Category: Politix

Well, folks, it’s over.

Tuesday is the last day of the George W. Bush presidency. I don’t feel exhilarated about that, as I thought I would. It would have been more satisfying to kick him out in 2004, or impeach him after 2006. Heaven knows he deserved to be sent home, or to prison, for most of his time in office. Quite a few Americans knew the truth in November of 2000, that we would not be well-served by “electing” a nincompoop who was, as they say, “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” Alas, almost half the electorate thought they’d like to have a beer with him. I wish they’d done just that, instead of voting for him. Eight years later, all but a small fraction of us wish we’d had that beer, gotten him drunk, and sent him home in an ice storm driving an old pickup with one headlight and bad tires.

In any case, we can hardly wait for him to leave our White House.

However, I am not down with the new President Obama’s apparent intention to let George and his band of criminal pals get away with what they have done. This is not having sex in the oval office, or failing to pay your taxes. The Bush Administration did Big Crimes, and we will all be paying for them for generations, so really, shouldn’t someone involved be held to account?

Let’s look at the charges (highlights only – I don’t have all day):

• Asleep at the switch on September 11, 2001. He is still bragging about “keeping America safe,” even though he ignored repeated warnings that an attack was planned.
• Illegal wiretaps. Yes, he spied on Americans without warrants, a clear violation of federal law. Yes, he admitted it publicly, and promised to keep doing it. Yes, he kept doing it.
• Invading Iraq. They had no weapons of mass destruction and they had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 2001. He fabricated evidence because he wanted to attack somebody, and he ignored or lied about intelligence counter to his delusions. He took troops out of Afghanistan, where the terrorists were hiding, to do this, thus on multiple levels he made our country (and the world) less safe.
• Federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Here’s a few quotes from the National Weather Service’s warning about Katrina: “…MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER…THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL…ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED…HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT…THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK…POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…” As this monster storm approached, George Bush ate cake (literally!) with John McCain, leaving his totally unprepared crony Michael Brown in charge of FEMA. People died. The city was destroyed.
• Obstruction of justice at Justice. Competent U.S. Attorneys were fired for political reasons, and replaced by right-wing loyalists in an attempt to rig the Justice Department. The Department was used to carry out politically motivated prosecutions, in violation of the Constitution.
• Signing statements. When he was not able to veto a law he didn’t like, Bush would simply sign it and issue a statement indicating that he didn’t agree with it and would not comply. Depending on how you count them, he has challenged up to 750 legally-enacted laws this way, more than all other presidents combined. But, signing statement or not, once a law is signed by the President, it’s the law, and if the President ignores it he is breaking the law.
• Torture. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Suspension of habeus corpus. Detention without charges. “Enhanced” interrogation. Kangaroo courts. Extraordinary rendition. I can say no more.
• Valerie Plame. Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby committed treason by outing her as a CIA agent to get back at her husband for calling them out on their lies about Saddam Hussein buying bomb materials from Niger. Bush either knew or should have.
• Looting the Treasury. A few contractors, most notably Vice President Cheney’s own company Haliburton, have made billions of dollars on no-bid government contracts, delivering crappy service at inflated prices. Adding insult to injury, contractors often work side by side with qualified U.S. service personnel making a tenth of the money. Meanwhile, Bush’s corporate welfare and tax cuts for the extremely rich have redistributed the wealth away from working Americans and up into the vaults of the upper upper class.
• Asleep at the switch as the economy tanked. Bush is trying to blame Bill Clinton for the current economic meltdown, and while there is more than enough blame to go around, you’d think the first MBA president, while in control of all three branches of government for six years, would have noticed what was happening in the Wall Street Casino and done something about it. But he didn’t, and he had no idea how to even slow the bleeding after the crash, and now we will have a depression. Thanks, George!

