It has just got to hurt when

you get dope-slapped by the Supreme Court...like being smacked in the pie hole with the business end of a shovel.
It is a BIG wake up call, trust Humble Elias on this.

Yup the SC has ruled that the President doesn't have the Tudor-like power to lock us all up for trial under the rules of Jus Gladii. This has immediate and obvious implications for the Guantanamo detainees and some long term impact on the whole warrantless wiretapping program.
Bush had his day in court and he lost bigtime.
Now no doubt the today and the holiday weekend to come will be full of sad yelpings from the Praetorian Class and it's numerous paid apologists in the media. Authoritarian Government always has its supporters after all. The cry will go up for even more rightical chic Justices...but with the President's approval rating mired at 29% and an election looming it is hard to see how he gets another Alito or Scalia on the Court without sending in the Marines.

Reed Hillman: Demagogue

In today's Globe, Kerry Healey's handpicked candidate for Lt. Governor added this bon mot to the current debate about a needle exchange program:

"Imagine your children not only coming upon dirty needles in the park, but standing in line next to a heroin or crack addict in a drugstore,"

Well, I guess the Commandant is agin' it.

Humble Elias could rant ad nauseum about Hillman's clever use of fundamentally despised strawmen (addicts) to whip up the usual tedious hysteria about crime and anarchy.
However...Look at it this way; suppose we follow the line of Hillman's rant to it's logical conclusion and lock up every addict in the Commonwealth without fear or favor and especially sans any provision for AIDs prevention?
What we would have then, is thousands of junkie behind bars with HIV all of whom would be costing the public coffers bigtime to usher them out of life even in a minimally humane fashion.
Reed Hillman would rather spend that money than swallow his pride and do something unpleasant now to prevent a costly epidemic later.
Ah but Reed wants to win and sound like a big tough guy in the bargain...Well we've had sixteen years of this kind of pseudo leadership and look where it has landed us?

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Florida's unique "Catch -n- Release" program for rich dope fiends briefly netted one

Rush Limbaugh last week who upon returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic was detained at the airport for three hours for possession of a viagra prescription.
Cynics out there have already noted that viagra apparently comes in the form of a little blue pill as does any one of a number of prescription pain killers...Possession of which would violate Limbaugh's light-as-ashes drug conviction.
What Humble Elias wants to know is, who the hell VACATIONS in the Dominican Republic? Especially a famously narrow minded praetorian jerk-off like Rush Limbaugh. So far as I know the country's main attraction other than the steaming heat is grinding poverty and famously lax rules governing the sale & distribution of pharmaceuticals.
The Chimes at Midnight is sure Limbaugh went there to giggle at the peonage, surely his trip had nothing to do with scrip shopping in the Caribbean's most wide open drug bazaar? No not a chance.

Cash-n-Carry Congress

Last week, the U.S. House quietly passed themselves a 2% Cost of Living increase in their take home wages...this brings their yearly above the counter haul to $168K or so.
These would be the same GOP congressional dickwads who refuse to increase the now stagnant minimum wage because it would somehow hurt job growth here in Plantation USA.
Humble Elias can see why they need the money though, the cost of blow and quality hookers has gone sky frickin' high and with Jack Abramoff behind bars, one of the House GOP's main sources of revenue has dried up. So you see, they HAD to raid the US Treasury or else the whore houses of Georgetown and beyond might've suffered!

That is Denny Hastert's congress always tryin' to create jobs.

Meanwhile, the senate mindful of it's constitutionally mandated role as a second rate circus sideshow is debating a "flag burning amendment" to the US Constitution spitefully sure that if they carry one long and loud enough, no one will notice they've voted themselves another undeserved pay-raise.

This congress has (in the words of Oliver Cromwell) "tarried too long for the good they hath done"...

