The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling strikes down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision goes further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

The wackadoos are in full command. Not only do they have two of the three branches of the government in their pockets, but the Congress is theirs for the asking too (see the right-wing extremist FISA bill they’re about to pass).  Now their judicial arm has created a new Constitutional “right,” just for the wackadoos.  Brass knuckles are illegal, but guns are too safe for the government to ban.  God bless America.

Incidentally, the above-quoted AP lede is dead wrong–it was by no means “the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.”  The Supreme Court had ruled AGAINST the Second Amendment having any relevance to gun control laws over and over again in rulings going back to the 19th century.

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Until the reign of general idiocy that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and is only just beginning to end, no one but gun wackos bothered quoting that irrelevant Amendment–or rather, quoting the second half of it, since the “well regulated militia” part never did their cause much good.

“Keep and bear arms”?  Nobody does that any more.  Members of the National Guard–which is today’s Congressionally-designated militia–do not keep their guns at all; they’re in an armory, and they’re the same issue the Army gets.  They DO bear arms when in uniform–unlike those who carry around a gun for self-defence or hunting, who are merely carrying arms.  In the eighteenth century, when the Second Amendment was drafted, to “bear arms” had a specifically military meaning (see the Oxford English Dictionary).

This explains the otherwise mysterious connection between a militia designed to protect the state and a right of the people.  Simply put, the feds can’t keep people from serving in their state militias–nor from keeping the weapons they’d need to do it, if any states still let militia members keep their own weapons (which they don’t).  It’s a right of the people to serve in their state’s military service–obviously subject to the provision that the state has to want them there (or the militia would hardly be “well regulated”).

Through the alchemy of our ever-obscurantist Supreme Kangaroo Court, this has transmogrified into a right to own a handgun for self-protection in the District of Columbia, which doesn’t have a militia.  Just about as logical as saying you have to stop counting votes because continuing to count them might at least temporarily swing the outcome, giving the impression that the person who’s going to be implanted into office anyway wasn’t really elected.  It’s the same five Justices–well, not quite, two having been replaced by the pseudo-president thereby implanted (and subsequently reimplanted through massive fraud).

What really worries me is the folks in D.C.  A lot of them are going to die because of this.  All in order to “reinforce the illusion, irrelevant to capitalist production but essential to its propaganda, that the individual stands self-sufficient above all symbolic restraint”–legal restraint in this case (quotation from page 21 of my big essay).

Click to see the thrilling conclusion…

Graphic by Tim Hollis

It’s oath-inducing enough when officeholders break their oaths of office. But there can be no greater insolence than an officeholder who denies knowledge of what his oath was.

The President…shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

–U.S. Constitution

I do solemnly swear that I will…to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

–Richard Nixon, 1968 and 1972

Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

–Richard Nixon, 1977

Nixon’s long, painful decent from the Oval Office was marked by the constant assertions of The President’s Men that their loyalty to him overrode all other considerations, including legality, and that they considered this the height of honor. Interestingly, their oath of office is to uphold the Constitution and doesn’t even mention the president, while laws were already on the books that required of them outright disobedience to illegal orders. “Loyalty to the president” isn’t mentioned anywhere, although the fact that the laws allow the president to fire members of his government at will certainly explains where it comes from.

In our own time, the Nixon Doctrine of presidential lawlessness is being used far more vigorously than Tricky Dick ever would have dared. From signing statements to illegal search and seizure to cruel and unusual punishment to forced self-incrimination, Bush’s “anti-terrorism” campaign has ripped out so many parts of the Constitution he swore to preserve, they should probably just issue an abridged edition to save paper.

In the latest in a long train of usurpations, Bush has ordered staffers Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolten, and Sara Taylor to refuse to answer questions and provide documents demanded by Congress. Such orders from more traditional presidents would only be exposed after a lengthy investigation, but Bush has come right out and done it in the open. According to the dark hints of James Comey, whatever they’re hiding is so extreme that that guardian angel of civil liberties, John Ashcroft himself, was ready to resign in 2004 if they didn’t stop it, along with Comey and other top Justice Department officials.

The greatest prophet of the sixteenth century might actually not have been Nostradamus but Shakespeare:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office…

What Hamlet is trying to account for with his great speech, in his princely, flowery language, is why everybody doesn’t just off themselves, given how cruddy everything is. The political trends of the past few years lend renewed significance to this question–especially when it comes to the oath of office.

Consider Keith Ellison, the freshman Democratic congressman from Minnesota who was trashed late last year after he announced he’d be taking his oath on the Koran. His Republican colleague Virgil Goode, who serves a district in an area of Virginia that has been a bastion of slavery, Jim Crow, and white paranoia since the nation began, warned against more Muslims coming into the country and electing more Muslims to Congress. Goode also commented, “I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way.” In an op-ed, with admirably unintentional irony, he called on Americans to “save Judeo-Christian values” to avoid “leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion.”

