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.

Or, at least, he’s upset that he won’t have the right to detain you forever on his say-so. Make no mistake about this: McCain will be a continuation of Bush’s regime in every way that matters.

This Word segment from the Colbert Report is absolutely spot on in re: Southern Confederate Battle-Flag fetishism. Watch.

Douglas Kmiec, an otherwise Republican law prof at Pepperdine has been denied communion by his priest because he expressed an endorsement for the pro-choice Barack Obama rather than the (presumably) pro-life McCain. Kmiec remains pro-life; he’s just done the math this time around and believes that on the whole, Obama is the better candidate for our country in spite of his disagreement on the subject of abortion. In other words, like most voters, he knows he can’t get everything he wants, and he’s happier with the set of values promoted by the Democrat this time around.

And for that, his priest and church are punishing him. They are of course free to do so, since the church is a private entity, but it is very, very difficult to see how this should not result in an immediate re-examination of this diocese’s 501(c)(3) status. Churches pay no taxes on their income, but to keep it that way they must stay out of politics; from IRS.gov:

Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one “which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

And more from here, also at IRS.gov:

…[V]oter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that (a) would favor one candidate over another; (b) oppose a candidate in some manner; or (c) have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates, will constitute prohibited participation or intervention.

Let them, and any church, behave any way they want — but they shouldn’t get a free ride if they decide to ignore the rules under which they operate.