Beaujolais! Today is a good day for FREEDOM and LIBERTY and EXPRESSION and MAKING JOHN ASHCROFT look like the giant dumb FUCK that he is. Because one small corner of liberty has been RECOVERED from the forces of evil and bastardoism. It's like THE HOBBIT OF THE RINGS, people, only with Feds instead of Klingons and George Bush instead of Dark Vader!

So here's the deal: as previously documented here in the pages of PDJ, back in the day, Mom and Dad America were freaking out about raves and deaths due to GHB and dumbness that were happening at raves. Not pausing to think that perhaps young and confused Biff and Suzy America would be going out doing something ELSE ridiculous to kill themselves, if they weren't going to the increasingly mainstream raves, like racing chicken with jetskis or strangling each other with clotheslines in weird fraternity hazing rituals, Mom and Dad figured it was the whole idea of a rave that was bad and they called Sally Jesse Raphael and Nightline and they goddamn wanted SOMETHING DONE. SOMETHING must always be DONE, right?

So, but, see, the US has these great things called CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED RIGHTS, among them freedom of expression and association. So it's not like the Storm Troopers can just go into any party anywhere and start bashing little candy heads left and right. They've got to have a pretext, so this is the one they found: federal agents started using this completely retarded idea that the clothes and stuff that ravers were wearing to raves was drug paraphernalia. After all, ravers are druggies, so if you're dressed like a raver, YOU ARE ON DRUGS. And if you are on drugs, the place you are is a DRUG HOUSE, which like QED, let the head-bashing begin.

The US court in New Orleans this week -- NO being one place that these dumb rules were injudiciously applied -- ruled that John Ashcroft is a big dumb shitrock and the Justice Department is decadent and depraved. Then, after wiping the flecks of spittle off their chins, they permanently barred the Feds from using the above-mentioned dumb arrest concept to feed little sugar-candy treats to ravenous jail bulls. Good for them! Good for the ACLU, who actually fought this dumb policy in court. Good for all of us!

However, it's something of a mixed victory. I mean, this policy should have NEVER gotten in place from step one. The current mechanism of checks and balances in America is that the Executive Branch institutes some ridiculous policy to score some public opinion points, and then thankless and exhausted volunteers and lawyers have to spend millions of man-hours to drag the damn idea through the courts until some judge finally says, "Crappo! This is totally RETARDED NAZI BULLSHIT! Get out of here!"

I mean, why is it that liberty-lovers are getting DOUBLE-TAXED? We have to pay for dumb Fed bruisers to be trained in evil liberty-crushing arts, AND for the government lawyers to defend those arts, and we ALSO have to pay the ACLU to fight these dumb policies just to protect our BASIC FREEDOMS. Wouldn't it be more FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE to just not have these dumb policies in the first place? Don't we ALL KNOW that they're not going to stand up to Constitutional scrutiny? Why do we have to go through this exercise? Just for public opinion points?

IN THE WAKE OF SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH (I love saying that), it's even more clear that our government has a policy of short-term Fascism and making the ACLU jump up and down in humorous little-person powerless fury. Sure, everyone KNOWS that the secret arrests, detention without habeas corpus, etc. etc. are going to get the Feds in big trouble at some point down the line, and it'll cost jillions and jillions of dollars and time and misery for the victims to even get to that point, but DOESN'T JOHN ASHCROFT LOOK THE TOP with his lists and his press conferences? Quelle MAN!

PERSONALLY, I think there should be some kind of ACLU within the US government. Some kind of RIGHTS PROTECTION AGENCY that reviews policies of, say, POLICE ORGANIZATIONS expecially, and says, "Hey, this is obviously never going to stand, and we're wasting taxpayer money and being BULLYING ASSHOLES just even thinking about this idea, so why don't we just put it away and cancel the press conference and pretend it never happened?"

Now that I think of it, shouldn't the ENTIRE GOVERNMENT be like that? Isn't every single person drawing a government paycheck SWORN TO DEFEND our rights from all enemies foreign and domesticated? HOW THE HELL are they getting away with this crap? WHY? How? FuX0r, now I'm pissed off all over again.

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zuul@pigdog.org