The awful FISA bill with its awful provisions intact passes the Senate 69-28. Senator Obama, of course, voted for the awful FISA bill. Here’s an interesting tidbit that wasn’t pre-ordained: “Sen Hillary Clinton (D-NY) voted against the filibuster [of Sens. Dodd, Feingold, and Leahy] and then voted against the law a few moments later.” It’s bravery like that wut makes the PUMA cause worthwhile.

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Of course Glenn Reynolds gave the ol’ heh-indeed to a pair of blog posts lionizing Antonin Scalia as a champion of women’s rights and gay rights in virtue of his Heller decision. Inasmuch as the right to own a gun not only trumps every other right in civil and common law, not only encompasses and entails every other right there is, but actually, in its indescribable majesty, is the content and the way and the truth of every possible right in every possible world, it follows that expansions of gun rights are a triumph of human rights in which every human being on earth has a share, and in which the vulnerable and the oppressed and those in greatest need of the protection of rights have the largest share.

So let’s run with the thought: Heller is the greatest victory for black civil rights in decades, since it expanded the right of black people to own guns; Heller is the greatest victory for Latino rights since Latin America’s independence from Spain, since Latinos finally won el derecho de llevar armas, which no one can force them to call “the right to own guns”; Heller is the greatest victory for immigrants’ rights there has ever been, since no previous immigrants were ever guaranteed the right to own guns; Heller is the greatest victory ever for Muslim-American rights, since it gives Muslim-Americans the right to join the mainstream of America by owning guns; Heller is the greatest victory for Zimbabwean rights since the overthrow of UDI Rhodesia, since Zimbabweans who come to the US would acquire the right to own guns; Heller is the greatest victory for Darfurian rights in the history of human habitation of Darfur, since it gives Darfurians who can make it to the US the right to buy a gun, go back to Darfur, and defend themselves from the Janjaweed; Heller is the greatest victory of Iraqi rights since…well, if you’d been reading up your Instapundit you’d know every day is a glorious triumph of Iraqi rights. And Scalia, as the author of Heller, is clearly the equivalent of Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Scoop Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Martin Luther King, Susan B. Anthony, Jonas Salk, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Norman Borlaug, Nelson Mandela, Bernard Lewis, Yitzhak Rabin, Rosa Luxemburg, Friedrich Hayek, Golda Meir, Barry Goldwater, Abraham Lincoln, Bayard Rustin, Victor Davis Hanson, Aragorn, Eowyn, Anakin Skywalker, Margaret Thatcher, Irshad Manji, Tony Blair, the Porkbusters bloggers, and Simon Bolivar all rolled into one, only better. (more…)

Alright, fair warning. This is going to be long. And it’s probably not organized optimally. That’s the nature of blogging, I’m afraid. I think there’s a payoff to getting to the end, namely seeing what’s really rotten about the Heller decision (hint: it’s not that it overturns a handgun ban).

Let me preface things by noting for the record a) that I approve the substantive outcome of Heller, b) that you’ll know I’m planning to run for office in 5-10 years when I join a gun club, and c) the Democrats’ push for gun control, as Jim points out, has been the most idiotic tactical maneuver since the Judean People’s Front Suicide Squad last deployed, yet Democrats and liberals appear still not to have figured it out. Handgun bans are infringements on liberty that accomplish nothing besides fostering a (kinda justified) siege mentality among gun owners that will perpetuate their mistrust of the left indefinitely. Maybe once liberals get tired of whining about Heller, they’ll recognize what an enormous blessing it was for the political fortunes of the Democratic party.

That said, both Scalia’s majority opinion and Stevens’ dissent are really atrocious miscarriages of jurisprudence, and for parallel reasons, failing both as historical and conceptual analysis. (more…)

You know, call me a naive youth, but I’d been holding out a little hope that Barack Obama’s weaselly hedging on the new (awful) FISA bill was just a tactic to allow him to mitigate the risk of voting against a bill the White House, the RNC, and the McCain campaign is suggesting could be the difference between whether hard-working Americans live or die. I.e., Obama could have been trying to make himself sound like the voice of centrist, moderate, non-ideological wisdom, emphasizing his support for the bill in general and expressing his opposition to telecom immunity sotto voce, so that when it came up for a vote, he could claim that the immunity-free legislation he supported was a sensible compromise, and that the Republicans were extremists who insisted on getting 100% of what they wanted or else they’d walk. That might not have been a very effective tactic, given that Steny Hoyer has already quite voluntarily allowed the Republicans to frame their 99% non-compromise as a centrist, moderate, non-ideological compromise, but hey, it would have been consistent with Obama’s usual manner of positioning himself when he takes the liberal side in a lost cause. (Cf. his vote against confirming John Roberts on the Supreme Court.)

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This, my friends, is corporatism and the military-industrial complex at work; companies so in bed with the federal govt that they do the state’s (dubious) bidding, at the expense of their customers’ trust and for fine pay (links omitted): (more…)

In 2005, the Christian right demanded that the Bush Administration crack down on the obscene death and maiming occurring in Iraq adult pr0n. And so it is according to the LAT, that a jury has been empanelled in a California federal district court to watch six hours of “fetish pornography” that includes acts of defecation, as well as man and/or woman on dog/snake/turtle etc. The producer of the films, Ira Isaacs, insists that he is an artist and his films works of art. But he concedes: (more…)

 Last week, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have enabled women  to more effectively sue employers over gender based wage discrimination.   The bill was intended to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear , which limited the ability of workers to seek legal recourse under Title VII by enforcing a statute of limitations of 180 days from the first instance of wage discrimination (despite the fact that this type of discrimination is often as subtle as it is insidious and therefore can take much longer to uncover).  John McCain was absent on voting day, but made clear through comments that he opposed the bill.  Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins had this to say about the bill, the vote, and the absent McCain’s stance in the debate: (more…)

Jesse Walker at Reason’s Hit & Run examines why “The FLDS raid in Texas looks more ludicrous every day.” Not to mention that, as WaPo reports, the original caller claiming to be a 16-year-old rape victim at YFZ apparently is a 33-year-old hoaxer, with a history of such false calls.

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Reason’s Jacob Sullum is dueling it out with Cully Stimson over drug policy in the LAT: Part I, Part II. Stimson decrees that drug laws “protect the public good,” public good, of course, being an abstraction that has neither rights nor duties. Those inhere in individuals. (And even if you do not believe in rights, legislating prohibitions on consensual behavior for “the public good” has historically been a great source for emiserating individuals under the aegis of lofty sounding, moralistic rhetoric.)

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By now most have heard about the raid on the The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) compound — Yearning for Zion — in Edlorado, Texas. Over 400 children were removed, each of whom has been assigned a volunteer attorney (h/t to Margherita by email) to serve as guardian ad litem; all the children face the prospect of ending up in a secular foster system utterly foreign to the sheltered lifestyle from whence they were abruptly yanked. And separated from mothers who are agonized and desperately want their sons and daughters back.

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The federal Road Home program was supposed to help those who lost their homes in the Katrina mess rebuild both dwellings and lives. But the private contractor who managed this relief effort — ICF International — is going after those who were “overpaid,” seeking return of an average of $35K from each “overpaid” recipient. ICF is bidding for collection agencies to chase after approximately $175 million from these families. (Oh, and “[o]ne-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week.”)

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