By the time Sonia Sotomayor had the chance to fuck him up, Jeffrey Deskovic had already spent ten years wrongly imprisoned.

The short story: Deskovic (via his lawyer, whose timeliness or lack thereof attaches to Deskovic under agency/principal vicarious liability) filed a Habeas Corpus Petition challenging his conviction (at age 16!!) for rape and murder.

Deskovic’s paperwork was filed four days after the expiration of the grace period that was provided for in the Bill Clinton Rolling to Re-election On The Dead Bodies of the Wrongly Executed Act.

Sotomayor granted, arguendo, the accuracy of this statement:

The Court Clerk, in an official act upon which Deskovic (via his lawyer) reasonably relied, told him in advance that his petition would be timely on the date he brought it in.

This act by its agent was not imputed by Sotomayor to the court, nor to the justice system, nor to the state which took and continued to take his freedom.

In this instance, the poor bastard had to spend an extra six years in prison—the “sucker penalty”—he believed the official agent of the court.

Now, I will admit that as a matter of principle I loathe and dispise prosecutors—they are venal, perjury suborning extortionists who make their living extracting guilty pleas from innocent people by use of terror—the unbearable risk of a long sentence imposed as a penalty for anyone actually demanding a jury trial and then losing.

And, of course, our plucky heroine was a prosecutor.

So, given I probably wouldn’t want to have a beer with her in any case, I still have to say that her ruling here is a Fucking OUTRAGE and I hope she is not confirmed. She is a mistake.

I was considering Emma's timely and well-put remarks regarding western womens' problematic encounters with customs of mandatory head-covering in Muslim states. We concentrate, of course, on the several and variegated mandates of female modesty that always include the covering of the head.

While we click our tongues at this (without peradventure) obsessive preoccupation with female modesty (and, male, for that matter...) may we not pause and reflect how, across all of the Yahwist Cults,and for both sexes, hair is to be hidden, shaved, shaved and replaced with a wig (if you are some sort of crazed haredin chick) symbolically hidden (a skullcap), or otherwise obscured (a wimple, cassock, turban) and either mandatorily allowed to grow (the taliban beard and hair) or cut at the peril of the wearer (Samson) and never, ever, should Yahweh be confronted by uncovered hair in church, temple, or mosque. It'll drive him nuts.

So, I put it to you, Yahwists of whatever stripe. (You have your Old Testament, or Jewish Yahwists, Your New Testament, or Christian Yahwists, and your Koranic, or Muslim Yahwists), what is up with the hair thing?

As the shitstorm over the prospective release of the Gitmo remnant rages, the prospect of the newly embittered jihadi, rightfully furious over his torture and captivity, turning his burning anger upon his old tormentors is brandished as if it were an excuse to perpetuate an injustice once it has first been perpetrated.

There is, of course, a thread of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence which is denigrated by this debate (besides the thread ending in the prohibitions against forced testimony in the Fifth Amendment.)

When the state wrongfully holds an individual, upon discovering its mistake, the *State pays damages. What a concept!

The justly compensated claimant may retain his dignity without the (otherwise necessary) striking out at his torturers and their countrymen; For an “honor society” the idea of just payment is even more fundamentally implicated in self-respect than, perhaps, our own mostly materialist culture.

Withal, a financial incentive for pacification can be built in ( Periodic payments conditioned on non-combatent status should quell the howls from the right.)

Consider that we compensate the wrongly held, wrongly convicted.

How much more do we owe to the wrongly held, never convicted?

*”amounts ranging from $15,000 total to $50,000 per year of imprisonment”

If you thought the portrayal of Vic Mackey on The Shield was hyperbole, behold NYPD Officer Shawn Jenkins in a story which demonstrates with chilling clarity the extent to which the war on drugs is really the war to enforce a commercial franchise.

Officer Jenkins was “bodyguard” (ie, enforcer) for a now deported drug dealer.

In the haste of the deportation, (I guess), the dealer left $900,000 stashed in the floorboards of his old apartment.(Ya couldn’ make dis up)

A new tenant moved in, and, as they say in Hollywood, hi-jinks ensued.

