When Is a Person Not a Person?

Jesus, Mitch McConnell is odious. Just freaking odious.

Here's a very short Salon item about something stupid McConnell said recently. But Salon got the emphasis wrong in this one. It was entirely inappropriate to bring up the Casey Anthony case when discussing trials for suspected terrorists. But McConnell's real ignorance was shown in this gem.

"I don't think a foreigner is entitled to all the protection in the Bill of Rights."

Really, Mitch? You don't think? Do you need to research that? 'Cause I can help you there.

Our constitution, which conservatives have pretended to revere so much recently, not only does not support this, it directly contradicts it. Here's what it says about the matter. It's Amendment V, which has only been on the books for 220 years or so, so I can see how Mitch might have missed the news.

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

See, it says "no citizen shall be..." What? It doesn't say "citizen"? It says "person"? Oh. That stinks. That covers, like, everybody. What kind of country is this, anyway?

SCOTUS Finds R Rating Unconstitutional!

I'm having a rough time with the logic behind this one.

I'm as behind free expression as anyone on this planet. I don't think there should be censorship of any kind. If you want to make something, make it. If you want to say something, say it. If it's profane or shocking or just plain stupid, so be it.

The SCOTUS decision today uses this kind of free speech absolutism to justify getting rid of California's ban on the sale of violent video games to children. Here's what Justice Scalia had to say about this.

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

I'm totally with him as far as that statement goes. Fist Amendment protection all the way. But here's the problem. California wasn't banning this type of expression. At all. It was only saying that you couldn't sell violent games to minors. That is a completely different thing. It's not even a First Amendment issue.

I don't see how this is any different than not letting kids into R-rated movies. Or (and you knew this was coming) giving them access to porn. Really. If we follow the logic here, and not very far at that, then no one in government has any right to say that children shouldn't have unfettered access to all of the porn they can consume.

Here's Scalia again.

Justice Scalia acknowledged that Justice Alito had identified some disturbing images. “But disgust,” Justice Scalia wrote, “is not a valid basis for restricting expression.”

Again, this ban did not restrict expression. It did not tell video game makers what kinds of games they could make. It simply said they couldn't sell them to minors. Just like porn. Or violent movies.

I think I may agree with Clarence Thomas here for the first time ever.

“ ‘The freedom of speech,’ as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians,” Justice Thomas wrote.

Scalia responds:

“He cites no case, state or federal, supporting this view, and to our knowledge there is none,” Justice Scalia wrote of Justice Thomas.

Okay. I'll be happy to approach any one of Scalia's underage relatives and begin a conversation with them about how much sex I'd like to have with them. Then I'll show them some nice hardcore porn. And a Takashi Miike film fest. And maybe "Triumph of the Will". I'm sure he'll find absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, they should be exposed to new ideas. To hell with their parents.

Taxation for Representation

I'm not sure why Michele Bachmann gets so much press.

Okay, scratch that. I do know why. Because she says dumb shit, just like someone else we know and love or hate depending on where we sit and how much grey matter we're sporting.

She's now riding this wave of neo-constitutionalism that has a stubborn tendency to ignore the parts of the constitution that contradict their goals. This is remarkably similar to the tendency of many, who are (perhaps not coincidentally) on the same side of the political fence, to ignore the parts of their other sacred document that don't support their views.

Although the teabaggers like to flout their reverence for the Founding Fathers (a phrase, by the way, coined by one of our most corrupt leaders), the U.S. Constitution was left intentionally open to interpretation. (And change. Amendments, anyone?) What does "general welfare" mean to you? How about "common defense"? A "well-regulated militia", maybe? They're all covered. And they're all pretty damn vague.

I just looked at Article 1 - Section 8, the section that is perhaps most frequently ignored by the teabaggers. Here's what it says.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Wanna do some "interpretation" with me? Cool.

I'm sure that people like Steve Forbes would argue that "uniform" means a flat tax. But what this really means is that no one state should be taxed more than another. That is, that the federal income tax rates should be the same for individuals living in every state. My federal tax can't be 10% in New York, but 15% in Alabama.

But take a leap with me for a moment. Could this possibly mean that each state should bear the same total burden? If we need to collect $1 trillion dollars, do we get 1/50 of it from each state? That would be "uniform", right? "No!", you scream. There are way more people in New York than in Wyoming. And way more money there. They should pay more. (These complaints would come from Wyoming far more than from New York.)

