Private Property Rights and the U.S. Supreme Court

A verrry interesting case is being heard by the Supremes today and maybe tomorrow - it hinges on a very simple concept: can government take your property (through eminent domain) and compensate you with "fair market value" because that government wants to use your land for something that will generate more taxes?

See a great narrative at Slate.com or the slightly drier NY Times take...

Terrorism in the rainforest

A 74-year-old American nun was shot and killed early Saturday in Brazil's Amazon jungle, where she worked for decades to defend peasant farmers and the rain forest from illegal loggers and ranchers.

Two gunmen approached US missionary Dorothy Stang and shot her three times in the back at a settlement of landless peasants, 30 miles from the town of Anapu in the state of Para, police and fellow missionaries said.

"She had no fear; this was her life, her fight," Ze Geraldo, a federal deputy in the Workers Party, said by phone after helping to bring Stang's body to Anapu, where he said she would be buried. Having shot her in the back, a gunman fired a fourth shot to her head when she fell to the ground, then fled, he said. ''This is the savagery of the big landowners," added Geraldo, who has worked in the region for 20 years.

An upscale housing development in Maryland is torched and "ecoterrorists" are immediately blamed, completely incorrectly as it turns out. Regardless, the public perception of environmental activists as ecoterrorists is further reinforced.

But when a woman who has given her life to creating a better world for the poor and landless in South America is executed Mafia-style while quoting from her Bible, there is....nothing.

When is the last time a so-called "ecoterrorist" executed anyone, let alone a nun?

Where is the outrage now?

What it means to be Dean

From Paul Krugman's article today in the New York Times:

It was always absurd to call Mr. Dean a left-winger. Just ask the real left-wingers. During his presidential campaign, an article in the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch denounced him as a "Clintonesque Republicrat," someone who, as governor, tried "to balance the budget, even though Vermont is a state in which a balanced budget is not required."

(God forbid.)

For a while, Mr. Dean will be the public face of the Democrats, and the Republicans will try to portray him as the leftist he isn't. But Deanism isn't about turning to the left: it's about making a stand.