Fables of the reconstruction

We're So Civilized

Lisa Williams at learning the lessons of nixon:

[W]hen I start reading stories about the US’s increasing use of mercenaries, I start having this weird feeling that the Middle Ages never ended, and if I could see truly, I’d see the Walmart walls as castle walls, and me, and the lady behind the cash register and everybody else I knew pulling turnips except when they ran off to invade the Holy Land for money and excitement.

I often feel this way. We're not so far removed from feudalism, or the cave.

This Is What Happens When You Don't Have Internet Access

Debra Beasley LaFave is a 23-year-old reading teacher in the Tampa area. Apparently bored by sex with her new husband, and turned on by the fact that it was forbidden, she initiated a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy who was one of her students.

Two things: One, it shows men have no monopoly on doing stupid things, although we certainly can claim the vast majority of the market. Two, if she wanted taboo sex, she didn't have to commit felonies. That's what the internet is for! Most likely, this all resulted because she wasn't conversant with using the web. Another tragedy that could have been avoided by making high-speed internet access freely available.

Clinton At National Constitution Center

Bill will be appearing at the National Constitution Center on Monday, July 5th, at noon, to sell and sign "My Life". I just spent the last half hour dialing the phone ("all circuits are busy now") and scored 2 tickets. Anybody want to come with me? In keeping with the occasion, preference will be given to slutty women in thongs.

100,000

A few moments ago, Fables of the reconstruction received its 100,000th visitor, which is pretty good, given that I only started less than 11 months ago.

But the fact that the visit was from the Department of Justice sort of creeps me.

A Neutral Tribunal

Hard Cases Make Weird Law

The Supreme Court has ruled in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, and unsurprisingly, a plurality of Justices reaffirmed the judiciary's power to review the detention of U.S. citizens while authorizing the classification of Hamdi as an "enemy combatant." While news reports declare this a setback for the Bush Administration, my very cursory initial reading of the opinion (pdf) by Justice O'Connor (joined by Rehnquist, Kennedy and, surprisingly, Breyer) is that it really is nothing more than a pinprick on an elephant hide. In fact, the Court suggests several means for the administration to get around their ruling. In short, the Court ruled 7-2 that the government has the power to classify a citizen as an enemy combatant - whatever that is - under some circumstances (they split 4-2-1 on what circumstances) and Antonin Scalia emerges as the staunchest defender of liberty. To say it is strange would be an understatement.

Half a Loaf

In the best part of the plurality's decision, the Court considered and rejected in detail the Fourth Circuit's decision that once the military had declared someone an enemy combatant, that they were thereafter not due any protection of the courts. Instead, there must be a hearing to determine if the facts of the case support a finding that the detainee is an enemy combatant. Incredibly, though, the Court left open the question of what exactly an enemy combatant is, holding only that it includes "individuals who fought against the United States in Afghanistan as part of the Taliban, an organization known to have supported the al Qaeda terrorist network responsible for those attacks, are individuals Congress sought to target" in the use of force resolution.

The Court also declined to set a clear limit on how long Hamdi can be held:

[W]e agree that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized. Further, we understand Congress'’ grant of authority for the use of “necessary and appropriate force” to include the authority to detain for the duration of the relevant conflict, and our understanding is based on longstanding law-of-war principles. If the practical circumstances of a given conflict are entirely unlike those of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war, that understanding may unravel. But that is not the situation we face as of this date.

What's the bottom line? It's not clear. The implication seems to be a double-edged threat: if the Court's "understanding" of the laws of war is no long operative, it is saying it will revisit the scope of the power of the executive to detain. Which way they would adjust the scope of the power, either to expand it to include lifetime detention without active combat occurring or forbid such detention, is not clear. This statement seems to me to be primarily a cautionary note to the government that, if pushed on the question, the Court may come down with a rule that the Executive will not like.

