Summer Repeats

These two stories have absolutely nothing in common save one thing. See if you can guess what it is.

Oh, wait, the title gave it away, didn't it?

Well, follow my wife's example and go through the motions anyway.....

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Freedom died in Hong Kong in 1997. That was the year, celebrated pretty much by the whole world, when the former British crown colony, free, capitalist, democratic, and everything else Red China is not, reverted to Mainland control. Now Hong Kongers are launching a series of ever-growing pro-democracy protests, and pretty much the whole world is ignoring them:

Pressure in Hong Kong for direct elections remains strong, newspapers said, after the annual democracy march drew a larger-than-expected turnout of at least 28,000. The fourth march marked the handover to China in 1997, under an agreement granting the territory Western-style freedoms. The marches began in 2003 after China tried to pass a national security law.

According to AsiaNews, ChiComm police tried to lowball the attendance figure, as well as drown out the democracy protests with state-staged festivities of their own.

Hmmm; growing pro-democracy protests in Red China that Beijing wants kept quiet. That sounds familiar, somehow....

There is one crucial difference: Seventeen years ago, the world may not have cared about Chinese democracy, but it was watching. If the level of media attention to Hong Kong's struggles for its lost liberty is any indication, the ChiComms could butcher the entire city and the rest of the world wouldn't even yawn.

It's a testament to the courage and doggedness of the people of Hong Kong that they protest anyway despite that recent grisly example. Pity the applause is all one-handed.

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Unlike my legendary stamina, the second story will pop shortly.

Congress is rolling with resolve to [*snort*] "overrule" the Supreme Court's Hamden decision via new Gitmo legislation:

The US Congress is ready to craft legislation to prosecute Guantanamo war-on-terror prisoners after the government's plan for military trials was rejected by the Supreme Court, top senators said.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told the Fox News Sunday television program that Congress could conceivably pass a new law allowing the government to try the prisoners by military commissions by September....

Democratic Senator Jack Reed told Fox News that the minority Democrats are likely to cooperate with Republicans and the White House to pass the legislation enabling detainee trials.

"This has to be a process where we understand and recognize that we have to have a legitimate procedure - legitimate in the eyes of the court, legitimate in the eyes of the American people, that we can move quickly to try these individuals and do justice," Reed said.

"And I think that's something that will come together in a bipartisan basis, I hope, in a deliberate and quick fashion, and do that."

Of course Democrats will cooperate with Republicans and the White House to legislate detainee military tribunals. Not because Crazy Nancy gave Senator Reed the vapors with her morally detestable and politically intemperate celebration of Hamden last week, but because they know that the effort is nothing but five-knuckle-shuffling. Why? Because Congress already "overruled" Olympus on detainee trials and concomitant SCOTUS jurisdiction with last December’s Detainee Treatment Act. And the SCOTUS just overturned that statute as well, flagrantly violating Congress' constitutional powers over it in the process. And judging by the reaction of the White House and Capitol Hill, the five Hamden justices carried out this blatant abuse of power with total impunity. So what reason is there to believe that any new legislation, no matter how clearly and unambiguously worded, won't meet precisely the same fate at the hands of the save damned five robed terror-symps? And with exactly the same result?

From Justice Scalia's acidic dissent:

On December 30, 2005, Congress enacted the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA). It unambiguously provides that, as of that date, "no court, justice, or judge" shall have jurisdiction to consider the habeas application of a Guantanamo Bay detainee. Notwithstanding this plain directive, the Court today concludes that, on what it calls the statute's most natural reading, every "court, justice, or judge" before whom such a habeas application was pending on December 30 has jurisdiction to hear, consider, and render judgment on it. This conclusion is patently erroneous. And even if it were not, the jurisdiction supposedly retained should, in an exercise of sound equitable discretion, not be exercised. [emphasis added]

"Patently erroneous" is Latin for, "totally, utterly, and completely full of shit." And until the elective Branches stop deferring to these secular mullahs, that shit will continue to run downhill, until all of America finally drowns in it.

[h/t: Cap'n's Quarters]