Some of this behavior is patently criminal, some of it merely incompetent. Either way, the Bush presidency has ruined the lives of millions and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands more, both in the United States and around the world. No U.S. president in history has done so much damage, been so unqualified, so blithely clueless or so stupidly stubborn in the face of the facts. And he continues to make speeches and give interviews, making excuses for his failures, trying to rewrite history, and convince someone, anyone, that he is not leaving the world in a shambles. I mean, he took just eight years to fuck everything up, and the least he could do would be to show a little humility as he departs.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m hopeful for the future. I’ve always thought that smart people, while not infallible, have a better chance of governing well than dumbasses, and I believe we are getting a smart and thoughtful new President to lead us through the coming dark years.

Hey, we’ve had our fun. We scornfully blew off Old Europe, we abrogated nuclear treaties, we drove huge gas guzzling pigmobiles, we borrowed money we had no way of paying back, we used the exploding equity in our homes as ATM machines, we kicked some Muslim butt in the bad, bad Middle East, we partied hearty for eight years. But We The People now have to suffer the throbbing hangover, and accept responsibility for our part in it, and pay the bills for our gigantic party of self-absorption. It seems only right that George W. Bush should have to chip in in some real way to pay for his ruinous eight years in office, for his crimes and misdemeanors, for his wooden-headed arrogance, and for his constant mispronunciation of the word “nuclear.”

After that, let the new era begin!

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I know I’ve left out some important Bush outrages and scandals, if not some more impeachable offenses. Feel free to fill in the blanks in the comments below. Truth now, reconciliation later. It’ll do you good.

Also, for excruciatingly more detail on the Bush crimes, see Hugh Makes A List. And thanks, Hugh, for this invaluable reference.

UPDATE: The simple version of what I’m saying in this post is that regardless of Obama/Biden’s big lead in the polls, not everybody who says they are going to vote Democratic will be allowed to vote. So the outcome might surprise us.

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John McCain looks like a loser in this election, but don’t think the Republicans have given up.

The New York Times reports today that tens of thousands of voter registrations in swing states have been purged, apparently illegally. The Times is careful to say that they can’t tell if one party or the other is orchestrating the mass removal of names from voter registration rolls, but when you are the (Republican) party of the elite wealthy minority, it stands to reason that you’ll benefit if fewer of the rabble get to cast their votes. The Republicans have been trying to make an issue of “voter fraud” for decades, but the truth is it’s not really a problem in our democracy.

The problem is vote suppression, (seriously, watch this 30-second video by one of the leading neocon thinkers, Paul Weyrich) and the Republicans have made an industry out of it, from jamming Democratic phone banks on election day to challenging peoples’ legal right to vote to rigging electronic voting machines. Low voter turnout translates into greater success for Republicans, and according to the Times article, these vanishing voter registrations are all taking place in swing states, so forgive me if I get a little suspicious about this. Even if this is not an orchestrated plan by the Republican National Committee, as the article points out, the Democrats have registered huge numbers of voters during this election cycle, and in some states for every new voter added to the rolls, two have been removed. Advantage — and suspicion: Republicans.

Meanwhile, across the nation Republicans are raising outraged cries of “voter fraud.” If you are a real wonk for details, you can read Columbia University professor Lorraine Minnite’s excellent paper, “The Politics of Voter Fraud” (PDF). The bottom line is “…the available evidence here suggests that voters rarely commit voter fraud.” The claim is simply a smokescreen to give cover to Republican operatives who know that they have a better chance of winning if the turnout is low.

Normally this is where I’d tell you that the solution to this particular problem is to make damned sure you get out on election day and cast your ballot, thus thwarting those who would prefer you stay home and watch John McCain eke out a narrow victory November 4. Unfortunately, if your name has been taken off the voter registration rolls, maybe because you’ve moved in the past year or so, maybe because you didn’t answer a letter from the RNC that looked like junk mail and so went directly into the recycle bin, the solution will be much more complicated than that.

You’ll be given a “provisional” ballot and told that it will be counted after proper verification. These are often called placebo ballots, because their main purpose is to get you to leave the polling place without making a fuss. The odds are that they will never be counted. You won’t know that, of course, and the only way all the votes will be counted is in an elaborate judicially-mandated recount, kind of like what happened in Florida eight years ago, and we all know how well that went.

I still think Barack Obama will be our next president. I’m just not sure how many lawyers and recounts it’s going to take.

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RECOMMENDED READING: The Bradblog, for all sorts of voter fraud and machine-rigging stuff.

Sarah Palin is a dangerous woman.

As you can see from the map (which appears today at pollster.com), she won’t be Vice President this time, because McCain won’t win.

But the wingnut Right has found their new George Bush, and you can be sure we’ll see her again. Maybe she’ll be a senator from Alaska next, which will give her a national platform and greater recognition, and then she’ll be running for President in 2016 or even 2012, maybe against Hillary Clinton.

For all I know the fundamentalists may be sincere in their screwball beliefs, but they sure don’t know anything about reality, nor do they have any interest in learning. They could never get elected on the basis of their “every-egg-is-sacred, evolution is just another theory” platform, so in order to get into a position where they can impose their thinking on the rest of us, they have made a deal with the devil, namely the demonic, scorched-earth “New American Century” gang, whom we shall call the Neocons.

Here’s the deal: The fundamentalists provide the empty vessel — know-nothing social conservatives like Reagan, Bush and now Palin, and in exchange the neocons provide the muscle (and the computer hacking) needed to win elections. The Christianists get a President (one of their own) who will appoint right-wing Supreme Court judges to reverse Roe v. Wade, oppose gay marriage, etc., and the neocons get a President who will let them make endless war on the rest of the world, while eliminating government regulation of business and robbing the Treasury of every last dime.

The Left, rightly convinced that their own programs and policies benefit the largest mass of voters, gets whipped every time, and they can never figure out what happened.

If you think this is far-fetched, I refer you to the cases of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, a senile old movie actor and a congenital fuckup. They spoke to the religious right directly and unabashedly, stood right up and called other countries “evil,” and claimed Jesus as their role model. Neither of them had any particular presidential skills or aptitude. Most of us on the left laughed at them pretty much the same way we are laughing now at Sarah Palin.

But it turned out that being clueless did not disqualify them from being President. The hardcore right-wing power structure, which had taken over the Republican Party, saw in them attractive candidates, dummies who’d be able to talk the Jesus talk convincingly, and who’d go along with whatever fiscal and military policies the Party handed them, because hey, who understands all that economics and diplomacy stuff anyway?

Palin is the political descendant of Reagan and Bush: attractive, zealously religious, folksy and vacant. She can be molded by campaign handlers such as Karl Rove (and Lee Atwater before him), and she can plausibly pose as presidential material, easily mouthing platitudes, slinging personal attacks and avoiding serious questions on substantive issues. Merely by virtue of who she is she can deliver the votes of the religious right, a coveted and loyal bloc.

Once in the Oval Office, like Reagan and Bush she’ll be content to let the serious ideological thinkers within the Party set policy and run the show. She’ll make good on her Supreme Court promises and other just-for-show religio-political stances, but important decisions about whether Halliburton gets all the contracts (they do) or what country needs invadin’ will be made by unelected guys behind the scenes.

There has been speculation that there was backstage neocon maneuvering to force McCain to put Palin on his ticket. I don’t know if any of that is true, but I’ve been saying for at least a year that the Republicans don’t have a chance in this election. It’s obvious to the voters who is responsible for the horrendous mess we are in, and they are ready to dish out some well-deserved punishment. Party insiders don’t really like McCain, so he was the perfect guy to sacrifice this time around. Nonetheless getting Palin on this ticket will give her the name recognition and credibility to be a believable candidate in the next election or in 2016.

We are about to emerge from eight years of Rove/Cheney/Bush darkness, and won’t it be a relief to see a little daylight for a change! But don’t turn your back on Sarah Palin. She’ll be back, and tougher than ever.

OK, I’ll say it: John McCain is ridiculous.

His campaign is in trouble, and he wants to stop and . . . what? Go back to the beginning? Start over and try a different strategy? He never had a serious chance to win this election in the first place. God bless him, he’s too moderate for the right-wingers who now control the Republican party. When the current president has screwed up as badly as George W. Bush, it goes without saying that the next president will not be from your party. McCain was the sacrificial lamb, an expendable candidate that the party didn’t really like anyway, so who cares if he loses? After they threw him to the wolves they decided to get a little fundamentalist mileage out of the campaign by throwing Sarah Palin into the mix. She’s somebody they can use later, maybe in the next election, once they’ve established her “credentials” as an actual player on the national stage.