Presumed Guilty

That aside, the core ruling of what happens to Hamdi next must be one that the Executive likes:

We therefore hold that a citizen-detainee seeking to challenge his classification as an enemy combatant must receive notice of the factual basis for his classification, and a fair opportunity to rebut the Government’s factual assertions before a neutral decisionmaker. ... [A]side from these core elements, enemy combatant proceedings may be tailored to alleviate their uncommon potential to burden the Executive at a time of ongoing military conflict. Hearsay, for example, may need to be accepted as the most reliable available evidence from the Government in such a proceeding. Likewise, the Constitution would not be offended by a presumption in favor of the Government’s evidence, so long as that presumption remained a rebuttable one and fair opportunity for rebuttal were provided. Thus, once the Government puts forth credible evidence that the habeas petitioner meets the enemy-combatant criteria, the onus could shift to the petitioner to rebut that evidence with more persuasive evidence that he falls outside the criteria. A burden-shifting scheme of this sort would meet the goal of ensuring that the errant tourist, embedded journalist, or local aid worker has a chance to prove military error while giving due regard to the Executive once it has put forth meaningful support for its conclusion that the detainee is in fact an enemy combatant.

In other words, the presumption of innocence does not apply, and the detainee has to provide evidence he's not an enemy combatant, which is not defined. This works well for CNN reporters, not so well for illiterate farmers. Which, of course, is the point.

The Court also tosses in the observation that military tribunals could do all that is required, which strikes me as a plea to get these cases out of the federal courts, which would solve the uncertainty problem for the military and relieve the Court of the obligation of displeasing the public by "coddling terrorists."

A Little More Free, Please

Justices Souter and Ginsberg, trying to strike a better balance, say that detention of enemy combatants would be lawful if Congress authorizes it explicitly, but that it didn't do so in this case. Dissenting in part and concurring in the result, their opinion is notable most for the fact that the plurality seems to totally ignore it.

Antonin Scalia, Hero

Perhaps the most surprising part of the decision is that Antonin Scalia delivers a dissent, in which Justice Stevens joins (words you will likely never read again), in which he forcefully argues that any detention of a U.S. citizen which occurs while habeas corpus is not suspended entitles that person to the full panoply of rights a criminal defendant is entitled to. In short, he says, charge Hamdi or let him go. Scalia's absolutely right.

In all, not a great day for the highest court in the land, although it's also not the Korematsu of the 21st century. Hamdi will get his day in court, and after a fair hearing, he will be locked away, probably for good. The respective power interests of the government branches have been protected, and civil liberties has taken a hit again, as a result.

Update: Jack Balkin:

In essence, the Court has said in these cases: don't tell us that we are irrelevant. The flip side of that demand is that if the Administration now goes through the motions of justifying its decisions before a court, courts are much more likely to let it do what it likes. In that sense, the decisions in Hamdi and Rasul cannot be understood to be complete victories for civil liberties. But they are better than the alternatives.

An understatement, to be sure. But he's right.

In Birmingham They Love the Governor

Hayneyz at sparkles of lucidity, laced with insanity (emphasis added):

When I was a kid, we used to clap at the end of the movie. As I got older, we just “evacuated” the theater before the credits so we could get the hell out of the parking lot. Today, I relived my childhood.

... I have never been to a theater where every person in line was buying tickets for the same movie. Until today. And, barring the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I haven’t been to a movie with such expressive participation. Again, until today.

Yes, in the middle of Alabama, in the middle of an upper-class area, in the middle of an upper-class shopping area, people were going to the movies. The movie, rather. A man in line in front of me told his wife, “It’s the only place us Democrats can get together and not be ridiculed!". I just laughed. I’m not a Democrat. But I appreciate the sentiment. It was an interesting group of attendees, older folks, really young folks, kids on summer vacation, people of different ethnic backgrounds, people of different economic backgrounds and I didn’t expect there to be as many people as there were. ...

It felt so intimate in a way. Almost like I was at home watching the movie in my living room with friends. What with the way folks were shouting at the screen. ...

We laughed, we cried, we sat in stunned silence. We lived all the movie-going cliches. As far as whether or not anyone should see it, it totally depends on your tolerance for pain. And how much you can take before your head explodes.

It's interesting. Moore obviously wants to tie into the collective liberal id. He's done a good job of that. And people want to have something to connect their anger to. Audiences don't walk into that theater neutral and get angry watching. They're already angry at Bush and Moore just provides them with the hooks to hang their anger on.