But ask those same folks in Wyoming how they feel about the Senate and it's a different story. They get two senators, New York gets two senators. So our constitution demands that each state get equal representation in one of our two houses of legislation. So howzabout they pony up for that? Equal representation, equal tax burden.

Maybe the federal tax rate should be adjusted for the amount of representation you get in congress. Toss the House into the mix, if you want. That'll level things a bit. But not entirely. Wyoming has 3 legislators in D.C., one for every 188,000 residents. New york has 31 legislators, one for every 625,000 residents. Maybe Wyoming should pay a bit more for that extra representation. More than three times as much, by my cheap calculation. Don't want to pay more? Okay, send one or two of those folks home.

And while we're at it, we can stop taxing the folks in D.C. at all.

Of course, I don't mean any of this. Except the last bit about the D.C. taxes. That I mean. But really, is it any crazier than some of the crap the teabaggers are tossing at us?

Grab Grab Grab (What I Just Gave You)

You can always count on Tea Party types to make arguments in defense of the U.S. Constitution that fundamentally misunderstand the U.S. Constitution.

Here's the latest from Fox News spokes idiot Sarah P, as quoted in Salon. Her beef is with "power grabs" by the federal government.

What we're seeing today is the inevitable result of national leaders who have forgotten the fundamental wisdom of the Tenth Amendment [which provides for America's federalist system]. Just as Mr. Jefferson warned us, as soon as we as a country disregarded the fact that the federal government's powers are limited, and that we as states and individuals hold the balance of the power, the floodgates were opened to the torrent of federal power grabs we're seeing today. Take the federal income tax, for example. We tend to think there are two constants in life: death and taxes. But America hasn't always had an income tax. The first federal income tax on individuals was imposed in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War. But the tax was never meant to be permanent, and Congress repealed it ten years after it was enacted. It wasn't until 1913 that the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and the individual federal income tax that we know today was created.

What is most dangerous about these power grabs is that they're usually done in the name of a good cause--insuring the uninsured, for example--and have a big wad of cash attached to them.

Hilarious, as usual. She's right on some things. Of course we haven't always had an income tax. And the original tax she cites was not permanent. But once you make an amendment to the constitution, that's pretty much meant to be permanent. (18th Amendment, we didn't mean you.) And that's what we did.

What's dumb about this, on first glance, is a typical case of 10th Amendment confusion, which is sadly prevalent in the TP. Here's what the 10th says.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Okay. And the 16th Amendment was...in the constitution. The constitution can't be unconstitutional, lady. Oy.

But the dumbest thing about Mrs. P's complaint is that any time the constitution is amended -- and I'd love to know, as I would with most of her pronouncements, whether she doesn't know this or she's just conveniently ignoring it -- it has to be ratified by 75% of the states. In other words, a constitutional amendment cannot, by definition, be a federal power grab. At least 38 of our 50 states have to say yes for it to take effect. And 42 of the then-48 states said cool to the 16th Amendment. (Three rejected it and three more never took it up.) Assuming that Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia's silence on the matter equalled consent, that's 93% approval from the states from whom power was being "grabbed". Nice.

This nitwit continues to say dumb shit on a regular basis. And our media continue to quote her dumb shit. Please stop. Or at least have the common decency to say, "Hey, that is some dumb shit right there. And here's why." It isn't all that difficult. What are you people going to do when you come up against an actual skilled sophist (like, say, Karl Rove)?

Truth, Justice, OR the American Way

Yesterday's New York Times Op-Ed page (usually a feast on Sundays) had a series on what to do about the almost-universally acknowledged law-breaking of the Bush regime. This discussion makes me want to scream.

The first salvo went to Harvard law professor Charles Fried. This is the screaming part. Fried seems to think that we should just forget about it and move on. The basic idea here, and I've heard it expressed elsewhere far too often, is that the election is all the punishment the Bushies need. This reminds me of The Idiot's own statement in early 2005 that "We had an accountability moment. It was the 2004 election." I am sick and tired of the notion that the vote of the generally ill-informed American people is all the justice that is required. If someone breaks the law, well, just vote 'em out. If we don't vote 'em out, we give tacit approval to anything and everything they do. No. No! NO! Fried uses multiple terms that are just plain false and inappropriate in order to suggest that those who want crimes to be punished do not have the purest intentions. Get a load of this:

"It is a hallmark of a sane and moderate society that when it changes leaders and regimes, those left behind should be abandoned to the judgment of history. It is in savage societies that the defeat of a ruling faction entails its humiliation, exile and murder."

