Christian Nation in Indiana

It's another token of our "changing" language. I put the word in quotes because it's so strange to see things like the weaponizing of words described in such benign terms, but "religious freedom" simply hasn't meant the right to perform rituals, say prayers or build places of religious exercise without restraint except to a few for a long while. 

In Indiana, or to the Indiana chapter of the Christian Caliphate in America it means the right to do any damned thing you want as long as "Christians" like the Robertsons: Phil and Pat or Reverend Phelps or a majority of the Indiana General Assembly approve. No one really, no one at all is in any doubt that, as it has in other religions, the militant wing of American Christianity is rising in power and rising in the lust for control and domination and the ability to punish people of other beliefs or thoughts or perspectives. No one fails to see how such assaults on liberty tend to thrive in places of ignorance and religious passion (you may find some correlation if you like:) places like Indiana.

No one has any doubt that if the shoe were on the other foot, and there were significant numbers of people who would refuse to service cars with those chrome fish, or religious bumper stickers or serve them at drive-through restaurants,  the Christian Nation  folks would hesitate to stand up for that kind of religious freedom and certainly they would be raising hell if "Muslims only" signs were to appear in Indiana.  No Yarmulkes inside, no cross, no service, no Irish need apply, only church goers in this neighborhood. We do not serve people with tattoos. We've been there before. We've had those tradinal values before.  Perhaps those who keep telling me we've made little progress aren't entirely wrong.  Certainly the spirit of hate and exclusivity thrives, along with talk of beheadings and rape and castration, damnation and brimstone by bearded zealots, to the cheering of the mob.

So yes, freedom of religion now means something close to its opposite and to be evil, nasty and mean --  contemptuous of  truth and justice is to have Christian values, to have "faith."   None of the claims made about life liberty, the pursuit of happiness, about freedom and justice for all are in any way compatible with the goals of the Christian Nation in America people any more than they are with the Islamic State people and yet the damnation is so faint and public discourse so filled with pop culture, celebrity surgery, the latest product from Apple, transportation calamities and the angelic innocence of Michael Brown.  Not only the language has been prostituted, but so have our thoughts and concerns, at least that's the goal. Denialism, lack of definable terms, amorphous logic, conspiracy theories and fear are the means, tyranny is the end.

Justified

This isn't the first time I've said that Justice in America isn't about the law, it's about the lawyers.  It won't be the last time.  The web footed honkers and quackers at CNN were still telling each other as I switched it all off and went to bed that we have a pattern of letting killers go free, but if you have a memory longer than a goose and if you still make an effort to look past the selected stories the angertainment industry allows us you'd be aware that if there is a pattern, it's a pattern of  framing the innocent.

I was appalled last Friday night when Cornell West told us on Bill Maher's show that Florida's Stand Your Ground law allowed everyone to carry a gun, but not surprised.  The level of ignorance about gun laws is shockingly high, stubbornly held and sadly near universal amongst those most vociferously opposed to public ownership of weapons. Tragically sad because the  law is written to exclude the right to chase down, confront and threaten or even to escalate a dispute if one wants to claim self-defense, but as I said, it's not about the law, it's about glib and sarcastic trial lawyers, dull witted jurors and ignorance.

I dread to read the news this morning. I don't want to lose my breakfast over yet more railing against guns, I don't want to hear that the decision to acquit Zimmerman was all about race or any of the other stale arguments imposed on this case before Trayvon Martin was interred. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another flim-flam defense based on making the law seem to say what it doesn't, and it doesn't say that you can shoot someone -- an unarmed someone who knocks you down or gives you a bloody nose particularly when you instigated the fight and violated someones civil rights in the process.  In fact, the law was designed to allow someone like Martin to use deadly force to defend himself against someone, some "crazy cracker" posing a credible threat to his life to force him out of any place he had a right to be.  He brought his fists and some skittles to a gun fight.

Innocent people wind up on death row. People are incarcerated for decades and their lives ruined for smoking Marijuana or receiving naked pictures of a girlfriend on a cellphone. People are locked up with false accusations and to me, that's worse than that a guilty man should go free, but although the NRA will doubtless try to make him a folk-hero like Bernhard Goetz, there is little similarity. Martin wasn't carrying a sharpened screwdriver and demanding money and Goetz didn't corner the muggers in a dark alley. Goetz wasn't a vigilante, Zimmerman I think, was, defending a community against burglars by carrying weapons and confronting and chasing suspicious people, something the gun laws do not permit.

But again, it's about the lawyers and while it's a respectable and necessary profession in any civilization, people like Mark O'Mara disgust me, convincing a jury that his "muscle tone" and perhaps his dangerous, hoodie wearing image was responsible not only for Zimmerman having chased him down but justified shooting him.