I don't know about the merits of the conservative group's lawsuit to try to ban advertising for the movie in advance of the convention, but it seems pretty clear to me that this movie is one long attack ad that lands nonstop punches. Bush is a moron; Bush is beholden to people who put their own wealth ahead of our national security; Bush has caused untold suffering. Enough of that, and the campaign will be redefined as a referendum on Bush's intelligence and Bush family integrity. If I were Rove, I would be praying that some other blockbuster comes along quick, and knocks this one off the screens.

Perfect Sunday Afternoon

Or any day, actually.

Found at Retroraunch, via Cat Nastey.

Philly: We Don't Try Too Hard! Or At All

900 block of Rodman Street:

You Know It's No Longer Hip When I Do It

I am a tech geek wannabe, not a real tech geek. I love technology but don't want to put the time in learning everything that I need to know to get my TGC (Tech Geek Certification). As a result, things filter up through the layer, and by the time they get to me, they are no longer new. For example, this is my first post ever over a Wi-Fi connection, as I sit in a coffee shop on South Street overlooking the detritus of another Saturday summer night in Philthadelphia.

Next I'll be writing about these new-fangled things called personal digital assistants. I just got one.

Target-Rich Environment

Remember how just the other day I said I usually visited right-wing blogs only to have a place to fight? Well, Michelle Malkin has a blog. With comments.

Maybe too much internet access is a bad thing for me.

No Justice For a Murdered Girl

Matt at TopDog04.com:

First they slapped, beat, and punched her to a bloody pulp. Then they beat her with a skillet and a soup can, put dents in the wall with her head, and tied her up. Next they dragged her into the garage where they tied a rope around her neck, hit her in the head with a shovel, and strangled her to death.

None of that is in dispute; yet the jury could not reach a verdict.  Why?  Because the girl in the picture, Gwen Araujo, was not born female.  And the defense attorneys argued that made it less than murder - and some on the jury bought it. 

The Octopus Grows Another Tentacle

The Supreme Court has ruled - 5 to 4, naturally - that you have no right to remain silent when police ask you your name. Nominally, they can only ask you during a "Terry" search in which they have "reasonable suspicion" (less than probable cause) to believe you've been involved in a crime. But since that's a legal conclusion solely in the police's judgment, then effectively it's not a bar to them getting your ID anytime. In other words, people don't know what a Terry stop is, and even if they did, they don't know if any given interaction with police is a Terry stop (because the reasonable suspicion is all determined from the police's knowledge.)

Thanks, conservatives! Let's get more judges on the Court like Scalia and Rehnquist, right?

The Catholic Church - International Pedophile Ring

NYTimes.com:

Hundreds of priests accused of abuse have been moved from country to country, allowing them to start new lives in unsuspecting communities and continue working in church ministries, the newspaper reported.

The priests lead parishes, teach and continue to work in settings that bring them into contact with children, despite church claims to the contrary, the [Dallas Morning News] said.

I heard a report on this originally on Sunday on NPR. The DMN reporter talked about one priest who had been moved out of the States after abusing kids, whose former parishioners were told he was being sent to a "remote area" with no contact with kids. When the reporter tracked him down to a Pacific island, he was surrounding by children who called him by his first name and to whom he was distributing candy. He was also known for giving individual reading lessons to local kids. At night. In his bedroom.

Can we yank their tax-exempt status now? Please?

Thought For the Moment

Dimitri Vassilaros in the Pittsburgh fucking Tribune-Review:

Attorney General John Ashcroft has more tolerance for torture than for adult films.

Why is this notable? The Trib-Rev is the Scaife house organ.

Torturing Policy

The editorial board of washingtonpost.com, from its latest shootout with their erstwhile buddies, Dick, Don, and that other guy, Bush somebody:

Donald H. Rumsfeld expressed dismay on Thursday about editorials in which "the implication is that the United States government has, in one way or another, ordered, authorized, permitted, tolerated torture." Such reports, he said, raised questions among U.S. troops in Iraq, reduced the willingness of people in Iraq and Afghanistan to cooperate with the United States, and could be used by others as an excuse to torture U.S. soldiers or civilians.

