The newest conflict is at Heritage High School in Vancouver, Washington.  Twelve students were holding informal morning prayer sessions in a commons area.  The school administration deemed the prayer meetings disruptive so they asked the students to move the sessions into a classroom and offered "limited supervision".  For anyone who was active in high school clubs, limited supervision means they have to have a teacher at the meetings who minds his or her own business and reads the paper while the club meets:

Bill Bentley, an Evergreen assistant superintendent who oversees Heritage, said pupils were warned days ago that their informal morning prayer sessions were blocking traffic in the crowded commons.  Other students complained to school faculty about the prayers, he said.

Representative Jo Ann Davis (R-VA-1) is the sponsor of H.R. 119, the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act.  The legislation requires "that health plans provide coverage for a minimum hospital stay for mastectomies, lumpectomies, and lymph node dissection for the treatment of breast cancer and coverage for secondary consultations."  The minimum stay period is 48 hours.  Because insurance companies do not cover that length of stay, men and women (it is mostly women, but men can have breast cancer too) are often forced to go home just a few hours after surgery, against the wishes of their doctors, still groggy from anesthesia and sometimes with drainage tubes still attached.  This is just wrong and it is something that can be fixed.

Around fifteen years ago I rented a space at the Englishtown Auction in NJ and proceeded to sell my baseball card collection out of the back of my pickup truck (yes, even a liberal can own a pickup truck, and I used it to get my rowboat down to lakes to fish, too).  I was hawking my wares, up came some guy who spent about fifteen minutes flipping through the pages of my collection.  Then he spent about fifteen minutes telling me how my collection sucked and his was so much better.

Some of you may be familiar with my friend Juan Melli and the Bluejersey web site (where I have the privilege of being a front-page blogger).  Juan and Bluejersey were out in front of the Laurel Hester story and also invaluable in the battle to bring marriage equality to NJ (Governor Corzine signed the new civil unions law yesterday, but the legislature is required to revisit it in six months to see if it is working, and they may just recognize full marriage equality at that time).

PoliticsNJ.com, the top politicial web site in the state, just named Juan Melli as its Politician of the Year, beating out such notables as Senator Bob Menendez.

Joe Conason analyzes two of the leading candidates, Jane Harman and Alcee Hastings, for the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), and suggests that the best person for the job is Rush Holt (NJ):

Among the possible alternatives is Rush Holt, D-N.J., a physicist and former State Department intelligence officer who is not only highly qualified to chair HPSCI but also has served on the committee with distinction. His honesty has never been questioned. For this job, above all others, Pelosi should honor her campaign promises and choose the best.

David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, makes a compelling argument in his Capital Games blog for why Nancy Pelosi should name Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ-12) to chair the House Intelligence Committee.  Holt is not the ranking member of the committee and the politics don't favor his appointment, but logic and the congressman's credentials favor it, and the netroots should favor the congressman as well.  Congressman Holt is a friend to web loggers and Net Neutrality and is one of the members of Congress who "gets it" when it comes to this powerful communications medium.

Here's what Corn had to say...

Two weeks ago I handicapped some of the congressional races.  Turned out I did pretty well.

Predicted:  Menendez over Kean, 8 points
Actual:  Menendez over Kean by 8.6 points as of 2:25AM, with 99% of precincts reporting.  Ed "The Weedman" Forchion received 11,360 votes and one of them was mine. That vote for Forchion was in protest of Menendez's vote on the Torture Bill, a law so heinous that it shames every American and violates the Constitution.

Friday night, October 27, Tom Wyka, Democratic challenger for Rodney Frelinghuysen's (R-NJ-11) seat in the House met in a debate.  Not one newspaper covered the event, but The Daily Record criticized both candidates and the sponsor, the League of Women's Voters, because the debate did not appear on cable television.  Actually, Frelinghuysen made it a condition of his participation that there be no audio or video record.

I was there and wrote up a report on it, which I posted to a couple of other web logs.  I figured I'd post it here as well to give it as much exposure as possible.  What follows is the unedited posting.
------------------
I was in Morristown last night for the debate between Tom Wyka (D) and Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen at Morristown High School.  Wyka is challenging the congressman for his seat in the House representing the 11th District.  The debate was marred by excessive civility and thoughtfulness, making it far less entertaining than, for example the widely deplored Senate campaign in New Jersey that has so many people saying "a pox on both their houses and their garden sheds".