But McCain is just doing crazy shit now. He’s like a guy in a board game who — realizing he’s too far behind to win — spends the rest of his time in the game making unpredictable suicide plays, screwing everything up for those who are still serious about the outcome. Picking Palin was crazy. He’d be doing much better now if he had a running mate who knew his ass from page eight about. . . well, anything. But he wanted to spoil Obama’s convention, and the Palin choice did do that.

Then he essentially canceled the first day of his own convention, saying in effect that you can’t do politics during a hurricane. A hurricane a thousand miles away. As if the Republican Party is somehow in charge of emergency preparedness for the Gulf Coast. WTF?

And now he has “suspended his campaign,” so he can rush to Washington to help solve the current economic crisis. And he wants to postpone the long-scheduled first debate. Never mind that he hasn’t found anything in the Senate important enough to warrant his presence since sometime in April, or that in a time of crisis the voters might actually want to hear what the candidates have to say about it, or that ranking members in both houses say they’re doing fine without introducing presidential politics into the wrangling, or that (as Obama has said) it is possible to do two things at once. Never mind that McCain has solidified his place as one of the nuttiest major presidential candidates in history.

I probably live in a liberal bubble here in California, and I watch MSNBC and listen to Air America, but I can’t believe Middle America is going to think this latest move is anything other than proof that John McCain is just too volatile — or kooky — to be president.

I admit it: I’m a partisan.

I’ve been a Democrat since the 1960’s. That’s right — a liberal, a “progressive,” a left-winger. But I think I come to this place honestly. My mother was not political, and my father was a WWII veteran who voted for Eisenhower. I figured out for myself what I needed to know to make my decisions. You can believe me or not. That’s up to you, but I say this just to let you know that I’m not a “knee-jerk liberal,” that I have thought through my positions

Over the decades since my first Presidential election I have remained hopeful, although there have been times when I couldn’t stay optimistic. My basic belief is that we are all we have, and it’s crucial that we take care of each other, and that’s the measure I use when I’m deciding who to support in an election. I’m not pretending to be all that altruistic. It’s just the way I think. I’ve never been able to understand why warmongers get elected, or pompous hypocrites who wear their religion on their sleeve.

But high public office, it turns out, confers great power on it’s holders, and so the competition to gain these offices has grown ever more cutthroat. Men — and now women — are desperate to get this power, and I mean desperate. We won’t go into the reasons why, but they are desperate. And in their desperation they have turned election campaigns into elaborate, amoral displays of deception.

Techniques have evolved that can get anybody elected, no matter their background. Negative advertising, whisper campaigns, sabotage and outright lies about your opponent actually work. I mean, let’s just face it, it’s far easier to cast enough doubt in your mind to stop you from voting for someone than it is to inspire you enough to go out and elect that person.

This is why no one in this campaign is talking seriously about the war, the broken military, the crumbling economy, the failure of the healthcare system, the corrupt Bush Administration or any of the other real issues that face us. This is why we are talking about real or imagined personal slurs or sex ed for five-year-olds. That stuff works, unfortunately, far better than real (and boring) discussions of monetary policy or international diplomacy. Sadly, the introduction of a smear campaign instantly brings both sides into the muck. There is no way to defend against it. You fight dirty or you lose. (This is a corollary to Jones’ First Law of Social Interaction: Bullies always win.)

So every four years I think maybe we’ve seen the worst of the negative campaigning, and every time it gets worse. Fine. I can stipulate that this is how all elections will be run, now and forever. It won’t stop me and you from knowing about the actual issues, and trying to get someone elected who at least seems capable of doing something about them.

I’ve written in this blog that I am a one-issue voter in this election, and that issue is the war in Iraq. I hate it. I hate the fact that it was not necessary, that our president tricked us into supporting it, that it has destroyed my country’s credibility and good will throughout the world, that it is draining the U.S. taxpayer’s pockets to the tune of ten billion dollars a month, and that it has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of victims.

