I wish the rationale were individual instead of “group” rights, but nonetheless, Canada has done a good thing by starting the process of legalizing gay marriage. Unlike Atrios or Yglesias, though, I won’t turn up my nose because of the company I keep on the issue or a fear that the lack of ideological purity will invalidate the progress.

My preferred solution would be that all marriages become civil unions and marriage be left for churches (and unions could be between any combination of consenting adults–I think tradition would do much more than law to keep polygamists at bay–and no, Ricky Santorum, dogs aren’t considered consenting adults), but if this is what’s politically possible, it’s a good second.

Yes, that’s me complimenting Canada.

Looks like a Supreme Court member may pay for his decision, in a near-literal sense. I’ll just link to Hit & Run’s post and what are sure to be funny, funny comments.

Yep, this decision has no potential for unconstitutional abuse.

But hey, after reading this roundup of eminent domain proceedings going forward after the decision, there’s an excellent chance that Souter would have been hit by this without sweet, sweet revenge as motivation. Now somebody go after Kennedy’s and Stevens’s pads.

Matthew Yglesias responds to a couple of pieces by Julian Sanchez and Matt Welch questioning the response of well-known lefties (as opposed to rank and file, who seem much more divided) to Kelo vs. New London.

Key quip from his pooh-poohing:

It speaks well of the intelligence of the libertarian legal community that when they try and establish precedents that will make it much harder to regulate large corporations and wealthy individuals in the public interest that they don’t choose the case of Mega Corp v. Cute Deer or Sick Child v. Giant Drug Company. Instead, they pick cases like Raich and Kelo, where liberal egalitarians may sympathize with plaintiffs ostensibly beseiged by Big Government.

Yes, because preventing local governments from becoming a way for businesses to circumvent the free market at the expense of the less-politically-connected doesn’t “make it much harder to regulate large corporations and wealthy individuals in the public interest”. It has zero, zip, zilch to do with regulation, and only the tiniest sliver to do with the public interest, which was the whole point. Or did he mean Raich, where activity that involved no commerce whatsoever was being regulated under the “Commerce” Clause? How does that favor big business? He doesn’t say, because there is no rational way to back that up. It’s just insanely random and desperate mud-smearing.

Think if the swing vote had been Kennedy but the affirmative votes were the conservatives–is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that Yglesias would be screaming about how this ruling shows that Republicans are firmly in the pockets of Big Business? I find it difficult to find a mainstream, popularly-read lefty who disapproves of the ruling. Yet from the comments on their blogs and from some liberals I’ve talked to, the base is not nearly so unanimous in their approval, despite the boot-licking of their punditerati.

Attention progressive pundits: Coalitions require compromise and finding common ground. If libertarians and “liberals” can’t find common ground on tyranny-of-the-majority issues like these, then there is no common ground and you will have lost another political constituency you might have used to chisel at the Republican base. This is a simple issue where your core principles, if those core principles are in fact greater than simply expanding government power at any cost, are not at stake. Your core constituencies are, in fact, at stake. This means that the Republicans will have pissed off a good portion of their base and you will have failed to pick them up.

Republicans have been on a drive for Big Business and Big Government at the expense of their principles, and it’s fractured the libertarian/conservative coalition and started to splinter the conservatives, as well. But since the liberal pundits have picked up the “libertarians are worse than conservatives” meme of the extreme left, they are blind to opportunities to expand their base because it means agreeing with Bad People. There are a number of libertarians who would be willing to vote for liberals if you agreed on issues of civil liberties (Raich) or corporate welfare (Kelo). However, if you can’t even be seen to get off the partisan “my guys can’t be wrong no matter what” spin-cycle for these issues, then there’s no net advantage for us to vote for you. I know this issue is pretty much making my mind up not to support the Democrats in the next election. Instead I’ll just vote for the Libertarian Party. They may be wacky, but right now they look positively reasonable by comparison.

Enjoy being the minority in a theocracy. You richly deserve it.

In Nashville, cops are targeting homosexuals in sting operations…not for being gay, but by trying to elicit drug sales out of them. They also get a little fun smearing, I mean, uh, “arresting” a “resisting” queer, after posing as an online date and asking him to bring some amyl nitrate:

In fact, the police later admitted that Sergeant Steve Brady, a 17-year veteran of the force, fired his Taser gun, delivering 50,000 electric volts into Steve’s back. Meanwhile, he was being kicked. Remarkably, Steve tried to get to his feet. In his mind, he was fighting for his life. Then Brady shot him a second time with the Taser. The officers ordered him to put his hands behind his back, but he couldn’t. His body was flopping like a fish out of water; every muscle was convulsing, it seemed to him at the time. The officers ridiculed him. “Does that tickle?” one of the officers asked, as the others laughed uproariously.

He was subsequently shot a third time–a guy who is six feet tall but slightly built. The catch?

In the meantime, nobody seems to know whether Steve even did anything illegal, other than resisting arrest. Here’s how the charges have evolved over the last few weeks: initially, police claimed that Steve’s bottle of liquid substance was not “amyl nitrate,” even though that’s what he told the informant he would bring over. So they charged him with intent to sell, deliver or distribute a counterfeit controlled substance. Oddly, both the defendant and the attorney claim that the bottle of substance he stuffed into his pocket was, in fact, amyl nitrate. The real deal.

So pretty much they’re abusing drug stings to harass homosexuals. But I guess Atrios would say it’s better they allow this than run the risk of not being able to entrap an Enron executive on an unrelated and bogus charge.

Link via Sploid.

“You know,” says kouncilman Klukker, “it sure had been hard fighting the NAACP trying to prove that a neighborhood with those people is blighted, no matter how high the median income or how little crack we were able to plant.” He stopped to light his fresh cigar with a lit copy of the Constitution. “It sure will be easier if I just say that the country club expansion with attached Wal-Mart will bring jobs and public use and leave the whole blight question out of it. Ain’t that right, boy?”

“Yassir, Mr. Klukker,” said Justice Stevens, from between the kouncilman’s legs. “I’m here to serve up good old-fashioned liberal values, just like Wilson. And I couldn’t be seen to be agreeing with libertarians.”

“Braak!” opined Atrios, from his cage. “Think if the Court had limited eminent domain instead! Then how would President Kucinich make everything perfect in America again, if he couldn’t force his political enemies out of their homes for any reason whatsoever? I just know he’ll be elected, if we can just abandon enough of our principles, except for the vote-losing ones!”

Kouncilman Klukker casually strangled the bird. “You’re right Atrios, but too noisy. Why can’t you be more like Marshall or Kos, making their noise outside, barking back and forth at Rove, who keeps pretending to throw sticks for them and calls them enemy coddlers? They sure are funny–they never learn that he’ll never give them a stick and just enjoys watching them froth at the mouths while he keeps stealing food from their dishes.”

“Gaak,” weakly muttered Atrios, “help me Yglesias!”

But Yglesias was carefully watching the Manichean nature of the moon, seeing what differences he could see between the light and dark sides.

“Braak,” offered Atrios apologetically, “you’re right; I should focus on the sideshow. Hey, isn’t it funny in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when they start tearing down Arthur’s house to build a bypass? I didn’t realize at the time I was laughing at Arthur instead of at the ludicrousness of his situation. Now the joke is even more funny! Thanks, Justice Stevens, it’s only through you that we protect poor people and get what’s funny about jokes about them.”

Stevens looked up and wiped a smudge off his nose. “Well, I figure that money given to Kouncilman Klukker will eventually do some good for some poor people, and if a few more poor people have to be thrown out of the homes they were born in 87 years ago, well, hell, I’m sure he has everybody’s best interests at heart. Since McCain-Feingold was passed, the money has gone right out of politics–hasn’t it? Besides, I can just claim it’s ‘federalist’ and that’ll cause Southerners to go along with it.” He looked up. “Say, Mr. Klukker, once I finish cleaning here, could you maybe change your mind about tearing down my mansion to build a McDonald’s and giving me thirty-five dollars for it? That was kind of my retirement nest-egg.”

