high times

First, tip o' the hat to the co-blogger and his missus for putting up with me and the mini-me. This was our first meeting since starting this venture, and of course we mostly swapped music and played with the kidlet rather than developing a serious business plan.

Second, a wag o' the finger to people you'd rather forget who appear out of the past. Remember Ken Starr? The ol' rascal's back and representin' at the Supreme Court. Specifically, he's arguing that a high school principal can suspend a student for holding up a "Bong hits 4 Jesus" sign outside the school grounds. Really.

I recommend the whole article - IMHO Dahlia Lithwick is the funniest and also most clear-headed writer on judicial issues, especially SCOTUS arguments (maybe madpoet has his favorites.) Just check out this graph:

Starr insists that "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" promotes drugs. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asks whether a sign that said "Bong Stinks for Jesus" would be more permissible. Souter asks whether a simple sign reading "Change the Marijuana Laws" would also be "disruptive." Starr says that interpreting the meaning of the sign must be left to the "frontline message interpreter," in this case, the principal. Then Starr says schools are charged with inculcating "habits and manners of civility" and "values of citizenship." Yes, sir. In the first six minutes of oral argument Starr has posited, without irony, a world in which students may not peaceably advocate for changes in the law, because they must be inculcated with the values of good citizenship.

I know, it gets so old and cliched, because we have to ask this all the time, but why do right-wingers instinctively hate America's freedoms? There is a set of ingrained cultural signifiers, e.g. the sweet leaf which has yet to harm anyone, that for some reason really get their goats. In this case, this was just a sign that mentioned pot (outside the school) which is somehow undermining the entire education system. It takes a special kind of mind to try to justify this level of meta-absurdity - not unlike the one that took tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to produce long and boring graphic descriptions of sexual acts and published them for the world to see, all in the name of defending family values?