No doubt many axes of all sorts will be ground on this case.  Perhaps as with OJ and Bernhard Goetz there will be a wrongful death suit and I think there's a good case for it. Although I don't think either victim or vigilante was without fault or are in any way heroes, I do think the preponderance of responsibility is on Zimmerman.  There is a responsibility on us as well -- not to traduce the law, misrepresent it or to make more of this case than it is for the purpose of furthering our politics, but of course, this being America it's a false hope to expect us  not to -- as false as we are.

Mirandize This!

Why are we supposed to be "terrorized" by the one in a hundred million chance of being blown up by cookware in the streets when we have black-booted, goose-stepping Republican goons insisting that the rights and liberties guaranteed by the US Constitution don't apply any time they don't think they should? What terrifies me is not the bang in Boston but the whimper of  cowards demanding that people can arbitrarily be deprived of their innate and inalienable rights by semantic chicanery and that we justify it by fear.  Why is the serial killer, the arsonist, the murderous Christian leader not a terrorist and so exempt from the protection of the law we fraudulently flaunt as our American birthright?  Because we don't like their religion? Because they have 'foreign' names? Ask the Republicans. Ask them why they're again demonstrating that the Constitution is a quaint anachronism and an impediment to the lustful needs of absolute power -- or 'Homeland Security' as they like to call it. Ask them why a massacre in Boston justifies the dismemberment of  the Constitution that grew out of  a previous one.

There is no chance in hell that whether or not young Mr. Tsarnaev talks to the FBI truthfully or not at all, has anything to do with whether or not he is ritually told he has the right to keep quiet, is responsible for what he says and has the right to legal counsel. He has those rights and we all have the guarantee of those rights. He already knows it and he's already demonstrated the personal qualities that prove he doesn't have a hell of a lot of respect for the USA or its laws and restraints anyway. If he can be forced to incriminate himself, if he can be stripped of all the rights we used to guarantee, we thereby incriminate ourselves as liars, hypocrites and barbarians unworthy of being called a free nation.

We have no idea whether he was in any condition to answer questions when apprehended or whether or not any were asked. We know that the request to surrender was first answered with a fusillade which is prima facie evidence of a mood of non-compliance.  Police weren't required to "Mirandize" him before asking him to give up or asking him if  he had explosives or if the boat was booby trapped or if he had accomplices at large or anything similar and at present he's sedated and intubated and the question of further questioning is moot.  Nothing he might say or might have said, is needed to convict him.

When the Senators from the Great State of Chickenshit insist that they have or someone has the power to ignore the US Constitution with some peremptory declaration that a criminal is an "enemy combatant" when there is no declared state of war and no entity at war with us that the criminal belongs to or acted in concert with, it's possible they are so stupid -- Republican Stupid -- that they haven't thought it out, but far more likely that they're still their old anti-American, Democracy hating, liberty fearing bastard selves -- and cowards, of course.  Are they really afraid that he will be released for lack of evidence, exonerated by some court just because he has a public defender?  Of course not.  It's not about bombs, it's about Obama. It's about accusing Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer and crypto-jihadist for the benefit of the fearful, the bigoted, the ignorant, the racist, the demented, delusional and dimwitted: the Republican Base, or as one says in Arabic -- Al Qaeda.

The stain remains on the American escutcheon from having sent American citizens to the gallows using a secret military tribunal in 1865, but I guess there's plenty more room for bloody fingerprints in the opinions of Senators McCain and Graham, who by fighting against the foundations of our nation are in my opinion true Enemy Combatants, subject to indefinite imprisonment without charge or access to due process and of course torture for the crime of having declared war on our country and the laws they have sworn to uphold.

If we lose the protection of the law simply because some political demagogue can strip you of it then we have lost the moral basis of the American revolution and the country should declare it's mistake and pledge its allegiance to the Crown of England which may long since have surpassed us in its concept and guarantee of justice anyway.

9/11 didn't change a goddamn thing.  9/11 was an excuse our internal enemies have been waiting for since the beginning.  

Obama goes to bat for the bad guys

Well, I was there and I saw what you did
Saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

-Phil Collins-

The truth can set you free, and it can get you hanged. It all depends on who you know and how much they owe you. Yes, we may live in a world of denialism, mythology and cover-ups but I hope truth still has a few teeth left. That's why I'm rarely the first to scream 'treason' when someone blows a whistle or leaks a secret. Sometimes it even gives me hope.

So people have been asking me, since my last post on the latest Wikileaks fatwah, just what we learned that was useful enough to warrant embarrassing our delicate diplomatic efforts. Well a number of things, in my opinion. For one, we now have cause to reflect upon the Obama administration's efforts to thwart international prosecution of Bush, Cheney et al, for using torture to extract confessions from suspects.

