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Family Ties

A Meeting of Two Great Minds

How many headlines?

We don't care much for the NBA, but for some reason we enjoyed jumping on the Celtics bandwagon this playoff season. The thought occurred to us today at work - how may headlines looked something like this after Boston won the Finals earlier this week?


Laker's can't handle The Truth








Turns out we're not that original. There are 252 hits on Google for that very phrase.

Boumediene v. Bush

Holding: "[A]liens designated as enemy combatants and detained at the United States Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . . do have the habeas corpus privilege." Boumediene v. Bush, 2008 U.S. LEXIS 4887

Translation: "Alien enemy prisoners, waging a jihad against the American people and captured by our military in a war authorized by Congress, have a right — under our Constitution — to petition our courts for their release." National Review Online

Precedent: Never before in history has there been

an instance where a court, in this or any other country where the writ is known, has issued [habeus corpus] on behalf of an alien enemy who, at no relevant time and in no stage of his captivity, has been within its territorial jurisdiction. Nothing in the text of the Constitution extends such a right, nor does anything in our statutes.

Justice Robert Jackson, writing for the Supreme Court majority in Johnson v. Eisentrager ("case involving German operatives captured in China and held in zone of postwar Germany fully controled by occupying American forces.")

So much for precedent.


My Hero: "Eisentrager thus held — held beyond any doubt — that the Constitution does not ensure habeas for aliens held by the United States in areas over which our Government is not sovereign…. [The majority opinion] is a sheer rewriting of the case.… By blatantly distorting Eisentrager, the Court avoids the difficulty of explaining why it should be overruled."
Justice Scalia, dissenting in Boumediene v. Bush.

What this case is really about: "The United States Supreme Court now routinely invents constitutional rights to support whatever social, political, and legal goals it deems desirable. It is so much easier to legislate from the bench than it is through the branches of government that were created by our Founders to do just that." Peter Wehner, Supreme Disgrace, National Review Online

What it means: "[F]oreign al-Qaeda killers detained in Cuba can march right into the federal district courts and demand what, suddenly, are their constitutional rights. In those courts, judges — without guidance and emboldened by the high court’s usurpation of war powers — will be encouraged to make it up as they go along: More access to classified information? Subpoenas commanding the testimony (and cross-examination) of our soldiers regarding the circumstances of capture? Miranda warnings? Prompt access to counsel, which is certain to halt any questioning — and thus any revelation of lifesaving intelligence — before it can even start? Full-blown trials in the criminal-justice system with the same presumptions of innocence, privacy, and other privileges vested in American citizens?" Editors, National Review Online.

More Scalia:

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today… It sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.

"What drives today's decision is neither the meaning of the Suspension Clause, nor the principles of our precedents, but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy."

"The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today."

More commentary on this ruling by "the al-Quaeda wing of the U.S. Supreme Court":
Supreme Cowardice, American Spectator
Lord Kennedy, American Spectator



Remember what the Obamessiah said about the type of judges he'd nominate to the Supreme Court?


We're convinced: A vote for Obama is a vote for al-Quaeda.

Great Orators of the Democratic Party

• "One man with courage makes a majority."--Andrew Jackson
  
  
• "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."--Franklin D. Roosevelt
  
  
• "The buck stops here."--Harry S. Truman
  
  
• "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."--John F. Kennedy

Oh yeah, and this:

• "What they'll say is, "Well it costs too much money," but you know what? It would cost, about--It-- It--it would cost about the same as what we would spend--It--Over the course of 10 years it would cost what it would cost us (nervous laugh). All right. Okay. We're going to--It--It would cost us about the same as it would cost for about - hold on one second. I can't hear myself. But I'm glad you're fired up, though. I'm glad. Everybody know that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. I haven't had much sleep in the last 48 hours."-- Barack Hussein Obama

Amen to that

Seen on the marquee near the interstate exit where our office is located:

Free Local Calls.
New Renovation.
God Bless America.

That's the beauty of our great nation - there are few countries in the world where the hotel you've chosen to stay in will have new renovations and can still offer you free local calls. Forget the HBO in France, baby - in these United States, you can call the pizza store down the street...for FREE!

If only the Rev. Wright had stayed at the EconoLodge in Irmo. Maybe then he'd be singing a different tune (or screaming a different nonsensical rant - we get the two confused).

God bless American, indeed.

Global Warming...

...from a meteorologist's perspective.

In his must-read eco-thriller, State of Fear, Michael Crichton creates a brilliant visual to assist us in wrapping our minds around the components of Earth's atmosphere. On page 387, he likens the atmosphere to a football field. The goal line to the 78 yard-line contains nothing but nitrogen. Oxygen fills the next 21 yards to the 99 yard-line. The final yard, except for four inches, is argon, a wonderfully mysterious inert gas useful for putting out electronic fires. Three of the remaining four inches is crammed with a variety of minor, but essential, gases like neon, helium, hydrogen and methane. And the last inch? Carbon dioxide. One inch out of a hundred-yard field! At this point I like to add, if you were in the stands looking down on the action, you would need binoculars to see the width of that line. And the most important point-how much of that last inch is contributed by man-made activities? Envision a line about as thin as a dime standing on edge.

Are you still worried about the dangers of CO₂?

Me, neither.

Obama, Political Viagra

A good reality check from Mark Steyn at National Review Online:

"If Obama is political Viagra, the media are at that stage in the ad where the announcer warns that, if leg tingles persist for over six months, see your doctor."

Maybe

At least the great orator is original.

The Man, the Myth, the Legend