Pubdate: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 Source: Daily Iowan, The (IA Edu) Copyright: 2007 The Daily Iowan Contact: http://www.dailyiowan.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/937 Author: Beau Elliot Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Bong+Hits+4+Jesus (Bong Hits 4 Jesus) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?225 (Students - United States) WICKED WACKY In this wonderfully wacky corner of the universe called America, the hits just keep on coming, don't they. No wonder (there's that word again) we're so black-and-blue. Take the Supreme Court. The good justices (five of them, anyway - the usual suspects) recently decided that the Constitution's freedom of speech does not cover a high-school student unfurling a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" (on a public sidewalk, not on school grounds). On the other hand, the same five usual-suspect justices ruled that the campaign-finance law attempting to regulate corporate and labor-union campaign donations (among others) infringes on their freedom of speech. Now, like any good American, I'm in favor of freedom of speech. I mean, of course I'm in favor of freedom of speech - I write for a newspaper, and freedom of speech is what keeps us in business. Well, that and the ad revenue. So it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that corporations' and labor unions' freedom of speech ought to be regulated, because once you regulate freedom of speech, it's no longer freedom of speech. That being said, it does seem a bit curious to me (if not wacky) that those five justices would rush to protect freedom of speech for corporations and labor unions but deny it for a high-school student. Wonderfully wacky. Or wackily wonderful. Of course, in the universe of wackiness, everyone runs a distant second to the vice president. Vice president in name only, apparently. If you've been paying attention, you'll know that it turns out that the Stealth President Cheney is apparently not actually in the federal government. Whew, what a relief. For six years, I thought he was the government. Well, OK, what the Stealth President is actually contending is that his office is not an entity of the executive branch. Yeah, I know - those of us who took junior-high civics are looking to the heavens (or the sheltering sky, if you're an atheist) with an incredulous expression and going, What? You know what? I don't think the Stealth President is even on this planet. I think he's in a secure, undisclosed location in the Mars Rover. Talk about getting beyond the long arm of subpoenas. Maybe he'll find Saddam's long-elusive (how many places can they possibly find to hide, anyway?) WMD up there. The Stealth President's office is taking this bizarre position because of a dispute with the National Archives agency over the keeping of classified documents. Cheney is arguing that his office is not covered by the rules of that agency, the Information Security Oversight Office, because his office is not part of the executive branch. So, under this thinking - if that's not a gross misuse of the word - his office does not need to file the required security reports to the oversight office. Even the Supreme Court can't touch this wackiness (well, maybe in 2000). I mean, Cheney seems to have had no problem invoking executive privilege in keeping the names of the people on his energy panel secret. What's more than a little bizarre is that the Stealth President's office filed the required reports about classification and declassification of secrets in 2001 and 2002 but stopped filing them in 2003 and subsequently. So it would appear that the Stealth President believed he was part of the executive branch in the first two years of the administration, but in 2003, he was suddenly reborn as a non-executive-brancher. Huh? What happened in 2003 to cause such a sea change? you might well ask. Ah - in 2003, CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was leaked. And that leak seems, at least in part, to have come from the Stealth President's office. Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was once famously facing a prison term for his role in the scandal, until wackiness stepped in. Now, far be it for me to suggest there's some connection between the Stealth President trying to remove himself from oversight from the secrets agency because of the Plame affair - it might just be coincidence that both occurred in 2003 and both center on his office, wherever that might be now. But as my father, a man far wiser than me, once told me, When you see a coincidence in politics, there's probably no coincidence. It's a wacky, wacky world. Even if so much of it is a secret. - ----------------------------------------------------------- Beau Elliot doesn't really believe the Stealth President is on Mars. A black hole is more his style. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake