When we first met Constance McMillen, the Itawamba County [Mississippi] School District had canceled her high school prom, for fear she might bring her girlfriend and get gay cooties on everyone.

You probably know what happened next:

In the announcement, the school board encouraged the community to organize a private prom. “It is our hope that private citizens will organize an event for the juniors and seniors. “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this causes anyone,” the statement concluded.

Inconvenience? Well, the community prom was duly organized, and Constance and her girlfriend showed up — as did five other students. The other community prom — the one everyone somehow forgot to tell them about — was a hit.

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Good to know that we can depend upon the American government to round up the Bad People without that silly habeas crappus stuff getting in the way:

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

A spokesman for Bush declined comment. An unnamed “former associate to Mr. Rumsfeld” says the charges are untrue. We imagine Liz & Dick will be dropping by Fox for some pushback.

Speaking of which, the Times of London is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Intramural fight, anyone?

George W. Bush ‘knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent’ [Times UK]

“Would a Lava Lamp work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? Would the wax still rise to the surface? Would the blobs be smaller and faster? With broad disagreement on the answers, I built a large centrifuge to find out.”

We’re not sure which we love more: the lava lamp, or the tinkertoy centrifuge.

Lava Lamp Centrifuge [Neil Fraser, via Kottke]

Fox asks: “Do you think the vice president’s use of foul language to describe the [healthcare] bill was offensive, or not?” 57 percent of Americans answer: No big fucking whoop. [Plum Line, via Political Wire]

Justice Stevens to Retire After 34 Years [NYT]

We were going to write another deep, probing, iPad-enhanced inquiry into the nature of representative government and the role of responsible citizens in the twenty-first century, but then we came across this…

In the past environmentalists, from Lord Stern to Sir Paul McCartney, have urged people to stop eating meat because the methane produced by cattle causes global warming.

However a new study found that cattle grazed on the grasslands of China actually reduce another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.

…and decided to call it a Friday.

Cows absolved of causing global warming with nitrous oxide [Telegraph UK]

Steve King (R-Infarction) plays to the home crowd: “The Humane Society of the United States… solicits money from well-intentioned but often uninformed animal lovers and uses these donations to lobby Congress for an anti-meat, anti-animal agriculture agenda. HSUS is run by vegetarians with an agenda whose goal is to take meat off everyone’s table in America.” [TPM]