EARL WARREN, IMPEACHED AT LAST

A lot of the right wing's agenda seems inspired by resentment, and one of the things they resented the most was the Supreme Court tenure of Earl Warren. In their mythology, this was when the country went astray socially, just as the focus on economic rights under Teddy and Roosevelt era took us down the wrong path economically.

Nixon couldn't do it, Reagan did his best, and now a presidential popinjay has creamed the impossible dream. This is what the appointment of Justice Roberts and Alito has finally accomplished for the far right: a reversal of the Warren Court in all its rulings for 2007, steering the rights of uppity poor people back to sometime between 1955 and 1969.

I might say, "we ain't going", but these days everybody's afraid of losing their jobs and their health care if they stand up for themselves. Society is so stratified, high from low, with the greatest inequality since 1928, that the Justices, with the exception of Ginsberg and Souter, simply do not see a problem from the height of the social circles in which they dwell, or in the case of Scalia and Thomas, the insulation of their self-regard. Justice Kennedy is the swing vote now instead of Sandra Day O'Conner, and he dwells in the middle of that road where Jim Hightower observed there ain't nothing but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

REAL ESTATE AND MEMORY

In London I could show you a lumberyard built over a plague pit. They threw bodies in all through the summer of ’65 until they lost count of the dead.

The ghosts of America are limited to the lifespan of whatever local can remember that this apartment complex was once an orchard full of pheasants, or that this bank was once a funeral home was once a hamburger restaurant, was once an Indian burial mound. No one remembers and no one listens anyway if it interferes with a real estate deal and making a buck.

There’s a section of wall that Charles Dickens’ father stared at when the alley was part of Southwark debtor’s prison, and there’s a corner in the Old Cheddar Cheese pub off Fleet Street where Dickens the son sat staring at the fire, just around the corner from the house where Dr. Johnson wrote the famous dictionary, and a stuffed parrot in that pub once held renown as the greatest master of profanity in all the British Empire, including Poona and Rangoon.

John D. MacDonald said once that a Florida conservationist is someone who bought their waterfront property LAST week. A few years ago, Disney had to be talked out of building a theme park next to the Fredericksburg battleground where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain covered himself with the dead to guard against snipers and had to listen all night to the hogs tearing at the dead and the wounded. That was before Gettysburg and the Battle of Little Round Top, when he and the 20th Maine saved the whole sorry country for the makers of theme parks and the real estate mavens.

A volunteer for ACORN (they lobby for housing for the poor) told me that their greatest enemies lurked in the United Way, which is often controlled by local real estate interests. I wonder what part memory will play in the rebuilding, I mean systematic looting, of drowned New Orleans? It's not just the poor that are being dispossessed. A good many people in the middle class are learning the hard way about the Invisible Hand of the marketplace: who it favors and who it bitch slaps, despite the pretty words of the civic boosters.

See Also: Eminent Domain and the Supreme Court, et al

SCOTUS and Guantanamo Bay, Friday Noon

[This is only a tiny victory from our side, because we're on the side of truth and justice. It is a major rebuke to the administration, because they are doing a bad thing, and when when someone is in the wrong, they cannot afford even the slightest derivation from their party line. We question ourselves as a matter of steering our course. They do not dare to question themselves about anything, because once they do, their intellectual conceit crumbles like a house of cards.]

everything below copyright the AP

***
In Loss for Bush, Supreme Court Blocks War-Crimes Trials at Guantanamo
The Associated Press

Thursday 29 June 2006

Washington - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.
The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and Geneva conventions.
The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the U.S. prison in Cuba. He faces a single count of conspiring against U.S. citizens from 1996 to November 2001.
Two years ago, the court rejected Bush's claim to have the authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers. In this followup case, the justices focused solely on the issue of trials for some of the men.
The vote was split 5-3, with moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the court's liberal members in ruling against the Bush administration. Chief Justice John Roberts, named to the lead the court last September by Bush, was sidelined in the case because as an appeals court judge he had backed the government over Hamdan.

"LET US TEACH DENNIS HASTERT THE MEANING OF FEAR..."

Okay, I used to feel sorry for Dennis Hastert, becoming Speaker of the House on the heels of a couple of REAL assholes.. but now he SO dearly needs to have his ass kicked from here to Sunday. This is me, advocating violence against a duly elected representative of the hapless people of Illinois. Getting in Hastert's personal space for just one good John Ford movie punch on the sweet spot would be worth going to jail, if only to let that hypocritical bastard feel for just... one... MOMENT the fear felt by true sons of the Constitution and the rest of the freedom loving world ever since the 2000 coup in Florida.

Are you having fun, now, Dennis? We've all had time to think about it and read the investigative journalism, and it WAS a coup, and the Constitution IS under attack. Forget about the Supreme Court rush job by the undearly departed Chief Justice and Sandra Day O'Connor's morning after remorse, forget about Florida and Ohio's Secretaries of State... Let's remember that riot, and the physical coercion of vote tabulators by Republican staffers flown in from Washington. Remember that, Dennis? Remember the 2004 highjinks in Ohio, where the Democratic districts suffered a mysterious shortage of voting machines, and university students had an EIGHT HOUR WAIT TO VOTE? Since then, we've had suspension of habeas corpus, harassment of dissidents, a pre-emptive invasion, at least 50,000 little kids and grandmas dead by violence and a billion dollar war that has doubled the number of terrorists gunning for American innocents... and NOW you speak up, now that the jackboot is getting mud on the carpet of the office next door? NOW you decided to speak up, you Fat Fuck?

