From the News &Observer:

RALEIGH – L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he’d ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours’ delay, one of Eason’s employees hung the flags at half-staff.

Bravo. His email message to co-workers is also worth reading:

“This is in no way a political decision. I simply do not feel it is appropriate to honor a person whose epitaph of government service was to have voted against or blocked every civil rights issue that came before the US Congress. His doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice cost North Carolina and our Nation much that we may never regain.”

Excerpts from an e-mail message that Eason sent later that same day to Gov. Mike Easley and state Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler:

“I made a decision to refuse to lower our flags at the NC Standards Laboratory to half mast in honor of Jesse Helms as soon as I heard of his death. I cannot in good conscience honor such a man who fought so hard against Civil and Human Rights throughout his life. Even to his death bed, he refused to apologize for the damage he caused. Now, I stand by this decision. It is a personal decision, but obviously affects my job at the lab. It has been over ruled by Division and Departmental Management and as I look out my window, I’m ashamed to see the flags lowered.

North Carolina and the US cannot escape that, at the end of the day, Jesse Helms stood for evil. It made me angry to see local flags at half mast after his death, Senator or no. I’m glad at least one person was willing to stand up to that madness.

(Hat tip to Rob.)

Anti-civil-rights senator Jesse Helms has finally gone to his eternal reward. Good riddance.

Betty Bowers has a fine list of quotes from the late Senator.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This isn’t just what we believe. It’s what is TRUE. People have rights, period. Governments do not grant them; governments are created to secure them.

Somewhere along the way, this administration forgot — or abandoned — these ideals.

Annoyed at a perceived slight by some NYT reporters, Fox News ran photos of the men that had been edited to make them ugly — receding hairlines, yellow teeth, exaggerated features, etc. Click the link for Media Matters’ coverage, which includes side-by-side comparisons of the original photos and the Fox versions.

From Scalzi:

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Check out this post over at the Agitator, especially if you still think of the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government.

TPM:

The Bush Administration’s newest tactic for policymaking is to ignore emails.

The New York Times reports today that White House officials simply refused to open an email from the EPA last year because they knew it contained a policy recommendation they didn’t like — part of the Administration’s on-going battle with scientists at the EPA over global warming issues.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

These clowns can’t be out of office soon enough. The damage they’ve done to our country will take a generation to repair.

Vice President Chet? It could happen.

Rightwing fruitcake fundie James Dobson is upset that Obama knows the Bible is a poor choice for a governing document.

In comments aired on his radio show Tuesday, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson criticized the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for comments he made in a June 2006 speech to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal.

In the speech, Obama suggested that it would be impractical to govern based solely on the word of the Bible, noting that some passages suggest slavery is permissible and eating shellfish is disgraceful.

“Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?” Obama asked in the speech. “Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?

“So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bible now,” Obama said, to cheers. “Folks haven’t been reading their Bible.”

and

Dobson also takes aim at Obama for suggesting in the speech that those motivated by religion should attempt to appeal to broader segments of the population by not just framing their arguments around religious precepts.

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values,” Obama said. “It requires their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.”

Keep digging, Jimmy. Keep digging.

Someone at the Texas state GOP convention on Saturday was selling buttons saying “If Obama is President . . . will we still call it the White House?”

(Thanks, Triple-F.)

This is nice. Also, it means McCain’s lost Will.

WASHINGTON — The day after the Supreme Court ruled that detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo are entitled to seek habeas corpus hearings, John McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” Well.

Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?

And then:

McCain, co-author of the McCain-Feingold law that abridges the right of free political speech, has referred disparagingly to, as he puts it, “quote ‘First Amendment rights.'” Now he dismissively speaks of “so-called, quote ‘habeas corpus suits.'” He who wants to reassure constitutionalist conservatives that he understands the importance of limited government should be reminded why the habeas right has long been known as “the great writ of liberty.”

No state power is more fearsome than the power to imprison. Hence the habeas right has been at the heart of the centuries-long struggle to constrain governments, a struggle in which the greatest event was the writing of America’s Constitution, which limits Congress’ power to revoke habeas corpus to periods of rebellion or invasion. Is it, as McCain suggests, indefensible to conclude that Congress exceeded its authority when, with the Military Commissions Act (2006), it withdrew any federal court jurisdiction over the detainees’ habeas claims?

As the conservative and libertarian Cato Institute argued in its amicus brief in support of the petitioning detainees, habeas, in the context of U.S. constitutional law, “is a separation of powers principle” involving the judicial and executive branches. The latter cannot be the only judge of its own judgment.

In Marbury v. Madison (1803), which launched and validated judicial supervision of America’s democratic government, Chief Justice John Marshall asked: “To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?” Those are pertinent questions for McCain, who aspires to take the presidential oath to defend the Constitution.

The Rude Pundit on the decision:

…[I]f you think yesterday’s Supreme Court decision was a pile of shit, then you believe that the United States has the right to hold foreign nationals without allowing them to challenge their imprisonment in fair, open courts. You believe that a special court with special rules of evidence and special procedures is the only means through which a presidentially-designated “alien enemy combatant” held at a United States-run facility can even say, “Umm, do you have any proof I’m anything more than a fuckin’ goat herder who was wandering in the right field at the wrong time?” You believe that the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions (except in the narrowest possible interpretation) do not apply to prisoners held at Gitmo. And you’re absolutely hysterical, batshit insane over the idea that a human being held without ever being told why might get to ask.

That’s it. Every right-winger’s rant about “terra! terra! moooslims!! terra!” really boils down to wanting Big Daddy Gummit to be able to snatch anyone from anywhere and hold them for as long as they want, with no recourse for the victim. That’s 100% antithetical to everything our government is supposed to stand for (and let’s just set aside for a moment that the GOP is supposed to be the government-hostile, drown-it-in-a-bathtub party); the right of habeas corpus was enshrined as natural law hundreds of years before our noble experiment took off, and our own Constitution notes in no uncertain terms that the right cannot be revoked except under extraordinary circumstances.

It’s significant, by the way, that the Constitution phrases it that way: the right cannot be taken away by the state. It says nothing about the State granting us such rights because the rights are ours, period. The State is not the source of our rights and liberties. It’s an institution we the people have created to ensure the safety of those rights while entering into a social contract to provide other services impractical to handle absent a construct like the State. Unlike apologists for the current Administration, our founders did not view the Bill of Rights, or Habeas, as legal technicalities to be subverted to serve some short-term gain. They viewed them as the natural order of things, a codification of the rights of man endowed by the Creator, whomever you believe that may be, and as truths that should not and cannot be legitimately abrogated.

True patriots still understand this, and behave accordingly. Believing an imprisoned man ought to be able to challenge his captivity in a fair court doesn’t make us weak, and doesn’t give aid and comfort to the enemy. It just means we truly believe in the principles of liberty and equality. Doing otherwise means we don’t. To abandon that core belief is to hate what this country should stand for, and must stand for again.