Eugene Volokh discusses U.S. v. Arzberger a case in which a defendant charged with possession of child pornography when released on bail would previously have automatically lost his right to possess firearms simply by virtue of being accused of a federal crime.

The federal magistrate found that, D.C. v. Heller having recognized the existence of a Constitutionally-protected individual right, Due Process comes into play, and it becomes necessary for the Government to establish the existence of a public danger of such a defendant engaging in violent actions using firearms before his Right to Keep and Bear Arms may be infringed.

The US Constitution has begun returning from exile.

Green on the outside, pink on the inside.

Stephen Dinan reports at the Washington Times:

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International‘s Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International (motto: Progressive Politics For a Fairer World – DZ), an umbrella group for many of the world’s social democratic political parties such as Britain’s Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

Walter Olson dropped me an email two days mentioning this, and observing that the Obama team must be worried about how this is going to play in Dubuque since they got Socialist International to pull her name.

It was never really demonstrated that any crime had ever been committed by anyone, and Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald already knew that it was Richard Armitage who told Robert Novak about Valerie Plame when he indicted Lewis Libby on the basis of his account of conversations a few years back differing from those of his interlocutors.

Clarice Feldman, who did a superb job of covering the Plamegame scandal at American Thinker, calls on President Bush to pardon Lewis Libby before leaving office.

She’s right, and I think he will.

Everyone with blue eyes shares a common matrilineal ancestor who lived between 6000 and 10000 years ago.

LiveScience

This 9:07 video describes how Britain’s bans on handgun ownership and self defense have resulted in unprecedented, previously unimaginable levels of violent crime. The British policeman, formerly equipped with a nightstick, now carries a pistol and wears body armor.

Jack Bauer violating a prisoner’s human rights

The Telegraph reports that the American left has succeeded in breaking the famed secret agent who will appear on television this evening to confess his crimes and offer apologies.

US conservatives are up in arms that the election of President-Elect Barack Obama has led the show’s producers to pander to the liberal consensus in Hollywood, which they claim has led to the blacklisting of those who disagree with their anti-war views.

When the series returns for its seventh season on Sunday night, Bauer will mouth the views of Mr Obama, who has vowed to end “enhanced interrogation”, also known as torture, and close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

And in an apparent bid to get in tune with the new president, the new season opens with Bauer facing a congressional investigation probing his use of torture and summary executions in previous series. “It’s better that everything comes out in the open,” Bauer says, echoing Democrat demands for greater transparency over US counter-terrorist tactics.

“We’ve done so many things in the name of protecting this country, we’ve created two worlds. Ours and the people’s we’ve promised to protect. They deserve to hear the truth and decide how far they want to let us go.”

Keep a close watch on Bauer’s eyelids. He may be signaling with Morse code that he is being coerced.

Alex Wissner-Gross, Environmental Fellow at Harvard, according to the London Times, has estimated the greenhouse gas effect of one typical on-line activity.

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

Of course, you have to subscribe to a whole assortment of stupidities to believe that any of this matters.

Would you trade 10 friends for a hamburger?

Burger King is running a promotion called Whopper Sacrifice. The idea is that FaceBook members can receive a coupon good for one free Whopper for every ten persons they eliminate from their friendship list.

Hopefully our (former) friends will understand.

Eric Felton reports that European vermouth maker Noilly Prat has decided to quit making the special dry-formula vermouth favored by Americans for modest use in the ultimate cocktail, the Martini. Only a far-sweeter and heavier, soi disant “traditional” formula Noilly Prat will be available henceforward.

First Obama wins the election, then this!

Felten quotes the poet Hugo Williams: “What a strange coincidence it is that everything always changes for the worse during the course of a single lifetime.”

Canadian journalist Paul Watson received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of the naked body of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia.

What does someone like Watson do for a follow-up almost a decade and a half later? Why, he goes to Afghanistan to ride with the Taliban and record their boasts and praise their hospitality for the LA Times.

Centcom ought to have a special Hellfire missile-equipped drone following Watson. When he next goes off behind the lines to rub elbows with the enemy, its controller can just wait until the traditional pashtunwali hospitality and America-bashing is well underway, then deliver a brand new award of 18 lb (8 kg) of metal augmented explosive charge.

Don’t slap that PTSD sufferer, General. Give him the Purple Heart!

Michael A. Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at New America Foundation, thinks the Pentagon is just plain mean for refusing to award Post Traumatic Stress Disorder victims the Purple Heart, a military decoration given in the name of the president to members of the Armed Forces killed or wounded in combat.

The original form of the award, invented by George Washington during the Revolutionary War, stated: “Let it be known that he who wears the military order of the purple heart has given of his blood in the defense of his homeland and shall forever be revered by his fellow countrymen.”

Mr. Cohen rejects the Pentagon’s (and George Washington’s) criteria of shedding blood for one’s country. For him, internal emotional suffering is quite enough.

Simply because their wounds are not evident to the naked eye does not mean they are not real and debilitating. In many respects, those who suffer from PTSD never truly recover and suffer through all sorts of deep psychological trauma. And as for the notion that it’s difficult to diagnose; perhaps the people who made this decision should crack open the latest copy of the DSM.

One would hope that in the 21st century, with all we’ve learned about the debilitating nature of mental illnesses, that these sort of simple-minded and uninformed characterizations of “war injuries” would be restricted to the peanut gallery. But instead they are seemingly driving Pentagon decision-making.

This failure to recognize PTSD has real consequences. Not only will those who are suffering not receive the added — and much-needed — medical benefits that come to Purple Heart recipients, but the stigma around mental illness in the military is only perpetuated by this action. One can only imagine the chilling effect that this decision will have on soldiers already uncomfortable about facing mental illness.

In the characteristic manner of pundits on the left, Mr. Cohen indignantly asserts the unproven and unprovable as a matter of established fact, pointing to the opinion of his ideological confreres, i.e., the liberal compilers of the American Psychiatric Association’s highly controversial and notorious for changing with the winds of fashion Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as inarguably probative.

His unexpressed, even possibly unconscious, goal is really more egalitarianism. From the viewpoint of the left, concepts of individual responsibility and good character must be discredited and rejected. No one is really better than anyone else. Some are simply more privileged than others. It is the inferior, whose failures in war as in peace must be regarded as lying beyond his own control and treated as the basis for a claim against society, who must be championed and decorated.

In her recently published journals, Susan Sontag writes (1957, p.131):

One of the main strands in modern literature (and in modern politics – DZ) is diabolism — that is, self-conscious inversion of moral values. This is not nihilism, the denial of moral values, but their inversion: still rule-bound, only now a “morality of evil” instead of a “morality of good.”

Hat tip to Excitable Andrew.

Lifehacker reports that underestimated volume turned the Windows 7 Beta trial into another Mac advertisement.

You’d think that getting soundly beaten by Google and Yahoo over and over in the online space would mean that Microsoft would take the web a little more seriously. You’d be wrong.

Case in point: Today’s epic failure around the distribution of the Windows 7 public beta download. This morning Microsoft’s web servers fell to their knees under the pressure of constant web page refreshes by enthusiasts who want to volunteer their time to test Windows 7 after Steve Ballmer’s announcement the download would be available at noon today. (Since noon today, the download was there, then pulled, and back up again only if you know the direct links, and the promised product keys still aren’t available. There’s “no ETA” when they will be.)

Is it fantastic that Microsoft is offering this freebie preview? Yes. Is it shameful that they’d be so woefully unprepared for the demand it would draw? That also would be a YES.