JABbering Stooge

As promised, here is my rebuttal to commentary at The Volokh Conspiracy on Citizens for Equal Protection et al. v. Bruning:

Amazingly enough, I got a response to my May 13th post. Someone calling him/herself "p-bs-watcher" wrote:

Is Judge Bataillon so stupid as to believe that anyone would buy his argument, or is he so stupid as to believe it himself? See Laws Are Illegal

Alright, since you were kind enough to link to your argument on the subject, allow me to offer a point-by-point rebuttal.

Federal District Court Judge Joseph Bataillon has rendered a landmark decision.

I would say that that’s painfully obvious, except for the fact that San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer did exactly the same for California’s gay marriage amendment on March 14th of this year.

It is either a monument to judicial stupidity or to brazen sophistry depending on how much one credits the intelligence of the judge.

Actually, it is neither. The judge correctly cited prior precedent and the appropriate Amendments to the Constitution in this case. But then again, this doesn’t surprise me - any time a judge issues a ruling that the right doesn’t like, they tend to resort to this sort of name calling and ad hominem invective.

Professor Volokh has completed a detailed demolition of the ruling here, and is translated for the general public here.

I will give a "detailed demolition" of Volokh’s "detailed demolition of the ruling" in my next post. Meanwhile, the "translation" into Joe Sixpack-ese is little more than the same old "judges who disagree with me are complete and utter morons" rot that one would expect from the thousand-word projectile vomit Ann Coulter passes off as a weekly calumny…er…column.

The most flagrantly absurd finding among many is that the Nebraska State Constitutional amendment violated the First Amendment rights of its opponents to propose legislation because "The knowledge that any such proposed legislation violates the Nebraska Constitution chills or inhibits advocacy of that legislation, as well as impinging on freedom to join together in pursuit of those ends."

Because the amendment to Nebraska’s Constitution unduly impinges on homosexuals’ right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." As has been our experience as a country, arbitrarily limiting the freedoms of a group often has bad, unintended consequences (as in the case of Prohibition, where we saw the rise of organized crime - Al Capone, for example), or, when "accompanied by an invidious or irrational animus against a certain group," as noted in the footnotes of the ruling, is inherently antithetical to the ideals of the Founding Fathers as outlined in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We’re looking for "liberty for all," not "liberty for some" here - and THAT is the basis of the First Amendment angle to the ruling.

Only the uninitiated would have been so gauche as to think that was the purpose of laws and constitutions.

Only the uninitiated would have been so gauche as to think that First Amendment concerns were the only things cited by Judge Bataillon in striking down the Nebraska State Constitution’s amendment. Remember, the Fourteenth Amendment states that "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Nowhere in the text of that is an exception made for State Constitutions - thus statutes in state constitutions are as subject to the same federal-level "constitutional smell test" as any other state law. Unless you’d like to try to argue that State constitutions are to be held in higher regard than the U.S. Constitution, but then you’d be running afoul of Clause 2 of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which states that the U.S. Constitution "shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Translating into Joe Sixpack-ese, the clause reads as follows:

The U.S. Constitution "is the ultimate authority on valid laws. Judges at all levels must abide by the Constitution, even if a State’s laws or elements of the State Constitution contradicts it."

Judge Bataillon has discovered what the rest of us had missed for over two hundred years. The first amendment trumps all.

All he did was interpret the law (which is the job description of the Judicial Branch - read the Constitution some time; it’s obvious you could use a refresher) and yet you want people to believe that he was pulling laws out of his butt. Sorry, but you’ll have to do better than that if you want to convince me.

Laws are illegal. Constitutions are unconstitutional.

Only those that don’t pass the federal-level Constitutional smell test, as mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment.

In the case of the U.S. Supreme Court, I argued that one must respect their expertise and intelligence, and therefore conclude that any outrageous ruling is intentional with malice aforethought. I can make no similar contention with respect to this court. I am forced to join my betters in the Blue State elites to question the capabilities of this flyover country rube. Is he so stupid as to believe that anyone would buy his argument, or is he so stupid as to believe it himself? I am sure it is all for the greater good.

Okay, now you’re just descending to the level of Tom DeLay and John Cornyn - flinging ideological feces at judges whose rulings you disagree with.

In the immortal words of Anne Robinson: "You are the weakest link, goodbye!"

Note: In the time since, the commenter’s blog, PBS Watch, has been hijacked by a spam blog.

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted May 17, 2005 4:52 PM)

Today was another full day of news to report. Let’s go straight to the rundown:

Well, final exams are finally over with, so let’s look at the events that have developed while I was hunkered down in an undisclosed location preparing for the inevitable:

I know I said I was going to take a brief hiatus from posting for a while, but then I saw some news that just pissed me off.

