Look At Me, I'm Sandra D.

There is certainly a new dynamic at the US Supreme Court that no one can miss. It was the theme of most of the end-of-term reports summed up and linked by Adam Chandler at SCOTUS Blog. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a jurist to the right of Sandra Day O'Connor, is THE swing vote on the Court.

Both Kennedy and O'Connor were Reagan appointees, yet this morning my ears were assaulted with the Faux Noise punditry explaining that while the Court did take a more conservative tone with O'Connor's retirement and replacement by a more ideologically pure winger; it was not, according to Brit Hume, a huge jump to the right. According to Bill Kristol, the Court could use another justice like Roberts or Alito to shore up a solid conservative ideological bloc.

Are they really talking about the same guy? Am I truly to believe that Kennedy is not "all that" conservative? The guy who they settled on after Robert Bork got ... Borked.

I swear to God, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whatever, that these people still can't get over the idea that Nixonian big stick, big spending, amoral and untouchable executive excesses has been exposed again and again as the opposite of American values and how to best run this nation. But if they had their druthers, Nixon's old Solicitor General, the guy who pulled the trigger on the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, would be there and not some fickle "moderate" swing vote. They still want their "Bork" to act as the cement for a monolithically reliable bulwark of conservative governance.

I'll note that the Hume/Kristol view is the extreme. The reliably conservative Hillary basher, Bay Buchanan, seemed very pleased with the current make-up of the court on ABC's This Week roundtable. But even she acknowledged that every GOP presidential candidate has promised they would put more Scalias on the bench. She and the conservatives who she identifies with are uninterested in polls or what the Washington Post might say, but are inspired by the likes of Scalia and Dick Cheney.

I'm sorry, that's nuts. They want their "I've got mine, everyone else is on their own" mentality to be to carved in stone, recognizing that the words chiseled in the granite above the SCOTUS entryway saying "Equal Justice Under The Law" take into account the Orwellian notion that "Some animals are more equal than others."

I have to wonder, however, that if Ann Coulter got her way and someone did put rat poison in Justice Steven's creme brulee, giving Dick Cheney another chance to put a wingnut on the court to solidify their majority: would Grover Norquist stop meeting with his fellow travelors every Wednesday since he organized the fight against Hillary Clinton's health care proposals back in '92? Unlikely. Will Fox News stop its demagoguery? Hardly. Will Rush Limbaugh retire? I wish!

Certainly if they get just one more ideologue who is reliably more conservative than the appointments made by St. Ronny Raygun, Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rove and the rest of their band of criminal co-conspirators will sleep a little easier, resting comfortably with the knowledge that inconvenient obstacles to running the world the way they see fit will no longer be interrupted by quaint little things like individual liberties and the will of the people through their elected representatives in Congress.

Sprachen Verboten!

Elections have consequences, and those elections effect future elections -- and your liberty. There simply is no logical reason for the 5-4 split decision on censorship that came down from the Roberts Supreme Court except to say -- they know what they don't like when they see it.

Ahh, the luxury to have a life-time appointment with the power to impose all my petty prejudices and wacky notions of how the world should be run with the stroke of a pen -- no matter how foolishly narrow-minded I come off.

"The message on Frederick's banner is cryptic," Chief Justice John Roberts said. But the school principal who suspended him "thought the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one," Roberts said in the majority opinion.

Cryptic indeed. Just as cryptic as the Court's reasoning when it comes to the other free speech decision it reached, reversing itself on campaign finance so we can be subject to unlimited cryptic messages bearing blatantly false, misleading, and downright offensive political ads by groups permitted to raise and spend unlimited funds to give us all the lies money can buy.

Is it any wonder that more, not less people are believing the lie that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, a staggering 41% of the population actually believe in an alternate reality -- about as many God-fearing folks who believe in the literal truth of the Bible.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Well, okay, there's a bunch of stuff wrong with this, I just don't want to get into it.

But, um .... that makes the point, doesn't it? Surely some kind of law breaking it being advocated by the cryptic picture on the left -- of course Senator Kerry is smiling, so I guess we can rule out rape. (But this just has to be some kind of gross sexual imposition -- it makes me feel gross and imposed upon.)

It seems that when you take the two decisions together, as long as you have high priced corporate lawyers you can say just about anything you want. I doesn't even matter if it's an outright lie. Just claim it's satire and you're golden. However, if you happen to be passionate about an issue and want to get your message out -- like the message that Christ likes the Ganja -- you better set yourself up as a 527 corporation or some kind of PAC before you start unfurling your little bedsheets with unapproved exhortations to grow your hair long and preach peace and love -- because there are different rules for the rich and famous -- and don't you forget it.

For far too long this nation has been run by far too many up-tight white guys. I don't believe for an instant that the Bong Hits For Jesus kids were forbidden to exercise their free speech rights because how they expressed themselves or what (or whatever the hell?) they were trying to say might incite some illegal activity. That's patently weak and foolish. They were censored because they pissed of their betters and their message was deemed unworthy.

The righteous indignation of our Christian elders was offended. How dare these kids take the name or our Lord and Savior and debase it in such a manner. By god, this will teach them. We'll find some way to shut them up and the consequences be damned.

Now seriously folks. Bong Hits For Jesus. That is now and forever a legitimate search query in the data base of United States Supreme Court decisions. Nothing else they could have spent their precious time on that would have been a bit more productive?