But the war has disappeared from our political radar, except for the candidates bickering over who was right and who was wrong about “the surge.” In the meantime, see the previous paragraph for a short list of all the stuff that is still going wrong with no end in sight. I accept the fact that we have made such a mess of things that whoever is elected will make almost no difference in the outcome. We’re stuck there for the foreseeable future. There is no honorable way out — as if anything we’ve done there has been honorable up to now.

So, while my Big Issue simmers on the back burner, here’s a little negative campaigning of my own: Last Sunday on 60 Minutes they re-ran a segment about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the 76-year-old right-wing “originalist.” Among his many smug responses, he was arrogantly impatient with interviewer Leslie Stahl when she asked him if he had any regrets about his part in selecting George W. Bush over Al Gore for President in 2000. Despite Bush’s disastrous presidency — the incompetence, the corruption, the stupidity — he said (paraphrasing) “That was so long ago — get over it!”

Get over it? I can hit my finger with a hammer and get over it. I have apparently missed my chance to get into Gwyneth Paltrow’s pants, and I’m over that. But I’m having a little trouble getting over the ongoing catastrophe that is the Bush Administration. And now it occurs to me that if John McCain wins this election, he’ll get to appoint a couple of Supreme Court justices himself, and what with his voting so often in agreement with Bush, and since he has actually said that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, I’m not feeling real good about the kinds of appointments he will make.

The Democrats, much as I love ’em, have a bad habit of approving bad appointments to the Supreme Court, even when they have multiple methods of stopping said appointments, and plenty of good reasons to do so. So even though they will probably have a majority in both house of Congress for the next few years, I don’t trust them to block a possible wild-eyed nutcase from getting onto the Court and screwing up the whole country for 50 years.

These judges are there as long as they want to be. Their terms never expire, and they almost never retire. The impact of a heavily packed right-wing court will be felt for thirty years at least, followed by a couple of generations that will have to live with their decisions until such time as the Court gets around to hearing and correcting old decisions. They are likely to make abortion illegal in this country. They will probably approve laws requiring all of us to carry guns (just kidding). They will continue to make it easy for government to take your property and give it to developers, for, well, development. They will continue to uphold obstacles to equal pay for equal work, as they did just this year. They will be unchecked by any kind of liberal balance. The conservatives will simply be able to steamroll any opposition, because they’ll have an automatic majority in every case.

Let me put this bluntly: They will be very conservative Republicans. Republicans are the party of the rich. They will stand with their party in making sure that rich people remain the ruling class (and get richer), while the rest of us hope for something to trickle down. They will continue down the road of making the U.S. a Christian theocracy, with rulings against abortion and in favor of displaying the Ten Commandments.

If you’re sick of all the slimy campaigning and you just want politics to go away, or if you just can’t decide from among the candidates, think about The Supreme Court. They will have a much greater effect on your life and the lives of your children than the guy who sits in the White House for the next few years. This election is a chance to halt the Court’s slide to the far right and bring some balance back to this crucial branch of government.

It may be your last chance for a long, long time.

Well, we have finally met Sarah Palin.

I watched her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention this evening, and she is a snide, snickering, smart-aleck, not at all the sharp, ambitious stateswoman the McCain campaign has been portraying the past few days.

I can’t recall a more mean-spirited speech during this convention or the Democratic one last week. There were so many low blows and so little actual content that it doesn’t require a rebuttal so much as a warning from the referee. This will definitely cost her a point or two with the judges.

Oh, sure, the speech was popular there in the convention hall. I think some of the attendees were starting to feel the Rapture. There was a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on in Saint Paul, but Americans won’t be buying what she is selling, which seems to be mockery, smirking and smears.

The good news for the Democrats is this: Until tonight, there was concern that in the Vice Presidential debate, Joe Biden would necessarily have to go easy on her, because she has little real knowledge of world and national affairs, and she’s just a cute former beauty queen who’s gotten in over her head, and by forcing him to pull his punches in this way she could fight him to a draw and come out more or less unscathed. After her vicious attacks tonight, she can forget about anybody going easy on her. No doubt she will try to turn on the damsel-in-distress act when she faces Joe’s big guns, but I nonetheless predict Joe will shred her, and it will be no more than she deserves.

