there was a time, i suppose, when gentlemen of leisure took great pleasure in the configuration of laws, of imagining a jurisprudence – of trying to construct a notion of justice completely without meaning
there have been great jurists in the 20th century – but hidden behind their abstracted ideas was a fundamental truth – the protection of property
justice was always an illussion
the jurisprudence of the empire is a construction of fools & brigands. it has become under the cheney bush junta a very blunt instrument. that people are cheering the sudden ‘return’ of habeus corpus is in & of itself a very sad testimony
only in an epoch as impoverished as our own – would scum like scalia & alito be considered important or even intelligent jurists. they are nothing of a kind. their kind of ‘leagal scholarship’ is revealed today where instead of using precedent as you normally would in an appelate decision – the scum scalia uses an op ed from the washington post. the next time perhaps he will use page 6 of the new york post
rupert murdochs nights must be full of dark laughter – where the culture he singlemindedly created represents rerun after rerun of ‘cops’ – we are that level – clearly the commentary on the decision today is on that level. so black & white it gives me chills thinking of the fifties science fictions series we have come to populate -& demented & deranged twilight zone
in brief, the popes are dopes. even the 5 who created this decision are only a shadow removed from the darker recesses of scali, alito, thoms, roberts – the devil himself rehnquist is absent of course – but his dead body stinks to high heaven still
what the decision has done though is reveal what a mockery the democratic legislature actually are

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 12 2008 23:52 utc | 4

right on, r’giap. what disgraceful times we live in.
from uncle’s link, this makes absolutely no logical sense whatsoever

The computerized cache included a picture of two nude women on all fours painted to look like Holstein dairy cows, images of masturbation, a video of a man being pursued by a sexually aroused donkey and a slide show featuring a striptease with a transsexual.
“If you found this kind of thing in your kid’s bedroom you would wash your kid’s mouth out with soap. We expect more from a judge,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Loyola University Law School.

huh?

Posted by: b real | Jun 13 2008 2:24 utc | 6

It’s the same atmosphere that prevailed after the Columbine High School shootings: if something like that happens again, everybody wants to be able to cover their asses by maintaining they did everyting in their power to prevent it, no matter how asinine or counter-productive.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jun 13 2008 9:00 utc | 8

Unfortunately for that judge he made his personal life private by putting the images on the web. I haven’t seen the images so it is difficult to tell if they are obscene whatever obscene is but, by the sounds of the two naked women painted as holstein cows, the images degrade women by presenting them in sexually demeaning environments and that has to rule him out as a judge. Whatever his politics are is irrelevant and in fact one of the reasons the left got into the state it is currently in is because corrupt hypocrites like Clinton were allowed in positions of power. These guys don’t bellieve in anything really apart from their right “to do what thou wilt” as aleister crowley put it.
It’s not the pictures per se just as with clinton the number of his sexual encounters were never at issue, it is the lying and deliberate risk taking behaviour which tells us that these people are men with feet of clay – unfit for their jobs, who are trying to absolve their guilt by putting everything on the line rationalising that if they can get away with what they do then they can’t be doing anything wrong. I haven’t explained it particularly well but it’s similar to many other mad and seemingly suicidally (career suicide) self destructive behaviours of traitors who are at burn out, be they spies, spooks or politicians.
When Roberts and Alito were given a greased run through Congress and ordinary amerikan dems expressed outrage and bewilderment, an ugly hypothesis began to develop from the depths of my cynicism about the ‘left’ political parties in western democracies, amerika in particular.
About a hundred years ( well just short of a century) ago, the english had a spy by the name of Sydney Reilly who had been given the task of bringing down the bolshevik govt in Russia. He organised a coup in 1918 with local ‘resistors’. Part of this was the hit on Vlad Lenin which left him so wounded he never really recovered.
That was about the peak of reilly’s achievements. After escaping russia, Reilly made contact with a great many russian counter revolutionaries back in russia.
lots of messages, plots, plans and conspiracies were dreamed up and were passed backwards and forwards between london, reilly’s MI6 and the ‘bourgeois counter-revolutionaries in russia.
By 1925 reilly had decided the time was ripe for a real counter revolution so he went back to russia to help with the final touches, completely ignoring the death sentence which had been passed against him after the Lenin assassination attempt.
reilly was arrested within days of arriving back in russia and executed. The resistance movement which reilly had been conspiring with all that time was an invention of O.G.P.U. (NKVD’s preseccesor just as KGB was once nkvd.)
OGPU had reasoned that humans being what they are, someone is bound to form a resistance movement against the bolsheviks, so the best way to control what happens is to create a resistance themselves.
Well the same is true of the dems. The easy run edwards and scalia had the the supreme court tells us that the dems political platforms are not something that dem leaders subsctribe to.
The party platforms are just something to attract all opposed to corporate capitalism and 21st century imperialism. By controlling the major opposition to untrammelled corporate power democrat leadership ensures that the corporates can’t be beaten. Deep down most of the slick, shiny suited, pink faced dem pols believe in the same inhumanly cruel political and economic agenda as the slick, shiny suited, pink faced rethug pols. The is the chief legacy of the clintonite DNC. A cardboard cut out opposition has been moulded to ensure that no matter who the citizens vote for they always lose.
It would be easy enough to prove.
Next year there will be a dem congress, senate and his ‘prezness’, yet if one were to ensure the piece of shit Alito did get his karma ie someone organised a piece of lead to enter his brainpan, you can be sure that the dem house, prez and senate would give the newly opened vacancy on the supreme court bench to a conservative, using the old “we can’t let the terrorists win” cop-out to excuse their pandering to corporate capitalism.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 13 2008 12:18 utc | 10

“Why are such idiots allowed to judge?”
Scalia is a very smart man. He is also very ignorant. These be Dubya’s kinda judger.

Posted by: DonS | Jun 13 2008 16:13 utc | 12

We fear because They need security all in place, for when The Fear really begins.
And you thought it was billions….
“The Gokhale and Smetters measure of the (US budget) fiscal gap is a stunning $65.9 trillion! This figure is more than five times U.S. GDP and almost twice the size of national wealth. One way to wrap one’s head around $65.9 trillion is to ask what fiscal adjustments are needed to eliminate this red hole. The answers are terrifying. One solution is an immediate and permanent doubling of personal and corporate income taxes. Another is an immediate and permanent two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits. A third alternative, were it feasible, would be to immediately
and permanently cut all federal discretionary spending by 143 percent.”
Wake up! Time to die!!

Posted by: Anton De Lauden | Jun 15 2008 7:23 utc | 14

If the U.S. can’t afford to rule the world, it can certainly afford to destroy it.

Posted by: Pyrrho | Jun 16 2008 20:20 utc | 16