Four years ago today, an American-made Caterpillar bulldozer driven by an Israeli Defense Forces soldier drove over peace activist Rachel Corrie twice.

The founders of the International Solidarity Movement, whom she was volunteering with, remember it as a black day. She was acting as a human shield to stop the demolition of the the house of the Palestinian Dr. Samir Masri.

No one has ever been charged in her death, and the Israeli investigation was along the same lines of one Alberto Gonzales would do on himself.

Tomorrow, Saturday, in Hartford there is a big protest at the Old State House at 3 p.m. There's one in Washington, D.C. at the Pentagon, as well.

On Monday, attorney Ken Starr will argue before the Supreme Court that high school principals have the right to discipline students who are not on school grounds in the case Frederick v. Morse. I'll be there at that one.

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As the military does, so does the paramilitary. Earlier this month, U.S. troops trying to cover up what seemed to be the wanton shooting of civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan erased digital photos from an AP photographer's equipment.

Say Anything blog has the report here.

Combine that with my arrest for photographing Gov. M. Jodi Rell, and you've got a precedent that cops in New Haven seem to want to follow, according to this report filed by New Haven Advocate photographer Daniel Smith.

Smith, who photographed Iraq without problems, says the cops threatened to arrest him for shooting at the St. Patty's Day parade in New Haven. The New Haven Independent has two other incidents this year here and here.

People, do we want to be a free society and a free press or not? It's T-minus six days and counting for an answer for me, as I return to court March 21. And the build-up begins.

Democratic State Representatives Peter Tercyak, Diana Urban and Tim O'Brien have introduced this beauty: Proposed Bill No. 6249: An Act Establishing A Legislative Intelligence Oversight Committee. They will hold a public hearing on it March 16.

Then the Judiciary Committee has rasied Bill No. 7390: An Act Concerning Oversight of Intelligence Gathering by Law Enforcement Agencies. The public hearing is apparently on March 19.

The AP has a short story on the WTNH website. CTNewsJunkie has a fix here.

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Correction: State Rep. Doug McCrory works full time for the Hartford Board of Education, half time as a vice principal at an elementary school, and half time as a minority recruitment officer. The 40-Year Plan regrets any inconvenience the error in reporting may have caused.

To avoid any appearance of impropriety in the recent hiring of State Representative Kelvin Roldán as a $90,000 a year fundraiser for the Hartford school system, Roldán should voluntarily agree to work half-time and take a commensurate salary.

Roldán's new job (documented here first) as a cabinet-level official in Superintendent Steven J. Adamowski's office - after Roldán lead the search committee to find the new superintendent - set off red flags for nearly everyone. Or at least those of us with an ethical compass.

The situation got Courant columnist Helen Ubiñas' dander up, in a column she called "Protége's Promotion a Blunder."

"So what do we have now?" Ubiñas asked in Sunday's paper. "A guy who works for the superintendent helping decide how much money the schools are going to get from the state. And a guy who can vote to raise or lower corporate taxes working with companies the schools lean heavily on."

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Mayor Eddie Perez will announce his official bid for re-election at some point in the future, he said Monday night after delivering his State of the City address to an overflow crowd in Hartford City Hall Monday evening.

"I haven't made a definite decision as to how we are going to do it," he said, but made clear it will happen. "Today is about the state of the city."

And the state of the city is fantastic, where not a mistake was made or a bad thing happened, according to his speech, which – minus the minor-league oration - sounded like a re-election stemwinder.

But Council President John Bazzano argued that the speech wasn't about presentation.

"We don't worry about delivery, it's content," Bazzano said. "It was all things important to the city: housing, police, education, quality of life issues."

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UPDATE: Firedoglake reports on 3/15 that Hillary wants us to rule Iraq as a colonial power indefinitely. Okay, they don't say colonial, but I do.

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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