Court rules in favor of Second Amendment gun right

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer 10 minutes ago

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.
The court's 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia's 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.
The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual's right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for four colleagues, said the Constitution does not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home."
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority "would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons."
He said such evidence "is nowhere to be found."
Joining Scalia were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. The other dissenters were Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter.
The capital's gun law was among the nation's strictest.
Dick Anthony Heller, 66, an armed security guard, sued the District after it rejected his application to keep a handgun at his home for protection in the same Capitol Hill neighborhood as the court.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in Heller's favor and struck down Washington's handgun ban, saying the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to own guns and that a total prohibition on handguns is not compatible with that right.
The issue caused a split within the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney supported the appeals court ruling, but others in the administration feared it could lead to the undoing of other gun regulations, including a federal law restricting sales of machine guns. Other laws keep felons from buying guns and provide for an instant background check.
Scalia said nothing in Thursday's ruling should "cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings."
The law adopted by Washington's city council in 1976 bars residents from owning handguns unless they had one before the law took effect. Shotguns and rifles may be kept in homes, if they are registered, kept unloaded and either disassembled or equipped with trigger locks.
Opponents of the law have said it prevents residents from defending themselves. The Washington government says no one would be prosecuted for a gun law violation in cases of self-defense.

Mega Pizza!

Man Without a Party

The Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering passing a "Jessica's law." Named after 12-year-old Jessica Lunsford, who was raped and murdered by a repeat sex offender, the proposed law would require a mandatory 20-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of raping a child under 12.
The Boston Herald reports that Rep. James Fagan is a critic of the legislation:

Fagan, a defense attorney, infuriated victims' rights advocates during a recent House debate when he said he would "rip apart" 6-year-old victims on the witness stand and "make sure the rest of their life is ruined." In a fiery soliloquy on the House floor, Fagan said he'd grill victims so that, "when they're 8 years old they throw up; when they're 12 years old, they won't sleep; when they're 19 years old, they'll have nightmares and they'll never have a relationship with anybody."

Fagan did not return calls seeking comment. What political party does Fagan belong to? The Herald doesn't say, but we'll give you three guesses.

Europe’s CERN particle-physics lab has issued its long-awaited report on safety issues surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive atom-smasher. Some have feared that when the collider reaches full power, sometime next year, it might create microscopic black holes or other exotic phenomena that could endanger Earth. The new report, like earlier safety studies, rules out the possibility of global danger.
Critics of the collider are pursuing a federal lawsuit challenging the safety claims - and they’re likely to continue the doomsday debate even in the wake of this report.
The report’s argument follows the basic line used in past reports: Even the most energetic collisions planned for the LHC are far less powerful than cosmic-ray collisions that have been going on for billions of years.
“Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists,” CERN said in its lay-language summary of the report. “Astronomers observe an enormous number of larger astronomical bodies throughout the universe, all of which are also struck by cosmic rays. The universe as a whole conducts more than 10 million million LHC-like experiments per second. The possibility of any dangerous consequences contradicts what astronomers see - stars and galaxies still exist.”
The report also delves into the theoretical implications even if it turns out that microscopic black holes may hang around longer than most scientists think, and still ends up ruling out the catastrophic risk. In the stable-black-hole scenario, physicists do not expect the black holes to gobble up matter and grow to a monster size. Instead, they would interact - or not interact - with the particles they came across.

Wanna Tro Some Boc?

America's Bocce
Capitalvia WSJ.com: Today's Most Popular on 6/20/08

Few people may be aware that Chicago's Highwood section is arguably the bocce capital of the U.S. And this past week, Mark Yost's little far North Side neighborhood was in its glory, hosting the U.S. Bocce Federation National Championships.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121399535061492827.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular

James Kirchick in the (shocka!) Los Angeles Times, on the radically dishonest claims that refuse to die: Bush never lied to us about Iraq.

Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.
Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

