Don't touch my junk

I remember once, long ago, arriving at O'Hare airport well after midnight with a pair of hungry, thirsty, overtired and near hysterical pre-schoolers following a full day of airport delays and stormy air travel that began in Jamaica. The agony of enduring hours of waiting and seemingly microscopic baggage inspection is impossible to forget as was the large Orwellian banner demanding "PATIENCE - A DRUG FREE AMERICA COMES FIRST." From my point of view, it sure as hell didn't justify the trauma and I don't have to add that it wasn't and still isn't 'drug-free;' but those were the good old days. They didn't strip search my 5 year old.

Yes, sure, a majority of Americans are willing to put up with the ritual humiliations that now accompany air travel; those same people that don't worry much about driving their luxury trucks at 100 while talking on the phone -- at night -- in the rain. Odds are they haven't had to experience more than being asked to remove a belt or their shoes or having been chastised by someone in a too-tight polyester uniform and rubber gloves about which size Zip-Loc they put their shampoo and toothpaste in or even having 'terrorist tool' nail clippers confiscated. Of course many of us still haven't been through the full-body cameras and the rude, abrupt, "up against the wall" attitudes of TSA tyrants. Many have been and many are now fed up with what's being mocked as Security Theater. Fed up is a euphemism here of course but in this week of peak air travel, some of us will undergo an attitude adjustment and begin to use more direct words.

Some will elect to deprive some unseen gnome of viewing their nakedness, or that of their spouses and children and choose a "manual" search. It may be more 'manual' then they expected. ABC News producer Carolyn Durand claims that

"The woman who checked me reached her hands inside my underwear and felt her way around. It was basically worse than going to the gynecologist."

Raw Story reports that women have had to remove prosthetic breasts for "inspection." One man had a urostomy bag ruptured by TSA's claws and had to board an airplane while soaked with public humiliation and urine. Keep in mind, that no probable cause is involved here since profiling would be insulting. Keep in mind that you probably can't get there by Amtrak and driving to grandma's house may be more dangerous than flying.

Of course, to me, the Government's power to stick their fingers in your hooha is far more offensive than its power to prevent the bus company from making some of my friends sit in the back seats and expel them from the Woolworths lunch counter, but then I'm not a Tea Party 'Patriot,' I don't support Rand Paul's discomfort with anything infringing on absolute property rights and I'm not an oil company either. Neither am I like the troll who used Raw Story's comment section to rave about supporting the "Terrorist State of Israel." I'm just sick of arguable ends being used to sanctify extreme and offensive methods. I'm tired of losing my freedom to other people's fear and my country to the neurotic and fearful mob.

Big Brother's keeper

Tiger Woods named his Yacht "Privacy." It's obvious why he was seeking it, but we assume incorrectly that we have any right to privacy in these days of The Patriot Act and the mass marketing of fear.

Monitoring our phone calls, reading our e-mails -- that's old hat. Forcing us to produce birth certificates and citizenship papers for any cop who decides your car is weaving even if you're ancestors have lived in Arizona for 15,000 years -- coming soon to a Confederate State near you.

But wait, there's more.

Law Enforcement agencies are now adding vans equipped with side scan x-ray units that can inspect the contents of your car as well as the contents of your jockey shorts if you're walking down the sidewalk. Probable cause, my ass -- and yours.

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go according to Time Magazine. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- the one Fox insists is so Liberaliberaliberal tells us we don't have a right to privacy if our cars are parked in our driveways. Search warrant? Don't make me laugh; they don't have to show you no stinking search warrant, at least not in the nine Western states under its jurisdiction, not to install the device or to use it to see who you visit or even how fast you drive . We have no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking our movements even if we pay cash at the gas station and at toll booths and don't use a cell phone. We're fools if we do.

Sound like a Libertarian, don't I? I'm not and I'm not because I am not blaming this on a straw man government, I'm blaming it on you. I'm blaming it on us. We voted for the people who are doing this, we supported the Patriot act, we wallow in the fear mongering the retailing of idiot rage that "justified" it. We fall for their distractions, their distortions and we bark and growl like Pavlov's dogs. When they push our buttons, we push their buttons on the voting machines.