Yes, that's it; you're either with us (when we torture) or you're with the terrorists.

Fuckhead.

A Broad in Iraq

Ginmar, who when last noted was surviving an outnumbered firefight in eastern Iraq, is now doing less dangerous things:

What I’m doing is reading infuriatingingly stupid reports. I swear, I think SB has found himself either a franchise or a cloning lab. What do you mean, Sadr’s men are made up of foreign fighters? Catch me! I never would have guessed! And there are IEDS? Here? In the roads?

I should specify that sometimes that’s all we get. If I put this in peactime terms, it’d be like some spook at the CIA getting a report turned in that breathlessly confided: There are Soviet spies in America right now!

And nothing else.

It got so bad that I was seriously wondering if there was a way I could work the word ‘dipshit’ into the editing job when Captain Comic Book intervened. “It should really say, Dipshit, sir.”

“Oh, yeah?” I thought, entertained. I once threatened a battalion commander during a field exercise with my M-16, and got away with it because I called him sir and because he’d done a really dipshit thing, but this was war, and I really, really wanted to try it.

“Oh, yes, but it’s got to be 'dipshit, sir'.”

“Because Sir Dipshit makes it sound like some kind of English inbreed.”

We looked at each right then and started giggling. It might have stopped there, except I had a sudden brain fart. “But what would the family crest look like?!”

We laughed for five minutes ....

Every day, I read and I correct, and what I’m reading about is what’s going on. The deaths. The ambushes. The bombings. Police stations get attacked in broad daylight. Convoys get ambushed, hit by RPGS, IEDS, and small arms fire.

Bit by bit, though, what seeps to the surface of these reports, are the Iraqi people affected by them. My brother was captured by Sadr. CAn you help me find him? A grand ayatollah takes his life in his hands to set someone straight. You should have put the people of Iraq first! Not yourself! Common people, one after the other, clinging to decency, no matter what. A crusading police chief leads a special team from city to city, building up his troops against the insurgents, reminding that soon they will be independant again. An American translator is re-united with the son he hasn't seen since the first Gulf War, when he had to flee the country. Once persecuted by Saddam, he now has to visit the graves of two brothers who didn't escape---and the palace of a brother who did, and will soon be a governor.

Simple people, decent all of them, but their words could come from any country. Americans and the Iraqis---they are the same people to me. I can go to the marketplace and say anything I want. It is against the Koran to take a life! I saw these men and they had weapons. They might hurt us---or you. He is not a good Muslim. Ordinary people, unarmed, even, taking on armed men. It goes on and on, the voices that rise out of these reports, bit by bit, and sometimes the bordom gets relieved because I have to sniff just a bit.

If anything good comes out of the Iraq misadventure, it'll be because of people like her.

Tropic of Cancer

Welcome to summer, everyone. "Summer", as everyone in Philadelphia knows, is an old Native American word which means "the garbage is rotting on South Street."

I'm An Asshole, and Proud of It

I have a natural talent for pissing people off. And I'm glad.

The world is filled with those who deserved to get backhanded across the face and I am just the guy to do it. Politeness is an ideology, and a disease that prevents people from calling things by their real names. This tendency endears me to everyone, and as a result, I've been fired from my share of jobs, (in my younger days) got my ass kicked when I tried to fight a gang of fratfucks, and generally been tossed from various social groups. And I don't give a rat's ass. Life is too short to put up with assholes, pricks, the vain, the pompous, and the generally clueless. Fortunately, I is reel smart, got a law degree that's portable (have J.D., will travel), and generally get along very well with smart, nice, kind people, who are more numerous than the asshole kind.

One of the consequences of all this is that I have been banned from a number of blogs, and now the roll has expanded by one. Moe Lane of Obsidian Wings pulled the hilarious move of ordering me to apologize for getting heated with ObWi's resident conservatwit, Sebastian Holsclaw. Of course, ordering me to apologize is the faster way to get "Fuck you" in return.