Spain has had a lot of experience with torture and gruesome treatment of prisoners from the Inquisition right up through the last of the Fascist dictators. I think they've grown a bit intolerant and perhaps touchy on the subject of right wing excesses. So perhaps when that country set out to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, our current administration had many reasons to worry about turning tables, embarrassing revelations and the repercussions of such an investigation on our future conduct. Without Assenge and Wikileaks, we might never have known that Obama and company had a rare bipartisan success in 'persuading' Spain to squelch the effort. It's nice to know and it sheds some light on the puzzling friendliness that Bush has recently shown the man his party has been presenting as something loathsome and dangerous.

We didn't need any breaches of state secrecy however to learn that Dick Cheney's vast ossuary of a closet still has occupants with inconvenient stories to tell. Nigeria is planning to charge him and his Halliburton cronies with bribery and to issue an Interpol warrant, says Bloomberg Businessweek. You may recall that the Right Wing US Chamber of Commerce has been pushing Congress to ditch The Foreign Corrupt Practices act which makes such practices illegal under US law. If you were puzzled as to why we needed so badly to do that so quickly, perhaps we now can answer the question.

Will Wikileaks make Obama think twice about protecting war profiteers and international criminals - maybe even think a third time about trying to portray leakers as dangerous traitors now that we have had a glimpse of what's been going on?

Kids in cages

"Children should neither be seen or heard from - ever again" said W.C. Fields.

Surprisingly, our activist Supreme Court has begged to differ. It was only five years ago that the Supreme Court finally decided that killing kids for justice was a bit behind the times, but of course some "Conservative" states have continued to sentence juveniles to life without parole. Chief amongst those states is Florida, which houses about 70% of them.

It would be hard to describe Florida as a particularly child-friendly state. Although I can't say it's particularly friendly to those who prey on them or neglect them, the poverty, substance abuse and ignorance that abound isn't child friendly either. Certainly "55 and older" communities are everywhere and as communities of older people are more likely to be afraid of the noise wild behavior and petty crime, there's a certain hostility. There's a certain feeling of helplessness and even terror amongst older people that can lead to hostility. It's a terror that overrides conscience in some cases and that sides with a draconian justice system while whimpering about a less powerful government.

Of course there's a big difference between chasing those brats off your lawn and locking them up in a cage for as long as they shall live, and that bit of casual inhumanity has at last drawn Supreme attention. Terrance Graham was implicated in armed robberies when he was a minor and has been sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. The court voted 5-4 on Monday and Kennedy, writing for the majority said:

"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law. This the Eighth Amendment does not permit." (as a cruel punishment)

This decision was a majority one because Chief Justice Roberts sided for once with the liberals although with the qualification that it should not apply to all non-homicide crimes. That of course makes the decision less than decisive. It's a step forward, but a timid and qualified step toward humanity; toward sometimes, in some cases allowing a second chance to someone who got caught doing what millions of others have got away with and never done again. That's just the sort of thing conservatives object to: making the law and justice more congruent; making the law for man and not man for the law -- and that's just the reason we need to balance the angry, self righteous and fearful elements on the court.

Tightening the belt

When A Texas jury set out to decide what to do with convicted murderer Khristian Oliver, the decision was made easier by a supply of Bibles in the jury room with specific passages highlighted. Whoever highlighted them chose words carefully because the jury decided to kill him -- based on their reading of the Bible.

Although the US Supreme Court decided in 1967 (Loving V. Virginia) that the government has no right to tell people they can't marry someone of another "race" the news may not have made it to parts of Louisiana. Keith Bardwell, (who claims he's not a racist) justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward refused to marry Beth Humphrey and her boyfriend, Terence McKay because Terence is "black" and she's not. Actually Terence is no darker than this sun tanned white Floridian, but it's not about that, it's about the "traditional value" of not "mixing the races" one finds in the Bible belt and it's about the result of preaching that this is a Christian nation whose law emanates, like the musty smell of unwashed laundry and pious injustice, from the Bible.

Wild Wild West

If you see someone standing on your front lawn taking pictures of your house and you stick your head out the door to ask what the hell he's doing, maybe you'd better find out if he's a Republican first.

Robert Lutes, a resident of Boise, Idaho suburb, Meridian, probably wishes he had done that. Asking the man on the lawn to tell him what it was about, his question was answered with a .357 magnum revolver pointed at him by the Republican Party chairman of Boise County, Charles McAffee, a "tea-party" activist. No, it wasn't high noon, it was just before dinner time.

There is a controversy of course about whether Lutes was engaged in heated discussion or argument about his delinquent mortgage payments before McCaffee drew on him, but McCaffee, working for collection agency used by Wells Fargo, says he pulled the gun on the unarmed homeowner to "de-escalate" the conflict. No, really.

I am unable to establish Idaho's policy on such use of a concealed weapon, but I know that in Florida, it is illegal to display or "brandish" even a legally carried gun to gain advantage in or "de-escalate" a dispute or argument. Since McAffee was arrested for aggravated assault, I would assume a similarity in the laws. Again, I don't know if Idaho is a "castle doctrine" state, but I suspect it is and under that philosophy, Lutes would have been justified in shooting a Republican Party County Chairman and tax protester like any other armed home invader.

