The World of Tim...

Happy Thanksgiving & Thank You!

I n the United States we are on the eve of yet another 4-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend. At some point, many of us will sit down with family and friends...maybe we'll be prompted to share what we are thankful for this year. I've given it some thought and while I've got so many things and people that I am thankful for; I have the highest gratitude for a very special group of people...

For those that are spending this weekend standing watch and putting themselves in harm's way; I am very thankful to you for delivering on a promise that our founding fathers made all those years ago...

"...that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Thank you for standing tall so that I can enjoy the life and blessings that I am so thankful for.

Bravo Zulu, Shipmates!

Earning Instant Citizenship...

Up to 8,000 non-citizens enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces every year and serve alongside American troops. As of May 2010, there were 16,966 non-citizens on active duty (The military does not allow illegal immigrants to enlist). Although born in Jamaica, 43 year old Rohan Coombs spent six years in his life serving in the Marine Corps; first in Japan and the Philippines, then in the Persian Gulf during the first war with Iraq.

If non-citizens die while serving, they are given citizenship and a military funeral. If they live and get in trouble with the law, as Coombs did, they can get caught in the net of a 1996 immigration law that greatly expanded the list of crimes for which non-citizens can be deported. Now he is locked up an immigration detention center and facing deportation from the country he had vowed to defend. Granted, most immigrants serve with distinction...Coombs was one who did not make the grade.

A Very Slippery Slope Indeed...

It has been an interesting week of developments in a First Amendment case that has been wandering through our court system. 

Larry Flynt, whose nasty taunting of Jerry Falwell a generation ago helped create broad free speech protections for defendants, may have offered the most useful perspective of all this week when asked to discuss the legal and moral implications of Snyder v. Phelps, the gut-wrenching military funeral protest case which came barreling before the Supreme Court for oral argument Wednesday morning.

What Fred Phelps and his followers of the Westboro Baptist Church do at military funerals is "despicable, distasteful, alarming" and "out of the pale," Flynt said Wednesday in a radio interview; before gently noting that Phelps should win anyway because Americans still "have to tolerate things we don't necessarily like so we can be free." That tension, between the legal right to loudly express hateful speech and the human right to silently grieve a loved one in peace, left the justices scrambling for a set of workable legal standards to answer what the Associated Press diplomatically called the "vexing question" of the Snyder case.