The hilarious part is, what kind of threat is it to tell someone you're going to blog-ban them? I've been shunned? (He left the link up to my site, though, so it's an incomplete shun.) I mean, there are thousands of blogs. I am all for people following the rules of a place, but don't use it as a threat. Ban me or don't, but don't threaten me. Believe me, I have plenty of other sites to read. It's even funnier because I actually was trying to be "reasonably civil." Poor Moe's obviously not spent a lot of time in a large city.

On a related note, the number of feeds in my Bloglines account is now down under 200, and heading south fast. I am just too damn busy to fuck around reading posts about nonsense ... like how abrasive the blogger is and which blogs they've been banned from. Ahem.

Anyway, I am deleting all blogfeeds that don't syndicate the whole post unless (a) they post infrequently, (b) it's systematically easy to tell what the post is about and whether I want to read it from the excerpt, or (c) the blog is just too damn important to miss. By "systematically easy", I mean blogs that write about subjects the meat of which is encapsulable in a few words. (Tech blogs and news feeds, for example, fall into that category; politics blogs usually do not.) Blogs that only syndicate excerpts but are must-reads for me include Talking Points Memo, Political Animal, and other less-famous people I just enjoy too much to cut.

I've also excised most of the right-wing blogs I used to read. Frankly, they just were there to give me somewhere to fight. They don't post any real information or analysis that's worth reading anyway. I have saved a few, less than 6, that are honest (both with others and with themselves), and seem to have the good of the country and the world at heart. (Don't give me a load of shit about hearing from other "perspectives"; I don't need to talk to 100 stupid, crazy people to figure out what stupid, crazy people think.) Fuck 'em. I'm going to kick their asses. They don't like it? Too bad.

Two Dozen Gitmos

Human Rights First (the organization formerly known as the Lawyers Committee For Human Rights) has issued a new report which describes more than two dozen U.S. detention facilities around the world, most operated in secret. The Red Cross has not even heard of these places, much less inspected them, and Congress has not been informed of their existence. You can only imagine the barbarity that goes on in these places.

There isn't even a pretense of representative government here. Bush truly considers himself above the law.

Rev. Moon's Coming-Out Party

Kieran Healy puts it pithily:

[T]he Rev. Sun Myung Moon had himself crowned Emporer of the United States and declared the Messiah at a ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in the presence and with the enthusiastic participation of a bipartisan contingent of Members of Congress. No, really. Did this even make the newspapers?

Actually, no, it didn't, and it boggles my mind that Moon's wealth can deter reporters from exposing this garbage.

Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Enabling Clutter

I notice that Yahoo! mail upgraded their free accounts today to 100 Mb of storage (from 6 Mb). I have been waiting with bated breath for a Gmail account because, well, I don't know why. It was new, it was big, it was Google. Obviously, Yahoo! believes they can stem a rush to Gmail (which, as you know, is offering 1 Gb of storage) when it actually launches by making users like me (who are conditioned to think of 6 Mb as the upper limit) feel that they have all this extra room. But the upgrade makes me realize something: I don't want more room, I want a way of not having messages lying around for no good reason. It's like someone who is fat from eating too much buying bigger pants and thinking they've solved the problem. Um, no. One day you'll run into that higher e-mail storage limit, and instead of having to go through hundreds of messages and deciding which to keep, it'll be thousands.

P.S. - Yahoo! has lots of teething problems with the new upgrades, too. Much of the time I can't access folders. Why the rush? Is Gmail rolling out soon?

Update: Okay, I take it all back. Mir at Dim Sum Diaries bids me stop whining and kindly sends me one of her gmail invites. I am all over it like a crack addict on free rock. In the first 5 minutes of using it, I notice (1) messages in my inbox show a preview of the text in the message, which is a feature I didn't know I needed and immediately must have, and (2) messages show links to the related replies and replies to replies, which is ditto. Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail are so dead.

What Did That Gray Davis Guy Say Again?

Okay, so new evidence shows that Enron manipulated the energy market in the West every day during the power crisis in 2000-2001. Remember when that was a wild, left-wing accusation? And the whole mess was the fault of environmental regulations? Yeah, me neither. They got away with $1.1 billion that they know of. So far.