According to the Raw Story, several amendments to the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA) proposed by Democrats to exempt family members and innocent bystanders from prosecution under the law (all of the amendments failed) were altered by House Judiciary Committe Chairman James Sensenbrenner, Jr. to make it sound like the Democrats were trying to protect "sexual predators."

That’s right folks, standing up for reproductive freedom means that you love child molestors. Expect the new meme to be propagated by all the usual suspects (the Oxycontin Junkie, Sean "I’m gonna pound Democrats" Hannity, Ann "Whack anyone who disagrees with me" Coulter, Michael "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder" Savage and all the rest of the right-wing hatemongers) - all cheered on by the "liberal" media.

Even worse, when asked by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the ranking Democrat in the House Rules Committee, why he perpetrated such an outrage, his response was "You don’t like what we wrote about your amendments, and we don’t like what you said about our bill."

I guess the "tu quoque" fallacy means nothing to Sensenbrenner, who apparently feels that the Grand Thuggery Party’s "mandate" (with Jeff Gannon) gives him the perogative to act like a spoiled child whenever he sees or hears anything not on his list of approved speech.

The adults are in charge, indeed.

One can just hear the sound of the horses of this army of true believers under the flag of Our Caesar George W. Christ as he prepares to cross his own Rubcon, trampling underfoot anyone who dares to raise a voice in protest.

Alea iacta est.

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 28, 2005 11:42 AM)

Yes, finals are rapidly approaching, and I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to prepare. Because of this, I won’t be posting as regularly as I usually do.

(I post regularly? When has THAT ever happened?!)

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 28, 2005 1:50 AM)

Well, well, well. I did a vanity search of this blog on Google, and one of the links that came up was an April 18 mention on blah3.com, official blog of AmericanStranger (Don Waller), who also hosts Take Back the Media.

Many thanks to Don for the mad props. Nice to know my work is actually read and appreciated (Ha ha - in actuality, he said that I got a mention on the strength of the name alone - wonder if he’s actually read any of my crap. Oh well.) by someone who’s actually been in the trenches fighting the corporate (conservative-biased) media.

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 28, 2005 1:35 AM)

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Critics see religious bias in Air Force Academy
by Robert Weller

AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. — Less than two years after it was plunged into a rape scandal, the Air Force Academy is scrambling to address complaints that evangelical Christians wield so much influence that religious harassment has become pervasive.

There have been 55 complaints of religious discrimination at the academy in the last four years, including cases in which a Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.

*snip*

More than 90 percent of the cadets identify themselves as Christian. A survey found that half had heard religious slurs, and that many non-Christians believed Christians get special treatment.

*one last snip*

Critics of the academy say the sometimes-public endorsement of Christianity by high-ranking staff has contributed to a climate of fear. They also say leaders are desperate to avoid the sort of uproar that came with a 2003 scandal.

You can also read about this story at American’s United for Separation of Church and State’s blog.

The American Inquisition has initiated a hostile takeover of the Air Force Academy. Not that that’s a hard thing to do, seeing as how the AFA is in Colorado Springs, which also hosts SpongeDob StickyPants World Headquarters.

You know, I would’ve thought that turning our military into an arm of the American Inquisition’s jihad against all things non-Christian would be the LAST thing we want.

Note: The link to the story at the Chicago Sun-Times has since gone dead. However, I did manage to find an active link to the story at SFGate.com titled, appropriately enough, "Air Force Cadets See Religious Harassment."

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 22, 2005 11:55 AM)

CNN broke the story that President Bush has nominated Marine General Peter Pace to replace Air Force General Richard B. Myers as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is a man who downplayed the military’s slow reaction to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Incidentally, he also defended General William G. "God told us to nuke those evil Muslims" Boykin, saying: "He [Boykin] mentioned to me how sad he was that his comments created the fury they had" and that "He does not see this battle as a battle between religions, he sees this as a battle between good and evil, the evil being the acts of individuals."

Sure, saying that Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups which represent all Muslims as much as Eric Rudolph represents all Christians (which is to say, not at all) are "after us because we are a Christian nation" is not "seeing it as a battle between religions." And I’m Elvis Presley.

Of course, this fits in perfectly with Bush’s pattern of sending up extremist, way-beyond-the-pale nominees, and then blaming even a microsecond delay in their (usually nearly unanimous - thanks co-dependent Dems!) confirmation on "partisan politics."

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 22, 2005 11:42 AM)

Pope Benedict Arnold I sure wasted no time injecting himself into the politics of sovereign nations. According to the BBC, the former Chief Inquisitor condemned a bill passed by Spain’s lower house that would allow homosexuals to marry and to adopt.

The BBC article includes this little gem:

He [an unnamed senior Vatican official] said Roman Catholic officials should be prepared to lose their jobs rather than co-operate with the law.

And yet we’re supposed to believe that this pope reluctantly joined the Hitler Youth.

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 22, 2005 10:06 AM)