Sure, the Ninth Circuit is Liberaliberaliberal, when they insist you can't use your religious beliefs to stop people from marrying, but they're not are they? They're not when they argue that your home is their castle as is your car, your mailbox and your telephone, and by pretending we're Conservative we vote for the people who appoint them to take our freedom and make us thank them for their trouble.

Muslims hate dogs

Shortly before I left the Midwest for Florida, a local Methodist Church with a largely Korean congregation was spray painted with the message: "Chines go home." Swastikas were spray painted on sidewalks and a leader of a self-styled Evangelist Church murdered a black Football coach and shot up a car containing two local Korean-Americans in protest of the growing ethnic diversity of America. Yes, it was an upscale suburb of Chicago and yes, most people were appalled. Since then, we've become more inured to such things, and since then, major political groups have become indistinguishable from what was a demented, lunatic fringe. The largest news disseminator in the country has become a preacher of the same kind of rage -- and we listen as disciples at the feet of wisdom.

I can't act surprised to see a similar fear and loathing phenomenon pervading my Florida neighborhood. No shots are being fired, but it's hard to come away from any social gathering without that sick, sinking feeling in my stomach resulting from some offhand remark about Mexicans. What must they be thinking of me? Is anyone really a bigot as concerns only one group? I think not. Is such bigotry confined to the uneducated? Hardly: the Beck Brigade contains the majority of millionaires I know and none who have anything to worry about from some undocumented day-laborer hanging around the Home Depot parking lot. Yet they do. They worry themselves sick that our government is being taken over by Black people who will make sure that no other black people will have to work for a living any more. They worry themselves sick that American Muslims will somehow institute Sharia and set aside the constitution, while they themselves see that tattered document as an impediment to Christian sovereignty.

"Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant [sic] on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law...."

reads an anonymous e-mail tied to a California Tea Party group. Where I live, such a thing is likely to be as sermon to the converted. It's a tenet as firmly adhered to as that "Obamacare" depends on "death panels" to keep costs down and that the US constitution is meant to subjugate all people under Christian law. But there are no Mosques here, not Islamic community centers as there are in other parts of the country. In California, in Tennessee, in New York and elsewhere, the bigoted scum that is America is being called upon to disrupt prayer with loud protest and being encouraged to bring dogs: because Muslims "hate dogs."

When I was a young man, traveling and studying in Europe, I heatedly defended my country against pervasive charges of racism and bigotry and imperialism, pointing to the strides being made in the 1960's. I was wrong, I was a fool and I wish I had not been. We have been jailing people for their political thoughts since the beginning, we replaced slavery with repression and subjugation, we've had laws reducing the rights of one ethnic group after another. We've denied entry and we have expelled citizens for their racial origins. We whine about invasive government while we use it to invade the lives of millions. We've made a straw devil out of those who have worked to undo the intrinsic hatred that is American culture. We have, save for a few glorious moments, been cowards, bullies and barbarians as likely to tear our own countrymen apart as the enemies, real and imagined, from without. There is no patriotism, no sense of a common goal, only flag waving and warriors at war -- and fear, always the fear.

Have we forsaken our ideals or did we ever really have any beyond "every man for himself" and "fuck you?"

Arizona burning

"The law was made for man, not man for the law"

-Jesus of Nazareth-

He's "not going to put up with any civil disobedience" said the notorious Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff on Good Morning America. No doubt he expects to see some, as the infamous Arizona "show me your papers" law goes into effect tomorrow. Protest is all "hype" anyway and it's "a crime to be here illegally and everyone should enforce" it. Everyone?

It sounds like fun and I can't wait to start enforcing the law myself -- I mean all the laws, of course and since I have the firepower, why not stop every blond person I see and make him prove he's not Canadian? It's all a cowboy movie to sheriff Joe Arpaio, so why shouldn't I play along? But, of course, it's not the law in general that we should all enforce, it's the infamous Arizona law reducing the rights of anyone looking to any Arizona Cop like he has Native American ancestry.