Oh, I like this part especially:

"The records also show that Enron employed at least five other schemes, dubbed 'sidewinder,' 'ping pong,' 'donkey punch,' 'spread play' and 'Russian roulette.'"

Donkey punch! Don't know what that is? Here, bend over and I'll show you, bitch.

Can't wait for somebody to ask Dubya about Kenny Boy Lay. Maybe he knows what a donkey punch is, from his Skull & Bones days. What's that? You need a press corps that's not completely clueless to ask tough questions? Forget it, then.

Creeping Third-Worldization of the U.S

One of my theses is that the far-right conservative movement and significant elements of the Republican Party are driving the United States to be like a third-world country, in order better to control and exploit it. And one of the defining characteristics of a Third World country is that the military consumes a huge amount of resources and definitively backs one side politically, over all others.

We spend about $1 billion per day on what is euphemistically called "defense," which works out to an average of $3,000 per capita annually. (I know, averages obscure more than they reveal sometimes, but although most people don't pay that much, the figure is telling in comparing it to other averages.)

As I have written before, the officer corps is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

Now comes this story of a base commanding officer attending a Bush campaign rally in uniform - a violation of military law - along with 500 soldiers who, while technically not in uniform, wore t-shirts supplied by the VFW instead, ran and marched in cadence and were directed by NCOs who were seen to be giving them orders. In other words, the soldiers were there in their official capacity as soldiers, regardless of whether they were in uniform. The Army is investigating, but won't comment on whether they plan to take any action.

Billmon at Whiskey Bar has an outstanding post up that lays all of this out in more detail, and he reaches the conclusion that the United States is being primed for a military coup. I wouldn't go that far, but I think there is good reason to be concerned and the hour of greatest danger would be in the aftermath of another catastrophic terrorist attack. I think this is a good time for liberals to do two things - reconsider their opposition to personally owning firearms and to make sure they have an exit plan in case things go badly wrong. Keep your passports in good order. It might also be a good idea to think about strategies to move assets out of the country or to deposit them now in a stable, secure, democratic country, like Canada. It probably won't ever be necessary to implement such measures, but I would say it's as likely as another terrorist attack affecting you directly, and that's a risk everyone should be prepared for, too. In fact, they probably go hand-in-hand.

Supreme Court Dodges a Bullet

The Supreme Court has ruled that Michael Newdow doesn't have standing to challenge the inclusion of the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance that his daughter has to say every day, because he's not the custodial parent.

Wise move on the Court's part, and probably one that leaves all the power interests breathing a sigh of relief. The Court once again shows its agility in avoiding a decision that could create controversy over a fundamental social issue. Bush, Kerry and Congress don't have to deal with the fallout of a ruling on the merits, which either way it went, presented a nightmare scenario for everyone. Atheists and civil libertarians and those on the other (wrong) side all know this issue is still live and they can get back in front of the Court someday - just not an election year.

The GOP is an Organized Crime Enterprise

Interesting back-and-forth going on between Matt Stoller and Matthew Yglesias, which captures pretty well the perception gap between those who view the current political situation as normal (Yglesias) and those who (I believe correctly) think the Republican Party has gone off the rails.

Dave Johnson at Seeing The Forest remarks, addressing Yglesias:

You're talking about "the merits of pragmatic compromise" and wishing you could have good-faith debates on issues with these guys, while they're creeping up on you carrying a noose.

Exactly.

Religion and Liberal Politics

There's a short article in today's Washingtonpost.com about a conference of religious liberals who gathered in D.C. yesterday to wring their hands and wonder aloud how to be more influential. ("Hey! We were relevant once - remember the civil rights movement?")

There is a bit of fingerpointing about how the secular left gives the religious the cold shoulder, but no fucking way do I want to reignite that debate again. I'll just focus on this part:

"We should take back the Bible, take back the theological principles and not just cede them to the religious right," said the Rev. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, a minister in the United Church of Christ and president of the Chicago Theological Seminary. "It's not good enough to talk in vague terms about values. We can do better than that. We can make the theological arguments."