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As I predicted yesterday, we all get to have guns now.

The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the 2nd Amendment since it was ratified in 1791, probably because it’s so simply written and so clear in its meaning that no interpretation is needed. But the current Cowboy Court has ended that neglect today by declaring that it is our legal — if not God-given — right to own as many guns as we want, and to keep them around the house, assembled and loaded. And oh, by the way, no one can make you use one of those cumbersome trigger locks, either!

The 5-4 decision split pretty much as you’d expect, with the “strict constructionists” Alito, Thomas, Kennedy, Chief Roberts and Scalia toeing the NRA line. They went with a “strict” interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, which states:

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.

Well, it was strict except for the part about a well-regulated militia. The majority on the Court didn’t include that part in their interpretation. I know — you’re saying “If you leave that part out, it changes the whole meaning of the amendment!” And yes, completely reversing the meaning of part of the Constitution does seem to go against the principle of Strict Constructionism. But, as the right wingers are fond of saying, “You lost! Get over it!”

The other losers will include the sad people who will use their guns to shoot themselves, their wives and children, and the kids who will accidentally shoot themselves or their friends, and the surprised homeowners who will have their guns taken away and turned on them by burglars and home invaders delighted to find that their victims are thoughtfully providing loaded guns for the party.

My favorite part of Scalia’s written opinion is where he says that guns are the weapon of choice to defend your home, because you can point your gun with one hand while dialing the police with the other hand. What a dumbass! If he’d watched even a few episodes of Miami Vice he’d know that you’re supposed to use two hands when you point your gun. But probably Scalia is trying to show that only God-fearing law-abiding, police dialing citizens will be pointing guns and that this new Arm America decision won’t create an epidemic of bullet-related civilian casualties.

Me, I’ll be practicing my quick draw.

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PS: This and many recent decisions of the Supreme Court have been split 5-4. Justice Stevens is 88 years old. Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter are near 70. They can’t go on forever trying to uphold justice against an ever more right-leaning Court. Do you see now why we can’t let John McCain be President?

Today the Supreme Court, which is in no way controlled by large corporate interests or appointed by those who are in the pockets of Big Oil, finally ruled on the Exxon Valdez class action suit, a case that has been going on now for nearly 20 years.

They decided that Exxon should pay just 10% of the original damage judgment.

You remember the Exxon Valdez – a few minutes after midnight on March 24, 1989, the supertanker crashed into a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into the water, which then washed up on the shore in an incident that has been described as “…a severe environmental insult to a relatively pristine, ecologically important area that was home to many species of wildlife endangered elsewhere.” The ship’s captain was not at the helm, but in his quarters sleeping off a night of heavy drinking. The incident was characterized at the time as the worst environmental disaster of all time. The cleanup lasted a few months. The litigation didn’t end until today.

The first damage award against Exxon, in 1994, was 5 billion dollars. Exxon appealed, of course, and the various courts involved over the years have reduced it bit by bit until the Supremes got hold of it. They decided that 500 million dollars, or 90% less than the original award, would be fine.

This is an amount approximately equal to six hours worth of Exxon revenue, so obviously the 19 years of denying responsibility paid off for them. It’s amazing how useful the Supreme Court of the United States can be when the President works for you.

Not so fortunate are the 32,000 people who lived along the 1200 miles of coastline that was damaged by the spill, some say forever. According to them, the spill has never been fully cleaned up. They say a lot of the wildlife, killed or driven away by the toxic mess, haven’t returned. The full amount of the original judgment wouldn’t have compensated them adequately for what they suffered. This latest reduction is simply the final humiliation for them.

Legal scholars may be scratching their heads trying to figure out the Court’s reasoning here, but, hey, what’s done is done. Fish, birds, plankton, fishermen: You lost! Get over it! Tomorrow, the Court is expected to rule that the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is meant to permit all of us to own guns. All of us, not just those darned “well-regulated militias.”

Yeehaw! Once we’re all armed, we’ll be able to assess our own punitive damages in the future.