Last week, John Kerry offered a Senate Resolution

Setting modest timetable for the withdrawal of US Troops from Iraq. It garnered thirteen votes in the US Senate, and the usual tidal wave of bitter denunciation from the usual ass-holes in the punditariat.
On Friday though, it was revealed that General Casey, the CO of US Forces in Iraq had presented to the Pentagon a plan to withdrawal something like HALF our troops by January 2007!
Now...Humble Elias isn't what you'd call a military man, but even he knows that US Theater Commanders DON'T compose detailed plans for a military withdrawal (what was jocosely called "cutting and running" just last week) unless they've been ordered to do so by the appropriate chain of command. Given the fact that the Department of Defense is run like a plantation these days there can be no doubt this plan was solicited either by Donald Rumsfeld or one of his henchmen.
The question is, are THEY planning to cut and run? Or is this plan of Casey's something deliberately leaked to give the GOP congressional candidates some cover this fall?
Humble Elias wonders if Kerry knew about Casey's withdrawal scenario and perhaps timed the resolution thusly?

Fearful Things

Jeff Jacoby is worried, he has been reading Robert Ferrigno's dystopian thriller "Prayer for the Assassins" and as such is scared Al Qaeda could take over the USA and impose Sha'aria law.
Frankly, I think the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Boy Scouts of America have a better shot at it, but why quibble with the frightened?
Now I've seen Ferrigno's book and it sounds mighty contrived as to how Al Qaeda etc actually pull off the conquest of the USA.
Contrivance is deadly when writing political fantasies, its what killed Allen Drury's ponderous "Advise and Consent" series.
Note to Jacoby and Ferrigno, always keep your near future dystopia's vague and simple, in this respect take George Orwell's "1984" or Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" as your models.
For that fact, if you are really in the market for a good book that beats the tocsin about the "Islamic Threat" just pick up a copy of the late Anthony Burgess' "1985" and excellent and utterly paranoid work in every respect.
On the other hand there is a bit of an intellectual disconnect here in Jacoby's thinking. It seems to me, that one of the reasons that US Movement Conservatism and it's Praetorian Apologists have been a bust a fighting Al Qaeda is that in the main, they have the same policy goals. They both lust after a primitive patriarchic society dominated and controlled by revealed religion as interpreted by a elite priestly caste.
Jeff therefore isn't railing against the coming hordes of Islam and their anti-rational rule so much as he wants to make sure the Next Society is one controlled by the right set of believers.
So between Jeff and his wowsers and Al Qaeda and their suicide bombers mere secular society has come in for some hard knocks since September 11th 2001.
Think about that for a while.

Now mind you, I'm not drawing a line of moral equivalence between Jeff and the suicide bomber class. Jeff lives in a civil secular society and wishes to peacefully transform it into a sort of Christian Theme Park with hot and cold running holy water at the Sheraton and witchburnings on cable TV. His ambitions are silly and retrograde but no one getting killed on their behalf.
The suicide bombers live in a society already overburdened by religion and are looking to solve all those problems with more sectarian violence.
So its a difference of means and milieu don'cha know.

Kerry Healey had better watch her mouth...

She now proposes to go screaming into the streets to demonstrate her freeper bona-fides as an anti-illegal immigration zealot.
Fine, she had to tack to the right at some point, it is entirely predictable that she'd do it in respect of an issue properly vetted by the Washington DC Praetorian Class.
But...Remember this me hearties...

It is IMPOSSIBLE to be truly rich in Massachusetts and NOT have hired an illegal immigrant to do something somewheres for your well-heeled ass. It might've been the crew that built your pre-gubernatorial palace by the sea on the North Shore or the crew that comes along and does the yardwork once a week. Sooner or later, someone without green-card one, has done the heavy lifting for you.
If I was Kerry Healey I'd lower my shrill little voice and start checking those invoices and go back a lot further than the year 2000 if she knows what is good for her.
Could be the old au pair with that charming Wexford accent, the Cape Verdean brothers who come to trim the hedges...But they are there count on it.