In addition to a healthy chuckle, we all ought to leave with a larger lesson from this story:

The parties with the most profound interest in continuing the socially destructive, financially ruinous, politically corrupting and constitutionally unjustifiable prohibition on the use by otherwise autonomous individuals of exogenous neurotransmission modifiers are the franchisors and franchisees of the current distribution system; its drastically inefficient market and resultant excessive profit accrual, combined with a business environment where the courts are closed to high-value commercial disputes, gives rise to a gangster style form of “self-help”.—hence, the market in highly paid “bodyguards”, which finds so ready a source of applicants amongst the police who, after all, are in constant contact with potential employers as part of their *investigative function.

Just like the regulators at the Fed and the Treasury go to work for Goldman Sachs, the narcs hire out to the Cartel. Similar “business culture” dynamics obtain.

Actually, there’s not that much difference in the two cases.

(I’m allowed to get high off running, yoga, fasting, falling in love, obliged whether I want to or not to have my brain suffused with DMT at birth and death, encouraged to get so fuckin’ high in church that I can handle a snake, but I’m a felon if I want to nudge the identical dopamine pathways with an exogenous agent.)

So it’s not really that I’m not allowed to get high—I’m just not allowed to use a shortcut!)

*When they interview 20 “persons-of-interest” and arrest one, they have made 19 new friends. (not necessarily exluding the real perpetrator of the acts in question who may be extra-special-primo-friendly.)

Taking a leaf from the heroic UE workers at Republic Window, the rank and file of Workers United who organized Hart, Shaffner & Marx are threatening to seize the factory floor before giving up their livlihoods.

Mirabile dictu, in the class-consciousness desert that is America, an unlikely hero emerges.

I'm guessing that Brother Hare has a safe seat--but if he ever needs my money, my *shoe-leather, or my voice--Buddy, I'm there.

The larger issue:Word to Wells: Cowboy up, and pitch in. We really are all in this together. Don't be so fucking obtuse. (or we will crush you like a grape...)

*And I will walk to Chicago to go door-to-door if I have to.

As we reflect upon our good fortune, viz, for 90 years sharing the planet with Pete Seeger, let us use this moment as an opportunity to begin the tortuous process of replacing the bellicose (and unsingable) S.S.B., with the far more truly American ballad This Land is Your Land.

Consider: Not only would a successful campaign end with a far improved musical product—the struggle alone, eliciting apoplectic right wing fulminations, will be a trip all by itself.

With a nod to Al Bundy, I am calling attention to the *other reason not to get a reputation for torturing captives. Your opponents will fight you to the death rather than surrender, right?

*Since the repugnants snicker (perhaps with justification…)when we allude to the likelihood that the “bad guys” (whoever the fuck they are supposed to be…)will be more likely to torture our brave captives if we torture them, and are otherwise unmoved by the international hearts and minds disaster that a reputation for torturing represents for a nation (Hey, it’s never really springtime for Hitler, is it?), let alone the simple moral outrage that torture appropriately evokes from anyone without a degenerate and malignant heart.

We are, after all, America; “We do not FUCKING torture”

The unfortunate return to prime ministerial power of Benjamin Netanyahu renders freshly disturbing his 2004 remarks anticipating eventual copulatory defeat for his co-religionists.

Evidently unconsoled by a five to one head start, Bibi seems convinced that in the long run, the Arabs will outfuck the Jews.

While I bristle at this slur upon my cousins (be they ashkenazim or sephardim), I am nonetheless moved by their plight, *as so poignantly put by Bibi.

It is not enough to say: “Fuck Faster!” We must mount an immediate airlift of testosterone patches and phosphodiesterase inhibitors lest our brave 82nd Bedborne Through-The-Sheet-Schtuppers find themselves, disarmed and unmanned, as it were…

*”The growing demographic weight (emphasis added) of Israeli Arabs, who constitute up to 20% of Israel’s overall population, was more serious and more dangerous for Israel than threats posed by the Palestinians, he said.”

I have already busted myself for savoring the distress of the Foxniks. I was enjoying the all the schadenfreude you can stand to eat buffet, this time over the reluctance on the right to credit Prez with any chops in the pirate/captain drama. (They practically choke on "commander in chief")

They are desolated by the absence of a Jimmy Carter caliber fiasco.

Anyway, here's *John Bolton, pronouncing after the successful rescue,( replete with three, count'em,. three pirate corpses and one pirate captive making a 100% pirate disaster) that "we should go after their villages". (Hey, what the fuck, with no real pirates left to play "Wanted, Dead or Alive" how can a guy feel like Steve McQueen? Why not just start killing pirate neighbors?!)

