The Senate rejected by a single vote yesterday an effort to amend the Constitution to allow Congress to ban desecration of the American flag, after a two-day debate freighted with political calculations and sharp disputes over the limits of free speech.

The 66 to 34 vote fell just short of the two-thirds majority required to approve a constitutional amendment and submit it to the states for ratification. It marked the latest setback for congressional attempts to supersede Supreme Court decisions in 1989 and 1990. Justices narrowly ruled that burning and other desecrations of the flag are protected as free speech under the First Amendment.

GOP congressional leaders have offered up several measures in recent weeks that are important to their conservative political base -- including an amendment banning same-sex marriage and further cuts in the estate tax -- culminating with yesterday's vote on flag burning.

Polls show that most Americans want flag desecration outlawed, and the amendment's proponents said they were trying to stop justices from thwarting the public's will. They said that burning a U.S. flag in public -- while rare these days -- is a reprehensible insult to the nation's founders and a dishonor to the Americans who died fighting tyranny.

The amendment's opponents agreed that flag burning is repugnant, but argued that U.S. troops died to preserve freedoms that include controversial political statements.

Overturning a Texas law in 1989, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that burning an American flag in protest is a form of political speech protected under the First Amendment. Congress later passed a federal anti-flag-desecration law, and the high court invalidated it on the same grounds.

He says he was a drug-using, politically unaware teenager from a small, racially divided town in the middle of England -- someone who used to watch "Baywatch" and dream of flying to America and chatting with beautiful women on a beach. Terrorism? Against the United States? In the fall of 2001, when he went with boyhood friends to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, it was mostly for fun and adventure, Ruhel Ahmed says.

For two years -- from February 2002 until March 2004 -- Ahmed was a prisoner at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he joined some 500 other "enemy combatants" who were rounded up by the U.S. government in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

For both supporters and critics of U.S. military actions abroad, Guantanamo has become a potent symbol -- either as a crucial element in the struggle to protect the civilized world from future terrorist attacks or as a prominent example of the degradation of American values, humane treatment and respect for international law.

Ahmed's capture and incarceration are depicted in "The Road to Guantanamo," a feature film now showing in theaters across the United States, including the Bay Area. Ahmed said his imprisonment was a tragic mistake -- that he and two friends from Tipton, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, were trying to leave Afghanistan in November 2001 when they were wrongly seized by the soldiers of the Northern Alliance, which handed them over to American forces.

After two years of intense interrogations that Ahmed says included torture, all three men -- without being charged with a crime -- were released from Guantanamo to the custody of British authorities, who immediately let them go. The U.S. government says it was within its rights to detain Ahmed, Rasul and Iqbal for so long -- and that the remaining detainees at Guantanamo are also subject to prolonged detention and legal prosecution before special military tribunals.

The Supreme Court ruled that the tribunals set up for Hamdan and other Guantanamo prisoners violated both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs American military proceedings. Dismissing the Bush administration's contention that al Qaeda is not a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, and therefore not eligible for normal legal hearings, the court ruled that minimum legal standards must still be applied to alleged al Qaeda members who are imprisoned.

The court's decision puts pressure on the Bush administration to end Guantanamo's use as a storage facility for accused terrorists.

Clocky™ (patent pending) is an alarm clock that runs away and hides if you don't get out of bed on time. The alarm sounds, you press the snooze, and Clocky will roll off of the bedside table, jump to the floor, and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects until he finds a spot to rest. When the alarm sounds again, you must awaken to search for him. Clocky will find new spots everyday, kind of like a hide-and-seek game.

Clocky alarm clocks were designed to reinterpret the common alarm clock into something that is not stressful and obnoxious but amusing and a better fit between humans and technology.

Ted Kennedy guest blogs at Think Progress, and tells us what we can do to help win the battle.

Despite our efforts, Congress year after year has refused to give working men and women the raise they deserve. Yet Congress keeps giving itself annual pay raises--it's the height of hypocrisy.

But now, we have a real opportunity. We've had significant minimum wage victories in red states and blue states alike, and an increase received strong bipartisan support in the House Appropriations Committee last week. The momentum is growing, and the time for action is now!

Make calls, send emails - tell Senators to support the Kennedy Amendment to raise the minimum wage. Ask your friends and neighbors to take a stand for a fair minimum wage too.

It's been nine years since the minimum wage has been increased. Nine years of inflation, of higher gasoline prices, of higher real estate and rent prices.

The minimum wage, $5.15, is just $10,700/year for a full-time worker.