Democracy, as Rumsfeld informed us, is indeed messy:

Several thousand Iraqis protested the closure of a newspaper Sunday, chanting anti-U.S. slogans and burning American flags outside the newspaper’s office in Baghdad. The U.S.-led civil administration in Iraq closed the Baghdad newspaper Al Hawsa for 60 days, accusing its publishers of inciting violence against coalition troops. The paper is published by followers of prominent Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. “If the Coalition forces are going to keep on presenting us with such messages… they can just dream about any sort of end to terrorism,” a statement from the newspaper said. “And they can also dream that we will stay quiet and step down from what we believe.”

The Coalition Provisional Authority accused the paper’s editors of printing articles that incited violence against U.S. and other coalition troops — a violation of coalition regulations. The building was sealed, and anyone caught attempting to publish the paper could face up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

It also tends to respond poorly to attempts to sterilize it.

NewAlliance Bancshares Update: The Hartford Courant explores who’s cashing in on the NewAlliance Bancshares – and who isn’t:

Consider the numbers: Among the 23,000 account-holders who signed up, individuals could seek as many as 70,000 shares, and families with joint accounts could put in an order for 210,000, worth $2.1 million. The average request was about $44,000. If even a small percentage of the buyers take large allotments, that means many of the people buying newly issued stock in this urban community bank will have bought just a few token shares.

Worse, as many as 53,000 depositors and their familes didn’t take part at all. I’d venture a guess that many of them are like New Haven great-grandmother Lorraine Grasso, a customer since 1943. “I just can’t afford to buy them, that’s all,” Grasso said. “I don’t have the money to spare. If I had money to buy, sure I would have bought some.”

From Ha’aretz:

State Prosecutor Edna Arbel on Sunday presented Attorney General Menachem Mazuz with a draft indictment against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for allegedly receiving a bribe from businessman and Likud activist David Appel in the Greek Island affair. It is now up to Mazuz to decide whether to press charges against Sharon, a decision he will make after taking into account Arbel’s counsel that Sharon face charges as well as the recommendations of the head of the police investigations division, Major General Moshe Mizrahi.

New Orleans’ Channel Six WDSU:

It’s a groundbreaking court decision that legal experts say will affect everyone: Police officers in Louisiana no longer need a search or arrest warrant to conduct a brief search of your home or business…The decision was made by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Two dissenting judges called it the “road to Hell.”

The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed in Denham Springs in 2000. New Orleans Police Department spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo said the new power will go into effect immediately and won’t be abused. “We have to have a legitimate problem to be there in the first place, and if we don’t, we can’t conduct the search,” Defillo said.

I think it would be overgenerous to argue that this road is even paved with good intentions.

At least some state legislators are taking a stand against balancing budgets on the backs of the working class people who depend on social services. And they’re not Democrats:

The Virginia Republicans’ plan, which passed the Republican-controlled Senate with Democratic votes in February, calls for raising cigarette, gas and sales taxes, as well as income taxes on the wealthy, to raise nearly $4 billion over two years. The plan would reduce taxes on food and on lower incomes.

“We felt it was time to make a significant investment in Virginia,” said Senator Thomas K. Norment Jr., the Republican floor leader, who, along with the Senate president, John H. Chichester, is a leading advocate of the plan. “I absolutely hate taxes, but as a colleague said, I love Virginia more.”

The Times reports on the controversy over the poll tax of the 21st century:

In one of the lingering puzzles from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida’s rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons. At the same time, some counties mistakenly allowed actual felons to vote or turned away legitimate voters as suspected felons. A lawsuit filed in January 2001 sought to prevent similar errors, while another, filed just before the 2000 election, charged that the ban on felons voting discriminated against blacks and should be overturned.

Florida is the largest of the seven states that permanently take away the voting rights of all felons. While other states have scaled back similar bans in recent years, Mr. Bush and the Legislature call their law a necessary consequence for citizens who commit crimes, and point out that many are eventually granted clemency. “The governor believes this is a fair process,” Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, wrote in an e-mail response to questions about the ban. He pointed out that more criminals were getting their rights restored without hearings under a smoother process set in place by the governor.