The more civilized part of my nature is glad he didn't, but the little demon on my shoulder sort of wishes the idiot Mr. Teabags had been dealt a little bit of old fashioned Republican justice.

Man was made for the law.

At least while the remnants of Republican barbarism still control the court, the law is the law is the law; right or wrong .

Is anyone still so idealistic as to think that our justice system is about justice and not about upholding the authority of. . .well, authority? Well, maybe the latest ruling from the Old Bastard's Club we sometimes call the Supreme Court and the Republicans sometimes accuse of giving a damn, will change your mind. In a ruling today one might have expected from a Texas court or perhaps the Spanish Inquisition, it ruled that once you're convicted, you have no right to obtain evidence that might exonerate you at least in Alaska, one of the six states in which innocence is no defense once the infallible courts have ruled.

"Science alone cannot prove a prisoner innocent,"

read the decision and of course not, but it can prove him not guilty and it often has done just that. But I guess this is a good way to keep from the inevitable embarrassment of killing a few innocent people now and then.

So isn't it nice that at least one branch of Government retains it's contempt for the value of human life once it's had the chance to be baptized?

Hesitate before you legislate

New rule:

People who have had tragic experiences shouldn't be allowed to have "closure" by giving us new, specifically targeted, laws. I'm thinking of the rash of laws given the names of lost children created in the vain hope that "this will never happen again." Passion makes bad law.

Take for instance "Megan's Law" that requires, among other things that people who exploit children sexually be registered for life as a sexual predator. Who could object? Why the very children the law exploits! There as been a rash, we're told, of 14 year old pubescents taking pictures of themselves with cell phone cameras, some times to show them to friends. Kids in their teens are drowning in hormones. Remember? They're curious about their bodies and new urges they're feeling. Hormones make for bad judgment.

Unfortunately, the rush to make sure "this will never happen again" Megan's avengers didn't think about such things when they wrote the law, and now a 14 year old girl for instance, who posted a nude picture of herself for her boyfriends delight on My Space is a sexual predator -- branded for life, if the courts obey the law, and unable to live near a community with children or a school. In Florida such people are forced by other laws of passion to live in the woods or under bridges along with schizophrenics, drug addicts and real sexual predators in their quest to serve justice.

Kids take pictures of themselves at slumber parties. Someone sends one by cell phone, a parent finds out and abracadabra, we have more "sexual predators" in possession of child pornography and distributing child pornography. Even the parents of Megan of the eponymous law are aghast, closure notwithstanding. Of course Law Enforcement is another matter. It seems that, blind to the absurdity, there is strong sentiment to prosecute anyway -- to "protect the children" of course.

There really out to be a law against stupid people passing stupid laws with terrible side effects in order to placate hysterical voters and win their votes -- but who would we name it for?

Pirates, bandits and road agents, LLC

If you buy almost any product that needs an instruction manual these days, ( and many that don't) you'll have noticed that more space is taken up with listing all the creative ways you might do yourself harm with, for instance, a camera than is given over to how to take pictures with it. Apparently this format wasn't followed assiduously enough by Motorola for their Bluetooth headsets and the waters around them have begun to fill with sharks. Perhaps you've seen the magazine ads for www.BluetoothHeadsetLitigation.com. It doesn't appear as though anyone has been harmed by a Bluetooth Headset, although conventional wisdom is that wearing any kind of headphones can damage some people's hearing in time if you turn it up to high for too long. Thanks to many years of this odd approach to product safety, we have become a country where someone who sticks a pencil in his ear is considered a victim rather than an idiot.

Americans are used to being provided endless and often ridiculous warnings about everything and are used to ignoring them. The result of all these warnings seems to have more to do with litigation than with any increase of caution and it appears to me that this class action suit is a classic example.

No one who purchased the headsets will receive a dime and the manufacturers, if the suit is successful, will be handing over $100,000 to an unspecified charity and $850,000 will be awarded to -- the lawyers.

While the web site talks about "your rights" those who purchased the headset have no rights to share in the booty, they only have the right to write to the Settlement Administrator to opt out of a suit they really have no participation in! Although the manufacturers claim to have done nothing wrong and no harm can be demonstrated, to defend the case would cost more than a million and so it's cheaper to stand and deliver; to let the bandits perform their extortion and pass the cost on to us along with more unheeded verbiage about loud noises and hearing loss. It's another example of how our legal system works and for whom it works and unfortunately it's not a rare example.

Liberty is a terrorist

The story goes like this: you're told you can no longer work at your current job and you can no longer find employment in your profession because your name is on a government list. The government won't confirm or deny it, so you can't go about demonstrating that you've been falsely put on it because you have no idea of what you've been accused of or why -- or even that the list exists. As far as you know the list is only there to keep you from working.

