Why is it . . . ?

. . . that whenever you read these kind of stories they are always about people of color? Have you ever noticed that? Can somebody send me a link to a story about a white person being freed from prison years later because he was innocent and jailed anyway for a crime he didn't do? I'm certain there have to be some, but these stories about some poor (always) innocent African American being incarcerated are almost as regular as stories about mass shootings in this country. Which is to say, frequent enough to be quite disturbing.

Nobody seems to draw, or at least mention, what to me is a perfectly obvious conclusion. That our judicial system of the past was grossly racist, and routinely did not serve the cause of justice. Do you ever wonder how many guys (and women) are in prison for crimes they did not do? And do you have any idea of how long it takes to right an injustice like this? This in itself is a crime. But don't hold your breath about it being prosecuted.

Colbert on Birth Control

The Colbert Report
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Here is the link in case the embed above doesn't work for you. They can be squirrelly sometimes.

Sometimes the only way to deal with the idiotic logic-chopping the Supreme Court majority (the four cavemen plus Kennedy) uses to shackle the corporate state upon us further is to mock it beyond the limits of credulity. Because that's what some of these decisions are: beyond the limits of credulity. I'm speaking right now about the Hobby Lobby decision which now allows corporations to have religious objections to facets of the law. It's a way of letting them to selectively decide what portions of a law, in this case the Affordable Care Act, they want to follow. Of course, the corporation has this right, but all those employees who may not have the same religious objections, don't have it. Here's a story about the SC decision in the case.

Colbert takes a swipe at the foolishness by skewering the whole argument against contraception paid for by the government. It's great stuff. He is really blasting the court for its decision, but the Court isn't mentioned once. This is deeply funny.

Sounds Just to Me

Read this story. Lemme give you the bare bones outline of it. Married man repeatedly sexually abuses his step-daughter for four years, starting when she is 12 years old. He goes to trial for the crimes and is sentenced. That's what this story is about. Now, without knowing another thing about it except that the defendant took a plea, what do you think the judge's sentence was? Most of you, I would hope, would think such a crime, even plea-bargained, would rate at least 10 years in jail. We're talking pedophilia here of the most loathsome kind.

Ten years, you say? You fool. What you don't know in this case are some salient details that change everything about justice for this beastly crime. The defendant was one Samuel Curtis Johnson III, a Wisconsin billionaire. Originally charged with a felony (sexual assualt on a minor) for his deeds, he ended up getting the charges reduced to a misdemeanor (fourth-degree sexual assault and disorderly conduct) after two trips to the state supreme court. And the judge, who cited the importance of the Johnson family in the community, sentenced him to four months in jail. He will be eligible to get out after two months.

You will please forgive me for not launching into a rant about the obvious here.

Disaster

The Bell Tolls: The three Democrats on the FCC have voted to neuter the Internet by letting Internet Service Providers (for which read ATT, Comcast, etc) sell preferred, faster and more reliable delivery to big money users (which means they will in turn charge you more to use their sites and services) while shunting the little people, like me, to a slow and bumpy second (or third or fourth) class future. They call this Net Neutrality. In a similar vein, Comcast announced plans to put data caps on all users and charging progressively higher rates to those who actually want to use the Internet. Source

I don't understand all I know about this. What I do know is this issue has stirred up a firestorm among a lot of people who understand it a lot better than do I. This much is clear to me: big guys with money are going to be able to buy greater internet privileges than the 99 percent. So what else is really new? Is not this the way things work in this country? What this represents, however, is an inroad into a business that has been relatively "free" since its inception. It's one of the last bastions of the American economy that is not controlled completely by the corporate plutocracy. It's a disaster.

(And don't forget: the federal judiciary is what began this assault on net neutrality. Some judge found the current FCC rules unconstitutional. Wonder who he belongs to? Whose pocket he's in?)

Someone Was Murdered, Take 1

Susan and I have a just right-sized retirement house. No room wasted. So my "Boss" chair and ottoman is located in living/TV room. It's where I read the morning paper. Well, since the George Zimmerman trial has started, Susan's been watching it and by osmosis, if not by interest--and I cannot deny there has been more than some of that on my part--I have absorbed a good bit of the court proceedings in Florida. The American legal process is something to behold in its nitty gritty. The prosecution's star witnesses, a 19-year old girl named Rachel Jeantel, daughter of a Haitian immigrant mother and father from Santo Domingo, spent the better part of two grueling days of testimony most of it from the defense attorney about the conversation she had with Treyvon Martin on the night he shot to death in Sanford, Florida.

