Hillary Clinton thinks I am her friend. At least that's how she addressed a letter to me the other day. "Dear Friend," it said.

I have no idea how she got my address (perhaps she bought a subscription database from some magazine, or maybe Russ Feingold gave her a list). I really don't want any mail from her either.

But since she thinks we're buddy-buddy, and she asked me what was important, I was honest with her. On the lines her campaign staff provided, I wrote that she needs to renounce her support for the Iraq war, that Bush needs to be impeached, and that AIPAC's dominance over Israel-Palestine-US policy demands to be challenged.

I sent her a small campaign contribution in the hopes that my thoughts will be taken more seriously because of it.

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Josh Wolf has spent the past six months in a federal penitentiary for refusing to turn over video footage of an anarchist rally that injured a cop in San Francisco in July 2005.

The footage is not even needed in the court case anymore. But the Ninth Circuit court has refused to release him from his contempt of court charges.

A federal grand jury subpeonaed his raw footage, and he claimed his First Amendment rights and wouldn't give it up. So he's spent 170 days in jail.

You can watch the video here. He blogs from jail here.

The same debate fomenting over my situation - is he a journalist? is he a blogger? - has run wild in his, too.

Wolf has his supporters, like the Society of Professional Journalists Legal Defense Fund, and his detractors, like Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post.

Will Bunch at Attytood frames it like this:

In 2007, it all seems like such a big mess -- who's a journalist, who's a confidential source? -- but it's really not as hard as it looks. Good journalism is simply the gathering of information in the way that will get the most truth out to the most people. New technology has opened those tools to more people -- that's a good thing -- but the basic news-gathering practices that deserve Constitutional protection remain the same.

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Joe Barber revealed another step towards a city inventory when he handed me a book last week called “A Hartford Primer and Field Guide.” Produced by the wizards at Trinity College’s Cities Data Center, the Primer indicts state-subsidized segregation through its in-depth factual presentation.

The Primer, whose second edition was self-published in December 2003, covers 10 areas like local economy, health, housing, politics, and poverty, and it contains a thorough index, all in under 200 pages. Originally created in 2001 by Professor Ivan Kuzyk to link Trinity to its host city, the Primer has assumed an almost cult status among city devotees.

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Kelvin Roldán, the 28-year-old Democratic state representative from Hartford's Fourth district, is on this meteoric career path:

He started out five years ago as an aide to Mayor Eddie Perez. In the fall of 2006, he sacrificed that $74,000 a year salary to run for Evelyn Mantilla's seat, which he won. Then Monday, March 5, he landed an $89,000 job in the Hartford Public School System.

Roldán is now acting Director of Strategic Partnerships, Superintendent Steven J. Adamowski said Tuesday, March 6.

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So I had this 17 or so page Motion for Summary Judgment due for law school yesterday, and that pretty much swallowed all my time for the past few days.

And then Friday morning I had to listen to Christine Stuart of CTNewsJunkie.com and Av Harris of WNPR talk about my bizarre existence on Where We Live. Here's a link to listen.

And the honorable folks over at the Hartford Indymedia Center compared me to Paris Hilton. Gosh. I'm buxom, blond and puzzled. I tried to comment on it, but they rejected my words. Open media, indeed.

And in case you didn't read it last week, here's a link to U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor's evaluation that prosecuting the war on terror is an art:New Haven Advocate.

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My court date originally scheduled for March 2 has been postponed until Thursday, March 8, 2007 at 11 a.m. Wednesday, March 21 at 10 a.m.

The supervised pre-trial conference will have to sit about a week three weeks because of my attorney's scheduling conflict. And the fact that the day we asked for to reschedule was unavailable. An apparently rare occurence. But nothing shocks me anymore.

Oh well. I'm anxious for justice, but I gotta sit tight and wait. So here's to the first day of spring.

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Forget any of the work that I have been doing. Kiri Davis, a high school student from Washington state, has produced a solid news documentary with great production values that puts the race issue back at the center of the debate.

Kiri interviews African-American teen women and they discuss the difference between being dark and light skinned black. The kicker, though, is the black and white doll test she conducts with black children, identical to the one done for Brown v Board of Education, the school desgregation lawsuit.

When 15 out of 21 black children choose the white doll as the nice one and the black doll as the one they don't want to play with in Kiri's documentary, we know we are still mired in racial issues.

This comes to me the same day Wendy Wallace of Poynter.org wrote a story about the Washington state legislature considering legislation to extend First Amendment protections to high school journalists. Right now, Supreme Court law limits the rights of high school journos.

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