This is insulting. We're not talking about people with whom we merely disagreed or who were just not good at what they did. We're talking about criminals. And yet Fried equates those who wish for a true accounting with savages hell-bent on revenge. Sane and moderate people would just let it go. Bullshit.

Here are some other bullshit terms he uses: "show trials", "persecution", "a politics of hate and revenge", "barbarism and desolation", "night of the long knives", "urge to criminalize", "our own over-lawyered culture".

Fried goes on to admit that these were indeed crimes, but it would just be too much of a hassle to deal with them. Listen, bub, a sane and moderate society would not dream of allowing crimes to go unprosecuted because it might mean we won't get home in time for "American Idol". We do not have an "urge to criminalize". You can't criminalize crime. It's crime already. And calling it something else is what our main problem is here.

Fried ends with a disgusting claim that those who want justice are comparing Bush and Cheney to Hitler and Stalin. This infuriating tactic is the same one that I (and Joel Stein) wrote about in this post. Saying that what you did isn't as bad as what the most horrible people in the universe did is not an excuse. People get arrested for drunk driving too. That doesn't make them Mao but it does make them criminals. We don't let them go and say, "Eh, at least he didn't willfully kill anyone. And it was only one, not like that Saddam guy." Enjoy your tea, Chuck. The rest of us want justice. Including the next contributor...

Next up is Slate's Dahlia Lithwick. This is more like it. Lithwick's piece reads like a direct refutation of Fried's. I have no idea if she read Fried's screeds before she composed this, but she certainly has heard the sad arguments before. It's not complicated. If the law is broken, it is appropriate and mandatory that investigations and, if necessary, criminal proceedings take place. We're a big tough country. We can handle it. Yes, we have other things to worry about, like cleaning up the mess we've got. But we have plenty of fine folks who need work right now. They can help.

The argument that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al are going to be punished enough by the shame of having lost an election and having some people mad at them is ridiculous. Have you heard these people lately? They couldn't care less what you or I (or the law) think. The only way to make sure this doesn't happen again is to punish those who broke the law.

"If we declare presumptively that there can be no justice for high-level government officials who acted illegally then we exhibit the same contempt for the rule of law.

It’s not a witch hunt simply because political actors are under investigation."

Last up is Yale law professor Jack Balkin. This is supposedly the calm middle ground between these arguments. The truth is more important than "revenge" or, as some of us call it, justice. I understand this to a point. But truth should lead to justice, if it points that way. I agree with Balkin's most rational argument against the "witch hunt", which is that the Bush team (in their "over-lawyered" fashion) did a bang-up job of providing themselves with legal cover in the form of made-to-order legal "opinions" designed specifically to aid them in a situation like this. Even though we know the true rationale behind it, it's tough to legally trump it.

And, of course, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (Worst. Law. Ever.) gave them even more cover. With the help of our own congress, thank you very much. Who also were "consulted" on just what was going on, albeit in a roundabout way. Are these same people now going to investigate crimes that they aided and abetted? And make themselves potentially culpable? Good luck with that.

Yes, we need to know the truth. What we know already is horrifying and we know that there is a whole lot more that we don't know. (Known unknowns, anyone?) And the Bushies are going to fight tooth and nail, as they have already, to make sure that we never find out the rest. But we are a weak and pathetic nation if we just allow this to be swept under the rug because we think we don't have the time or energy for it. That's exactly what the Bushies are counting on.

Dumb Letters: Legal Evils

This kind of crap makes me crazy. It never ends. This is from today's NY Times.

When something is this loaded with stupid, we have to take it bit by bit, to allow the proper amount of jaw-dropping and snarky refutation for each nugget of poop. Here we go.

When we release the prisoners now at Guantánamo Bay, many will go back to their homelands and carry out attacks similar to what we just saw in India.

And this is to be proven how, exactly? Do we know which ones? If we have their plans for doing so, we've got enough to keep detaining them, don't we? And if we don't, well then, this is just fear-mongering and speculation. And this isn't Minority Report. Or is it?

And despite what many say, I believe that these people would have done this before they came to Gitmo, and not because of it.

