The contention of the Defendent, Bennie Herring, is that his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were violated when he was arrested for an outstanding warrant against him (the warrant had been erroneously issued and withdrawn five months earlier.) In a search pursuant to the arrest, drugs were found on Herring’s person, and a gun (which he is not allowed to own due to an earlier felony conviction) was found in his truck.

The Court, in fact, does not dispute that Herring’s constitutional rights were violated. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts writes, “The parties here agree that the ensuing arrest is still a violation of the Fourth Amendment.” The Court disputes, he says, that the illegally-obtained evidence should be excluded from future prosecutions. The reason being that the Court has come to view the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule not as a means of protecting individual rights, but rather as a way of deterring law enforcement officials from abusing the Fourth Amendment. In this case, Roberts argues, the deterrent effect is minimal, since the violation was “a negligent failure to act, not a deliberate or tactical choice to act.” Therefore, “the benefit of suppressing the evidence would be marginal or nonexistent.”

While it may seem like a fine line, the Supreme Court has come to view the Fourth Amendment solely as a tool for promoting proper police procedure, rather than as a means of protecting individuals from wrongful police action. Since the benefit in this case would be to shield a defendant (whom Roberts has presumed to be guilty*) from prosecution based on ill-gotten evidence rather than to deter future police misconduct, the Court decided to allow the evidence in court.

To trigger the exclusionary rule, police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system. As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence. The error in this case does not rise to that level.

So if your constitutional rights are violated inadvertently, then the Supreme Court doesn’t want to hear about it. They don’t care about protecting individuals’ rights; they simply want to provide a deterrent to possible future deliberate violations. That’s what Bush is leaving us. Obama may be able to un-do most of the damage done through executive order, congress may be able to fix what was broken through legislation, but nobody can change the fact that Bush gave us a Supreme Court that cares very little about the rights of the individual.

*Regarding the Supreme Court’s rule of excluding evidence obtained by violating the Fourth Amendment, Roberts says, “The principal cost of applying the rule is, of course, letting guilty and possibly dangerous defendants go free.” In the eyes of the Court, once the police have evidence against you, you are guilty. The Court’s concern is not whether a search was illegal, but “whether a reasonably well trained officer would have known that the search was illegal.” After all, if the result of excluding evidence obtained through an illegal search is to protect a single individual’s constitutional rights, rather than to provide some grand deterrent to future law enforcement officers, it’s just not worth it. As Roberts says, it does not “pay its way.”

As an interesting side note with regard to the Court’s presumption of guilt, Roberts states “Herring was no stranger to law enforcement.” He does not elaborate as to why this was cause for Officer Anderson to perform a warrant search on the man. In the dissenting opinion, though, we get a few interesting details of the case’s background.

On a July afternoon in 2004, Herring came to the Coffee County Sheriff’s Department to retrieve his belongings from a vehicle impounded in the Department’s lot. [...] Investigator Mark Anderson, who was at the Department that day, knew Herring from prior interactions:Herring had told the district attorney, among others, of his suspicion that Anderson had been involved in the killing of a local teenager, and Anderson had pursued Herring to get him to drop the accusations.

Interesting.

(Sing to “Jingle Bells”)

Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell

Whitey has to pay;

Burning, shooting, oh what fun

On this made-up holiday!

Not surprisingly, that little gem is from none other than Ann Coulter. (Found via ‘Midst The Hum.) In her re-hashed column from 2001, Coulter calls Kwanzaa “a synthetic holiday.” She goes on to describe it as “some phony non-Christian holiday invented a few decades ago by an FBI stooge.”

Normally, I would have given this particular screed about as much attention as I give anything else Ann Coulter writes or says, which is to say none. However, the notion that Kwanzaa should be dismissed (or, more precisely, derided) on the basis of its being a “made-up” holiday irritated me.

To be sure, it’s not simply Ann Coulter who espouses this opinion. A broad spectrum of Christians have spoken out against this particular celebration. Some, such as Slate’s Melonyce McAfee, are blacks who at one point celebrated Kwanzaa with their family. It seems the indignant mob railing against this fake holiday are not joined by the color of their skin, but rather by the content of their hearts. Specifically, they are all Christians.

If Christians want to fight Kwanzaa because they perceive it as a threat to Christmas, I can certainly understand that. I mean, it would be horrible for a group to put their holiday at the same time as some other group’s major winter celebration for the purpose of subverting it and converting its followers. Sure, that’s exactly what the Christian church did, but that was a long time ago and we should all forget about that.

What bugs me about Coulter’s and McAfee’s and everyone else’s argument that Kwanzaa is a made-up holiday is this:

Every holiday that exists today, or that has ever existed, has been a made-up holiday.

