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Michael Moore has donated $20,000 to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s bail fund, claiming that the rape allegations against him are part of a “vicious attack” on Wikileaks orchestrated by “the powerful and the corrupt.” In announcing this donation, he gave little attention to the specifics of the allegations themselves, though he did characterize them as “strange.”

I’ve written before that there’s nothing particularly strange about the claims made against Assange, and that the public perception to the contrary is largely a result of misrepresentations proffered by Assange’s lawyers, combined with some deeply problematic reporting.

Today Sady Doyle of the website Tiger Beatdown has launched a Twitter campaign calling Moore out for his dismissive attitude toward the allegations. Some have claimed that Doyle is misrepresenting Moore’s position, and the passage in his blogpost is at least arguably ambiguous, but Moore has said more in other venues about the charges, and those statements demonstrate that Doyle’s analysis is on target.

Here’s what Moore said on BBC yesterday:

Interviewer: Everybody knows you are a very strong advocate of freedom of speech. But you’ve offered $20,000 to help bail him on sex charges, and you’re not in favor of sex crimes, obviously. So … that has got nothing to do with what he’s done in Wikileaks, has it? These allegations of sex crimes?

Michael Moore: Yeah, I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with anything. [laughs] Are you kidding me? I mean really. What? I mean, we’ve lived long enough, through enough of this kind of deception, these kinds of dirty tricks that governments and corporations play. And the issue here is that if he were any other just normal Brit, with this so-called “crime” that he’s been accused of — which I understand isn’t, wouldn’t actually be a crime if it was committed in Britain, a condom broke I believe is the “evidence.” He hasn’t even been charged with a crime. He hasn’t been charged with anything. And what is he doing sitting in a jail tonight? I think that’s just absurd, and it looks bad on Britain, frankly, to your court system somehow be played by another government, which is probably in cahoots with my government, perhaps your government. We don’t really know, but we will someday, because it’ll all come out on Wikileaks on the internet.

Moore is just wrong. The accusations against Assange aren’t “strange.” What he’s accused of would be a criminal act in the United States, or Britain. The claims have nothing to do with criminalizing the accidental breakage of a condom.

Moore is wrong. He should retract and apologize.

Students staged mass protests in Rome and throughout Italy yesterday as the Italian parliament voted on a confidence resolution that threatened the government of media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi, who has proposed huge cuts to higher education as part of a reform package condemned by many in Italy’s universities, prevailed by a mere three votes. As news of the result spread through the crowds, anger swelled — in all, more than a hundred protesters were injured.

Though Berlusconi, who has dominated Italian politics for more than a decade, survived yesterday’s vote, his ability to lead — and the fate of his controversial higher education policies — remain doubtful.

“Student power is not so much something we are fighting for, as it is something we must have in order to gain specific objectives. Then what are the objectives? What is our program? There is much variety and dispute on these questions. But there is one thing that seems clear. However the specific forms of our immediate demands and programs may vary, the long-range goal and the daily drive that motivates and directs us is our intense longing for our liberation. In short, what the student power movement is about is freedom.”

–Carl Davidson, National Secretary, Students for a Democratic Society, 1967

Last week the House of Representatives passed the DREAM Act — a bill that would give undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as children a path to citizenship through college or military service. The Senate, which was scheduled to hold a parallel vote, tabled the bill instead.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Yesterday’s motion to table in the Senate came for two reasons — first, because the House had made changes to the bill, and second because supporters decided they needed more time to round up votes. The DREAM Act isn’t dead — a new version, matching the one the House passed, can still be introduced before the end of the year.

• The 59-40 tally in that vote to table is pretty much meaningless. The rumors going around that the DREAM Act now has 59 votes in the Senate are false. See my post from yesterday for all the details.

• Yesterday’s announcement that Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) would be voting against the DREAM Act is pretty much meaningless, too. He’s been a known “no” vote for months.

• Chances of passage are still slim — one big DREAM organizer put them at ten percent yesterday — but they may be rising. Check out this fascinating piece in The Hill for the blow-by-blow on how Harry Reid kept the DREAM alive.

• The White House has announced that it wants a vote on the START arms control treaty to be the Senate’s next order of business. The DREAM Act and repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are likely to come after that.

• Nobody knows for sure when a new Senate vote will be held. All the smart money is saying it won’t be this week, though.

• I’m covering this story on an ongoing basis. Follow @studentactivism on Twitter to find out what I know as soon as I know it.

Over the weekend I’ve heard rumors from both sides of the DREAM Act debate that the bill — which would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children — is currently just one vote shy of the sixty it needs for passage in the Senate.

I’m skeptical.

The DREAM Act has garnered lots of Republican support in the past, but most of those allies have reversed themselves in recent months, as the political winds in the country — and in the GOP specifically — have shifted. With the rise of the Tea Party, many Republicans now see a vote for the bill as a potential liability in future races.

It’s not impossible that the bill could get to sixty votes during the current lame duck session, but it seems highly unlikely. And there have been no public declarations of support for the DREAM Act in recent days that would lend credence to the “59 votes” story.

So where did the rumor come from? I’m guessing it was the vote last week on tabling the DREAM Act, a vote that pulled the bill from the Senate floor allowing it to be brought back in revised form this week. That vote passed by a 59-40 margin, with supporters of the law mostly voting yes, and opponents mostly voting no.

Pay close attention to that “mostly,” though. The vote on the motion proceeded largely along partisan lines, with only four Democrats voting against and five Republicans voting in favor. And crucially, those defections don’t track with what we know about how the DREAM Act vote itself is likely to shake out — the two declared Republican DREAM Act supporters voted with their party against the motion, for instance.

I don’t know why the vote came out exactly the way it did, but it’s clear that it’s not a proxy for the DREAM Act vote itself.

Sorry.

Update | DREAM Activist Prerna Lal replies to this post on Twitter: “It’s prob not going to be close. It’s either 60 (like 10%) or teetering at 55.”

She’s right, and here’s why. There are more than sixty senators who support the DREAM Act in their heart of hearts. If this vote were held by secret ballot, it’d pass pretty easily. But a significant number of senators — most of them Republicans — are worried that they’ll suffer political consequences if they vote yes.

If you go to one of those senators — let’s call her Shmusan Shmollins, just to pick a name out of a hat — and ask her to be the 57th vote for the DREAM Act, she’ll turn you down. Because if she’s number 57, and there’s no number 58, the bill still fails. She takes a hit, and the bill still fails.

If you ask her to be the 60th vote, on the other hand, she’s got a tougher predicament. Voting yes hurts her, but voting no hurts the DREAMers. If you can get to 59, getting to 60 is easy. And by the same token, if you can’t get to 60, numbers 57, 58, and 59 are likely to flip back to the “no” column.