But why pick on this comic book villain? The idea is widely popular, particularly in the old Confederate states, where good manners, big hearts and small minds go hand in hand. Civil disobedience is, in fact, just what we need to clog up the courts and disable and embarrass the damned fools who pretend it's all about the law and not a distraction to hide another expansion of police power. We need just what was so effective in the 1960's; thousands and thousands of people to flood the streets of Arizona looking illegal. We need a spectacle: sit-ins, marches, civil disobedience, dogs, water cannons and an impotent, sputtering, apoplectic, beer-belly Joe looking like the Dukes of Hazzard relic he is.

Now, before you reach for some more canned rage: no, I'm not in favor of allowing undocumented workers to remain, or letting people overstay their visas, just don't tell me we have to become a brutal, inhumane police state to correct the problem and if it isn't all based on racial purity, tell me why we don't know or care how many Canadians or Englishmen are working here and living here without benefit of citizenship.

Big tent

The Republicans sometimes like to talk about their big tent. Others, in consideration of the exploits and shenanigans of the party of values and families and apple pie may think it's more like a freak show tent, but we shall see soon enough which kind of tent the Donna Milo show winds up in.

Cuban born, 48 year old "Conservative" Republican Ms. Milo is running to unseat rather liberal Broward County Florida U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Yes, Miami Cuban Republicans are pretty numerous and at first glance one who didn't know that Ms. Milo used to be a Mr. Milo, whose friends called him Ed, wouldn't think anything was out of the ordinary.

Donna Milo is a person who prides herself in getting to where she is by her personal ability and in spite of her differentness -- not like those who we support with our tax money or special favors to Cuban immigrants, perhaps. Will that differentness matter more to the GOP than the traditional Republican attitudes she publicly displays?

It remains to be seen whether the party so traditionally inimical to the rights of gay, lesbian and transgendered people -- their agenda -- as they so often phrase it, will welcome her into the three ring big top with the other anti-Castro, pro-corporate liberal bashing Miami paranoids or ushered out the side door.

Fear and Trembling in the Court

OK, so now I'm worried. I was willing to make some excuses for Obama's new support of offshore drilling; blaming it on previous administrations' infiltration of oil men into the department of energy and the drowning of environmental regulations, but if what I'm hearing about Elena Kagan is even partly true, I'm worried that we're going to have a more dangerous court, more friendly toward unfettered Presidential powers and willing to cut a wider swath through the law to root out nebulous, ever shifting devils and their agents -- making any accusation, any suspicion a de facto conviction without representation, without trial, without appeal: in some cases without anyone even knowing about it.

"Battlefield Law", said she to Lindsay Graham last year, should be applied to anyone we have a feeling is financing Al Qaeda and one's rights should not be read to anyone that might be construed to be a "terrorist" despite the lack of any real definition of what a terrorist might be. Vague definitions and accusations of shadowy connections leading to indefinite detentions without due process? Why have a court at all if we're no longer a civilized nation but a band of warriors on a worldwide battlefield?

Attorney General Eric Holder said on ABC's This Week Sunday, that even US citizens don't need to be read their rights if they're suspected of being involved in terrorism. Suspected is the key word here and in a time when everyone seems to be suspected every time they board an airplane, it's a scary word.

“I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception." Chopping a piece out of the Bill of Rights is “one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress to do – to come up with a proposal that is both Constitutional, but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face.”

I think it's worth mentioning that the most recent attempts at terrorist acts were hardly impeded by the reading of rights as the terrified terrorists , one of whose gonads had just been blow off, spilled their guts as fast as they could get the words out and when we're happy to torture people so thoroughly their testimony becomes invalid, what's going to change if we tell them they have any rights at all -- which, practically speaking, they don't. I'm afraid we don't either. It's certainly harder not to cry when reading about our forefathers' noble ideals about all mankind being endowed with inalienable rights when we're told that's just too risky these days.
It's always been risky and taking that risk has been one of our valid claims to greatness.

