So here's our new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don't see them, we don't quote them, we don't link to them. They're banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

Awesome. I don't agree with all of their policies, but I agree with this.

I do want to be clear though that I did not make this decision to benefit any movement or serve anyone's agenda. I made this decision for myself, based on an intense personal conviction that what I am doing is not only right, but the only decision possible for me as a person and a veteran.

I swore an oath that basically boils down to, if by my sacrifice my nation will be protected from decay, I offer myself proudly and willingly. I'd like to think it is American to find creative ways to support dissent against injustice.

"I think it's very much a reflection of the fact that there was a very aggressive assault on civil liberties," said ACLU national deputy executive director Dorothy Ehrlich. "Over the past seven years, many Americans felt their own cherished values were under attack, and they didn't want to sit by."

The ACLU counted about 250,000 members in the final year of Bill Clinton's presidency. Today, the organization has about 500,000 card-carriers, 2,500 of them in Utah.

Fundraising has increased in kind. According the IRS, the nonprofit had about $44 million in annual revenues in the 2000 fiscal year. In the fiscal year ending in March of 2007, it collected more than $80 million.

The women's anti-war group has told ralliers to come equipped with spells and pointy hats Friday for "witches, crones and sirens" day, the last of the group's weeklong homage to Mother's Day.

"Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we're going to end war," Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

Yeah, that'll work. Maybe next week you can have a "throw salt over your shoulder" protest, or sacrifice a goat to a Roman goddess.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to pay a million dollars for fake meat -- even if it has caused a "near civil war" within the organization.

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But, Ms. Newkirk said, the decision to sponsor a prize caused "a near civil war in our office," since so many PETA members are repulsed by the thought of eating animal tissue, even if no animals are killed.

I don't agree with PETA as an organization. That being said, if they could grow me a filet mignon in a test tube and do it with less impact on the environment than cattle farming, I'm there.

Why there's some PETA people who would be against eating a test tube steak, I don't know. No animals are being killed.

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it's not an easy one to answer. I don't know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in "An Inconvenient Truth" came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That's when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the "why bother" question. Let's say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

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Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only "food miles" but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

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There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists' projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

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As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection -- and responsibility -- linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

While it is easy to say that there is some guy in Chinawhois your carbon-footprint evil twin, it's just as easy to say that there's some guy in Texas, driving his Escalade at 85 miles per hour to meet his tee time at a golf course that sucks down more water than the town it is in who is going to have a round of steaks with his buddies afterwards.

As for the rest of the concerns, that it might be too little too late, no matter what you do and the fact that some courses of action might not actually be helpful but harmful, there's always The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

At least one torchbearer decided to show her support for Tibetan independence during her moment in the spotlight. After being passed the Olympic flame, Majora Carter pulled out a small Tibetan flag that she had hidden in her shirt sleeve.

"The Chinese security and cops were on me like white on rice, it was no joke," said Carter, 41, who runs a nonprofit organization in New York. "They pulled me out of the race, and then San Francisco police officers pushed me back into the crowd on the side of the street."

The Olympic torch was rerouted away from thousands of demonstrators and spectators who crowded the city's waterfront Wednesday to witness the flame's symbolic journey to the Beijing Games.

As the heavily-guarded torchbearers made their way through the city's streets on a chaotic journey, there was scuffling between police and protesters, but order was restored quickly.

The planned closing ceremony at the San Francisco Bay waterfront was canceled and another one was planned at an undisclosed location. Massive crowds had gathered at the waterfront to support and protest the flame.

If the entire point is to display the flag as it goes around the world and have ceremonies for people to attend and then you change where all of these things will take place and not tell people, then you might as well not bother.

Shouting "Shame on China!" and waving Tibetan flags, pro-Tibetan demonstrators and others protesting Chinese human rights abuses turned the running of the Olympic torch through the streets here on Sunday into a tumult of scuffles. The police said that one man broke through a tight security cordon and made a failed grab for the torch, and that 35 people were arrested.

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One protester who broke through the police cordon, David Allen, said his anger flared at the sight of British sports stars being guarded in the streets of London by Chinese security men.

"What really got my goat was our sporting heroes being surrounded by the Chinese security heavies guarding the torch," he said. "It makes us complicit in the regime's repression. You have to ask: Where were these security men last week? Beating up people in the villages of China, no doubt."

One of the protesters who sparred verbally with pro-China groups in Trafalgar Square was David Phillips, a 25-year-old American from Austin, Tex., who said he had worked for six months at the American Embassy in Beijing.

Now working at a travel agency in London, Mr. Phillips said he had witnessed human rights abuses in China. "There are serious human rights violations going on, and you can't ignore that," he said. "And this is an appropriate place for us to voice our feelings."

Seven Tibet independence activists were detained this afternoon after three of them scaled the Golden Gate Bridge and unfurled a large protest banner reading "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 08." The three climbers remained on the bridge for about 2 hours before coming down voluntarily. Upon their descent they were met and arrested by officers of the California Highway Patrol. The daring action comes two days before China's torch relay is expected to be greeted by thousands of Tibet protesters from across North America when it arrives in San Francisco.

Local mirror of video of protestors on the Golden Gate Bridge