Good Lord, what next?

The newest on Palin, bringing rage to my librarian's heart:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

RAAAAAAAGE!!!!!

John McCain does not believe in your right to privacy

...and, if he is elected president, he will appoint the final judge who takes it from you forever.

I can't hammer it enough that this is the single starkest consequence of a Republican presidential victory in 2008, and if John McCain wins, it will happen. The Supreme Court currently has 4 diehard, social conservatives who don't believe in the right to privacy. There are 2 ancient justices who are likely to retire within the next couple of years, and they're both liberal. John McCain has already said on multiple occasions that he will appoint "strict constructionist" judges, which is dog whistle for anti-right to privacy. John McCain has also already said that he thinks Roe v. Wade, which relies entirely on the right to privacy, should be overturned. Why would he do anything other than to appoint another socially conservative judge? And why would anti-Roe groups do anything other than to bring an lawsuit before the Court when that happens? And why on earth would 5 socially conservative, "strict constructionist" judges in the most politicized Supreme Court in decades do anything other than to hand their side their greatest victory in who knows how long?

If Justice Scalia were presiding in a case over the constitutionality of the right to privacy or abortion, would you bet your rights on him doing a 180 and voting with Ginsburg and Souter? What about Alito? Thomas? Roberts?

learning to pick your battles

Via Cristina Page there's news that people opposing birth control are planning to protest the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, the court decision that guaranteed the right for married women to use birth control by recognizing an implicit constitutional right to privacy. Frankly, this is a protest that I just don't understand, and I mean that in the strategic sense. I don't understand why anyone would take up this fight.

Now I can understand, tactically speaking, waging a campaign to ban abortion, even though I don't agree with it ethically or politically. The procedure is visually disturbing and the idea of people having it done "wantonly" offends a lot of people. Even for the people who want it to be legal, it's not something you could ever call "popular," and virtually nobody is willing to mount an unqualified defense of the practice. It's pretty easy to gin up support for a movement to "get the sluts to take responsibility for their actions instead of killing their children."

Birth control gets a might trickier, though, as you're now talking about something that just about everyone uses or has used at some point in their lives. Condoms, for all that can be said about sensitivity and having to apply at awkward moments and whatnot, have saved a lot of people a lot of heartache, not to mention a lot of lives, and that's before we even bring up The Pill. We didn't pass over medications curing all manner of diseases and helping us sleep and focus and stop seeing hallucinations in favor giving the oral contraceptive the moniker of "The Pill," for nothing: The Pill is a magical thing. It prevents pregnancy with extremely high efficiency. Using The Pill lessens the need to stop in the middle of the warm-up to fiddle with other contraptions and jellies and whatnot (assuming, of course, you two are safe STD-wise). It regulates menstrual cycles. It decreases your chances of developing ovarian and endometrial cancer. It can even reduce acne, for Christ's sake! I mean, my God, the only people who love The Pill more than men are women! Trying to get people to support a movement banning The Pill is no easy thing.

But the pro-lifers and the anti-"judicial activism" people aren't stopping there; they are even waging a rhetorical assault on the right to privacy. The right to privacy. In a time when people are chaffing against the government's ever increasing desire to monitor our phone calls and web activity and library records, when people on the Left decry the "police state" and people on the Right rail against "big government," the pro-lifers are trying to convince people to support laws and politicians who will take away their right to privacy. Anyone wanna place bets on the outcome of this battle?

"Justice Thomas, at least put down the magazine"

Saw this last night. James Spader as Alan Shore from Boston Legal arguing against the death penalty before the Supreme Court. The whole clip is worth a watch, but starting at 3:20 there's a brilliant indictment of the Court, and from my perspective a great argument why a Democrat, any Democrat, needs to be elected to the White House in the fall.

Damn you Michael C. Hall!

Crime dramas bother me. In virtually every crime drama, the judicial system is actually an impediment to the struggle for justice because it is hamstrung by the Bill of Rights. Evil criminals slip through the fingers of the righteous policemen thanks to sissyfied civil rights and unctuous, amoral defense attorneys until the evidence finally proves their guilt, when suddenly their eyes narrow and they remorselessly and calmly lay out their evil machinations in minute detail, revealing their true, monstrous nature. The moral message of every other episode is: "Damnit! If only we didn't have habeas corpus and laws against illegal searches, then we could've saved that last victim!"

Dexter adopts this "moral" message and carries it even further, arguing not only that skirting civil rights makes for more efficient justice, but that it takes a serial killer to clean up the mess of criminals made untouchable by the Bill of Rights, that true justice is the western style, 2-in-the-noggin variety. Dexter is a more efficient and precise instrument of justice, we are told, precisely because he is unbound by the accused's civil liberties, and his justice is more enduring and complete because there is only one punishment.

Now if the damn show would just stop being so well written and acted, maybe I could stop loving it.

a Navy SEAL discusses his experience with waterboarding

and he says it's torture. This is probably the best discussion out there of exactly what waterboarding constitutes, the sensation it creates, and why it's torture.

It sounds horrific.

worst. majority. ever.

From the Washington Post:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.

Why? Why would you do this, Democrats? What kind of gutless chickenshits do you have to be to sell out the 4th Amendment just so the least popular president in history won't call you names?

News flash: he's going to call you names anyway.

I swear to God, only the Democrats would watch their approval ratings slip to 11% and then conclude that it's because they haven't been caving enough.

Greenwald reflects on how utterly inappropriate of a use of congressional power this is, since it's basically Congress intervening in a number of active litigations asking the very same questions as Congress, at least one of which AT&T recently lost, on behalf of major campaign contributors Verizon and AT&T.

And here's Kagro X with the rundown of the wording of the law and all the backdoor dealings that went down between the telecoms and the government.

"I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat." --Will Rogers

The Republican Party is run by totalitarians

Don't believe me? From Glenn Greenwald:

Various Republican candidates attended a meeting of Club for Growth, and afterwards, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to Cato Institute's President Ed Crane about what they said. This brief report from Ponnuru is simply extraordinary:

Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review.

So Crane asks GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney if he believes the president can nullify by fiat a United States citizen's rights of habeas corpus and a fair and speedy trial of his peers, a power no British king has had since the 12th century. Any person with American political sensibilities, especially, God bless him, a conservative, would be aghast at such a proposition, right? Romney's answer:

Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

Apparently the issue of whether American citizens have the right to contest their charges is a little hazy for this Republican candidate.

What about leading GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani?

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.

Giuliani promises he'll only occasionally strip American citizens of the most basic freedoms guaranteed them in the Bill of Rights.

There is no such thing as a democracy in which the Executive can imprison citizens without a fair trial. The law states that all citizens have rights, and in order for power to rest with the people (the definition of "democracy"), the rule of law must be upheld. If it is a president that rules, and not the law, then power rests with him and not with the people. And a president that can defy the Bill of Rights with impunity is not a president, but a dictator. After all, if a president can disregard amendments to the Constitution, what laws bind him?

Democracy and totalitarianism cannot exist side by side. Either the people rule, or the executive rules. I vote for the people.