Moments of Justice:
Aw, shit, get ready to hear all the gruesome details of the cases of juvenile murderers who were on death row whose sentences have now been thrown out by the Supreme Court. By a 5-4 decision, the Court said that it's unconstitutional to off prisoners who committed their crimes before they were eighteen, thus finally allowing the U.S. to become a slightly more legitimate member of the "civilized world," thus making us slightly less evil than Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan on that account. Yeah, thank Christ that we Americans can hold our heads high in the world and say, "Hey, we don't kill the 'tards or the kids." Wanna take bets as to who's gonna call for a constitutional amendment that says,"We believe the children are the future. Let us kill them"?

You can also bet that tonight on your O'Reilly, your Scarborough, and your oh-so-flatulent Hannity, you're gonna hear all about the case of Christopher Simmons. What Simmons did was awful, disgusting, and disturbing, in hog-tying his neighbor, who happened to wake up while the 17 year-old Simmons was robbing her house, and then tossing her over a bridge into a river in Missouri where she drowned. You're gonna hear from her family and/or people who knew Shirley Crook and how outraged they are. And you're gonna hear liberals mocked for daring to suggest that juvenile brains aren't developed and that Simmons had been abused as a child and was a drug addict. Anyone who dares suggest that society is degraded by a juvenile death penalty will be mocked and derided for being a part of the "loony left."

It's gonna be a party of hatred, a chance for us to do our little jigs of death and doom and horror. It's gonna be all about Lee Boyd Malvo, the juvenile D.C. area sniper, sent to jail for life, but we wanted his blood, motherfuckers, we wanted that juvenile bastard executed on the fuckin' mall, with a big American flag behind him, and fuckin' Toby Keith singin' songs of how great the U.S. of A. is because we're killin' that kid. But, now, aww, fuck, it's like gettin' a hard-on and havin' nowhere to shove it.

Be ready, though, 'cause we're gonna be inundated. There's a lot of grieving people who wanted blood. There's a lot of goodly, godly citizens who wanted blood by proxy. And now because of what will no doubt be labeled an "activist court" that "makes laws," that blood will not be spilled by the state, by the nation. In fact, in that oh-so-quaint way of his, Antonin Scalia made this into a states' rights matter: " Judges are ill-equipped to make the type of legislative judgments the court insists on making here . . . The court says in so many words that what our people's laws say about the issue does not, in the last analysis, matter: In the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty . . . The court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards." Ahh, morality, the refuge of all the hatred that permeates American society. It's "morality" that says gays should not marry, and it's morality that says it's okay to execute kids.

All in all, it's been quite a day for justice, real, actual justice and not law of the jungle justice, in America. There's the Roper v. Simmons decision at the Supreme Court, and then there's the U.S. District Court decision saying that Jose Padilla, the supposed, maybe, but we can never know "dirty bomber," must be charged with something, anything, or released. After two and a half years in some hell hole, more than likely being tortured, the poor fucker, whose only crime seems to be being a not-white gangbanger and having read some shit about dirty bombs, is at least one step closer to seeing the light of day for more than an hour a day.

Of course, this one's headin' to the Supreme Court, too, because the Bush administration would rather use the Constitution as liner in the cages of its parrot cabinet members than actually release Padilla.

We live now in this world of Bush where every day we are confronted with the myriad ways in which this administration and its hellish minions attempt to strip rights, dignity, and humanity in favor of a world of unchecked corporate greed-seeking and governmental repression in the guise of parental protectiveness. So it's always blindsiding to hear news that affirms something akin to human dignity. Let us mark the day, because there are precious few.