Death eligibility.  Anthony Kennedy is stubborn when it doesn't matter, decisive about the insignificant, and can't discern dignity from pomposity.  His unfailingly poor choice of words reflects a wandering intellect, unlike Aristotle's peripatetic contemplations, but more like senile aimlessness.  Eligibility?  I bet he joined the four humans on this court only after they said he could write for the majority in this case.  If so, then he probably believes his choice to be a principaled one. 

Splitting hairs about how old a person must be to be eligible for murder by the state?  Puhlease.  I would have more respect for the other four who joined him in this decision—Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer—if they forfeited Kennedy's 'support' and dissented with something like this:  "The death penalty, no matter the age, is abhorrent to humanity, and a poison to any society which embraces it.  We dissent." 

And Scalia was not 'scathing' in his dissent—he was embarrassing.  Scalia's contempt for all who disagree with him is a repudiation of jurisprudence; it exposes his naked venality.  I'd be insulted if he liked me.

But don't get me wrong, this decision is a step toward the enlightened society we will become one day, and regardless of the shenanigans necessary to secure this verdict, scores will be spared execution as a result.  That cannot be bad.  I just think a more direct, more honest route would cost us less in the long run. 

On the bright side; there can be no appeal.  That is both the best, and the worst thing about the Supreme Court of the United States.  When their actions are treasonable, who do you call?  Who can redress such grievances?  We had no recourse in 2000.  They have no recourse today. 

And to Lee Boyd Malvo, Christopher Simmons, and 70 others, and to scores more who would have been sentenced to death but for todays Supreme Court decision; your sentence now is life.  Like it or not.  The irony that a life sentence may be worse for some than death, is not lost on me.  But no matter how tragic, devastating, even cruel, is a sentence to spend the remainder of one's natural life in America's prisons, there is still a greater meaning for a decision to limit the death penalty, even if it fails to abolish it.  It says that we are not inhuman, and that we are capable of embracing everything with life, instead of rejecting it in death; it says we choose to make our existence inclusionary, not exclusionary; it states very simply to all evil intent lurking anywhere in the world, even anywhere in all the universe—we are not afraid.

He's dead.  Please, say it ain't so...

Neocons do not like to admit it, but judicial activism is the same-sex partner of conservative extremism. 

Judging justices has historically been the weak link in their elaborate plans to pillage the republic.  The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision that banning gay marriage was unconstitutional was led by Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, who was named as Chief Justice in September, 1999, by republican Governor Paul Cellucci, a less than moderate conservative.  Associate Justice Judith Cowan, who concurred with Marshall, was also appointed by Governor Cellucci as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in October, 1999.  Cellucci, now Ambassador to Canada, is currently engaged in this administrations efforts to make Canada a compliant partner in this nation's world-wide terrorism.  Specifically, Cellucci has been instrumental in obtaining treaties with Canada (as if the current US administration respects treaties at all) to seize draft-dodgers in Canada for prosecution here in the US, side-stepping the due process of extradition proceedings.  I can't help but wonder what all those new prisons will be for; hooded, nameless young men who dared dissent?  Despite all the sound-bites downplaying the looming resumption of involuntary conscription, the draft is coming.  And you have nowhere to go.  Welcome to George Bush's version of a free world. 

As a result of Margaret Marshall's decision defending the rights of gays to marry in Massachusetts, Cellucci, who appointed her Chief Justice, will have a lot to do in order to regain favor among the neocons.  And that is how they like it.  Threaten the man with exile from the party to which he has given his life, and push him to extremes he would never have considered on his own.  Their cake, and eat it too. 

This is a government of inconsistencies, and it needs men like Alberto Gonzales with brains capable of balooning into grotesquely elephantine shapes in order to accomadate the illogic of those inconsistencies.  But he has a nice smile. 

I do not have time to research Clarence Thomas, distinguished for being the most un-distinguished Supreme Court justice in memory, and his slim but hopeful potential for disappointing his neocon handlers.  He sleeps on the bench.  His only virtue recommending him to a seat on the US Supreme Court was his betrothal to the ideologies of the neo-conservative pillagers of republic.  The phrase "bad marriage" is in the modern lexicon for its ability to sum-up within its three little syllables a potential for long-term disaster and regret, stunning for having grown out of a beautiful and happy beginning.  The experience is, for many, all too familiar. 