It's like that scene in "DieHard" when one of the bad guys lands with a !Crumpf! on the hood of the cop car. Now imagine Dennis Hastert in the role of the drowsy cop. Imagine the ACLU as Bruce Willis, looking down from the window and yelling to Hastert: "WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL!!!"

Now that the royalist presidency is permitting search and seizure of congressional offices, Dennis Hastert has suddenly discovered that there's a Constitution, and something called Separation of Powers...? MotherFUCKER. No, too harsh. His own mother's womb is embarassed to have given birth to an equivocating traitor to the ideals of the United States.

Okay, I won't hit him with my fist. Besides, if men really struck each other like they do in a John Ford comedy, they'd break their hands and walk around whimpering for a week. But I'm gardening today, and there's a big heavy bag of cow flop out by the road with Hastert's name on it, and if the son of a bitch comes within 100 feet of my furious digging, the Speaker of the House is going to wind up smelling like the BULLSHIT that he's been eating with a spoon like it was sugar for Lo These Many Months.

Hey, yesterday I intimidated a comic book geek in a "Sin City" shirt who was complaining loudly in the bookstore about "Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's diDACtic lectures against [snide voice] 'cruelty to animals.'" Guess I'm on a roll. It's not that I've suddenly become an advocate for bullying the complacent-- I've spent my life in satyagraha-esque spiritual struggle AGAINST bullies. But in both these cases-- Dennis Hastert learning his civics lesson too late, and the comic book geek who didn't mind seeing someone ELSE suffer-- we have individuals who have always jested at scars because they never felt a wound, who have failed to develop empathy until they themselves were on the receiving end of a threat.

Ain't It Funny how the comic book geek and his pal quickly backpedaled and allowed as how they were VERY against animal cruelty, and how the brave little Pirate (a character in Morrison and Quitely's book) deserved a better fate, Yessir they were just on their way to send money to the Humane Society. All I did was move very close to them and ask, "What's... wrong... with... Being... Kind.. to Bunnies?" in my best imitation of a tyrannosaur idly chewing on a piece of sheet metal.

And Ain't It Funny how fast these congressmen have discovered the rights of the accused, now that THEY'RE the ones threatened with Guilt by Accusation???

Better late than never? I hope they choke on Alberto Gonzales's mealy-mouthed smile.

'Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Do pay it. Don't forget.'

The Supreme Court may grant the human animal the same consideration we would give a dying pet. Twice the people of Oregon have voted to let doctors prescribe a lethal dose of drugs for mentally competent, terminally ill patients who are within six months of dying. Those patients could then decide themselves whether or not to end their own lives. There were provisions to protect depressed patients from themselves (phew) and to save the wealthy elderly from over-anxious heirs.

Then the nipple-fearing Ashcroft and the mealy-mouth Gonzales decided that helping someone commit suicide by prescribing a narcotic would violate the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, and that assisting with a suicide is not a "legitimate medical purpose." If you use a baseball bat or a concrete overpass, that's your business. Just don't ask for anything certain and painless. Thanks for your help!

Today Diana Ross, excuse me, John Roberts and the Supremes voted 6-3 against the Attorney General in Gonzales v. Oregon (formerly Ashcroft v. Oregon). What happens now depends on who you ask. National Review even dug up the corpse of John Calhoun to equate Oregon's law with "state nullification" and Calhoun's defense of slavery.

See also: Supreme Court: The Kelo Decision

THEY DO IT ALL FOR YOU, BUT LORDIE DON"T GET ON THEIR BAD SIDE

I generally go with the conventional wisdom and list the Dred Scott decision as the Worst Supreme Court Decision Ever, but Holy Shit is this Kelo decision a doozy or what? I always knew the government could use Eminent Domain to dispossess us, but never have I seen such bald-faced endorsement of greed, not since the Court declared that corporations have the same rights as a person.

In 1886, the Supreme Court in "Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad" Chief Justice Waite wrote: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

Betcha didn't know that, did you? The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect freed slaves: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Santa Clara decision meant that you have to treat a corporate entity as you would a person. Catch being, a corporation is effectively immortal; when one corporate lackey dies, ten more shall take its place. You are not immortal. You might go to court to stop a corporation from paving over a favorite tree, but their lawyers don't really have to win, they just have to wait you out... (A favorite trick around here is to cut down the trees, put in the parking lot, then apologize, pay a fine, and plant some saplings.)

I guess with Kelo, the gloves are off between the private homeowner and the legions of Corporate Man.

Sadly, no surprise here-- when you grow up on John D. MacDonald novels, you can't have many illusions about real-estate developers-- but even some

Republican bloggers

see this for what it is.
Decisions made in a panic are almost always bad decisions. A lot of city fathers in an economic panic would sacrifice their own daughters to a volcano, if they thought it would attract developers. Wait till the dust clears from the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast; early reports say only 30% of the contracts are going to local businesses.
My interests are more literary than political, and I see the betrayal of Kelo and the others as another case of people who thought they were secure in the American social contract, until they found themselves on the losing side of an issue. I think of the middle class families at Love Canal, or the dairy farmers in Michigan when the PBB scandal broke.
We all expect the poor to be run over, but just wait till the Kelo decision bites someone prominent in the ass. I'm trying to get Wal-Mart excited about building in Georgetown...


See also: Supreme Court: Oregon's Right-to-Die Case