Why only the SECOND amendment?

Second Amendment absolutists are out in force these days, insisting that the Constitution gives citizens the right to unrestricted ownership of any goddamned gun that makes the most money for the gun industry.  What the hell.  As I've noted before, I don't think any private citizen has to have a hand gun, and if all the super-popular Glocks disappeared tomorrow, it would be a great day for the USofA.

What I'm wondering about today, though, is why only the second amendment gets such special treatment.  Why not the first, or the fourth, or the sixth, or the eighth?  (Probably, you don have a clue what the sixth or the eighth  are about.  We former social studies teachers probably were less effective than we might have liked.)

In case you have forgotten what the fourth was about, it's the one on search and seizure — that is, the right to privacy.  Our President, in case you had not noticed, not only has supported the infringements on our rights in the Patriot Act, but expanded them.  If you really want online anonymity, for example, your best bet now is the Tor Project.  Is the whole thing run by the CIA or the FBI?  I don't think so, but who the hell knows?

The sixth amendment is trial by jury — speedy and public.  Ask the leftover Yemenis at Guantanamo how that right is holding up for them.  Ask the American citizens executed by drone strikes overseas.  The eighth amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, figures in here too.  Obama says torture is a thing of the past, but he won't prosecute any former torturers because it's all top secret, so who knows?

Oh, and by the way, FREE BRADLEY MANNING!

You must read this!

Let's Give Up on the Constitution, by Louis Michael Seidman

Morsi and the media

Mohammed Morsi is in a difficult situation right now, but no more so than the American media.  Okay, it is tempting just to go along with Mohammed el Baradei, traditional "friend of the West," and accuse Morsi of aspiring to be a new "Pharaoh," but it's a lot more complicated.  What we have to remember is that the Egyptian revolution against Mubarak is far from complete, and the American media still is trying to figure out which side "we're" on.

Yes, Morsi's assumption of pretty much autocratic powers is kind of out of synch with American values, but I think we still must take into account that the real struggle in Egypt is between Morsi and the Mubarak judiciary, still hanging on with firmly clenched teeth as a surrogate for the Egyptian Army.  That judiciary, in case you forgot, was the power center that dissolved the popularly elected parliament and the first assembly charged with re-writing Egypt's Constitution.  In recent days, it has been moving towards dissolving the current constitutional assembly as well.  That judiciary wants nothing better than an opportunity to put the army back in charge of everything.

Oh, pathetic American media, forced to choose!  You can slant your coverage towards the Mubarak judiciary, which would be easier because it's not "Islamist," or you can slant your coverage towards Morsi because, at least, he was popularly elected — and the favoritism shown by the courts to the Mubarak thugs was hard to miss.

 In the long run, though, Egypt will have to work things out for itself.

Time for a Constitutional Convention?

Every four years, for as long as I can remember, there's been discussion of the Electoral College — albeit there never seems to be anything done to reform it.  Two states, Maine and Nebraska, took a stab at it in that they distribute electoral votes by Congressional district, with the extra two going to the top vote getter, statewide.  It would go a long way towards solving the "swing state" problem were all the states to adopt the system, but it doesn't go far enough enough for my taste.

Something that always has bothered me is that a vote cast in Alaska (one Congressional district, three electoral votes) counts roughly three times as much as a vote cast in California (fifty-three Congressional districts, fifty-five electoral votes.)  Well, that's not going to change.  It would require a Constitutional amendment, and the states that benefit from the current system would torpedo the change in short order.

Also, don't expect any Constitutional amendment limiting corporate contributions to election campaigns — the corporations are just too powerful, and our Constitution is just too hard to amend.  Even though women are a clear majority of our population, the Equal Rights Amendment failed, even with an extended period of time for ratification by the states.

I know that the Constitution of the United States has many admirers, and quite a few countries used it as a model for their own constitutions when they got around to writing them, but its popularity as a model has declined rapidly in recent decades.  New nations, today, are far more likely to use Canada's constitution as their model.

Maybe our Constitution is just too old.  It always was most useful to those determined to maintain distinctions of class and wealth – and despite hard-won changes over the past couple of centuries, it continues to favor entrenched interests.

So, is it time for a Constitutional Convention to re-write the whole thing?  I think not.  The entrenched interests would only use the opportunity to further entrench themselves.

(PS: You may have noticed I had absolutely nothing to say about the final day of the Democratic Convention.  What was there to say?  I am old enough to remember when political conventions actually selected candidates.  Conventions were exciting back then.  Now, they're pretty much a bore.)