Monday night and Tuesday morning saw the Leonid meteor shower grace the skies primarily over the eastern part of North America, dazzling thousands while instilling the wonder of the cosmos into the hearts of many, proving once again that our universe is vast and chaotic, capable of massive destruction at the same time as profound beauty. Of course, none of this could be seen in Buffalo, since, as I'm sure residents of at least a year here have noticed, you don't see the sun, moon, stars - much less meteors - between the months of October and April.
I would be sighing along with the forlorn Buffalo stargazer as well right now if it weren't for some, shall we say, "troubling" news that made the New York Times on Monday.
Hang with me now, the plot picks up from here.
In May of this year a lower federal "U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review," or "Spy Court," as it will hereby be known, decided that John "der Fuhrer" Ashcroft's pet project, the Patriot Act, had some loopy clauses that violated certain well-known federal guidelines protecting against, among other things, illegal searches and seizures in the form of wiretaps. These guidelines are better known by precocious seventh graders as the United States Constitution, and specifically the Fourth Amendment.
As Himmler, um, I mean Ashcroft, steps on the Bill of Rights as if it were a shower mat, Spy Court stood in the way waving the American flag as if it were those airport wands, saying, "Don't land here big guy."
Victory, right?
Not so fast, the dark lord would not be so easily deterred. The case was appealed to a higher Spy Court, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review Appeals Court, or, as I like to call it, the Imperial Senate. This oligarchy of oppression is composed of federal judges, who are presidentially appointed and selected for this duty by Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist, or, as I shall call him, Don Quixote. Quixote's selections were three "semi-retired," as the Times put it, federal appeals court judges from different circuits around the country.
For the record, the Imperial Senate's members were originally appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan (does he even need a nickname?). It gets better - Chief Justice Quixote was not always Chief Justice; he was Associate Justice Quixote first, and was elevated to the same position as John Marshall and Earl Warren by, you guessed it, Josef Stalin ... I'm sorry, I meant Ronald Reagan.
Moving right along.
The Imperial Senate ruled, and this is according to the New York Times, that the Patriot Act's provisions on surveillance "certainly come close" to meeting marginal constitutional standards regarding searches and seizures.
Um, what?
Basically, Spy Court was overruled by logic tantamount to "Hey, he tried hard, let's pass him to the fourth grade anyway, even though he still eats the purple crayons."
Let us, for the sake of fun, define our terms, shall we? "Provisions of surveillance," means the way your government will spy on you. "Certainly come close" means they're pretty darn sure it's almost legal. "Marginal constitutional standards" - this one's my favorite - means the bare minimum interpretation that makes something precariously, not to mention dubiously, legal. "Searches and seizures," once again, how elected officials will spy on their constituents. All together the Imperial Senate asked us to buy the line that they're "Almost sorta sure that the way the federal government will violate constitutional rights is dangerously close to being legal as far as violations go."
Anyone for a Labatt and some Leafs tickets?
I wish the news got better from here, but I would be lying more than President George W. Bush when he told us that line about compassionate conservatism. Spy Court, in its initial decision, cited 75 surveillance violations committed by the last two presidential administrations. That's not exactly what one could excuse as an "oops." Seventy-five in 10 years works out to 7.5 every year, which is more than once every two months - this, ladies and gentlemen, is a trend that screams "run away, far, far away." Oh yeah, the Imperial Senate thought it wise to overturn Spy Court knowing this information.
The enemies now are Osama, Saddam and Kim Jong Il, no question. But the enemies of tomorrow and next year are sitting on their white thrones in our nation's capital, safe from snipers, safe from ridicule, and in Republicans' case, safe from the electorate, as we saw Nov. 5.
The last time there was a revolution in America, it was fought by the pens of the educated and by the muskets of the young. They overthrew a regime that was attempting to be omnipresent and omnipotent. This regime passed edicts like the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax to fund its own imperialism, at the expense of those paying. Fast forward the tape a little, and we have Don Quixote ordering the Imperial Senate, who is doing the work of Stalin in the name of a Nazi acting for the sake of a king named George.
There was a meteor shower this week, but I'm willing to bet that not all of those bright lights were rocks falling from the sky; in fact, if I squint at one of those pictures just right, it looks a little like a telephoto lens. But hey, it was cloudy here, so what am I worried about?