No, it's not a newly discovered Franz Kafka novella, it's the story of Erich Scherfen, a man who served honorably in the US military and during the Gulf War. He's currently employed as a regional airline pilot, but has been told that he can no longer fly because the TSA has him on a "terror" list -- a list that no one is allowed to see, not even to demonstrate that it's all a mistake.

But wait -- aren't we guaranteed the right to confront our accuser? Don't we get a day in court? Doesn't the government have to show we've committed a crime before taking our rights away? Hell, no, not in the Republican fascist hellhole full of apathetic consumers and mewling, cringing cowards that we used to call a free country. The "terror" list itself is the most terrifying thing about our pathetic pretend democracy and more pathetic for the fact that the only organization anywhere who will stand up for this man, the ACLU, is the favorite demon of the ruling party.

Of course they know why Scherfen is so terrifying and so do I -- he's a Muslim and his wife, an American citizen, was born in Pakistan and came here as a kid. His crime is flying while Muslim. Our crime is not giving a damn. Our crime is not storming the Bastille, dragging the bastards out of their offices and pillorying them. But we don't, we mumble about the Pledge and God on the money and them damn "Libs" in the ACLU and how John McCain will deal with "terror" much better while freedom itself is on the "terror list" and cannot fly.

Cross posted from The Reaction

When is a crime not a crime?

"Professionalism is alive and well at the Justice Department,"

says Michael Mukasey and I'm sure he's right, but just what is it that the Bush Action Team is professional about? Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association, the Attorney General said

"not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime."

So when is breaking the law not a crime? I think we know: not when the professional lawbreakers do it.

Mukasey has announced, according to USA Today, that "former Justice Department officials will not face prosecution for letting improper political considerations drive hirings of prosecutors, immigration judges and other career government lawyers."

Not that it's not against the law and it's not as though there is no evidence and testimony that the law was broken. It's just that certain people are above laws meant for the proletariat. Certain people belong to the class of übermenschen. Just ask the Nazis Bush administration.

Just shoot him

So Florida is finally going to kill Mark Schwab. It's 16 years since the 23 year old man was convicted of the kidnap, rape and murder of an 11-year old boy and I so think it's safe to use the cold blood metaphor. Of course the government of Florida won't be shedding his blood, they'll strap him to what looks like a cross, try to get a needle into a vein to make him unconscious with Sodium Pentothal. They'll then hope they guessed right enough about the dosage and that it lasts long enough that he won't feel the searing agony of the pancuronium bromide used to paralyze him flowing through every blood vessel in his body like Liquid Plumber, making it impossible to scream or even twitch. If that goes well, they will stop his heart with potassium chloride. It doesn't always go well.

We've read about Florida's electric chair that has set people on fire, blowing boiling eyeballs out of their sockets while shaking the victim like a rag doll and causing witnesses to vomit in disgust, but for the most part, people don't care because they don't have to watch. We've read about the botched "three chemical" process that has taken over half an hour of indescribable agony to finally kill the strapped down and paralyzed prisoner, but again, not all of us are capable of caring.

It doesn't help that Schwab is as loathsome a man as any; the rape and murder of Junny Rios-Martinez occurred about a year after he got out of jail for raping another boy. The fact that the same government that let him out of jail however is the same government that is going to kill him, doesn't reflect well on the capability of Florida to deal with violent criminals.

But this is not about my horror of trusting demonstrably inept State governments with the legal ability to kill people. It's not about the corrupt and incompetent judicial processes, the correlation between race and the severity of punishment. It's not about my moral and ethical objections to executing criminals: it's about human pigheadedness, the propensity to stick with a decision long after the abject stupidity thereof has been proven. The process now being mandated as a merciful alternative to traditional executions is far too unreliable and cruel to be used on a pet cat, but governments and the supporters of legislative death share much with the pit bull that needs to be put down. Nothing will dissuade them once they have that taste of blood.

When it comes to the time when Fido has to go, the veterinarian will simply give him a shot of pentobarbital and he will drift away and be gone in 30 painless seconds. For larger animals there are stronger barbiturates, but even a bullet in the head is a certain and more painless death than the one we have turned to because the electric chair was too grisly and firing squads and hangings are emotionally unsanitary.

Self-important people with Junior College Criminal Justice degrees and people in politics however cling to this medieval drama as though it was a procedure handed down from Sinai. Somehow, the people who insist that the government can't do anything right are sure that the government does this right -- and maybe not often enough. Of course the intentional infliction of agony on a helpless and bound prisoner and it's place in that hilarious concept: the "Judeo Christian ethic" doesn't seem to be discussed here as much as it is in other areas.

