Washington Half-Step Uptown Toodleloo

Entire forests have been pulped to provide the paper for all of the commentaries in the day and a half since the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, but when all is said and done this is what it comes down to:

Justice Antonin Scalia, who in vociferously opposing the majority in the Gitmo detainee decision two weeks ago wrote that it “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” has no such concern when it comes ignoring the literal meaning of the Constitution, let alone the well being of residents of violent inner city neighborhoods.

A few blocks from the Supreme Court, David Addington and John Yoo, the two key players in justifying the use of torture on those detainees and other guests in the Rumsfeld Gulag, cozied up to microphones and did a bad cop-good cop routine that would make Heinrich Himmler blush.

The graceless Yoo showed none of the fire he exhibited in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece justifying his infamous torture memos and copped a poor-pitiful-me attitude in trying to blow smoke up the asses of his questioners by asserting that he was merely a bit player — and a misunderstood one at that. Nobody, of course, believed him.

There is an emerging consensus in the wake of that Supreme Court ruling that Gitmo has to go, but where? John McCain proposes the Army prison at Ft. Leavenworth, but the base commander and Kansas’ two Republican U.S. senators are crying NIMBY.

Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV says the Disciplinary Barracks, as the prison is formally known, would require a major revamping if foreign prisoners were to be brought in. This presumably would not mean having to add running water, a requisite for waterboarding.

The Fourth Branch of the U.S. government is unhappy about President Bush’s conciliatory gestures toward North Korea.

Mr. Fourth Branch answered question after question during an off-the-record sit-down with foreign reporters, but when the subject of the newly de-listed member of the Axis of Evil came up, participants say he froze and stared unsmilingly at his questioner for several long seconds, harrumphed that he was not the one to announce the decision, declared he was done taking questions and left.

Who are those people?

With 75 percent of Americans blaming George Bush for a hydra-headed economic meltdown, including the worst June on Wall Street since the Great Depression, and nearly that many people disapproving of the president’s overall job performance, you have to wonder who the holdouts are.

Why affluent John McCain supporters, of course, while Barack Obama is making substantial inroads among Americans who are struggling to make ends meet.

In a grown-up but no less immature version of a brat sticking his fingers in his ears and humming loudly so he can’t hear bad news, the White House told the Environmental Protection Agency that it would not open an email containing a document concluding that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled. The EPA found that there would be $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 30-plus years if auto emissions were curtailed.

The email remains in cyber-limbo, but the EPA was back this week with a sufficiently watered-down version that offers no conclusion.

Washington is full of boobs, but we’re not talking about politicians here. It’s exposed women’s breasts and even men’s willies, and Robert Hunt is very unhappy over this rampant immodesty.

The Texas rancher was appalled to find so many statues and art work of naked women and men when he visited the nation’s capital and recently proposed that the Texas Republican Party adopt a resolution calling for this filth to be removed from what he termed “our sacred cities.”