The way that these people talk, a “real” holiday like Christmas exists on its own in nature, independent of the group that celebrates it. Maybe the people who have recently discovered a new species of monkeys in the Amazon could keep their eyes out for a previously unknown holiday lurking in the wild. We could use something to fill the gap between New Year’s Day and Memorial Day; perhaps the Mekong Delta holds a natural, genuine, not-made-up-by-humans holiday for us.

I’m being facetious, of course. The fact is that every holiday is an artificial construction. Christmas didn’t always exist, it was created by people. The same goes for Chanukah, Ramadan, Easter, the Fourth of July, Presidents Day, Martin Luther King Day and every other holiday.

But of course, the War on Kwanzaa isn’t about it being a “synthetic holiday.” It’s about Cristians’ persecution complex. To the paranoid followers of Jesus, the threat from Kwanzaa is just as real and just as insidious as the threat from secularists who want to see other groups represented in the decorations on public property, or the threat from evolution, or the threat from Muslims, or the threat from gays. The list goes on.

So as you take down the Christmas decorations and box them up for next year, dragging the tree out to the curb, take a moment to consider that not a single piece of this most popular holiday is original to Christians, and that the entire thing was invented (well ok, stolen from the pagans) by the church.

If you’re interested in the history of Christmas, you may want to check out one of these books:

After upgrading, I discovered that 512MB was nowhere near enough memory to run Vista. I upgraded to 2GB, which more-or-less fixed the sluggishness. However, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the display driver to stop crashing sporadically, or the track pad to track the cursor reliably. In the almost two years since installing Vista on my laptop, I’ve come to the conclusion that I will not install Vista on any of the machines at work if I can avoid it. I can’t see spending the time, money or resources to upgrade when there’s virtually no benefit to doing so. And it seems I’m not alone.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they are once again extending the life of Windows XP, which was set to retire last summer, originally. The outcry from consumers forced MS to rethink the plan. They had slated the end of January for XP’s retirement, but have now pushed it back to May 30 for system builders and July 31st for large OEMs like Dell and HP. According to Computerworld,

Earlier this year, Microsoft had loosened the XP rules to allow makers of low-cost notebooks, and later budget-priced desktops, to sell machines with Windows XP Home until June 30, 2010.

Microsoft has scheduled Vista’s successor, Windows 7, to be released on the third anniversary of Vista’s release, which would put it at the beginning of 2010. Since XP will be available on business machines until at least the summer of 2009, I expect that most (if not all) corporate PC buyers will do what they can to postpone any purchases until Windows 7 is available. Also, I’m sure that major OEMs will offer some sort of trade-up coupons to get people to buy Vista machines with the promise of a copy of Windows 7 to arrive later. Otherwise, the second half of ‘09 looks to be rather bleak for PC manufacturers.

It’s only right that Vista should be relegated to the technology trash heap before its time. Vista is a mediocre vision poorly executed. As Microsoft cut feature after feature in order to hit the release date (most notably WinFS, the allegedly revolutionary new file system,) Vista became little more than an overly-complicated muddying of XP. While I’m glad that Microsoft is acknowledging (if only unofficially) its error and pushing toward Windows 7, I think it would only be right for them to provide a free upgrade to everyone who was unfortunate enough to upgrade to Vista, or who bought a machine with it pre-installed. It’s their mess, they should clean it up.

All I know is that Microsoft had better deliver on Windows 7, because if it’s as kludgy as Vista, people will start moving to Macs in droves. And nobody wants that.

I think, you know, we talk about the Congress being critical. They had ample opportunity to deal with this issue and they failed. The president had no choice but to step in.

What he failed to mention was that it was members of his own party that have been blocking the bailout package, a fact that is not at all surprising, since the Republicans in the Senate have been little more than obstructionists ever since the Democrats took over in January of 2007.

The thing that he said that really bugged me was this:

I mean, the fact of the matter is that, especially given the kind of conflict we’re faced with today, we find ourselves in a situation where I believe you need strong executive leadership.

What we did in this administration is to exert that kind of authority. We did it in a manner that I believe and the lawyers that we looked to for advice believed was fully consistent with the Constitution and with the laws of the land.

Cheney has believed in a “strong executive” at least since the early 70s, when Nixon enjoyed arguably the broadest powers of any president. Ever since Congress started reigning in executive power following Watergate, Cheney has wanted to expand it. This was his reasoning when he stood against Congress (as a representative) during the Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan.

President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.

…

[Cheney] commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power.”

And of course, one has to keep in mind that when Cheney says they consulted lawyers regarding the constitutionality of their actions, he’s referring to people like Alberto Gonzalez, who has shown utter disdain for the law and especially for Congress, who he lied to and ignored a subpoena from, and John Yoo, who was the author of an infamous memo in which he justifies the administration’s authorization of torture.