Bush refused to criticize Goode’s overt anti-Muslim bigotry–”no judgments have been made,” Bush spokesman Dana Perino explained. But Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) took it upon himself to play the good cop for the GOP, distancing himself from Goode’s remarks:

“Why would you swear allegiance to a document outside your faith? …I embrace religious diversity. I welcome this new member of Congress. I’m glad he’s swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith.”

Unfortunately, what Graham says here is both a deliberate deceit Read the rest of this entry »

Ostensibly, Clinton was impeached and being tried for lying about a sexual liaison. If truthfulness about extramarital affairs had been a requisite for everyone in Congress to hold their seats before they voted to oust Clinton, neither the House nor the Senate could have formed a quorum.

–John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience

Two right-on-the-money rebuttals: first off, Moyers’ impassioned fire. Then, Greenwald’s legal, logical ice. Both pieces are brilliant.

All Glenn Greenwald ever does, really, is uphold the sense of political decency, propriety, legality, and respect for the rules and for basic fairness that were, believe it or not, widely accepted by the American establishment as recently as the post-Watergate era (1975-78). Granted, they didn’t consistently practice what they preached, and huge areas — such as all U.S. operations overseas, and certain assassinations that had occured back home — were exempt from any concept of fairness, decency, or lawfulness whatever. But debates within the U.S. were, provided they stayed within certain bourgeois, pro-Cold-War bounds, protected by hard-fought-for rules of fairness — as were the contestations between the two major parties — as was ideological struggle within a rather broadly defined mainstream, from strong liberal to strong conservative. (It wasn’t until the Reagan era that we were indoctrinated through endless repetition with the idea that liberalism isn’t part of the mainstream. Most liberals and progressives, seeming to almost relish their faux unpopularity, did not strongly contest this nonsense at the time, with disastrous consequences ever since.)

And the corporate media, in those same post-Watergate times — at least the respectable, anti-tabloid media — adhered to strict rules of neutrality in news reporting that have since gone by the boards. (Imagine news stories that don’t assert what is likely to win public support or how the ongoing struggles they chronicle are likely to come out, that don’t make use of the passive voice or appeals to anonymous “experts” to attribute authoritative opinions, and that don’t strive for false balance — news stories that, even when they decontextualize or fail to dig enough, more or less report facts and not opinions. Yes, Virginia, many of the basic principles of journalistic integrity progressives now fight a 175-degree uphill battle for were once part of the establishment media’s own rulebook.) These rules did not prevent bias — even massive bias — in sourcing and framing assumptions, for example — but they did put some very real limits on it.

Don’t get me wrong — the rules of fairness under which public discourse operated in this country at that time were perfectly compatible with, and indeed conducive to, the capitalist order. Given the destructiveness which American imperalism had already achieved by 1975 (which Greenwald, significantly, does not criticize), it might not seem like much to aspire to get back to a comparable level of inconsistently principled public discourse. But we’ve fallen so very far that in fact it is a huge undertaking, and a desperately needed one to keep us from outright fascism. (No, North Carolina, we are not already in a state of fascism — or I’d be arrested for writing this — and not merely, as is likely, spied upon.)

Like Greenwald, Bill Moyers also, in his way, upholds the old sense of honor — the one that eventually forced out Agnew and Nixon, and that caused a backlash against their repressive machinations, not just among the great unwashed, but even among the freshly scrubbed of Washington opinion-setters (who already viewed said unwashed with the absolute condescension of an elite whose members know their names will always outweigh their lack of talent). Still less than Greenwald would Moyers ever question American imperalism as such. After all, he was the lackey of the president who lied us into Vietnam. In Moyers’ field of vision, such an act is only an excess, not a monstrosity like those committed by “our” foes.

Yet in opposing these excesses, folks like Moyers and Greenwald sometimes see with brutal clarity the exact place where tyranny is now advancing into yet another former stronghold of those who, however waveringly, resist it. My confirmed impression, from hanging out with my fellow leftists, is that most leftists most of the time don’t see this stuff for what it is, dismissing it as fiddling over crumbs. It is not.

To defend these quite unpurist strongholds, good radicals must fight full-shouldered beside our liberal brothers and sisters — even if in other areas, especially their nationalism, they are themselves part of the problem.

never mind anthrax…here’s the headline of the century:

Turds found in Capitol

According to a Capitol Hill newspaper, police are unable to solve the mystery of the “caca caper.”

What mystery? They’re there every day, passing bills — rather than bowels — to kill more people in Iraq and maintain a class stratified society at home.

“Usually, if a turd gets into the Senate, it’s because he or she was elected,” Emily Heil reports for Roll Call. “But on Wednesday, several large piles of actual, nonmetaphorical ‘No. 2′ found their way into the Capitol, and the source isn’t yet clear.”

Fake news…it’s not just Jon Stewart and The Onion, but the regular news that’s full of shit. Here is a fascinating history of fake news in America…it goes back much further than you might think!

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Another clueless corporate media reporter falsifies Reagan’s atrocious record on — well, pretty much everything, but in this case Central America. The pretense that he supported human rights there is particularly nauseating.