You will recall that she was on the phone with Treyvon Martin as he was being followed by George Zimmerman and at the early part of the confrontation between them. It is amazing to me that a lawyer can ask the same questions of the same witness numerous times before finally (and mercifully for the viewers and the witness) the judge puts a halt to it. To me, it was perfectly obvious that the defense lawyer was trying to catch her in an inconsistency. One slip, not answering the same question precisely the same way, and he would pounce.

Rachel Jeantel under the gun, Zimmerman trial, Sanford FL, June 27, 2013

It was relentless. Over and over, the same question. And not just two or three times. Eight, ten times. If it had been me, the lawyer would have probably gotten under my thin skin pretty quickly, and I would have been snappish if not downright confrontational after answering the same question two or three times. I personally thought she held up really well under the barrage, but her irritation was at times palpable. I remarked to Susan that this black teenager proved to be every bit the equal of the powerful white, beautifully manicured, impeccably spoken lawyer. She is not highly educated (she's a ghetto black teen, for Pete's sake), she doesn't speak the king's English, but she's not stupid. She refused to be tricked, refused to have words put into her mouth, refused to let her dead friend be blamed for his own death. She knew what she heard on the phone, and she knew what it meant. The bottom line here is: somebody got murdered, and this trial is about holding that murderer to account.

There's a flood of commentary about this witness out there. Here's a sample:

The Nation
The Raw Story
Salon
Time
Media-ite

No Bad Dogs, Just Bad Sniffs

Several years ago there was this Englishwoman – I forget her name – who wrote a book, it was probably one of many, about dogs. It was called No Bad Dogs. She was really quite an amazing person: she would approach any dog even dogs with a reputation for being vicious, and these dogs would accept her like one of the family. None of them ever attacked her or was anything but nice to her. It was really quite an amazing thing to see. And as a dog lover, I've often had that phrase "no bad dogs" reverberate in my head whenever I'm around a dog who's skittish or nervous or even threatening. I often had this thought about dogs when I see the K-9 corps dogs, cop dogs, dogs who've been trained to either attack people on command or sniff out drugs, explosives, etc. Not that these jobs are necessary sometimes, although I do question attack dogs almost on principle, because somehow it seems unfair to the canines to put them to such uses. Because basically it goes against the nature of the dog, its basic nature, to do things harmful to human beings. Dogs are at their core devoted to people. Of all the animals on earth, their lives are the most closely integrated with ours.

Anyway, all this just leads up to a satisfying report on the Supreme Court's decision in Florida v. Jardines, an opinion was handed down recently. "In an opinion written by Justice Scalia, the Court affirmed the Florida Supreme Court. The Court held a dog sniff at the front door of the house where the police suspected drugs were being grown constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment." And it was therefore illegal without a warrant.  In essence, they found that the police would be trespassing in this case.

You got to get a picture here. The cops, or the DEA guys, with their dogs just come up on your porch– without a warrant – and let them have a sniff around. If the dogs alert, they bust in your door and collar you for those pot plants or your stash. (Or they say "whoops" because I can't find anything. either way, they bust into your house and search it without the authority to do so.) The Supreme Court said that's a no-no. You can read more about the Court's reasoning here. But it should be noted that it was a 5-4 decision, in the most unlikeliest of justices was the swing vote here. So the American people came within an ace of seeing their civil liberties erode even more.

But never fear: that will happen again soon enough.

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We Deluded Americans

What are some of the most interesting or shocking things Americans believe about themselves or their country? An intriguing question, don't you think? It was to me too when I ran across it at this site. How would you answer it? Well, I discovered that I would respond pretty much the way thoughtful people who answered the question did. I've just pasted responses from various people in verbatim and commented where I felt moved to. As you will see, the quality of the observations vary, but they all have this in common. They are true.