Later, Wallace asked Cheney:

Was it worth it? Did the decisions that you helped set in place on interrogation, on detention, on - - on surveillance, did they, in fact, save lives that you would maintain would not have been saved under the old rules?

Cheney of course said yes. When asked to give an example, he replied:

Well, I guess I’d direct you to the intelligence agencies involved, but I know specifically of attacks that were thwarted. Think of the airliner attack that was planned out of Heathrow when they were going to hijack … six airliners and blow them up over American cities.

So to justify the admnistration’s sweeping abrogation of our civil liberties, and the almost unprecedented expansion of executive power, Cheney refers to an alleged plot that was foiled by British police working on a tip from Pakistan. A case in which,

On 8 September 2008 after more than 50 hours of deliberations, the jury did not find any of the defendants guilty of conspiring to target aircraft.

He predictably has no qualms over any of the actions they’ve taken or policies they’ve enacted. I get the feeling that he’s a real ends-justifies-the-means kind of guy. It’s no real secret anymore that Cheney has wanted for quite some time to change the office of president to one of near-imperial power. I wonder just how far he may have been willing to go in order to achieve his goal.

However, if I were of a conspiratorial mind, I might suspect that there were other forces at work. Over the past year or two, as oil prices climbed steadily upward, peaking somewhere around $146 a barrel, gasoline prices followed suit. At one point, a gallon of “the cheap stuff” topped $4.00. At that point, the “green revolution” got into full swing. Green was the new black. Everyone and their brother wanted compact fluorescent light bulbs, recycled shopping bags, and –most notably– a hybrid car. Suddenly, it seemed that every car company had plans for hybrid vehicles. Even the lumbering dinosaur known as GM developed a plug-in electric car. And that, of course, was the whole problem.

The producers of oil know one thing: how to make a lot of money. Exxon has had record profits several times over the past couple of years (by which I mean greater profits than any company has ever had, not just record for them.) They also know another thing: the electric car is their worst nightmare. Imagine, if you will, a nation of commuters humming along in cars that don’t require a drop of gasoline, that don’t take five quarts of oil every three months. Suddenly it’s not so hard to imagine the green revolution keeping a few oil executives up at night.

As the price of gasoline passed $4, demand went down. That was to be expected. In fact, according to the Energy Information Administration, (as reported by Reuters,)

U.S. oil demand is expected to grow only 1 million barrels per day, or 0.2 percent, over the next two decades, as higher vehicle fuel standards and increased use of renewable fuels stifle petroleum consumption.

According to a different Reuters article:

The weak U.S. economy will slash America’s oil demand this year by 1.1 million barrels per day.

[...]

For 2009, total U.S. oil demand was projected to drop by an additional 250,000 bpd.

So we can see that demand is down and thus understand the drop in the price of crude as well as what we in the US are paying at the pump. But that may not be the whole story. From the second Reuters article:

Global oil demand was expected to increase by only 100,000 bpd this year and remain virtually flat next year, the EIA said.

Between 2007 and 2009, oil consumption in non-industrialized countries, especially China, Latin America and the Middle East, was projected to rise by 2.3 million bpd, which will be offset by a 2.2 million bpd decline in demand in industrialized nations.

Global demand is holding steady. The amount of oil needed by the world is not decreasing. Yet, we’ve seen the price of crude plummet from a high over $140 per barrel to under $40 (as reported by Bloomberg.) Gas prices have dropped over 50% to under $2 per gallon.

The result of this drop in price is that people are using more gas. As people start to feel ok about buying more gas, their interest in alternative-fuel and hybrid vehicles declines. Stated simply:

When gas prices decline, consumers simply buy more trucks.

Trucks, of course, are huge money-makers for the auto industry. Back in May, Reuters reported:

April auto sales slump as truck sales plunge

U.S. auto sales fell to their lowest annual rate in more than 15 years in April as weak consumer confidence and rising gas prices hit the industry’s most profitable vehicles hardest.

[...]

Of equal concern to automakers, buyers defected from high-margin trucks and SUVs to cheaper and more fuel-efficient cars more rapidly than expected due to the high gas prices. The trend threatened to crimp profits due to reduced sales volume.

Toyota, which reported a fifth consecutive month of sales declines, experienced a sharp drop for SUVs and pickup trucks, like the FJ Cruiser and the Tundra, which more than offset gains for small cars like the Yaris and the Prius hybrid.

It’s possible, of course, that the recent drop in oil prices is merely the result of market forces acting to correct yet another bubble created by speculators. It could be that the mysterious yin-yang of supply and demand is working to restore order to our oil-driven world. That certainly seems plausible. However, after watching the documentary Who Killed The Electric Car, in which the auto industry and the oil industry (along with a few other suspects) worked to remove a viable electric car from the market, I’m not overly inclined to trust the official story.

I should have new analysis / opinions / whack-job conspiracies posted before long. Stay tuned!