Those who believe the Times that voter disenfranchisement in Florida was a matter of innocent mistakes should take a hard look at Greg Palast’s reporting here, most of which could only get printed across the Atlantic.

Disenfranchising black men with the same names as felons, of course, accomplishes the same ultimate goal as disenfranchising the felons themselves: edging working class and minority voters out of the political process. Felon disenfranchisement is an affront to the democratic principle that decisions are made best through the participation of all affected by them and to the hope that America’s crimminal justice system can serve to rehabilitate and return people to society. It perpetuates a vicious cycle by stopping the people most victimized by a broken system from mobilizing to change it.

Josh Marshall on Bill Frist’s latest move in the campaign to destroy Dick Clarke:

I never cease to be amazed at these guys’ ability to outpace my ability to impute bad faith to them.

He was just running it up the flag pole. Maybe, maybe, maybe …

From Agence France Press:

For the fourth time in two years, millions of workers across Italy observed a general strike to protest against the economic policies of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government.

Workers in most industries observed a four-hour strike, but schools, banks and post offices closed for the entire day.

The Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions’ blog points out this article reporting that seeking to defuse a movement for graduate student unionization, the University of Utah has announced improved health insurance:

This fall, many graduate students can get health insurance from the U for the first time, thereby saving money and avoiding graduate unions, said David Chapman, dean of the Graduate School.

A policy provided by Student Health Services costs students $1,000 and has a maximum benefit of $50,000.

With his administration under fire for the Jose Dirceu scandal, Brazil’s Lula Di Silva takes further steps towards his promised challenge of the IMF and the Washington Consensus:

While Lula has thus far remained above the domestic fray among his ministers, he threw down the gauntlet against the IMF and other international institutions when he met with Argentine President Nestor Kirchner in Rio de Janeiro on March 16. The presidents of South America’s two largest economies jointly released “The Declaration of Cooperation On Cooperation for Economic Growth with Equality.” It demanded that the international financial institutions act “sensibly” and that they end the deep contradictions between the economic demands they place on the developing countries and the countries’ real needs for sustainable development. The two presidents stated “this financial architecture requires mechanisms to avoid causing the crises that have afflicted Latin America.” As a step in this direction Lula and Kirchner asserted that investments in productive infrastructure projects should not be included as part of regular government expenditures. Brazil and Argentina called on the other full and associate members of the Mercosur trade bloc–Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Chile-to sign on to the declaration…

In December, Brazil extended a billion dollar loan to Venezuela to enable it to purchase Brazilian goods it urgently needed. Conservatives in the Bush administration fear an emergent alliance of Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, and now Argentina as Nestor Kirchner works with Lula to challenge the political and trade policies of the United States.

Josh Marshall on Wilson, Beers, and Clarke (oh my!):

The first possibility is that the Bush White House is so freewheeling, inattentive and just plain unlucky that it keeps appointing senior counterterrorism aides who actually turn out to be both policy incompetents and closet Democratic partisans. The second that these malefactors leave the White House, they show their true colors and start leveling all manner of baseless charges against the president.

The second possibility is that every counterterrorism expert the White House hires who isn’t (a) a hidebound ideologue or (b) a dyed-in-the-wool Bush loyalist eventually becomes so disgusted with the mix of incompetence and mendacity that is the White House’s counterterrorism policy that he eventually quits and then immediately sets about trying to drive the president from office.

From Human Rights Watch:

The U.S. government is threatening to obstruct low-income countries’ access to generic HIV/AIDS drugs approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), Human Rights Watch said today. The United States will convene a conference in Botswana on Monday that may challenge the WHO’s approval of generic copies of patented AIDS drugs. WHO has made enormous headway in verifying the quality of generic AIDS drugs that are the only hope for millions of low-income people with AIDS. But to protect brand-name pharmaceutical interests, the United States may dash that hope.

“WHO has made enormous headway in verifying the quality of generic AIDS drugs that are the only hope for millions of low-income people with AIDS,” said Joanne Csete, director of the HIV/AIDS Program at Human Rights Watch. “But to protect brand-name pharmaceutical interests, the United States may dash that hope.”