1. American exceptionalism: that some magical combination of Anglo-Saxon liberties, Protestantism and capitalism made the US new, unique, better, and outside the normal rules. [Number one. As well it should be.]
2. That now or ever, there was a mass public in foreign countries praying for United States Armed Forces intervention.
3. That the quality of life in the US is better than in Europe.
4. That Detroit cars are as good or better than Japanese cars like Toyota and Honda.
5. That women from the US need to worry more about their safety in Europe.
6. A large fraction of Americans believe that humans have only been on Earth for about 6000 years, and that evolutionary biology is false.
7. That a public healthcare program would be socialistic [well, actually it is socialistic, but that doesn't make it bad.]
8. That President Obama is a socialist, a Muslim, and was foreign-born.
9. That all Americans have an equal chance to become wealthy. [how people actually believe this has been a mystery to me for decades]
10. That the UN is a dangerous concept.
11. That American society is truly "classless."
12. That there is no need for labor unions.
13. That corporations are people [according to the law. A bizarre 19th century construction that has wreaked untold havoc on our political system]
14. That there is nothing of significance that the US could possibly ever  learn from other countries
15. That no matter where Americans are in the world, they will never be more than a few feet away from someone who speaks English [Something I observed over and over when I lived abroad.]
16. That the corporate-owned mainstream media is liberal. [Another completely counter-intuitive belief]
17. That our national government is less corrupt than most other nations. [Everything floats of a sea of falsehood in government, not to mention business, and just about any other field of endeavor you care to mention.]
18. That everyone carrying arms somehow makes our society safer and deters crime. 
19. That the military is the most honorable, truthful, and virtuous constituency in American life, and the corollary that U.S. military intervention anywhere is be definition necessary, well-intentioned, and desired by the people of other countries. 

This last one is mine. There were were many more, and you can probably come up with a list of your own. The bottom line is as a people we probably rank at the top in self-delusion.

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To Your Health!

I'm sure this will be a toast lifted by Republicans all over the land to the health insurance companies if the Supreme Court invalidates the ACA. As the media seems to think it will after parsing the expressions, raised eyebrows, and questions of the Court. Today the justices heard arguments on the so-called individual mandate, the requirement that everyone in America buy health insurance or pay a penalty. This is the part of the law that drives the Right particularly bananas. Dictatorial powers by the government, a nefarious plot by the president to deprive people of their freedoms, a trampling of the rights of the people, etc., etc. But the very idea, the notion itself, is a product of the Heritage foundation, and it's been endorsed by people like Newt Gingrich. So it's just politics once more. If Obama favored it, the Republicans are against it. And naturally they've been successful in stirring up the ignorant masses, who overwhelmingly approve individual provisions of the law, but damn it out of hand as a whole.

All I have to say about this is this: I cannot believe that in the first part of the 21s century, a civilized nation would be without universal health care. It's even less credible that a country would jettison a health care plan already in effect and replace it with . . . what? The mess we had before? Please! Some Democrats think it would be politically advantageous for the law to be overturned by a conservative Republican court. I'd just as soon not even have to find out.

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ACA: Why We Have to Defend It, Despite Its Flaws

Yesterday I watched You Tube video of a Tea Party rally that happened in Washington two years ago. It was pretty disgusting for me to be reminded again of the absolute fury these people were in over the prospect of the then-pending health care bill passing in Congress. Disgusting and frightening. And both from the images of this mob of 98 percent white, many overstuffed fellow citizens tromping around Washington hollering about the perfidy of the health care bill. Which, as we know, passed. And which will be before the Supreme Court of the US beginning tomorrow for three days of arguments as to its constitutionality. When push comes to shove, I have to stand up for this law. Despite my considerable misgivings about it.

Right here you'll find an excellent article* that reminds all of us progressives who were bitterly disappointed at what the health care bill lacked, as well as the advantages to Big Pharma and the health insurance colossus that were built into it, why the law is something we should be defending much more vigorously than a lot of us are. (I must plead guilty for being one of those progressives. You can read my most recent blast on the ACA here. It does an excellent job of pointing out all of the non-progressive aspects of the law.) Here, succinctly, are the major points we should remember about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)--it's full and proper name. ("Obamacare" is a Republican slur that the party has succeeded in turning into a dismissive synonym for it.). The law, we're reminded:

• "expands access to medical care and health insurance to more than 30 million low- and middle-income Americans; 
• imposes much of the cost on affluent individuals and businesses; 
• terminates longstanding practices by parts of the private insurance industry that victimized millions of sick Americans even after they’d paid premiums for decades; 
• elevates health and prevention as a priority; 
• launches the most comprehensive set of initiatives and experiments to date to restrain both government and private-sector expenditures on medical care and claw back inefficient spending to help pay for widening access."