When Clarence wakes up, and finds himself in the company of bright lights such as Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer, there may be no telling what grief he might bring to the inhumane political ideology that elevated him.  But then he may not surprise.  He may just turn out to be a compliant partner for his neocon masters; a good wife. 

I had a lovely dream...

...and I started to believe again.  But then, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I realized with astonishment (and even more shame than before, if that is possible) that the words which woke me with what resembled the sterling sound of ringing truth were in fact words of hubris, drenched in gall, of an ultimate felon accusing others of petty crime.  Can you believe it? 

Colin Powell's only redeeming feature today is that his bosses have rejected him, yet still he snivels in their service, promoting a diversion. His manufactured indignation at questions of electoral fraud in the Ukraine--a nation new to democracy--is stunning in its arrogance and obscene in its presumption that we in the oldest democracy on earth will accept such a fraud. 

The fact that indeed we will accept his fraud is the only thing that sickens me more.

Can you believe it?

latest

Wise words not often heard these days. 

I get scared, scared of absolutely everything.  There's no where to go that's safe.  Why care?  Why hope?  Why not just participate in the rape of anything you can get your hands on?  It seems to be the trendy thing to do. 

I think we should call off the election and have a televised lottery (like mega-bucks) pick the next president.  People seem to have more faith in scratch tickets than ballots.

While we are at it, let's just call off wars and instead execute about a thousand young soldiers a year, all chosen by lotttery.  There would be no more suffering than there is now for the soldiers' families, and Bush's friends would have to get rich honestly (if they knew how) instead of at the expense of innocent lives.

Quotes below are excerpts from Bill Moyers address to the 2004 Conference of Inequality Matters. 

Please, read the whole speech.

...And it's too late.  The dream was comely and elegant.  It even achieved some reality in parts and places.  But today, in America, it is American to be un-American, it is patriotic to be unpatriotic, and it is right to be wrong. 

I don't believe that any of our battles (i.e.; the fight to reveal the scandolous underfunding by Republicans of the no child left behind initiatives) are battles 'at the front' so to speak, as if there were any real American territory to defend anymore. We are a nation completely overrun by an occupying force alien to the Jeffersonian concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We are oppressed by a force which opposes all things truly American; equality, liberty, freedom, and justice for all.  We still think of ourselves as American, even though under this regime, little remains of what made our nation, historically, so special.

So, I have to say, in despair to my self, "Why go to New York and protest at the RNC?"  As a member of a generation remarkable for its apathy toward, and its failed husbandry of, the commonweal, I have to wonder, "Do I really care?"

It was great growing up in Massachusetts as a Kennedy-an in the 1960's, and feeling that politicians were noble for answering the call to public service.  It was great believing then, even if they were crooks, that they were humane crooks who took care of the People's needs.  Today, power is weilded by inhumane politicians, crooks among whom no honor can be found.

We have been unconscious, and now, responding to bitter economic hardships and visciously inflicted state invasions encroaching on our civil liberties, we wake and say, "There will be none of that!"  "Ha!" I can hear our opressors laugh.  They say, "What do you mean? 'There will be none of that.'  There has been lots of that for decades now, and you have not raised so much as a finger of resistance."

Wake up, my pretty little American boy.  You've been getting screwed both thick and long, while you slept in sweet oblivion.  Now wake, and either face the truth and pain that you are a prison whore, or slip away back to your dreams of an America that is no more.

...resulting in a flood of trash spilling from the open frames which hold the trash barrels.

We can see who the stasi want for president, and it is not the hometown boy.  (Boston Globe article.) 

Tons of garbage and trash—even enough to bury the gleaming dome of the State House, and all of Beacon Hill as well, including Kerry's house—will never stink to high heaven like what the Bush-Republicans have already done.

With a huge effort, the Bush administration was able to create a deadlock over the Patriots Act.  A deadlock.  What a resounding indictment of democracy as we now know it.  I live in the despondancy of the United States of America.

Asshole.  And it was the republicans who made happy hour a tax-deductible business expense for PACs.  How dare he impugn the integrity of true patriots in the name of a lie--the Patriots Act? 

*

Just thought you should see this.  Bound and Gagged.

I have to link to this.  (Found from links at r@d@r's excellent blog.)

And the same day I found that (today), I also wrote this to my Senators, Kennedy and Kerry, regarding Constitutional amendments to bar flag burning: