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Just a turn of phrase I like, from Billy Beck:

I’ll drip up some bean-sweat….

The Geek With A .45 lays it out:

Entire Societies Can and Have Gone Stark Raving Batshit Fucking Insane.
…
We know the stakes: it is nothing less than the soul of the Republic itself.

Right now, the Gods of the Copybook Headings are inking up the rubber stamp that says “Epic Fail”, and at some point on Wednesday morning, that stamp will come down on either Barack Obama’s head, or on We The People as a whole.

If our inner thirst for the false promises of a Philosopher King has finally weighed heavier than our memory of freedom, we will well and truly get what we deserve.

[Emphasis and link mine.]
Yeah, yeah, read the whole thing.

We have been warned.

When I was younger and even more foolish than I am now, I professed myself terrified by Presidential Candidate “Ronald Raygunz”, as I called him in hip disdain.

When he was elected, I thought about leaving the country to escape the inevitable police state, but it was too much trouble.

Amazingly, the result was that a real police state, East Germany, fell, along with The Wall. I was too hipply ignorant at the time to realize how profoundly ironic that was.

This time, though, I think I really am…deeply, deeply troubled. The difference is that in Reagan’s case, I was only afraid of a man about whom I knew almost nothing. This time, I’m afraid not only of Obama himself (and I know much more about him, and about politics and history generally), but I am also terrified by his parents, his teachers, his friends, his wife, his preacher, and his political backers. Most of all, though, I’m afraid of the news media that has relentlessly hounded his enemies while jealously protecting him. And I’m afraid of his worshipers, the likes of which I have never seen in any political movement in my entire life. Faint shadows of it in Bobby Kennedy, perhaps, but…faint. No one else even comes remotely close.

This time, even if Obama loses, I will still be afraid, because the fact that he is even on the ticket shows how profoundly the American people have abandoned their dream.

No matter what happens today, folks, it’s going to be a long four years.

I have one hope: I hope that if Obama ascends to the Oval Office, he finds the Levers of Power to be so unwieldy, so jammed, so filthy and crusted, that he can do little or nothing with them. Many of the most impressive will turn out to be for show only, unconnected to anything. Many of the most important will be insignificant, hidden, mislabeled.

I think his own inexperience will work against him here; he really does not know how to run an operation the size of a state, much less a country.

Most of all, I do not think the press will shield the Man in the White House, not even the One they have anointed. The Press Room is a shark pit, they will not be satisfied with scraps. They’ll want, and need, live meat. And Obama has never suffered any scrutiny at all, nothing more than fawning adulation. I seriously doubt he will be able to handle real teeth, real fire.

No, it’s not a grocery store stock boy saying this as you walk past a spilled cart.

It’s Ambulance Driver at a drunk driving scene.

Context is everything.

Andrew Orlowski, in The Register, a computer news website:

Long-time readers will know I was the San Francisco correspondent for El Reg for six years and was frequently asked by Europeans: “What do Americans think of … x?” To which the only honest answer is, “I can’t tell you what Americans think, but here in San Francisco …”

Ken Lammers:

I don’t like the result, but really can’t argue with the reasoning.

Well, OK, but so what? Why does that get QotD status? Doesn’t sound all that earth-shaking, it’s not particularly witty, comes off pretty flat, in fact.

That is his response to Jaynes v. Commonwealth (No. 062388) [scroll down], a case challenging what the Virginia State Supreme Court says was an overbroad anti-spam statute. Presumably, Lammers doesn’t like it because now spammers are free to spam, and with that, I agree.

He gets QotD, however, because of the broader principles involved. Here’s the decision summary:

Held:

(1) Jurisdiction is valid because all of AOL’s servers are in Virginia and this is common knowledge.

(2) The Virginia Supreme Court quotes the Commonwealth’s own stipulations during a prior argument before the federal supreme court and finds that Virginia cannot limit access to constitutional protections to fewer people than the federal government allows.

(3) While trespass may be a valid theory in a civil suit, it does not apply in a case involving the government because governments must answer to the 1st Amendment.

(4) The mere fact that someone sends an anonymous email cannot be illegal because anonymous political speech is protected political discourse. Unlike other States, Virginia has not limited this statute to commercial speech. Therefore, the statute is not sufficiently narrowly drawn.

(5) While mere overbreadth is not enough, this statute is substantially overbroad. It “would prohibit all bulk e-mail containing anonymous political, religious, or other expressive speech. For just being published today example, were the Federalist Papers via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the statute.”

(6) The Supreme Court refuses the Commonwealth’s invitation to narrow the application of the statute so that it only applies if the internet service provider objects or the emails contain criminal activity, defamation, or obscenity. Rewriting a statute is the province of the General Assembly and mere construction of this statute cannot reach as far as the Commonwealth urges.