 The article is well worth reading because it helps explain why it is so savagely opposed and why it is worth defending. It also points out that from little acorns large oaks grow, i.e., growth of both Social Security and Medicare from their origins. It does not advance the argument that anything that so pisses off the Right as this law does cannot be bad by definition. But I will.

*The piece is in large part a discussion of a new book on the evolution of the ACA by Paul Starr, Remedy and Reaction.
 

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Harpooned, Again

From the Index in the latest number of Harper's magazine:

• Percentage of political ad spending during 2010 election that would have been prohibited before Citizens United: 72  An amazing number, don't you think? I see that two Supreme Court justices--Breyer and Ginsberg--are calling for the court to reconsider the decision. Gee, ya think? The dollar amounts reported for the GOP primaries are astounding, and almost all of it not accountable. See correction below.
•   Percentage increase since 2009 in investment fraud targeting adults over 50: 100  More good news for us seniors.
• Age at which a typical person's financial decision making peaks: 53.3  So the swindlers ain't no dummies.
• Estimated number of parking spaces per car in the United States: 3
• Years by which the average life span of a homeless person is shorter than the overall average: 30  And we have how many hundreds of thousands of homeless in U.S.? and how many are children? About 842,000 in a given week. I checked. And approximately 1.5 million children are homeless in any given year, that's 1 out of 50.
• Annual savings the U.S. Mint estimates will result from aborting its efforts to circulate $1 coins: $50 million. Are you kidding me? What the hell in wrong with the American people they cannot deal with coins? Which makes everything cheaper and simpler.
• Minimum number of persons whose remains the U.S. Air Force dumped in a land fill between 2003 and 2008: 274  Support the troops!
• Number of U.S. servicepeople dismissed for pre-existing "personality disorders" between 2002 and 2007. Don't know all of the personality disorders involved, but you can bet they include aversion to war or to killing people the government has decided are our enemies this week.
• Percentage of Americans who have been arrested by the age of 23: 30  Just let that number circulate in your brain . . . 3 out of every 10? Really?
• Rank of the Mafia among Italy's largest lending institutions: 1
• Rank of Goldman Sachs employees among the largest funding sources for Mitt Romney's campaign: 1
• For Obama's 2008 campaign: 2

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UPDATE I: A reader kindly informed me that Harper's had corrected the first entry on this list. Here's the text of the correction:

A line in the March 2012 Harper’s Index incorrectly stated that 72 percent of political ad spending during the 2010 election cycle would have been prohibited before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. In fact, 72 percent of outside political ad spending in the 2010 cycle would have been prohibited before Citizens United and a 2007 decision, Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. Although the item was sourced to the Center for Responsive Politics, the mistake was entirely ours. We regret the error.

Military Justice

Did you see where the last Marine out of eight, Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich, was given a virtual free pass at his court martial for his part in the murder of 24 Iraqi civilians including 10 women and children and one guy in a wheelchair, in the town of Haditha in 2005? The charge against all of these Marines was manslaughter. This was another of those horrific acts that we actually heard about--how many other atrocities committed by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan do you think will never come to light? I would argue that several more are out there. After one of the Marines in his squad was killed by an IED, Wuterich told his squad to shoot first and ask questions later as they entered a clutch of houses down the road from where the IED exploded. The other seven guys? Well, one was acquitted, and the other six guys had charges against them dropped. Wuterich pleaded out: he got to walk in exchange for a guilty plea to a single charge of negligent dereliction of duty.

The source article says nothing about his being dismissed from the service, but he's getting busted and is taking a pay cut. A little out of whack with the crime, dontcha think?  We should note that military justice has actually progressed in sparing the guilty in this matter of murdering civilians. During the Vietnam war, Lt William Calley, who gave the order that resulted in the death of over 500 civilians at the village of Mai Lai, and his court martial sentenced him to life imprisonment, which only seems fair to me. (I have to observe, however, that Calley was basically the fall guy for this crime; it got covered up all up the chain, and didn't come out but by the investigative reporting of Seymour Hirsch of the NYT.) But there was such and outcry and furor that President Nixon pardoned him right out of Leavenworth and into civilian life. Wuterich, too, and his fellow killers will now blend back into American life as if nothing had ever happened. But Haditha will never be the same again.