The last thing I expected or wanted from the President in the way of restocking the Court was another battlefield lawyer, supporting the degradation of our most basic American traditions and laws from gutless cowardice. We have more to fear from fear of terrorism, it seems, than from terrorism itself. At a time when the very concept of a government is so frightening to so many, I would have expected a selection with a more obvious commitment to taking the risk of Liberty and willing to face saboteurs without sabotaging our own freedom.

Who, me?

O that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it should be your wisdom.

-Job 13:5-

California state Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield) is very concerned about the "gay agenda" and he's been a fierce opponent of same sex marriage and a "family values" blowhard for a long time. Although many don't agree with my feeling that such obsession is a cover up, examples keep emerging with regularity and it's hard even to list the most humorous ones. Senator Ashburn was recently arrested for drunk driving in downtown Sacramento early Wednesday morning. There's no particular surprise there and I imagine many other patrons leaving the gay bar "Faces" in the wee hours had had a bit too much to drink. He was given a field sobriety test and promptly taken off to jail. I don't know what happened to his "unidentified male companion."

Perhaps it will be less of a surprise to hear that Angelo Balducci, a "Gentleman of His Holiness," was caught on a police wiretap negotiating for the services of male prostitutes with a Vatican Chorister. No official comments have yet been published.

The pattern emerged a long time ago, even before Wide Stance Larry tapped his toes in Minneapolis and whether you do or don't agree with me, I'm going to bet that more often than not, the biggest and most assertive opponents of gay rights and fantasy fabricators are dealing with difficult inner longings. Perhaps after all, if you'll forgive my radical libertarianism, the best way to hide them and to avoid suspicion is to simply leave gay people alone?

Under my skin

It's strange to find myself on the same side of any fence with the Book of Revelation Literalists, a group for which my loathing is nearly boundless. None the less, the disturbingly Orwellian prospect of having RFID devices implanted in people so that their employers can track their movements scares hell out of them as much as it does me.

A Radio Frequency Identification Device is small enough to be placed under the skin with a hypodermic needle and it's a great thing for keeping tabs on cattle or identifying lost dogs. They can also contain data, medical or otherwise that can be read by a scanner. Most humans object to being forced to having one inserted however particularly as a substitute for a key or ID badge.

Civil Libertarians -- indeed any kind of libertarians -- tend to be militantly opposed to allowing this to be done to people but it's of course for reasons of privacy and the protection thereof, not because they give credit to what may be the looniest book to worm it's way into the Christian canon. There are many such people in places like Virginia and it seems to be they who are behind a bill designed to prevent such implants. Why? because John of Patmos almost 2000 years ago had RFID capsules in mind when he talked about the Mark of the Beast.

He didn't and the Beast is most likely Nero, but even if the enemy of my enemy is not really my friend, these things are the mark of some kind of beast, corporate or governmental and I'm as much against it as they are.

Snatch and Grab at G20

The G20 circus is back in town and no matter how many rings it has, it's all sideshow. Does this picture show US troops shoving a protester into a car? The security people claim that no, these were policemen wearing camouflage. There is a mix of National Guard and Policemen on the street in Pittsburgh to keep the peace, but it matters who did this and why, because the US Military can't make arrests and may not be used to enforce the law - oh wait - there's the Patriot Act.

Again, G20 security claims the man was removed because he was vandalizing stores. Can we be sure? The blog DemocraticUnderground.com bulges with comments, some of which assure us it was all staged, or that it was an innocent bystander having his freedom of speech infringed upon - but who knows? There's the Patriot act - almost anything can be legal, either the death of Posse Comitatus or the spiriting away or arrest with no charges of anyone, or so it seems to many of us. Who can be sure what is happening here?

There's the Patriot act and many of its more egregious features are set to expire at the end of the year. Whatever it was that the picture shows, that legacy of George Bush will allow speculation of all sorts, legitimate and otherwise because it will allow things none of us want. As it is, the powers granted under the Patriot act have been used primarily to go after dope smokers, not terrorist suspects. A bill backed by two Democrats and an independent may be able to put the brakes on widespread abuses, although I would like to see the entire thing scrapped. Otherwise people who believe they really are planning to round us all up will be justified in worrying and none of us will ever be quite sure what's going on in Pittsburgh, Washington or anywhere else.