Reversed.

[My bold.]

Lammers calls the decision a “tour de force”, saying it’s “28 pages and not an inch of fluff.”

The crux of the whole thing is point (6): “Rewriting a statute is the province of the General Assembly and mere construction of this statute cannot reach as far as the Commonwealth urges.”

See how that works? As much as I hate spam, as much as I want to see spammers staked out on fireant mounds with their eyelids snipped off and their bellies slit open, the VA Lege screwed up by writing an unconstitutionally broad law — and it is not the job of the Court to fix that, even though the Lege invited the Court to do so.

That’s how it’s done, folks. That’s how separation of powers works. That’s how the Rule of Law works. You don’t tolerate tyranny even if, in the short run, it achieves a goal you want. The Virginia Supreme Court understands that (at least in this case) and Lammers understands that — his quote is the essence of Point (6).

Together, they share Quote of the Day.

No, I’m not going to be oohing and aahing over the damn Olympics this year, any more than I’ll be praising the next Arafat Peace Prize winner. Billy Beck explains why:

I can’t help it: it really does strike me that the Chinese might’ve thought much better than to hire one Albert Speer as a central planner on the Olympic Games. That would be: the son of that Albert Speer.

Bonus curiosity: the Taipei Times article is written by Nina Khrushcheva. That’s Nikita Khrushchev’s grand-daughter.

Now that, right there, is what we can reasonably call diagnostic. But it’s not the quote of the day, just a plain reciting of fact.

Beck’s trade is lighting rock shows. When he sees a show, he can tell exactly what was involved in putting it on.

All over the net, I’ve seen various ravings about the Opening Ceremony. That was the biggest cued lighting production I ever saw. The scale of automated lights control was out of hand.

…

The fly-rigging was amazing, and I’d love to see the drawings. What you saw the other night was the biggest extension of rock production technology to date, and make no mistake that that’s not what it was. None of it will ever tour, but almost everything about the hardware and a great deal of the design (color saturation, for instance) can be traced directly back to San Francisco acid shows in the 1960’s, the principles and aspirations of which rock-tour crews have been dragging around ever since.

The development of that hippie technology, by the way, is the result of applied capitalism, not applied socialism, much  less communism.

From the cold eye of technique, this show was a stupendous integration of applied technology. This is what the craft can do today: show you a real-live illusion of a man running along an unfolding scroll over a hundred and fifty feet in the air along a circumference of over fifteen hundred feet.

What it cannot do is abstract the ethical purpose to which it’s put.

It was all very pretty, but I couldn’t like the look of it. If I had the fruits of over a billion peoples’ labor at my disposal, I should hope that I could paint big pretty pictures, too.

You want to know about another venue for pretty pictures?

North Korea, whose beloved leader Kim il Poofy Hair has a thing for huge flash card displays and mass dance routines. Watch the video at that link, and understand: those thousands of faceless performers are not fulfilling their own dreams, they are acting out the commands of a ruthless dictator who could order any of them to his bedroom, his torture chamber, or the firing squad, as easily as he could order these displays.

I haven’t seen the Olympic opening show. I plan not to, and I plan to spoil the enjoyment of anyone who tries to watch it in my presence.

It’s bright paint on the face of a hideous demon.

Beck has more words on the technicalities and its implications in a follow up here.

Via ESR:

I have only ever made one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.”

And God granted it.

Via Overcoming Bias.

The decision is narrow, the majority is as narrow as it can be, but fundamentally:

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter, but here comes the sun.

Thus begins the reversal of the long slow slide into abject sheepdom that started with the 1934 Gun Control Act.

Many, many more cases to come over the next several years. D.C. will play silly buggers over things like licensing.

However, the pendulum begins its long, slow swing back. The trend is clear. As Americans once again begin to openly exercise their right to keep and bear, future decisions will be broader and easier, and the resistance will weaken.

The next decision, I think, will be broader and the majority not so narrow.

Damn.

Dean Barnett, slamming Ezra Klein for claiming that “Democrats, even liberal Democrats” supported the surge:

Before charging forward, I should mention that a while ago I swore to ignore Klein’s commentary, regardless of how counterfactual or juvenile it was. I made this commitment at roughly the same time I vowed to stop knocking the walkers out from under enfeebled old ladies as they crossed the street in front of my house. I had come to the realization that picking on the lame and defenseless was wrong.

Got this from Mike at Cold Fury, who says, “They’ve got balls the size of church bells, I’ll tell ya that for nothin’.”

“I’ll tell you that for nothin’.” I like that. “I’ll buy that for a dollar!”