Washington knows best:

The nation’s major drug policy reform groups today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for censoring the speech of those critical of the government’s “War on Drugs.”
. . .
The lawsuit responds to an amendment buried in the 2004 federal spending bill that cuts off more than $3 billion in federal funding from local transit authorities that accept advertisements critical of current marijuana laws and other drug laws. With at least $85 million at stake, the Washington Metro last week rejected an advertisement submitted by a coalition of drug policy reform groups that criticizes marijuana laws for wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and imprisoning non-violent offenders.
The rejected advertisement sponsored by the ACLU, Change the Climate, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the Marijuana Policy Project shows a group of ordinary people standing behind prison bars under the headline, “Marijuana Laws Waste Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Lock Up Non-Violent Americans.” The same groups that sought to run the advertisement filed today’s lawsuit.

It’s one thing for the federal government to use its spending power to “bribe” state and local governments to adopt federal guidelines (e.g., speed limits). It’s quite another for it to use public money to shield itself from criticism by imposing content-based speech restrictions.
The First Amendment says that’s no good.
Via Volokh Conspiracy.

Interesting AP piece on the growth of Iranian blogging. Unfortunately, if hard-line conservatives assume power following today’s election, they may try to censor the Internet and crack down on blogging.

CNN has a “conspiracy” story on how Senator Edwards is courting Howard Dean. At the bottom of the piece is a interesting factoid. Earlier, I noted how much more per vote Dean’s campaign had spent than front runners Kerry and Edwards had. It turns out that in terms of bang for the buck, Dean is far from the worst:

Dean raised and spent about $50.3 million in his presidential run, and he won 201 delegates. That means he spent about $250,000 to win each delegate, including superdelegates. Without superdelegates included, he spent some $500,000 per delegate. That’s nothing compared to Steve Forbes, who won two delegates in ’00 and quit the race in early February after he spent about $34 million — $17 million per delegate.

Ouch.

I would think this was obvious enough that it wouldn’t need to be reiterated. But apparently not.
If your a highly-paid public ambassador at a major state institution, it’s a bad idea to say the following about anyone, much less a young woman alleging sexual assault:

“It was obvious Katie was not very good. She was awful. You know what guys do? They respect your ability. You can be 90 years old, but if you can go out and play, they’ll respect you. Katie was not only a girl, she was terrible. O.K.? There’s no other way to say it.”

Barnett has since come out with the old “taken out of context” defense. But the damage has already been done. And now he looks like the awful one.

There’s bizarre, and then there’s bizarre:

An elderly Irishwoman shared a room with her sister’s corpse for up to a year and sometimes slept with it in the same bed, newspapers report.
Mary Ellen Lyons never told anyone that her sister Agnes had died, the reports said. Even their brother Michael, who lived in the same remote bungalow in rural western Ireland, did not know.
An inquest heard on Monday that Agnes probably died in 2002 — possibly in September — at the age of 70.
However, her body was only discovered in August 2003 when Mary Ellen fell ill and had to be taken to hospital.
. . .
After Agnes’ death, Mary Ellen sometimes slept in the same double bed as the corpse and sometimes in the bathroom. Michael stayed in his own bedroom and the living room of the tiny house and never entered his sisters’ room.
“There is no way that Michael would open the door of a woman’s room,” a neighbour told the inquest. “They wouldn’t even watch the television if there was a woman on it. They were from a different era.”

That’s an understatement.
Via Straight White Guy.