Let me state for the record: any “historian” who considers Reagan a great, a good, or even an acceptable president, I have no respect for. He was much like W, except that he operated under more restraints. He took a right wing, usually quite unpopular position on every significant issue. He was an enemy of the poor and of civil liberties, he undermined the working class majority every way he could, and with Iran-Contra he made a mockery of constitutional government. He brutalized Central America under the pretense of fighting communism, although the movements “we” were fighting weren’t even Communist. He manufactured the first ever super-sized peacetime budget deficits by combining humongous tax cuts for the rich with massive military spending increases, which his administration justified by slanting intelligence to exaggerate Soviet strength. And he brought down Communism in the same sense that Nixon brought down acid rock.

The “great communicator”? On TV, Reagan was known mostly for his use of simple-minded anecdotes to “prove” sweeping points, for his inability or unwillingness to make elementary distinctions between truth and falsehood, and for his frequent, politically costly gaffes. Widely considered the least electable major Republican candidate in 1980, he unsurprisingly won anyway against the highly unpopular incumbent Jimmy Carter after a campaign in which Reagan’s own team admitted he performed poorly, endangering his once-massive lead with risky statements until, on the eve of the election, the race was too close to call. In the end Reagan won big, but only because he dominated the last-minute, “hold your nose” vote; dissatisfaction with the incumbent was, as usual, simply more important to voters than doubts about the challenger.

Once Reagan took office, his approval ratings shot up and down like a roller coaster; as with most presidents, they primarily reflected the state of the economy. Among all the presidents since Gallup started polling in the 1930’s, Reagan’s average approval ratings were, well, average — smack dab in the middle of the pack. (The same goes for his “personal likability” ratings, for whatever little that may be worth.) He did have the good fortune to have his popularity at its peak just in time for the 1984 and 1988 elections — and the nation consequently had the bad fortune of having eight more years with Republican presidents.

On the other hand, for any readers too young to remember the old goat, if you haven’t learned your history, I can’t blame you if you think he was some sort of demigod. After all, isn’t that exactly what you’ve always been told?

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Huge story from Seymour Hersh, completely ignored by the corporate media, showing that some of the people “we” are supposed to be fighting may well be directed from Cheney’s office:

THE REDIRECTION:
Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?

Now, I don’t buy into his subtitle at all. There’ s no such thing as a war on terror, any more than there’s such a thing as a war on tanks. You cannot fight a tactic, only specific users of it. But although Hersh more or less accepts Acting President Bush’s account of what happened on 9/11, and doesn’t cleanly break with the cause of American imperalism, he is nevertheless an effective critic of it — within his limits — and an excellent journalist.

The redoubtable Brad Friedman over at THE BRAD BLOG has just posted yet another on-point piece, partially dispelling the corporate media obfuscation of Congress’ very real responsibility with respect to the the troop “surge”:

All of the Sunday news shows today were abuzz with talk of Bush’s reported troop “surge” plan for Iraq. The general theme was that, as Commander-in-Chief, Bush could do whatever he wanted in regard to troop levels and the only thing Congress could do about it was to use their control of the purse strings by voting to stop funding the war.

… But aside from cutting off funding for the war, now or in the future, there is another option for the moment in answer to Bush’s predicted call for a “surge”; demand that the White House release their estimates of the number of casualties we will incur during such a “surge.”

…It seems to me that any plan to increase troop strength would come with some sort of general estimate from the Pentagon as to the cost in increased, or decreased, causalities [sic] for our troops. Congress must call on the White House to go on record with that estimate!

Apart from debunking the idea that Congress has no effective options, Brad’s full piece goes on to point out that holding Bush to an official prediction of casualities would enable his feet to be held to the fire later. I like what Brad’s saying…but I want to point out that under the Constitution, Congress also has the power

to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.

So they’re NOT restricted to purse-strings and information requests. Nothing could be more repugnant to the spirit of the Constitution, whose framers envisioned nothing like the Imperial Presidency of the last sixty years, let alone Dubya. Congress has DIRECT power to determine how the armed forced are used. The President, as Commander in Chief, only has supreme EXECUTIVE power over the military (and the rest of the government as Chief Executive), not power to override Congress.

The last clause of the same section of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) gives Congress the power

to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

On what grounds, then, can a president possibly claim that his executive powers preempt the legislative authority of Congress?

Now, I grant you, given the veto power–not to mention the profound state of Constitutional confusion that shills for the imperial presidency have created in the national consciousness–it would be difficult for Congress to effectively assert the power I’m talking about. Maybe as a rider to a bill Bush desperately wants? If he signed the bill and tried to signing-statement the rider away, then there would be some chance of recourse in the courts, kangarooish though they are.

What Brad’s suggesting is probably more practical. But I think it’s still important to discuss all options. We need to keep up a discourse about what our actual rights are as Americans, and not get discouraged into letting the obfuscators with the megaphones trim them away on the grounds that “there’s nothing we can do about it.” That defeatism got us here, bit by bit, and if there’s more hope now, it’s because people have started taking destiny back into their own hands.