A good judge is hard to find.*

if you're looking for one, try Iowa. A guy here named David Wiggins makes his living as a supreme court justice. He keeps beating our primitives over their little statist heads, making the point that constitutions are written for reasons -- even that Fourth Amendment which makes life so inconvenient for cops.

Last week he let a drunk (but not very, .088) driver go because officers had only  a sorehead's anonymous tip to justify stopping him.

"To hold otherwise would cause legitimate concern because such tips would let the police stop persons on anonymous tips that might have been called in for vindictive or harassment purposes or based solely on a hunch or rumor." 

Thank you, Your Honor.

If you're interested in a a lucid explanation of some constitutional limits on a cop's authority to invade your privacy, the Wiggins opinion in the case (PDF) is worth a read.

This is the same guy who wrote another Fourth Amendment stunner saying that if police stop you for a piddly reason, they need to be damned careful about searching you in hopes of finding an unrelated offense. Wiggins warned them  to shape up or face the liklihood of being required to explicitly tell you, "No, you don't have to let me search you for pot just because your dog got off his leash." This is State vs. Pals.

One other reason to like this guy. He earned the hatred of Rick Santorum hard-shells in Iowa by ruling -- along with all six other justices -- that banning gay marriage violated the Iowa Constitution. Santorum's alter-ego in these parts, Bob Vander Platts, saw a fund-raising opportunity and led a successful drive to oust three of those justices.

Wiggins came up for retention one cycle later, and VDP went after him, too, but blew it. Many folks in the Vander Platts pews had become less excitable, allowing Wiggins to make his case that that the process of constitutional law was far more important than the outcome of any given issue. (As an aside, that was the same approach Bork took before an audience of excitable senators, and don't we wish he, also, had carried the day.)

I'm trying to phone His Ineptness to suggest he appoint our Justice Wiggins to oversee all FISA court cases. So far the call goes straight to presidential voice mail. I'm not really angry, though. According to the news he is up to his ears in trying to give Africa seven billion of our dollars so they can have electricity to charge their iPads, and isn't that just what we elected him to do?

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*You often get the other kind.

Justice Waterman dissented in this recent case, continuing his pattern of telling Officer Fife, "Whatever Barney Wants, Barney Gets."  (The Pals case again.) Unfortunately, he's a long way from his retention vote.










  

Freedom can be disgusting

Not to brag, but I have a strong stomach. That happens when a fellow has a life history of summer camp food, Navy chow, church basement cuisine, and his own cooking.

So I didn't heave yesterday morning when my electric teevee got its jollies showing Bruce and Reggie swapping spit on the Supreme Court steps because the justices said they could get married.

It was a close-run thing. Moist PDAs between or among anyone make me slightly uncomfortable. Civilized humanity invented doors and drapes for a reason, and I am personally attuned to the notion that the queerer the foreplay, the thicker the  curtains required.

Teevee producers disagree, of course, and there is that pesky First Amendment, so we're stuck with living-room sodomy, or preludes thereto. Fast work with the remote control is one palliative.

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The Court is to be congratulated for yesterday's slapdown of the DOMA and Proposition 8. It moderated political control over personal intimacies among free adult Americans. Liberty won, and the legal-political complex left me free to publish my annoyance  that freedom can lead to things I find somewhere between distasteful and repugnant.











,

Sorry I haven't spoken with you in a couple of days. The weekend was a bit on the social side, mostly with neighbors. We popped in on one another between thunderstorms and engaged in illuminating chit-chat about how nice it was to be between thunderstorms for a change.

Then there was yesterday when I decide to stay within eye shot of my electric television set and pay attention to the Zimmerman trial.  That didn't last long. I caught the prosecution f-bomb lede and the idiotic knock-knock defense  joke. Then I doped out the HLN channel approach to coverage -- two minutes of actual courtroom proceedings as fill between inane analysis by their ever-so-pretty analysts who specialize in  the segue-to-commercial field of legal journalism. I suppose I could have written something for this space after the nausea bout subsided, but the impulse to communicate was too weak.

This morning I decided to give The Vast Waste Land one more chance before test-firing a large weapon, center mass into the small, cheap flat panel. A gentle wave of fantasy stopped me. I became a news personality and, for a moment, loved it. Every one would have to pay attention to me, even the silken news chicks with their fresh leg waxes. And I would be lavishly paid; with the right agent I might even have negotiated a contract awarding me a bonus, say a brick of .22s for every segment in which I remembered not to pick my nose.

I slowly returned to the world-as-it-actually-is when the thought struck that if I were on teevee with Mika or Gretchen,  I would have to pretend that I really, really gave a good goddam about who won the Stanley Cup and how cute it was when everyone on Rush Street decided to celebrate by taking their Rolling Rock outside and fouling Rahm's sidewalks.

Britannia waives the rules

I'm for Women's Lib and equal pay for equal incompetence and all that. But, jayzuss, Ladies, do you leave us Chappies nothing of our grand Nelsonian tradition?

Out: "Here's to our wives and sweethearts."

In: "Here's to our families."

I suppose the jocular Mess Night addendum, "May they never meet," could still be appropriate, but by Jove, Man, it just doesn't sing.