Right. Because, after all, some of those kids might grow up to have the temerity to commit a crime against some American, some where. And besides, if they are not pirates, I'll bet they have friends who are.

We thought it barbarous for the Ayatollah Khomenei to pronounce a death sentence ex cathedra and in absentia on Salman Rushdie--Why do we grant a buffoon like Bolton a forum in which to mirror the atrocity?

George W. Bush should be a beacon to his fellow war criminals; keep your head down and keep your fuckin' mouth shut.

• whose dick can only get hard within **four hours of his last bout of bluster threatening death and dismemberment on some innocent bystander of color

** ( It's like viagra to him.)

DISCLAIMER This screed is the personal opinion of the author, and should not be attributed to the Brethren of The Coast, just because he isThe Autarch of the Brethren.

Harry Reid has grown a pair, or maybe he borrowed my own representative’s. (Suddenly I’m feeling warm and fuzzy about Nancy Pelosi, after voting for Cindy Sheehan last year…).

We are advised, in the final graf of an otherwise unimportant piece, that the fix is in at the joint house/senate conference, and the confereees, (Robert Byrd notwithstanding) are bringing back a can of reconciliation whup-ass for the Senate Republican Caucus (and their DINO friends).

Pass the popcorn.

Judd Gregg (you remember this putz, don’t you) pisses and moans thusly:

“That would be the Chicago approach to governing: Strong-arm it through…” referencing the use of an umbrella, budget reconciliation bill to carry our agenda past the menacing jaws of the filibuster barracudas.

The WaPo gives credence to the preposterous meme that if not rendered hostage to the most crazed supply-side, gold-standard, Paulista on the Repugnant bench, the Dem agenda is tainted with the stench of (say it with me…) PARTISANSHIP, EEEWW, but does at least give some historical perspective.

Personally, I love the stank of Repugnants pissing on themselves in the morning; it smells like victory.

Let the Blue Dogs bay. Let the ethnic lobbies lob choriza blintzes. Their flicker of efficacy is dying.

To quote one 28 year old lass, as heard on NPR just after the election:

"I'm ready to do whatever my president asks of me".

Today, he asks us only to pledge.

And to prepare.

For the pikes must be together by the rising of the moon.

To make this post, I am obliged to reveal something not entirely admirable about myself, but so be it.

Since the election, I have been drawn to spend more and more time in an orgy of schadenfreude, listening to the genuine anguish with which the Fox boys contemplate the socio/econo/political scene.

To be frank, I feast upon their pain like a vampire at a blood banquet--what can I say?

Anyway, in the course of hearing "the lamentations of their women", I have been amused to be treated to the preposterous complaint which would have it that Prez sins in failing to be the same sort of denial-addled moronic cheerleader as the guy who ran us into this ditch.

These are simply not serious people.

This is so profoundly depressing.

As a special cultural event co-incident with the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, we are treated to a veritable blizzard of news so disturbing as to beggar belief.

Reading the instant report, purporting to show a 43-39 edge for Creationism over Evolution, the mind staggers and the senses reel.

Bad enough these people walk among us without tatoos on their foreheads indicating caution:empty; that they might cast votes is practically an act of political terrorism. (Scares the shit outta me...)

An urgent Constitutional Amendment: To Register to vote, you must swear that you understand that the world is not 4000 years old, and that you do not believe Raquel Welsh could really be *flown off by a Teradactyl,.

*even if the resulting shot up her fur bikini from the ground was worth the price of admission to 10,000 B.C.

Those among us (and there are few...) who went to our *last live ball game at Ebbets Field, we who hate the Yankees more than Satan and all his works, will be rejoicing at the immanent disappearance of Alex Rodrigues from the list of future residents Cooperstown.

Let us, however, temper our glee as we contemplate the folly that first led some idiot to propose "random, anonymous, testing" as a prelude to some kind of steroid policy.

Talk about having your union sell you out.

Jimmy Hoffa would be turning in his grave, had he not become 175 pounds of Parks Sausage Patties.

The correct action of a rank and file union negotiator, when the man wants a member's piss, is to direct the response in his face.

Jim Matles, my godfather, taught me this.

*(and then withdrew with broken hearts)