Wall Street Lobbies to Protect Speculative Oil Trades

By Jeffrey H. BirnbaumWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, June 19, 2008; D01
Wall Street banks and other large financial institutions have begun putting intense pressure on Congress to hold off on legislation that would curtail their highly profitable trading in oil contracts -- an activity increasingly blamed by lawmakers for driving up prices to record levels.
Representatives of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, along with the trade associations for hedge funds and other financial groups, have lobbied the offices of key legislators, briefed senior staffers on committees that oversee pivotal parts of the energy markets and distributed research materials explaining their view about oil and how it's traded.
In a pair of lengthy and sometimes testy closed-door sessions in the Senate last week, executives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two of Wall Street's largest investment banks, made the case that their multibillion-dollar investments in energy contracts have not led to higher oil prices. Rather, they told Democratic staff members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the trades allow international markets to operate efficiently and that the run-up in oil prices results not from speculation but from actual imbalances of supply and demand.
But the executives were met with skepticism and occasional hostility. "Spare us your lecture about supply and demand," one of the Democratic aides said, abruptly cutting off one of the executives, according to a staff member in the room.
Another aide at the meetings warned the executives that no matter what arguments they muster, it would be hard to prevent Congress from acting. Referring to a vote earlier this year to impose new mileage standards on automobile makers, the aide said, "At 90 bucks a barrel, Congress rolled the autos for the first time in 30 years -- is it too much to think that Congress will impose more restrictions on you if oil goes to $150 dollars a barrel?"
Goldman and Morgan declined to comment about the meetings.
Separately, lobbyists for the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and other financial entities such as hedge funds roamed through congressional office buildings this month and, in the Senate, left behind short policy statements that defended the current state of regulation. "Blaming speculation for the increase in energy prices is to confuse causation and correlation," one of the documents said.
A second document, or "talker," asserted: "Congress and regulators have acted to strengthen oversight of the energy markets. Give the new authorities time to work."
But time is running short. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates oil trading, has drawn the increasing ire of lawmakers for exempting financial firms from rules that limit speculative buying, a prerogative usually reserved for airlines and trucking companies that need to lock in future fuel costs. The CFTC has also waived regulations on U.S. investors who trade commodities on some overseas markets, allowing them to accumulate large quantities of the future oil supply by making purchases on lightly regulated foreign exchanges.
Under pressure from lawmakers, the CFTC and its British counterpart agreed Tuesday to impose new limits on the trading of the United States' benchmark oil contract on a London exchange. Such trading of West Texas intermediate oil contracts has been occurring beyond the purview of U.S. regulators on the London platform, the Intercontinental Exchange.
The move did not go far enough to satisfy some Democrats who criticized the CFTC for abdicating the job of policing overseas oil traders to the Intercontinental Exchange.
Until recently, Congress had been reluctant to intervene in the energy futures markets, and the lobbying by financial entities has been a major reason. "We have known since 2001 that there were problems here, but we've run up against people on Wall Street who don't want to be helpful in policing the market," said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), one of several lawmakers frustrated by the effectiveness of the financial lobby.
A growing number of members of Congress have reacted to public outrage over skyrocketing gasoline prices by introducing at least eight bills that restrict the ability of financial companies to buy futures contracts, disclose more about those investments or stiffen federal oversight of energy trades. Other legislation is in the works, congressional aides said.
Democratic lawmakers have been particularly outspoken. "There is a bubble of speculation on the oil commodity exchange that is also driving up the price of gas, and that has to stop," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.), a leader on the issue.
But some Republican lawmakers are also pressing for change. "At a time when American people cannot escape the direct impact that rising gas and oil prices have on their day-to-day lives, it is incumbent that we ensure that our energy futures markets are transparent and demonstrate supply and demand -- not manipulation by large institutional investors," said Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (Maine).
What's more, the ramped-up lobbying by financial services firms has provoked a counterattack by lobbyists eager for additional regulation of energy trading. Led by the Air Transport Association, the lobby for the airline industry, a newly formed coalition of energy users -- which includes truckers, farmers and consumer groups -- has been urging lawmakers to approve several bills that would limit speculative investments in energy.
But advocates for the financial industry insist these concerns are misplaced.
"Increasing regulation on what we do will not lower energy prices," said Greg Zerzan, head of global public policy for ISDA. The association, which represents all aspects of the multibillion-dollar practice of trading exotic financial contracts outside of formal exchanges, hosts a conference call every Friday in Washington to coordinate the activities of like-minded groups.
Its latest addition: the Financial Services Roundtable, the lobby for 100 of the nation's largest financial services companies. And now the Roundtable and ISDA are courting the nation's largest business federation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to join their crusade. Chamber executives said they were seriously considering the alliance.

http://www.yoest.com/2008/05/20/intelligence-briefing-for-chief-executive-officers-by-herbert-meyer/

Great article

http://www.vfdaily.com/culture/2008/blogopticon/index.html

The New York Times, scrupulously fair as always (cough), suggests that it might be time for the United States to reconsider this antiquated idea of “free speech” and join the rest of the world in prosecuting people like Mark Steyn: American Exception - Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech - Series - NYTimes.com.

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”
Professor Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.
But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

http://www.mikeshard.com/weekend/

This is useful!