Zero tolerance for zero tolerance

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Fear of terrorists, fear of drugs -- fear itself shall be the law.

Does the hullabaloo about legal "loopholes" allowing gun sales to people secretly on an FBI terrorist list but not charged with anything, have anything to do with allowing school officials to strip a young girl half naked and rummage around in her underwear? Should people working for a local high school have police powers yet not be restrained by the responsibility a policeman has to explain the accused's rights? I think both cases illustrate the struggle between expediency and respect for civil rights and in neither case do I feel that the foundation of our legal system was to make it very, very easy for any authority to treat suspects as convicts.

Clarence Thomas was the only Supreme Court member to think such things as a summary strip search of an 8th grade girl are legal, although he may or may not think it's wrong. True to his Republican principles, he differentiates between law and justice as though one was not to serve the other. Of course I might often agree with that, but not this time. Thomas clearly stated that the "scourge of drugs" trumps the right to due process and elevates a school principal above the powers and responsibilities a police officer has. In his dissenting opinion, he claimed the court was making a “deep intrusion” into the administration of public schools and their efforts, constitutional or otherwise, to fight the scourge of drug abuse. Fear trumps the law, fear trumps justice, fear trumps freedom, due process and in some cases, common decency. Fear is turning some of our schools into little versions of Stalinist Russia where any accusation is as good as guilt.

I haven't read the transcripts and I have never walked through the door of a law school, but the sense of outrage can't be exclusive to me or any other parent and the legitimacy of allowing school personnel, who would otherwise go to prison for doing what they did, to have such authority simply because of the grave danger that Savana Redding might have had an Advil hidden on her person. I can say with near certainty, that had it been my 13 year old daughter, there would be some folks at Safford Middle School in need of their own pain pills.

While most of us would disagree with Thomas and would side with the majority decision that the danger was so minimal that such a false accusation could not justify personal violation of that sort by people who are, after all, not policemen, some appear to be quite happy with using innuendo, suspicion and prejudice to deprive anyone of his civil rights. After all, we passed a Patriot Act designed to do just that and suggested that those who opposed it weren't true Americans.

In other countries; in countries that value freedom more than we do, there would be demonstrations in the streets against the things we ignore while giggling about the sex lives of Senators. It's sad.

Past imperfect

Anna Quindlen writes in the current Newsweek about Loving V. Virginia, the mostly forgotten 1967 Supreme Court opinion that "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man" thereby ruling against the Racial Integrity act of 1924. Of course we consider a ban on interracial marriage a bit archaic today, even though the fundamentalists who told us that since God had "separated the races" we shouldn't allow them to mix are still here and telling us what God wants and damn the Constitution and its heretical equal protection clause. It's probably what they mean by "Judicial activism" when they complain about the Supreme Court of the 1960's, but of course our constitution was specifically designed to thwart the impositions of religious institutions; impositions that are still the backbone of Conservative culture.

Does anyone sane still think the purpose of our government is to enforce sectarian rules as interpreted by self appointed mullahs? Apparently so. Karl Rove sets forth in the same issue to tell us that in reconstituting the Republican party, the values traditional to people who traditionally oppose any concept of freedom other than their own freedom to impose rules, should absolutely never be compromised. Can we really separate the "conservative culture" he champions from the long standing tyrannical opposition to things as diverse and numerous as "Misogyny," Women's suffrage, the five day work week, segregation or Social Security? Can Republicans seriously consider themselves to be the "Party of Lincoln" when Lincoln was a Liberal willing to ignore biblical tolerance for slavery?

The Social Conservatism of Karl Rove, whether or not it's a smokescreen hiding the dragon of tyranny, is outmoded and has been abandoned by countries along with fundamentalist religiosity and bigotry toward social minorities. In fact it's obvious that much of the world has begin to recognize the freedom of people to define their own family relationships, make domestic contracts and partnerships as they see fit. So far, despite the Fallwellian demagoguery, nothing bad has happened and isn't likely to happen when we catch up with the Canadians, as eventually we will do.

