Link to video

Avery Doninger, a high school student in Connecticut, has civil rights actions pending in the US Second Court of Appeals. She and her mother sued high school principal Karissa Niehoff and superintendent Paula Schwartz after they removed Avery as class secretary.

Doninger lobbied the community to support a battle of the bands sponsored by the student council. Bizarrely, the administration responded to this by canceling the event. Doninger, 15, blogged about it, calling the administrators “douchebags.” Doninger was then banned from school office, even after apologizing, while another student who called Schwartz a “dirty whore” was given an award.

Doninger ran as a write-in candidate, won, and the school refused to accept it, and went so far as to ban t-shirts students were wearing in support of her. Clearly, the petty tyrants at the school are unacquainted with the concept of free speech.

The Doningers are appealing a decision by a judge to deny a motion for a preliminary injunction, and want an apology from the school for civil right violations and sharing of the secretary office with the administration backed candidate.

In this video, her lawyer, Atty. Jon Schoenhorn details why this case is so important. Until the Internet, schools had no right to punish students for what they did outside of school. Recently though, schools have been saying that the Internet is so pervasive that they have the right to censor students for things they do “outside the schoolhouse gates.”

Yet the doctrine on this has always been clear. Discipline can only be used if the conduct disrupts the “pedagological interests” of the school, something which clearly did not happen in this case. Yet these creeping and noxious infringements on freedom of speech continue. That’s why this case is worth following and supporting.

Andy Thibault’s Cool Justice Report has continuing coverage, and he helped organize the event.

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As oil prices rise, orbiting solar panels that beam electricity electromagnetically to earth may become practical - and COULD “generate an amount of energy nearly equivalent to all of the energy available in the world’s oil reserves.”

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He calls it a drought “of historic magnitude,” saying Lake Lanier, which provides water to one-third of Georgia, has only enough water for 121 days.

All outdoor watering has been banned. Forecasts says the drought, which is getting worse, will persist in much of the South until December.

Current U.S. drought monitor map. All of southern California and large parts of the South are classified as D-3 “extreme” or D-4 exceptional” droughts, D-4 being the most severe.

Here in Connecticut, we have a D-1 “moderate” drought. However it just started raining again, we got an inch these past few days, and more is coming this week. So our drought may be ending.

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Moomaid

Art Mooveau

Cows Gone Wild

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Would Saddam have murdered as many innocents as have perished under American occupation? It is becoming a more even match, isn’t it? And would the United States have lost its moral leadership without the torture tactics adopted across the war theater in Iraq? The answer is yes: torture was authorized before the Iraq invasion. But using it in Iraq, against Muslims and in Saddam’s own prisons, deepened the stain. With every day we stay on, the day we leave recedes from view. We will, I think, never leave. A Clinton presidency would be the means that half the country is reconciled to that fact. Which is why the neocons will come to terms with it. And she with them.

Except the choice may not be that of the United States to make. Like with Vietnam, another insane war for no purpose, the US government clung to the belief that somehow they controlled the agenda. They didn’t. And events forced them to leave.

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In Connecticut recently, the night manager of a liquor store who had a legal concealed gun permit was arrested after, while paying for food at a restaurant, the gun showed and scared a waitress. She called police who arrested him even though he proved he had a permit. The charges were dropped, but he will have to wait nearly a year to get his revoked permit back due to an apparently dysfunctional Board of Firearms Permit board.

Had he been in Utah, this would have been a non-issue. Any adult can carry an unconcealed handgun, no permit required. There’s no proof one way or the other other that states with relaxed gun laws are any more (or less) violent. So, I say, let people have guns if they want, without major legal restriction.

Also, if the Democrats wish to take the West, the best possible way they could do that is by relaxing their stand on gun control.

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