Maybe. But if you piss on a hornet's nest, they're a lot more likely to sting you. And once again we're dealing with "these people", as if they're all cut from the same cloth and all have the same motives. This is the essence of xenophobia.

So the question becomes: What do you do with a person so evil that he will never give up the idea of killing Westerners until they are dead?

Well, I'd say you probably wanna lock 'em up. But we'll need some kind of way to determine which ones this applies to. Some kind of, I don't know, legal system.

Again, does this apply to all of them? How do we know? And here we also see the entrance of the dreaded "e" word. They're evil! Not criminals. Not war criminals. Not even deranged. But evil. If this is your view of the world then don't even bother making a legal or logical argument. You don't have one.

I eagerly await Barack Obama’s plan to try these barbarians in United States federal court. Security, both physical and national, will be a nightmare.

Ah, yes, barbarians. Barbarians, of course, are one step above cro-magnons. Naturally, such a being is undeserving of legal protections afforded to the civilized and non-evil (and white).

Obama doesn't need a "plan". We've had one in place for two centuries. It's our basic American legal process. It works fine. If they're guilty, they go to jail. If not, they don't. We've tried a few folks in civilian courts and so far no security nightmare. My guess is that the nightmare would only come from assheads like this causing a fuss at the courthouses.

Teaching about constitutional law and actually having to protect America and enforce the law are two very different things. We’ll see how Professor Obama reacts to his first encounter with reality.

Eric Smith
Stafford, Va.

Um, yeah. Switch out "teaching about constitutional law" for "running a few oil companies into the ground" or "fleecing a city for money for your baseball team" and you've got the problem with the last eight years. I think that teaching about constitutional law is a pretty good training ground for learning how to uphold said constitution. Call me crazy. Hell, just reading the damn thing once should have helped.

I love the word "reality" in this context. It's always used to imply that "reality"="maniacs want to kill us and anyone who says we shouldn't behave just as maniacally in response is a big fat pussy who hates his country and wants to see us all die". Here's reality in my estimation: on Inauguration Day the president swears to uphold our constitution. If he doesn't uphold it, he breaks that oath and disqualifies himself for the office. He does not swear to protect us, although it would be nice if he did that too. But it's not in the basic contract. Our ideals are more important than any individual life or group of lives.

And it's President-elect Obama to you, fucknut.

Free to Be, You and Me (No, Just Me; Not You)

Seriously, people. Someone get Governor Moosekiller a copy of the Constitution. Ours, that is. I'm not sure which one she keeps referring to, but it's not the United States Constitution. Hell, you don't even need to buy her one. I just linked to it. And then read the fucking thing to her. And then explain it. Seriously. It doesn't take long.

First, she insists, repeatedly, that the Constitution gives the Vice President lawmaking powers. And now she craps all over the sacred 1st Amendment.

Apparently, "freedom of speech" really means "freedom of speech for governors from cold states but not you". And "freedom of the press" really means "freedom of the press to keep their yaps shut when I say stupid shit and never ever call me on it". Here's what she said to conservative radio host Chris Plante of WMAL-AM.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

Excuse my French, but how fucking dumb is this asswipe? Oh no, I made slimy allegations about somebody and then the press said they were slimy. My rights are being violated!

Set aside for a second the logical problem with her argument (and I use that term loosely). Negative campaigning, by definition, is making statements about the other party meant to cast them in an unflattering light, as opposed to making positive statements about yourself. The media don't need to convince anyone of anything. It's negative campaigning. Period. What's at issue is its veracity. Anyway...

Palin has the 1st Amendment exactly backwards. She can say anything she damn well pleases. But then the press has the equally important right, nay, the responsibility, to call bullshit on her. This is basic stuff. Really basic stuff. I'm sure nobody reading this needs me to explain it to them. Which makes you all more qualified to be Vice President than this moron.

Mrs. Palin, here's the deal. Your rights are no more or less important than anyone else's. I know you don't want to believe that. If you want to have a nice little dictatorship where you can do whatever the crap you want but nobody can say or do anything to you, then please go back to your pals in the Alaskan Independence Party and make your own little stupid country. Please leave ours alone. The Bush/Cheney junta has done enough damage to it already.

Please, America, get this goddamn election over with so that this utter dipshit can go back to the cave she crawled out of and John McCain can begin apologizing for letting James Dobson and Bill Kristol foist her on us.