But basically, it's all about cowardice. We want government to make the bad men go away and we want them to do it where we cant see it or smell it or hear it. That's all we care about. We care more about that than we do about reasonable doubt, about cruel and unnecessary suffering, and if we have scruples about casting the first stone, why then we pay others to do it.

For Christ's sake, just shoot the guy if you have the stomach for it and since you don't, lock him up forever. There will be plenty of room once you let the dope smokers go home.

If it feels good, kill him.

The concept of punishment is inseparable in people's minds from the concept of justice. I have a hard time understanding either one. In the youth of our species, the notion prevailed that some sort of balance existed in the universe and that balance had to be maintained scrupulously lest the sun not rise and the crops fail. A more modern knowledge of the universe makes it a bit hard to believe in such things, yet we do. We do at least in as far as we talk about debts to society being paid in kind or in body part. Of course with regard to crimes of theft or property, the notion that justice prevails in the return of value to a rightful owner seems obvious, but in other cases where there is no value to be returned, such as in the case of rape or murder, the accounting model for justice runs into trouble. Does taking away a life provide a new one for the victim or the victim's heirs? Does inflicting pain and suffering or death upon the perpetrator satisfy any debt or does it satisfy the urge to kill we have inherited from our hirsute ancestors?

Being a person for whom the abuse of women and children is sufficiently loathsome that I would readily shoot someone to stop certain crimes, I still maintain that taking an eye for an eye repays no one but fictitious gods, and the universe continues to expand at the same rate and our little world goes on in the same trajectory. Yes, I would love to inflict a great deal of suffering on people who rape children. Given the opportunity I probably would, but I do not try to fool myself that I'm talking about justice. I want revenge because revenge feels good and if feels good because like anyone who reads this, I am an animal and the heir to a host of animal instincts and emotions. Instinct is expressed as the urge to do what feels good. Somehow I believe that justice needs more justification than that.

Short of denouncing judicial killings, the Court has ruled that "evolving standards" have made it less acceptable to kill someone for a lesser crime than killing someone else. While I agree, I would apply that same standard to the unnecessary ending of human life entirely. That strapping people to a cross and pumping their veins full of drain cleaner is tolerated in a nation fulsomely bellicose about its Christianity stretches the bounds of the term hypocrisy.

That's my opinion anyway, although I could be wrong. But I don't think so.

American family values -- no foreigners need apply

These days, it's not just justice wearing the blindfold: it's the law, the people who enforce it and the great majority of the people who don't give a damn.

The country of refugees and pilgrims is more dedicated to the letter of the law than anything else, at least as far as immigration is concerned. True, industry may look the other way because we couldn't afford to eat without illegal immigrants, but when it comes to the educated, the motivated and the talented, we're not willing to make any accommodation: we're not willing to offer any alternate route to citizenship no matter how someones skills might benefit the country.

Take Arthur Mkoyan, a 4.0 high school valedictorian from Fresno, CA. He speaks only English and since he was a baby, knows only the United States. We just can't wait to send him and his parents back to what used to be the Soviet Union, whence his parents fled for their lives. They were never granted that asylum, although any Cuban looking for better opportunities would be if he can get here illegally. All appeals having run out after all these years and the American kid has to be deported to a country he doesn't know and where he's an illiterate alien doomed to a life of misery. Freedom wins again.

Because they wish to appear merciful, ICE has allowed him out of jail to attend his graduation and make his valedictory speech before he's discarded like a bag of garbage. Of course his younger brother is a legal citizen, having been born here, so the family may have to be broken up, but who cares? It's all in a day's work for the ICE men and God, I love freedom and family values!

So move over Michelle Obama, I'm ashamed of this country to the point where I don't know whether to reach for my passport or my gun. It's the country of "I've got mine and screw you, it's not enough." It's the country of fear and intimidation and self righteous contempt for decency. If I'm ever really proud of this country, it will be when it starts acting as though the law was made for people, not people for the law. It will be when the much bragged about Christian Values aren't just a euphemism for "fuck you." It will be when the anger of the stupid, the willfully ignorant, the selfish, the war lovers and the cowards no longer lifts its light beside the golden door to hell.

And that's not going to happen.

Zero Tolerance

Every breath you take Every move you make Every bond you break Every step you take Ill be watching you. . .

-The Police-

"No matter how minuscule, there is some risk,"

said the prosecutor -- and apparently accepting that astonishing proposition, the jury decided Willie Campbell was attempting murder when he spit at a Dallas cop. Willie, to be sure, is HIV positive, but since the risk of spreading the disease in this fashion is minuscule, it calls into question whether changing lanes without signaling, something with a far higher chance of killing someone, should be considered assault with a deadly weapon and a crime worthy of a sentence like Willie's: 35 years.

"That means there is the possibility of causing serious bodily injury or death."