“Shut up and put your tongue back there, bitch,” Klukker said with a tender smile. “Yeeeahp,” he sighed, farting comfortably. “With Republicans gaining at every level, I’m sure the politically-connected who will most influence the eminent domain process will be the poor, the unpopular, and the disenfranchised. Way to stick up for them, Stevens! I think I’ll have you use that federalist distinction to reinstate government-mandated separate lunch-counters next, just to see Atrios here spin himself into a pretzel trying to justify it as a good power that Hillary Clinton can use to ban smoking. Now make a little room for Justice Kennedy, because I like to have both ends taken care of while I’m opining on how much I care for stomping on the �ntermenschen, I mean, uh, helping out the less fortunate with an economic development scheme that coincidentally makes them go be poor and smelly and bl- I mean, uh, economically suboptimal somewhere else. Thanks for the assist in that, boys.”

Kouncilman Klukker settled back. “Now, lick harder, bitches!”

The Republicans are making sure I know that conservatives can be every bit as repugnant to those who care about liberty by trying to pass an anti-flag-burning amendment. So here’s what I’m going to do.

I’m going to buy two flags. If a Constitutional amendment on something so meaningless, let alone anti-First-Amendment, as enabling prohibitions against flag-burning is ratified, I will burn the first flag on a public sidewalk. If the enabling legislation to make it a crime is passed, I will burn the second flag, again on a public sidewalk.

Now, you have to remember that the government can stop you any time it wants. Laws do not exist for you to follow, but rather to make sure there’s some obscure law they can accuse you of breaking when they decide they want to alter your behavior in some manner. So there are already some current laws against unlicensed fires or something or an EPA regulation against garbage disposal (because at that point the American flag may as well stand for garbage, because it sure won’t stand for freedom) that they will charge me with in the first instance.

So if you are against burning flags and want a law against it, the way to get me not to burn them is not to pass any stupid amendments or laws. Tough, I know. You’re just yearning to be stupid.

If you’re against burning flags but you think a law is silly, then you should follow my example. Of course if you’re for burning flags, then you probably are doing so already and nothing I say one way or another will affect what you do.

So I suggest the day after a constitutional amendment is officially ratified as the day to burn the first flag. Criminals, please note that the police will not be caring about murder or property theft that day, because that’s nothing when compared to burning a piece of cloth with one certain design as opposed to another.

Fresh off defending their ability to regulate commerce over the dead bodies of cancer patients, the so-called liberals of the Supreme Court are now defending the right of the government to steal homes from working stiffs and giving them to the super-rich. Prediction: this will merit at most an approving eyebrow-raise from TPM or Yglesias or Kos.

Yay. Now democracy is saved from people trying to live in the house their grandfather built. And with housing prices as they are, well, I’m sure they’ll be able to afford something equivalent at the compensation the government is willing to give. Not in a First World country, mind you, but there will be something.

If they don’t like it, let them eat cake! I heard a new recipe on NPR. By the way, collect that pauper’s taxes as you kick him out of the house so we can get a new transmitter built for WETA. The limo doesn’t get good reception in the mansion’s fourth garage.

Disgusting.

I have heard many conservatives use the following as a justification for the Iraq war: the elections in Lebanon, the abandonment by Libya of its chemical weapons program, and even the lessening of restrictions in Egypt. I have also heard many liberals go to great lengths to either a) deny those things were good or b) deny they came in any way whatsoever from the US invasion of Iraq. These arguments don’t sway the unconvinced, because they sound like sour grapes and some of the justifications, particularly of the first argument (by groups like ANSWER) sound far-fetched themselves. So if you actually want to convince anybody, rather than beating your chest to feel better about your own morality, there are better alternatives to reply to this argument.

Certainly there is no airtight case that any good things in the Middle East must come directly from the invasion of Iraq. That’s a classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. That being said, there are commentators within the region who have suggested that the example of the election in Iraq has done much to cause populations over there to wonder why their own, presumably unconquered, governments can’t do the same. There’s no denying that reports of it were filling Al Jazeera regularly and were at least in the back of the minds of people operating afterwards. Also, there have been suggestions leaked that Qaddafi was indeed influenced by the Iraq invasion that oh shit, they really mean it this time and it had a Voltarian effect on him.

So while it is hardly a proven case that any of these at least potentially good things came of the Iraq invasion, nearly is it impossible to think that it had an effect pour encourager les autres. So does that mean that, therefore, the invasion was a good thing?

Absolutely not, and liberals and other war opponents who feel the need to engage those points are essentially giving conservatives a free pass by legitimizing their underlying argument while disputing the facts. In essence, they’re saying “Hey, we know that if these things were good and were caused by the invasion, it would be justified, so we’re going to fight like hell to make sure they aren’t considered either good or a result thereof.”