Republicans should come across ( not necessarily be) as morally serious, says Rove, although Rove has long demonstrated that victory is the root of morality. What escapes him is that the Constitution of this country protects me against other people's moral seriousness when it comes to the rights it guarantees. What escapes him is that his vision of a reconstituted party is a party still attached to the losing side of history.

"We can't just dwell on the past" says Rove without any apparent sense of irony. "The Future is already here."

Indeed it is and I'm hoping that the conservative impulse toward clinging to that past is part of the past, and that Karl Rove and the other enemies of liberty and personal responsibility are not part of the future.

Don't we look foolish enough already?

I don't think I want to watch the Olympics this year. It's not that this iteration of the games will be any more or less boring or fulsomely nationalistic than the event ever has been, but I'm afraid that some self-appointed ambassadors are going to make damn fools and hypocrites of us.

My first reaction was "tell me it's a joke" when I read the Reuters item telling us that an unspecified group of "human rights activists" have asked George W. Bush to complain to the Chinese government about political prisoners while he is there, and to wear a wristband that declares: "free the North Koreans." They intend to show up under full sail in Beijing wearing their version of the trendy rubber band rhetoric. I can almost hear the jeers.

Tell me it's a joke.

According to White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe, Bush will not be taking wristbands with him. I'm glad to hear it. Another thing George will not be taking with him on the trip is moral authority; or indeed anything else that gives him the right to demand that China not expel illegal aliens coming across the Korean Border looking for work, or that they release militant Islamic separatists, much less to extend them anything resembling the right to Habeas Corpus.

It's not that no criticism is due, it's that we are in no position to make it. I can well imagine my own feelings should a Chinese delegation show up here demanding that we free Puerto Rico, close Guantanamo and open the border with Mexico.

I mean, it's really a joke, isn't it?

Location, location, location

"If there was a role reversal with the races, I doubt there would be a jury in this country that would convict a man for trying to defend his family."

So said Noel Leader, a spokesman for 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a New York City-based civil-rights group, about the murder conviction of John White who shot and killed a hopped up, drunk teen ager who along with a mob-like group had shouted threats and insults in front of his house. I'm afraid it's true.

Would it have been the same if the scenario had been transported to a state where it's not necessary to register an old handgun you inherited from your grandfather with the police and where you're allowed to take the threat of grievous bodily harm seriously? Certainly Mr. White should not have gone out to confront the darling son of the tatooed skin-heads who hooted and high-fived each other when they heard the verdict. Yet Daniel Cicciaro Jr. was committing a crime by making terroristic threats and in many States, that fact would have made his unruly, drunken friends accessories to murder. Not so in New York, a State more concerned with the possibility that attackers may be hurt than with any harm coming to the attacked.

Here in Florida, if a group of people threatens my life and is able and apparently willing to make good on the threat, I'm not required to petition the police and wait half an hour for the Sheriff to finish his donut and show up. I'm not required to try to outrun a 17 year old with my 62 year old legs or to abandon my family and hide for fear that I might hurt the young gentleman.

Take the case of Hygens Labidou, the Florida man, who recently was cut off in a busy intersection in Deerfield Beach Florida and accosted by two very large, very angry men carrying a knife, pounding on his truck and yelling " get out of the truck, N****r!"

Waiting for the police would have meant the last of Labidou for sure, but drawing the handgun he is legally permitted to carry, he shot both would-be murderers, one of whom had prior convictions for attempted murder and hijacking. Labidou was not charged and the surviving assailant is now charged with murder since his actions contributed to the death of his partner in crime.

Of course it's not a perfect comparison. White's immediate chances of survival were probably better than Labidou's, yet he lived in a state where protecting one's life and family is of secondary importance to the perceived chance that one may someday use a gun in a crime.

Yes there is a difference between law and justice, but in New York, the gap seems wider. There was a great deal of fuss made when Florida passed the "shoot the Avon Lady" law that is the reason business owner and family man is alive today, yet no Avon ladies have been shot and a variety of home invaders and parking lot hijackers have been. New York is a different place, just ask Bernard Goetz who went to jail rather than be stabbed and perhaps killed by a gang of "kids." In New York, he was called a "Vigilante," In other places he would be called a survivor.