That means, according to Dallas County prosecutor Jenni Morse, that the remotest of possibilities is to be treated as a certainty and because it's possible than nearly anything you do, any object you pick up or put down, every movement you make, every breath that you take could harm someone, it's a deadly weapon. Think carefully the next time you change lanes . Think twice before cursing your boss - curses just might work.

OK, so Willie Campbell isn't a nice guy - he has bitten other inmates and has attacked other officers. Mens Rea or criminal intent isn't hard to establish in his case, but precedent is precedent and if I have now to consider remote possibilities as accomplished facts, don't I have to wonder how our increasingly Zero Tolerant country will treat pillow fights that go awry or anything said or done in anger that by some freak of chance results in death?

Absurdity is reality today. You can be guilty of a serious crime for possessing an empty container which once held a substance that is illegal. You can be guilty of a crime if you open an e-mail with an illegal drawing, even if you delete it. You can be given only 18 years for giving a lethal dose of heroin to a minor as De Leon Vanegas Jr. was given in the courtroom next door.

From the Jury and the lawmen, good Lord protect us.

The strange case of Mister Bah

We've come a long way from the founding principle that all people have certain inalienable rights, even if they're aliens. Of course that enlightened idea has so often been honored in the breach that it may be hard to make the case that the US is in decline, but it's still disturbing to hear about imprisonment so devoid of oversight and so absolute that dying people can be thrown into solitary confinement, incommunicado and with no effort to inform anyone in their families or their respective embassies simply because they missed a plane or their status was changed without notification.

There have been too many examples of late where tourists from such terrorist hotbeds as Iceland, for instance, have been abused physically and mentally for overstaying a tourist visa by a few hours. 66 people have died while in custody, some in privately owned and operated prisons. Nobody seems to give a damn about what happens to foreigners; after all we were attacked by foreigners, weren't we?

Take Mr. Bah, one of 66 prisoners to die in custody since January 2004 to November 2007. A tailor from Guinea, he fell and hit his head (or so they say) while in custody. He was in custody because they revoked his green card without telling him. Because he sustained brain injuries and was incoherent, he was shackled and left in solitary, vomiting and foaming at the mouth. No one outside was informed and it took five days for his family to locate him. It took another 4 months for him to die without ever regaining consciousness. Such things seem to be typical and considering that privately owned prisons for profit are the fastest growing form of incarceration, giving our swashbuckling government agencies like ICE an opportunity to make people disappear without a trace. The more people we toss in the clink, the more money the private jailers make and can contribute to Republican campaigns.

But of course we don't care. We were attacked by foreigners and although Bah, a 52 year old tailor whose family has been here since 1943, who lived and worked legally in New York for ten years, his elaborate gowns displayed in Manhattan boutiques, must therefore be a threat to our ethnic purity and our safety because his green card was suddenly revoked while he was abroad and he was automatically jailed upon his return for 9 months -- until he died. Did I mention that we were attacked by foreigners?

So why bother about them; why investigate when there is really no law requiring ICE to do so? ICE can, like so many agencies public and private under the Bush autocracy and is all but immune from oversight. Bah had family in the US who were able to get a few details, albeit too late; many detainees don't and some have been held for decades without anyone outside knowing what happened and doubtless many have died and been disposed of as quietly as were the countless victims of Stalin's godless system. We trust in God and we're Christians and foreigners can stay the hell out of our country -- and what's this about Samaritans -- they're foreigners, aren't they? We were attacked by foreigners, weren't we?

To be a conservative

I don't want to speculate about how many of our publicly educated young people know who John Wilkes Booth was, but I'll bet that far fewer recognize the Englishman, John Wilkes and know about the part he played, by proxy, in shaping the fourth amendment to our Constitution. Because Wilkes ran afoul of the Crown by openly criticizing a treaty signed by George III, a general warrant for his arrest led to his apprehension along with the publishers of the paper that printed his argument. Wilkes had popular support in England and in the colonies and the notion that the King could authorize upon his own authority and without challenge from Parliament or the independent judiciary, a general search or fishing expedition to seek anything they could use to squelch protest, made him a bit of a hero and martyr.

We are no longer a group of colonies. We are no longer the nation that grew out of those colonies and we have another George who insists on the right to unrestricted, unsupervised and secret investigations without court oversight or any scrutiny at all. We are no longer a nation that objects. We are no longer a nation that values individual liberty to the point where we can accept the slight risk of crime rather than the security of a police state.

We've had so many examples of warrantless wiretapping and other acts of indignity without probable cause that anyone who doesn't know, isn't someone who cares, but documents appearing in the Washington Post show how the FBI can and has been indulging in espionage of "suspects" without having to explain who they are or why they are or what they are suspected of by what evidence to any court. Only the Federal government knows for sure; a Federal government that loves secrets and fights to keep them.

