Supreme Court Rules that High School Students Who Do Anything Have No Constitutional Protections
While I'm understandably thrilled that the Supreme Court ruled that school voucher programs are constitutional, I am understandably disappointed by the Supreme Court's decision that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to students involved in any extracurricular activities.

While this ruling is consistent with the court's other opinions involving the lack of rights or protection that anyone receiving government aid is accorded, it does bolster my argument that the government should NOT be involved in these areas. Government involvement, since their attitude is "we're paying for it, so you have to do it our way," is a recipe for defining down constitutional rights.

It scares me to think of how many intrusions this decision makes legal. Now that schools don't even have to show that they have a drug problem before performing warantless searches of their students, what's next? They don't have to show that they have a reasonable suspicion a girl is carrying a weapon before they bend her over the principal's desk and give her an anal probe? (Okay, perhaps tha'ts a bit of exaggeration there, but you get the point.) The court's snotty opinion that student's who don't like the policy can always go to private school simply makes my case painfully clear: we shouldn't want the government to get involved with our daily lives, because when they fund even part of it, they decide how to control it. So the government has created an abysmal public school system, mandates that all school age children attend school, and once they have you trapped (and you pretty much are, unless you have the money to send your kids to a private school) they announce that they can search your children, and take samples of their bodily fluids, whenever they want to, without even thinking that your child has misbehaved.

Make no mistake - the US government believes that it owns us.

What's Wrong With this Country...
In a development that could only come from a loony place like San Francisco, the pledge of allegiance was declared unconstitutional.

Excuse me while I shake my head and proceed to convulse for a few minutes, and when I raise my head, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine if the tears in my eyes are from mirth or from frustration.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
All my bitching today about rudeness reminded me of this excellent editorial by Linda Chavez I found in the Washington Times.
In it, she makes the obvious point that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

People seem to have forgotten this. It's called polite behaviour. It means that: because you know that millions of people died during WWII, and the symbol of the Nazi's homicidal cause was the swastika, you don't display it on your street, because this offends people.

This means that just because you have the time to redo your nails on an airplane, you don't, because the place is small and recycles the air, and you know the smell of nail polish remover in tight quarters can be nauseating.

This means that even though you might find putting your shoes up on the seat in front of you at the movies more comfortable than leaving them on the floor, you don't, because the person in front of you doesn't want your dirty soda-soaked, scum-laden shoe sticking to bits of the nice, clean hair on their head.

This means that even though its legal to fart in public, you don't, because it smells bad and offends other people.

I do not want any of these things to be made illegal. That's not the point. The point is that you shouldn't need to make laws that require you to take other people's or comfort into account. I sincerely wish courtesy would come back in style.

Slant Watch
Nowadays, I find I read the Washington Post, more to get myself riled up than to get the news. The completely unbalanced reporting, and the obvious bias they show never fails to get my hackles raised.

So, in an article about polygamist, Tom Green, they insisted in putting the word "wives" in quotes, because, after all, plural marriage is wrong... but in an article where they joyfully trumpet the good news that gay life partners can now receive health benefits there wasn't a single quotation mark around the term to be found.

After all, the sorts of folk that engage in plural marriage are typically religious, and therefore unfit to be a lefty cause celebre (or however the fuck you spell it).

I don't get the anti-polygamy stance most folks have. How is marrying more than one woman somehow worse, or less deserving of political protection from prosecution, than giving a blowjob to an anoymous stranger in a park? Or having sex with a 10 year old boy? How is a man or woman who wants to share their lives with more than one person less deserving of their shot at happiness than someone who likes to have anal sex? I've thought and thought about this, and the only thing I can see that makes polygamists different from gays, transgenders, bisexuals, etc... is that polygamists tend to be religious, and therefore undeserving of protection.

... and that reminds me
To whoever it was on the flight from Dallas/Ft. Worth to Dulles that decided "to hell with decorum, public decency, or respect for the fact that we are, in fact, in a small enclosed space... I'm going to take off my shoes and socks and stuff my sweaty toes up through the seat in front of me, directly into the armpit of the girl sitting in front of me, who is not riding for free"...

I hate you. I wish I'd yelled at you more when you did it, so hopefully you would have been embarrassed enough not to be so completely inconsiderate and tacky again. May you get corns, athlete's foot, and some nice painful bunions. And may you end up on a flight from Kansas to Beijing with a 450lb man with a perspiration problem sitting right next to you.