Having had to face down a driveway full of young men shouting racist threats more than once during the hurricanes of 2004, I have to sympathize with Mr. White as well as Mr. Goetz and I have to be glad to live in a State that isn't so jealous of its dubious power to protect me that it will force me to die rather than allow me the constitutional right to self protection.

The strange case of Jack McLellan

It's not exactly a case of punishment fitting the crime. As concerns the punishment meted out to Jack McLellan by Superior Court Judge Melvin Sandvig in Los Angeles, on Friday, it's more a matter of there not actually being any crime to punish - outside of McLellan's head, that is. Unlike those we hear about who prey on little girls, McLellan talks about it on television and has operated a web site discussing his obsessions and his methods of getting close to children and photographing them. At one time he posted photographs legally taken of young girls in public places like parks and playgrounds, but he no longer does because of public outrage.

McLellan has no arrest record. There is no evidence that he's ever committed any crimes and he claims that he never will, yet this homeless man, currently living out of his car, was served with a temporary restraining order while on his way to Chicago to make a TV appearance. He is forbidden to get withing 30 feet of anyone under 18; a condition that will make it difficult to be anywhere in public and nearly impossible to enter any commercial establishment. Since stories about him have begun to run in the media recently, mothers of small children have been making frantic complaints that their children have been photographed and the traditional hysteria that defines America is in full bloom. If you're scruffy looking and unshaven and even perhaps if you're not, it can't be a good time to be out on the streets in Southern California with a camera.

Of course this is a temporary order and he will have a chance to challenge it at a hearing set for August 24th, but I have to wonder at preemptive prosecution and thought crimes and their place in this formerly free country where fear and terror and hysteria issue from the media and consumed by the public like water from the tap. I don't want to make too strong a comparison between Salem and Santa Monica, because child molesters really do exist and witches do not, but with more and more localities putting special codes on drivers licenses tagging the owners as sex criminals for the rest of their lives; with more areas forbidding anyone once convicted of unspecified "sex crimes" to own a house or rent an apartment or have an internet account, I have to wonder if we aren't re-creating the medieval concept of outlaw. My disquiet isn't helped by the fact that more things are being labelled as "sex Crimes," including public urination or "mooning" someone out a car window and the perpetrators of such juvenile things can be linked for life with rapists and punished in perpetuity. It would be more than disquieting if such people weren't actually guilty of anything.

Screw the People

We should twist constitutional law to make sure the State law doesn't get in the way of undermining civil rights. If Massachusetts can't vote religious contempt for homosexuality into civil law, well, we'll get the Feds do it, says presidential pretender Mitt. We'll write it right into the framework of our constitution!

It's an interesting proposal from a man who wears a lot of makeup and spends a hell of a lot of money on his died hair and his clothes. It's interesting to see him play a verbal shell game with "the People" and Government too. Sometimes they're the same, sometimes they're opposite. Sometimes we argue State's rights, sometimes we argue that religion speaks for the people or that the people speak for religion. It all depends on the immediate needs of the will to power.

Is the State Legislature of Massachusetts the people? Is it there to represent them and does it serve at their pleasure? It would be hard to determine what Romney thinks from his argument that the will of the voters of Massachusetts is being thwarted by their elected representatives who "Decided not to let the People of Massachusetts vote on the definition of marriage."

So what he'd like to do is to enlist the help of the same federal government that formerly forced the Mormons to redefine the nature of marriage, to override the Massachusetts legislature to allow Massachusetts voters to thwart the decision of their elected representatives and accept Federal intrusion into private religious beliefs while facilitating "the People's" right to write religious dogma that excludes a law abiding segment of the pubic from equal protection under the law, into law.

What did I just write? I don't know, I'm just as confused as you are and just as puzzled at what this man has to offer as President of the United States other than being another whore in the musty, stinking, infected cathouse of the Religious right - and being tall. You can't discount tall as a presidential qualification - and he has good hair.