* On Thursday, August 31, 2006, a small group of black students asked if they could sit under a tree on the traditionally white side of the Jena High School square.
 * The students were informed by the Vice Principal that they could sit wherever they pleased.
 * The following day, September 1, 2006, three nooses were found hanging from the tree in question. Two of the nooses were black and one was gold: the Jena High School colors.
[...]
 * Principal Scott Windham recommended to an expulsion hearing committee that the three white boys responsible for hanging the nooses in the tree should be expelled from school.
[...]
 * When black students staged an impromptu protest under the tree on Wednesday, September 6, 2006, a school assembly was hastily convened. Flanked by police officers, District Attorney Reed Walters warned black students that additional unrest would be treated as a criminal matter. According to multiple witnesses, Walters warned the black student protestors that, "I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen."
[...]
* In one incident, a black student was assaulted by a white adult as he entered a predominantly white partly held at the Fair Barn  (a large metal building reserved for social events). After being struck in the face without warning, the young black student was assaulted by white students wielding beer bottles and was punched and kicked before adults broke up the fight. It has been reported that the white assailant who threw the first punch was subsequently charged with simple battery(a misdemeanor), but there is no documentary evidence that anyone was charged.
 * In a second major incident, a white high school graduate who had been involved in the assault the night before pulled a pump-action shotgun on three black high school students as they exited the Gotta-Go, a local convenience store. After a brief struggle for possession of the firearm, the black students exited the scene with the weapon.
[...]
 * Shortly after the lunch hour of Monday, December 4, 2006, a fight between a white student and a black student reportedly ended with the white student [Justin Barker, later arrested for having a rifle with 13 bullets in his truck in the school parking lot.] being knocked to the floor. Several black students reportedly attacked the white student as he lay unconscious. Because the incident took place in a crowded area and was over in a matter of seconds eye witness accounts vary widely. Written statements from students closest to the scene (in space and time) suggest that the incident was sparked by an angry exchange in the gymnasium moments before in which the black student assaulted at the Fair Barn was taunted for having his "ass whipped".
 *  The victim of the attack is close friends of the boys who have admitted to hanging the nooses in September of 2006.
 *  Within an hour of the fight, six black students were arrested and charged with aggravated battery.
[...]
 According to The Jena Times, at least a dozen teachers subsequently threatened a "sick-out" if discipline was not restored to the school. According to the Alexandria Town Talk, District Attorney Reed Walters responded to the teacher's threat by upping the charges on the six boys to attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder--charges carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison.
[...]
The white boy who threw the first punch at the black student [Robert Bailey Jr.] at the Fair Barn was charged with simple battery - others who took part in the beating were not charged at all. The white adult (a Jena high school graduate) who threatened three black Jena students with a shotgun was not charged with a crime.
[...]
Black Teen Convicted After a prosecutor reduced attempted murder charges this week, an all-white jury found Mychal Bell, 17, guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery, both felonies.

Hat Tip to Larisa, at-Largely:

...we have the power to bypass bypass the traditional media filter by participating in discussions online, through blogs and YouTube, ensuring that the important issues - like how to responsibly end the war -- get the real attention that they deserve in the 2008 presidential campaign

Out of nine lives, I spent seven
Now, how in the world do you get to Heaven
Oh, you don't know the shape I'm in

President George W. Bush has become dangerously steeped in ideas of Armageddon, the Apocalypse, an imminent war with Satanic forces in the Middle East, and an urgency to construct an American theocracy to fulfill God's end-of-days plan, according to close observers.
...
Further evidence is the Bush administration's transformation of the military.
...
Army Lt. General William "Jerry" Boykin made headlines in 2003 when he said he believed America was engaged in a holy war as a "Christian nation" battling Satan. Adversaries can be defeated, he said, "only if we come against them in the name of Jesus." Despite his highly publicized rhetoric, Boykin remains Bush's deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

...Bush's own personal minister, Franklin Graham, has called Islam "evil and very wicked." He has said, "Let's use the weapons we have, the weapons of mass destruction if need be, and destroy the enemy."

Respected journalist Bill Moyers says that for the religious figures around Bush "a war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared, but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption." Scholars calculate that the group, which religion author Lynne Bundesen has dubbed "end-time Christians," has up to 40 million followers.
...
Meanwhile, the influence of end-time Christians has burrowed deeply into the American Israel Political Action Committee, AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobby. At the last AIPAC meeting with a long list of speakers that included Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, "Hagee got the loudest applause of anybody," according to Mezvinsky.

Mezvinsky reports he is increasingly hearing Israelis say that "we want the United States focusing on Iran. Those are people who would like the United States to attack Iran. They realize that, given the involvement in Iraq, there's not the wherewithal to go after Iran." Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has called Iran an "existential threat" to Israel.

This spring, AIPAC, with the help of its end-time supporters, succeeded in removing language from a military appropriations bill that would have required Bush to get Congressional approval before using military force against Iran. So again, Iran policy provides the example - here for how end-time religion, the politics of Israel and neocon strategies converge. And how end-time thinking entangles George W. Bush.

With God on Our Side: Evangelical Christianity On Steroids In  US Military

Do they really mean it?   No way Republicans wouldn't fillubuster it and I doubt they good get Dems from conservative districts to support it.

Dark clouds gathering.  Many dark clouds.

While in "modern" times, that approach is understood to be as at least as abusive as government's current intrusion into people's sexuality, (the "get government out of the boardrooms and into the bedrooms" types), perhaps there is another cure.

As it is clear that many of these laws are passed in order to provide a cover for politicos, and those in that ancillary machinery, such as police and judges, to indulge in such things as the pornography, etc., all the while they are ostensibly fighting it, we should test for that.

Baghdad - A huge bomb explosion followed by a hail of gunfire and grenades killed five U.S. soldiers, the military said Friday. The attack climaxed the deadliest three-month period for the Americans since the war began.

Seven soldiers were wounded in the attack Thursday in the Rasheed district, a mixed Sunni-Shiite area of southern Baghdad where U.S.- led forces recently stepped up pressure on extremists. The commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad suggested the ambush could be part of an escalating backlash by Sunni insurgents.

Those deaths brought to 99 the number of U.S. troops killed this month, according to an Associated Press count. The toll for the past three months - 329 - made it the deadliest quarter for U.S. troops in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. That surpasses the 316 soldiers killed during November 2004 to January 2005.

Transcripts of four hearings in the case of Thomas Kontogiannis, a financier who pleaded guilty in connection with the Randy "Duke" Cunningham scandal, will remain sealed, a federal appeals court said yesterday.

What possibly could be in this private citizen's hearing transcripts that is classified? Cunningham was a congressman on the House intelligence committee, and his plea agreement and sentencing documents are not sealed. But Kontogiannis' hearings transcripts are. What is Kontogiannis' relationship with the US government?

Air strikes in the British-controlled Helmand province of Afghanistan may have killed civilians, coalition troops said yesterday as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them women and children, had died.

In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants.
...
In Afghanistan, the civilian deaths caused by US and Nato-led troops have infuriated local people and prompted President Hamid Karzai to publicly condemn foreign forces for careless 'use of extreme force' and for viewing Afghan lives as 'cheap'.
...
Three children were also killed on Friday and another wounded when an old rocket they were playing with exploded in Zabul province in the south, said General Yaqoub Khan, the provincial police chief.

Just as Bush has done, Chamberlain authorized the wiretapping of citizens without court authorization; Churchill was among those whose phones were tapped by the prime minister's subordinates. Churchill, by contrast, believed firmly in the sanctity of individual liberties and the need to protect them from government encroachment.