Cahin Chain Cheney...
Scotus – after a power breakfast consis6ting of a few Hispanic children and a gay marijuana grower – got down to business and ruled 8-0 today to give Secret Service agents significant latitude to limit the First Amendment rights of protesters they believe could harm the people agents are protecting. The court tossed out a lawsuit by Steven Howards, who said he was wrongly arrested for expressing his opposition to the Iraq War to Dick Cheney at a Colorado shopping mall in 2006. The agents said they had reason to believe Howards broke the law by lying to them about touching the vice president during the confrontation.
Zombie Apocalypse
Bradley Manning will see his future this Wednesday in a pretrial hearing that reflects the Obama administration like no mirror ever made. To say there ahve been changes in the way we do theb business of justice is an understatementl.
Since pvt. 1st class Bradley Manning was dropkicked into the twilight zone of military tribunaland, America has become a monster to her own people. We are not being stalked by zombies: we have indeed become the very tooth of the zombie itself.
First came Miami: the case of a naked man eating most of another man's face. Then Texas: a mother accused of killing her newborn, eating part of his brain and biting off three of his toes. Then Maryland, a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain.
It was different in New Jersey, where a man stabbed himself 50 times and threw bits of his own intestines at police. They pepper-sprayed him, but he was not easily subdued.
He was, people started saying, acting like a zombie. The actual incidents are horrifying - and, if how people are talking about them is any indication, fascinating. In an America where zombie imagery is used to peddle everything from tools and weapons to garden gnomes, they all but beg the comparison.
So many strange things have made headlines in recent days that The Daily Beast assembled a Google Map tracking "instances that may be the precursor to a zombie apocalypse." And the federal agency that tracks diseases weighed in as well, insisting it had no evidence that any zombie-linked health crisis was unfolding.
The cases themselves are anything but funny. Each involved real people either suspected of committing unspeakable acts or having those acts visited upon them for reasons that have yet to be figured out. Maybe it's nothing new, either; people do horrible things to each other on a daily basis.
- KBOO