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Allah Akbar

A few days ago, a federal appeals court--not always the voice of sanity, but in this case definitely so--to the surprise of no one who knows anything about the US Constitution, declared unconstitutional Oklahoma's recently approved proposed constitutional amendment that barred judges in the state from considering Sharia or international law in formulating their decisions. (See here.) The Bubba electorate of this state thought that was such a fine idea they voted for it en masse, by a 7 to 3 majority, when it was offered as a state question in 2010. A couple of Republican dingbat representatives, naturally, had proposed the measure. It was nothing but hysteria-driven nonsense, but that the electorate of this state was heartily in favor of blatant discrimination against a religion other than Christianity just shows to what pass we've come in this country. Since 9/11, it seems the whole country has taken leave of its senses.

The federal judges pointed this very fact out: the proposed amendment openly discriminates by name against a specific religion, it said. Moreover, the supporters of the law could not point to any specific problem the proposed amendment addressed. "Indeed," they wrote, "they admitted at the preliminary injunction hearing that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma."

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It's a Great Embarrassment

I don't know if other bloggers do this, but I suspect they do. I often back-date entries, i.e., writing Wednesday's blog entry on Thursday, Sunday's on Monday, etc. That's what I'm doing now. Typing at 1:35 a.m. on Sunday morning and posting to yesterday. (Of course, I would not have this problem at all if I weren't so anal about trying to maintain one daily blogging entry. I'm not like my friend Montag over at "A Father Talks to His Daughter about God." I mean that guy is prolific, sometimes half a dozen entries a day, always at least two or three. And sometimes he so erudite and deep I cannot really follow what he means. But it's all good. I like the way his mind works.) Anyway as I was saying, I read in the Writer's Almanac that tomorrow is the 54th anniversary of the day that President Eisenhower sent over a thousand federal troops to Central High School in  Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure the safety of nine black students who were the first to integrate the school. Like all the southern states, Arkansas had dragged its feet about implementing the order of the Supreme Court in 1954's epochal Brown decision. And in the case of Arkansas, the governor had used the state national guard to essentially prevent the blacks from attending the school. You can read all about the story here.

The point of the story is to tell how embarrassed I am now at what I was then, just another southern white guy who uncritically accepted the racism of everything and everybody around me, including my family and relatives, friends, the whole white culture in the South, as normal. It's a great embarrassment to me that won't, I fear, ever be subsiding. I was part of that whole culture of hate. My conversion, my sanity, came too late to eradicate what had gone before.

This is what it took in 1957 to get into your school . . . if you were a  black person.

Hate--an iconic image of the time.

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Why Doesn't This Happen to Poor People?

 I really cannot believe what I just read on the Net. Roger Clemens, another cheater in baseball who took steroids to enhance his performance and then has continued to lie about it now for at least a couple of years, was about to go on trial for lying to Congress and perjury. I say "was about to" because the jury had been selected and the trial was in its second day of testimony when Judge Reggie Walton declared a mistrial. He had barred testimony from the spouse of Andy Pettite, and he halted the trial when in video evidence someone referred to what she had said. The prosecution in this case, which apparently had built a very solid case against Clemens, either was incredibly stupid or careless. The judge said that any first-year law student would have known better and declared that it would be impossible for Clemens to get a fair trial now. Maybe not, legally he cannot, but that doesn't change the fact that the odds are now that Roger Clemens is going to skate for lying about his cheating in baseball. And instead of a conviction on his record that would prove he cheated, future generations will only have his steroid-enhanced numbers as a baseball player.

I'm not taking issue with the legal ruling here. Just with the uncanny good luck that seems to adhere to lying millionaires. Don't you think the millionaires of Wall Street, who are again enjoying obscene salaries and bonuses, two years after they brought the world to brink of financial ruin, have been lucky? A couple of centuries ago pitchfork-wielding mobs would have torn them to pieces in the street for what they did.

And let me just wonder out loud: are judges accustomed to being super diligent about fair trials for, say drug offenders? Petty criminals? I'm just saying . . .

