A woman in Iowa serving jail time for prostitution is diagnosed as mentally ill (schizophrenic) and placed on medication. When she's transferred to prison, they decide not to give her the medicine anymore. She then had hallucinations and started acting, well, mentally ill, breaking prison rules. So Iowa transfers her to the prison medical facility and starts her on the medication again, and she improves. When she's well, they start punishing her -- for what she did when she wasn't taking the medicine that they wouldn't give her.

How many lives and how many billions of dollars could this country save each year if, like every other civilized nation, we admitted that people get mentally ill and we treated them? Instead, we pretend they don't exist, wait for them to break the law, and imprison them. We're not very bright sometimes.

7-year-old Alexis Patterson is missing in Milwaukee, having vanished while on her way to her school on May 3. 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart, as you've probably heard, was "apparently kidnapped at gunpoint from her family's million-dollar home on June 5." Says the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

A Nexis search of major newspapers and magazines shows 67 stories about Patterson, almost all of them by The Associated Press and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In the last week, there have been more than 400 stories about Smart.

There is another difference between the two cases that cannot be ignored. Smart is white; Patterson black.

His book tour seems to be going well. Had I realized about two days earlier that he was in Dallas one week ago, I would have found a way to go. Would have been better than the post-vacation nightmare I endured here, that's for sure. (Thanks to Jerry Kindall.)

The Slate editor who created Today's Papers, died in a scuba accident Saturday in southern California. TP has become an indispensable shortcut to the work of the five major US newspapers that I read almost every day, and Shuger was the one who set the tone. He stopped writing it last fall to cover the "Terror War" for Slate, but it's still a must-read. Shuger had a lot of good work left to do. I hope someone picks it up.

An aside: Slate's insistence on using Microsoft technology like Active Server Pages (Microsoft owns Slate) means that, until they put the link above in Shuger's tribute, I have never been able to find a URL that would simply show you the current installment instead of one tied to a specific day. I'm glad to have it, and I'm putting it in the "Links" section of the site (replacing Slate itself), but it should be on Slate's front page. It's a bad URL, it's a bad policy, and the feature deserves better, even without Shuger. Damn.

I know it's another Salon Premium article, but drawing the parallels between the current administration's love for secrecy and how that same love led to disaster in the Nixon White House -- with some of the same advisers -- is another vote for Salon's premium service. An excerpt:

Ashcroft has played to fear. Earlier this month, when he tossed Levi's domestic-spying guidelines into the compost, Ashcroft misleadingly told the public that FBI agents had been prevented from surfing the Internet, monitoring public rallies and attending religious services. Nonsense.

Under the Levi guidelines, any of those investigation and surveillance activities were possible and, indeed, common -- so long as agents had at least a slim pretext for engaging in them. Just last week I was on a panel with Laurie Levenson, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, who recalled accompanying FBI agents to photograph political rallies in the not-so-distant past, fully authorized by the Levi guidelines. Besides, the question has never been just whether the FBI can attend public events, but what agents can do with the information they collect. My own filing cabinets are filled to overflowing with papers released under the FOIA that document the bureau's old pre-Levi practices, like monitoring the speeches of dissenters, disrupting protest groups, and otherwise intruding on the most basic rights in ways that had nothing to do with public safety. Ashcroft's new guidelines could easily return the FBI to those lawless days -- a prospect, by the way, that many of today's generation of agents do not look forward to.