Bullshit. To violate Godwin’s law (which I think is stupid because who else is universally considered evil, at least in public?), I’d like to draw an analogy. The Nazis did some horrific experiments on death camp prisoners, such as Jews and Gypsies. Yet medical doctors have used the data they collected in those experiments because they had data that can’t be obtained by ethical people. Some of that data, such as the curves of body temperatures, have saved many lives since then. So, arguably, some good has come from those experiments. Does that in any way justify the experiments?

Of course not. I doubt any conservatives or liberals would make that argument. So why fear positive effects, regardless of their veracity, claimed as a result of the Iraq war? The answer to those is basically the analogy: “So, you’re saying that Nazi experiments were a good thing because we know more about how people respond to extreme cold?” Or, if you still believe that you can’t ever use the Nazis to take an argument to its unintended but logical conclusion, then just use the Tuskeegee Experiments: “So, do you think it was right of the US to inject black people with Syphilis just to get data on how it affects the human body? I’m sure the data was useful in diagnosing syphilis, but that doesn’t make it right to hurt people just to see how they react.”

Then you can go back to the main arguments against the war that they do less well defending.

If global free trade is a race to the bottom, as many who view income disparities as the root of all evil claim, then shouldn’t we applaud the implied social justice of the resultant world where we’re all dirt poor? At least we’ll all be equal, because even rich mens’ salaries will eventually be pulled down to less than a dollar a day, right?

If you aren’t in favor of global free trade, you have to explain why not everyone, if it is left unfettered to the end of time, will become poor, especially when the global economy grinds to a halt. Or you’ll have to explain how equality of incomes isn’t a requirement for social justice.

I suspect a world of truly free global trade (no subsidies, no tariffs, no barriers) would raise the floor of poverty to above the current UN definition in real terms. I also suspect some people who are currently winners would temporarily lose income in real terms. I am positive that income inequality will increase, because I don’t believe free trade is a universal race to the bottom.

Why?

Because the lower cost of living in Columbia, SC didn’t abate the rise in salaries in DC during the last economic boom. Had it been a true race to the bottom, and labor wages been the sole determinant of income, DC would have quickly adjusted until they dropped to Columbia, SC levels.

Guess what, we’ve been through a recession, a terrorist attack, and two wars, and it still pays better to live in DC than Columbia, SC. Yet there is a freer market, including more mobile labor, between the two areas than there is between the US and Mexico as a result of NAFTA. If the “race to the bottom” types are right, I should be working for Columbia, SC wages. And before you say “oh, but the political system is the same,” I would note that in general, regulations are less strict in South Carolina than they are in the District, including a lower minimum wage. So an “off the books” South Carolinian could send money home to his family just as well as a Peruvian. Have you checked the residency status of your accountant lately? Does she speak with a funny accent?

I await the calls to ban South Carolinians from travel to the District, lest they take ahr jarhbs! Or will we not hear them because South Carolinians are, in the majority, white?

…when the most liberal member of the Supreme Court upholds racism and classism to side with John Ashcroft.

We’re gonna beat up on cancer patients to make sure that black people remember their place in our society–behind bars. And there’s no national-level liberal I can think of who’s against it, with the exception of Eric Schlosser.

If you actually care about the inner city and want to stop imprisoning an entire generation of minorities, there is something you can do.

Write your congresscritter and senator in support of the Hinchey-Rohrabacher and the Truth in Trials Act bills.

For the record, in case you need the qualification, I don’t do illegal drugs nor do I advocate that you should start. I also don’t advocate that you should become an alcoholic or get addicted to tobacco. But I don’t want to put you in jail for any of those activities if done in your own home or apartment and you don’t try to drive or perform surgery while doing so.

Radley Balko sums up why I’m even bothering:

I’m pretty cynical about grassroots efforts to effect change. But what the hell? We don’t really have any other choice at this point. And if blogs can motivate the move to get Trent Lott to resign, CBS News staffers fired, and a CNN producer canned, why couldn’t we devote as much keyboard-pounding, verbiage, and drumbeat-generating toward getting Congress to put an end to federal agents pointing assault weapons at cancer patients?