That they can use whatever they find for whatever purpose they wish seems to be evident in the case of Eliot Spitzer and the use of his ATM records to show that he cheated on his wife. I'm sure nobody believes that information was obtained for such purposes and we're just too delighted by the circus to care. If we don't send to know for whom the wires are tapped, the e-mails read, the bank records examined, the mail box inspected, the credit card receipts tallied, it none the less tolls for us.

If we're good subjects, the King will be good to us and protect us. He may or may not tell us what he's protecting us from or how or why, but we can trust George or pay the cost of being adjudged, like John Wilkes, a Liberal, a traitor, an enemy of the state.

Which side are you on, Mr. conservative?

Impure thoughts

There are some subjects that have been made so taboo even to discuss, that the government has been free to define crime as it pleases and to use any means it can dream up to identify and prosecute people who for instance, abuse children by forcing them into sexual acts. Personally, I have a special kind of hate for people who abuse women and children, but I'm not terribly fond of the kind of crusader who loves fighting this kind of crime so much that they will expand the definition and flaunt not only law, but reason itself to fight it. There are those who argue that criminal intent without action or that conspiring to act upon it is not only a crime, but a crime of thought equally as deserving of all possible punishment as a criminal deed. The difference between a thought crime and a crime become blurred and inconsistent as a religious prohibition and we are not, need I remind us all, a nation where sin is legally equated with crime.

If the State put up a website with a link labeled click here to learn how to steal a car, would you be committing a crime by clicking on it - even if the link was non-functional? Now consider that the link was billed to give you access to child pornography. Now consider that clicking on it allowed the government to have your address; to go to that address and break into your home with guns drawn. Consider that it's being done and that the courts and the law have decided that intent to obtain illegal images is shown by clicking and that an attempt to view is equivalent to viewing and that viewing is equivalent to producing and that producing is abuse of a child.

Is this train of logic soritical? does offering something illegal entail illegal entrapment? Consider too, that you may not have been the one using your computer or indeed your ID and password that day. Consider too that when the swat team bursts through the door unannounced, the accidental shooting of anyone will be charged as murder against you. Consider that ultimately no child has been protected and no abuser of children has been identified much less prosecuted.

Yes, one could consider a random or involuntary click "probable cause" and there are laws equating a mouse click with an attempt to obtain illegal information, but I'm worried that we have cut another swath through laws that were intended to protect the innocent in order to satisfy the zeal of enforcers and the false zeal of politicians eager for one reason or another to appear to be saving the children from harm.

Is it too big a departure to imagine the police putting up a "speed limit 60" sign in a school zone and using it to arrest anyone who believed it? Perhaps it's not a perfect analogy, but perhaps we need to restrain the crusaders or at least constrain them to actions more consistent with justice and with the spirit and letter of our constitution.

Tort Reform

It's an idea everyone can get behind. We need to stop those lawyers from winning huge settlements that make life expensive for the rest of us, right?

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." said Daniel Webster and getting people angry or afraid to the point where they don't assess the unintended consequences is the cheap tactic we're usually subjected to - and effectively, I should add. No, I'm not going to rehash the way we've been deprived of our freedom and privacy by the administration's Punch and Judy show. We've been had repeatedly in the same way since I can remember.

Since I started studying being propagandized in grade school, I was told that in this great country, (say it's the greatest or you're a traitor) everyone was entitled to his day in court. That principle is one of the many casualties, not only of our invasion of Iraq but of the success of our unofficial Corporate House of Lords.

Some of the boilerplate you may have signed when dealing with employers, banks and other entities may effectively have been a Faustian bargain if not worse. Ask the Woman who was raped by co-workers for KBR in Iraq why she has no recourse whatever and why KBR was allowed to dispose of evidence without breaking any law. Ask her why she is denied the right to sue in Federal court. Tort Reform is the answer.

" 'Tort reform' is a deliberately deceptive term coined in the 1980s by tobacco, pharmaceutical, insurance and gun lobbyists and lawyers who set about to transform our civil justice landscape by eliminating corporate exposure to civil liabilities."

writes Peggy Garrity in the Los Angeles Times.

"Tort reform is a game of bait-and-switch in which ordinary citizens have been snookered by carefully orchestrated and relentless propaganda into seeing a phantom boogeyman in the much-reviled "trial lawyer" who brings "frivolous lawsuits" to "runaway juries" that render "out of control verdicts" in "judicial hellholes," making insurance rates and the costs of all goods and services go up."

We're still waiting for the results, but Halliburton, the recipient of corporate welfare so massive as to defy description and which, being now based in Dubai, doesn't have to bother with those pesky taxes, is essentially free to deny that day in court to anyone who works for them and anyone else if they happen to be raped, harassed, beaten or killed in their Iraqi fiefdom.

Wave the flag, America. Make sure you lapel pin is in place and let's keep booming and bragging about how great we are and how unpatriotic our critics may be. Just keep marching and don't pay any attention to the cliff.