Last Monday night, the editorial board of Blanton's and Ashton's met in the basement of a private residence in Franklin Township (Somerset), New Jersey to analyze a few of the closest House and Senate races.  Fortunately for all involved, there is a large and well-stocked wine cabinet in that same basement.  As of 4:30 AM, October 17, 2006 that same wine cabinet was not nearly as well-stocked (the editorial board of Blanton's and Ashton's unanimously endorses the Kendall-Jackson Vintner's Reserve Sauvignon Blanc 2005 as a great "value" wine) and those same races were still considered tight, but the editorial board of Blanton's and Ashton's was decidedly looser.  Or tighter.  Depends on your point of view.  Many of us had a good look at the ceiling.

Tom Kean Junior's cynicism is impressive.  You folks, you know how politics is.  It is often a dirty sort of business, and the Kean campaign this year has sunk to some pretty deep, if not entirely new, lows in Jersey politics, but the fact that he has actually decided to attack the families of people who are serving in Iraq or have died in Iraq for political motives is truly impressive.  The members of the Military Families Speak Out organization keep trying to ask him questions about his support for the war in Iraq, you see.  They've been doing that since August, when he met with them, and if he had answered their questions, as he promised to do last August, the whole matter would have gone away.  The unanswered questions include questions about improving care for the returning troops and the threat of an Iraqi civil war.  Now, with the peculiar cynicism of his campaign, Kean has made his refusal to answer their questions the biggest story of the campaign with just one month to go to the election.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), the man responsible for the page program in the House, says that he is responsible for the failure to do anything about sexual predator and ex-Representative Mark Foley (R-FL).  A senior GOP leadership aide also says Hastert won't step down as Speaker of the House.  In other words, he is taking responsibility and there is no consequence for his failure to oversee the safety of the House pages.

The status of HR 550, Congressman Rush Holt's (D-NJ-12) Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act is like something out of Alice in Wonderland: curiouser and curiouser.

[Re-posted with permission of the author from Sumo Merriment.]

Thank God No One In America Can Remember Anything About Anything Ever

Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday:

   

"But some seem not to have learned history's lessons...once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism."

   

George Bush yesterday:

   

The war we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century...As veterans, you have seen this kind of enemy before. They're successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists, and other totalitarians of the 20th century. And history shows what the outcome will be.

   

Where were both of these speeches given? At the national convention of the American Legion.

   

And what was the American Legion up to in the 1920s and 30s?

No less a notable than the great Kos himself is writing about the intended swift-boating of Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, but with the GOP, sleazy tactics are the first choice when honest campaigning won't win.  Winning, after all, is the only thing, whereas good government must take a back seat.

And so we have New Jersey State Senator Junior Kean, son of former Governor Tom Kean, whose campaign consultant Matt Leonardo stated outright that he was preparing a swift boat-styled film on Bob Menendez.

Then you have Junior Kean himself, on WHYY in Philadelphia (mp3 of the interview is here), repeating sleazy claims about Senator Menendez that were actually thoroughly and clearly refuted by both the New York Times and the Star Ledger.  In fact, when Kean repeated the sleazy claims on the air, the interviewer read from the New York Times and refuted his remarks right to his face (it was really delicious).  Kean's response was a flustered, "Um, what was he doing there then?"

They've come fast and furious during the five and a half years he's been in office:  opportunity after opportunity to be his own man, to be presidential, to do the right thing.  Time after time he lets the pitch slip past him.

Tens of thousands of Westerners are stranded in Lebanon and the federal government appears befuddled as to how to extract American citizens from a war zone.

If you thought the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina was inadequate and incompetent, you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Under George Bush's stewardship, incompetence has become the standard of performance in all branches of government.  Now we have the evacuation of American citizens from Lebanon, which is going so poorly that I can't imagine anyone in the federal government has the slightest clue as to what to do or what is going on.  In other words, Situation Normal, All Fouled Up.

The rumor is that Fidel Castro, who either will be or was going to be 80 years young on August 13 of this year, is dead.

Chip Griffin is the founder of Netvocates.  He, or someone claiming to be him, left the following comment to the posting titled Netvocates Redux: Don't Look At Me...I'm Hideous:

I'm happy to respond. Simply put, NetVocates does not post anonymous comments on blogs. If an unattributed comment appears on your blog, it is not from us. We will always attribute any comments to whomever we are working for so that it is crystal clear to the blogger and the readers. If you see our domain on your blog, it simply means we were reading it to learn what you had to say.

This is my response.