BobHarris.com - Exciting upset: Humanity and the Constitution 5, Dictatorship 3!

Books! Actual books!

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-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life

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Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

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— Boston Globe

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— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

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Exciting upset: Humanity and the Constitution 5, Dictatorship 3!

Tag it now -

Thursday, 29 June 2006

Wow. Neat.

Surprisingly for these days, five members of the Supreme Court are not clinically insane after all, and have just ruled that Guantanamo, where human beings — some of them absolutely innocent — have been detained without representation for years in brutal conditions which have created global outrage — sucks legally, too.

Very good news. (Granted, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas are still dangerous loons, and Roberts would have ruled against basic human decency, had he not already done so when the case came before him earlier in a lower court.)

You can read a .pdf of the ruling itself here. More articulate and better-informed thoughts than mine are here and here, courtesy here and here.

I haven't yet read the whole ruling myself, and I'm not sure I'd understand it all, anyway. But from what I'm reading, it's not completely clear, but a number of voices are saying that the ruling also has important ramifications regarding several other attempts by Chimpus Maximus to arrogate executive power. The Times certainly thinks so:

It was also the most significant rebuff to date to President Bush's effort to expand presidential power in the course of waging that struggle. And the reasoning adopted by the majority called into question the justification Mr. Bush has used for other programs that have come under Congressional scrutiny, like the warrantless wiretapping conducted by the National Security Agency.

Hope so, although Chimpy's track record indicates that he's more likely to try to ignore the ruling completely somehow. We'll see.

Even so. 5-3. This is even better than the World Cup.