State of the Union -- State of the Computer

Although I've been rough on the president these past few months and been really angry at him for Afghanistan in particular, I have to say that the man knows how to give a speech. Would that oratory could move masses or even just Republicans! Mr. Obama gave his first state of the union address tonight, and it was a good speech. As always, the speech was a model of If a president were evaluated on how well he spoke in public, this president would surely rate high. But the key visual for me was the sight of all the Republicans sitting in stony silence and on their hands at about 95 percent of the applause lines. Obama certainly advanced some persuasive reasons that the paralyzing gridlock in Washington ought to be ended, and the sooner the better. Sorry . . . I don't see that happening. I think we're fated to go down the tubes quicker than we would if we had a government of bipartisanship in full cry. The Republicans are willing to pull the temple down over their heads and kill everybody rather than be cooperative. And surely the problems we're facing are only getting worse the longer the damn politicians are more interested in preserving their political skins than in recognizing just what terrible shape we're in.

Best part of the speech to me was Obama excoriating the terrible, just horrendous, decision of the Supreme Court to allow unbridled spending by corporations . . . well, maybe "excoriate" is not the most accurate verb, but whatever it was, it was right in the face of the five justices that made this horrible decision.

Later . . . much later. 

It has taken me hours to get back to this note. Why? Because of all the hassle, bother, and frustration involved with restoring a computer drive. I've been sitting here in front of this computer for untold hours trying to get everything back to as close to it was before, which was optimal.

This is not my first experience with this delightful job. But it is driving me plumb loco this time. Murphy stalks me pretty much whenever I've got to do something like this. I've had everything from install discs that won't work; software serial numbers that won't work; restoration of over 33,000 files from backup service getting stuck--the restore has been going now for almost two days and it's still got over 15,400 more to go, and I never had this kind of problem when I had to do a restore onto a new computer--a wireless printer I cannot get to work wireless (I had to plug it into the computer); at least two hours on the phone with the "restore" people.

My frustration level is high. I'm going to watch the news and drink some wine.

A Whole New Ballgame

My boys are here until Sunday, and my time for blogging is limited, but I don't want to let languish, so I'm just checking in long enough to say that the Supreme Court ruling on Thursday that basically gutted the provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign financing law passed into law during George W. Bush's first term and signed into law by him is a terrible decision. There is not a thing in the world now to restrain corporations from spending as much money as they want trying to influence the outcome of elections at every level of government.

Can you say: "Holy shit! Does this mean what I think it means?" The answer is, it means that and more. It means that corporations now have not even flimsy restraints on how much money they can spend to buy the election of their candidates for office up and down the chain--municipal, county, state, national--with absolute impunity. And if you don't think that's a whole new ballgame, well, you just haven't been paying attention. They already own the political process. Now they don't even have to pretend democracy anymore.

Quite simply, this is one of the worst decisions ever issued by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Here Comes the Groom

OK. This gay marriage decision in California. It's raising the predictable shit storm across the blogosphere, and opponents of the court's ruling say they're going to push for an amendment to the state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. If you want to go read all about it, fix yourself a big pot of coffee, sit in a comfortable chair and Google "California gay marriage ruling" then search the blogs, too. I saw and heard all I wanted to see and hear about this on the Lehrer News Hour yesterday. I'm really tired of the subject, to tell the truth, and let me be straight out here (no pun intended) and tell you that a couple of seconds shot of two dudes kissing each other on the lips is enough for me. I thought the news story on the News Hour was a little over the top in that aspect of its coverage.

Let me make these observations:

• First of all, I can't get worked up about this. If these people want to live together and say they're married, if they want to have a ceremony with their friends where the groom gets to kiss the groom, and the bride, the bride . . . well, have at it. How does this threaten anything at all, much less the institution of marriage as the religious right (what a misnomer) contends? Does the fact that some people put their money under the mattress threaten the institution of banking? And what materially is changed in California by this decision? Gay unions there are already thoroughly protected by the law. They just aren't called "marriages."
• Second, the only reason I think there's any importance to this issue at all is that it will be whipped up into a slavering frenzy by the right, and they will try to make it a central issue in the coming campaign. It may not have the salience it did previously, though, because McCain is fuzzy on the issue, not foursquare on God's side like some other Republicans. His campaign issues site doesn't say anything about this. He's on record as saying this is a matter for the states to decide--same thing Hillary and Barack say, too--everybody's tiptoeing on this one--but he's against what the California Supreme Court decided.
• The usual blather about "activist judges" is abroad again . . . "one judge" deciding the case and all that. These people ought to find out how the American constitutional system works.