convention arena, protesters sued, and less than a month before that convention began, a federal judge ruled that the designated area was unconstitutional. Organizers were forced to move the area to a parking lot directly across the street from an arena entrance, in keeping with earlier federal court rulings that any legal demonstration be allowed within “sight and sound” of its intended audience.

I haven’t checked out these decisions, but this “sight and sound” element could be used to challenge several of the “free speech zones” which I’ve read about.