First of all, forget whether secular and religious liberals have common ground, my question is: do conservative and liberal religious people have any common ground? I submit that the reason why religious liberals don't have much traction in the policy area is that conservatives don't consider them religious at all. Look at that quote above - do you think if that female minister makes a theological argument, that your basic white suburban Republican churchgoing conservative man is going to give a rat's ass? You can make arguments all day long, sweetie, you're still a liberal, and that means you're just this side of devil worship. And why aren't you home, taking care of your husband and kids? Run along, now.

Second, I'm a goddless sodomite, so naturally I don't think her argument is very strong, but do any normal people feel a eensy weensy bit uncomfortable with the idea that policy decisions are going to come down to who wins the theological debate? If your political participation is motivated by your religious faith, fine, good, great, whatever - I'm all for free exercise and free expression and all that whoohaa. But if specific policies are determined by the prevailing religious belief, aren't we just turning the whole government over to the clergy and letting them run it? It would be great if we could finally figure out exactly how many angels can dance on the head of a pin - that one's been bothering people forever - but if what God wants is the beginning and the end of every argument, then democracy will just get trashed. Why even involve politicians in the process at all? We could let the big corporations and wealthy individuals control the economic decisions and the religious control the social policy, and just suspend elections indefinitely. Hey, that sounds like the Congress right now.

She Comes First

I've been wanting to write about this subject for a while, but someone has gone ahead and done it for me: The Cunnilingus Manifesto. He has a blog, too! Of course.

I realize this is the second vagina-related post in three days. It's a coincidence, I swear.

Not Common, Even For a Philadelphia Lawyer

It's not every day that your nice, friendly neighbor stops you for a chat on the street and reveals that he's a notorious murderer. And then asks you for legal help.

I love this town.

The Porn Pussy Identification Game

This is so weird, I just have to share it with you:

'Can you tell for certain what your girl's vag looks like if you were given a random, but similar snatch shot?...'

Ronald Wilson Reagan

In the interest of politeness this week, I will follow the rule that you don't speak ill of the dead. I'm sure others will say it all for me anyway.

Mourners, on the other hand, are fair game. My local (right-wing, it should go without saying) AM business station is eulogizing Ronnie as a "patriot" who "loved liberty." (When Carter or Clinton dies, I am sure they'll be urging people to spit on the coffin.) The SCLM outpouring of fake grief is fascinating and repelling. If we aren't careful, it'll be renamed the "Reagan Bell." Hey, we came narrowly close to changing Broad Street to "Smarty Jones Street", until traditional Philly loserdom reasserted itself.

It's a Free[ish] Country[, For Now]

Mac at Go Fish does the rant so I don't have to:

So....is declassifying the news that Jose Padilla planned to blow up apartment buildings [according to the government] supposed to make me respect Padilla's rights as a U.S. citizen less? I don't care if he planned to stick dynamite up the Vice President's ass and burn the White House to the ground, he doesn't deserve to be sitting in detention for two fucking years without access to a lawyer or his right to a speedy trial.

You know, Padilla might be guilty of something. But given the government's track record, I'm tempted to say that the fact that they claim something is true is prima facie evidence that it's not. (For other examples, see Mayfield, Brandon and Yee, Capt. James.) I heard on the radio Ashcroft's story now is that Padilla really wanted to explode a dirty bomb but his al Qaeda contacts told him to leave the gas on in apartments and try to blow up the buildings that way. What the fuck?? Does that sound like the superterrorist organization at work to you? It's like they told him to not bus his own tray when he eats at McDonalds.

In other terrorism-related hilarity, today the Philadelphia police shut down a wide swath of center city because they found two cassette tapes attached to light poles near City Hall. There were paper airplanes attached to the poles, too, pointing toward the cassettes. (Loony, or what?) The detail I enjoyed most was that a Philadelphia police officer concluded they were suspicious by listening to one of the tapes in his patrol car (cop cars have tape decks?) and deciding the voice on the tape was speaking in a "Middle Eastern language." Obviously, despite their seemingly limited grasp of English, Philly cops are polyglots who can identify the region of origin of a spoken foreign language. Right. I've got $10 here that says the tapes were left by one of my city's many, many religious wackos.

Welcome to America, where every terrorist threat is a joke or a lie, except the one that kills you. Don't worry, we'll hold a commission about that one.