Why can't we just charge by the pound?
Was sitting in the local pool hall cum diner at lunch today, watching a pair of amazingly, enormously fat women waddle their way to a table, and it reminded me of the recent flak over Southwest charging for an extra seat for the super-fat.

Honestly, as a thin person who has had to have those too-soft gelatinous folds of some other person's sweaty flesh pressed against my arm and hip for an entire 9 hour flight because they're too goddamned big to fit into a single chair and are now oozing through the cracks in the side... this doesn't bother me one bit. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy if we charged for airline tickets in the same manner we do for freight shipping: by the pound.

Yeah, I mean it. It costs more to fly your bloated ass cross-country than it does mine, and I see no reason whatsoever why I should be forced to pay the same amount of money for a plane ticket when I'm taking up a third of the space. We charge by the weight on all sorts of things, I don't see that charging by the pound to fly people would be that much of an imposition either.

Talk about S L A N T
Just about anyone with an interest in 1st Amendment cases is aware of the current travesty of justice occurring in Seattle, where Paul Trummel was jailed for posting perfectly legal information on his website. The judge uses the excuse that Trummel is not a paid journalist, and is therefore not protected by the 1st Amendment. This assertion makes me think that perhaps the judge is edging over into senile dementia and is no longer fit to decide matters of law.

But this horribly slanted article I found in the Washington Post doesn't even mention on what legal grounds the judge jailed Trummel, and instead concentrates on the fact that Trummel is a mean old man. Mean he may be, but it does not mean that his speech isn't protected, and trying to whitewash the judge's irrational behaviour in this fashion is, as Daffy is so fond of pointing out, "despicable."

You're not the boss of me...
For those of you who haven't heard of it yet, Consumer Freedom is a great site for news regarding the latest attempt to take away our natural right to be fat and unhealthy.

Seriously though... you read their updates, and its downright depressing that there are that many people out there who want to tell everyone else what to do. Everyone whines about the increased costs to society that smokers and obese folks represent, but no one seems to have bothered asking the most obvious question I have: Who says society has to pay for smokers and fatties?

There are all sorts of knowitalls out there scrambling to be the next to present their loony proposals based on bogus scientific research to the government. Proposals ranging from the obnoxious (levy a 9 cent tax on every 2 liter bottle of soda sold, because soda is, like, evil) to the truly horrifying (create a marginal tax scale for foods that will have higher tax rates the higher the fat or sugar content the food has.) Aside from the fact that this just makes food less affordable for the poor, and the fact that it ignores those who have special dietary needs (I know a number of diabetics on the Atkins diet), the burning question that remains on my lips is: Who cares if we're a nation of fatties?

The issue is not wether or not we have an obesity epidemic on our hands (we could argue that, too, since the government's scale does not take muscle mass or percentage body fat into account), but wether or not the government has any obligation to do anything about it. I vote No. If someone wants to get fat, more power to them. I don't care.

What's The Big Deal about Monopolies Again?
Microsoft just announced that they were removing support for Sun Microsystem's Java as revenge for Sun's support of the government's anti-trust case against Microsoft. I am not making this up.

"The decision to remove Microsoft's Java implementation was made because of Sun's strategy of using the legal system to compete with Microsoft," Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan said in a statement.


So Microsoft is just a poor little company that's being set upon by jealous competitors, right? That's what all the pro-business anti-MS lawsuit folks have been telling me. See as how I work for one of those jealous competitors, I can say that Microsoft is a royal pain in the ass that will do anything in its power, legal or extra-legal, to gain and maintain dominance in the marketplace. I, for one, am completely for a modular version of Windows. I hope the States win their case.

Mixed Feelings...
Well a judge out in San Francisco tossed out Marjorie Knoller's murder conviction.

The couple, as the judge rightly says, is despicable. In addition to their ties to a white supremacist group in prison (who it is rumored they were raising the dogs for) there was also apparently evidence that the Knollers were engaging in bestial acts with these dogs as well. They suck. They're evil. I'd like neither of them to set foot out in public again.

But then again... how do you convict someone of both involuntary manslaughter and second degree murder??

Today's Washington Times piece by Nat Hentoff is titled J. Edgar Hoover is back...

I said "Welcome Back, J Edgar Hoover..." right here on 30 May, with regards to the exact same subject. Nat's column is completely different from my post, but the title advantage goes PermagrinGirl.

MPD = Ministry of Poor Detectives
I know other people are just as disgusted by this as I am. But is anyone who has ever been around the DC area really surprised?

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt
Get a load of the comments made by INS officials regarding a breakin at their Seattle office... from the Washington Post