f you want to call me a bigot, fine.”—Senator Jesse Helms in 1993, after President Bill Clinton nominated a lesbian for assistant secretary for Housing and Urban Development.

Bigot.

eople are getting more on the bandwagon,” says Doug Green, an industry insider, about a possible and important new trend in American professional sports on which the New York Times reports this morning. 

Jim Alexander, a retired Coast Guard commander and also an industry insider, is less cautious than Mr. Green in declaring the arrival of this exciting new craze. “People go ape when they see it,” says Mr. Alexander. “It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling that takes over a whole stadium. If anyone in the stands opened their mouth and objected, there would be hell to pay.”

It is Frank Supovitz, the N.F.L.’s senior vice president for events, however, who really puts this vogue in perspective for the Times. “It is an American phenomenon, no doubt about it,” says Mr. Supovitz.

The trend? The use of giant American flags—as large as 75′ x 150′—at games. And the feeling that Mr. Alexander describes? Fascism.

*Apologies to David Foster Wallace. Poor Richard is in the middle of reading Infinite Jest, and cannot now resist referring to the 4th of July this way.

eople would not listen to what you were saying on the phone or on their doorstep because they thought he was Muslim,” says 19-year-old Emily Nordling, a Kentucky volunteer for Senator Barack Obama. Ms. Nordling told the New York Times’s Jodi Kantor yesterday that she has recently begun identifying herself, on her Facebook page at least, as Emily Hussein Nordling, in order to express her solidarity with the Democratic candidate for president. Ms. Kantor doesn’t comment on whether or not the people Ms. Nordling contacts in her capacity as a volunteer for Mr. Obama now believe that she is Muslim too—or simply a distant relation of Iraq’s former head of state—and thus doesn’t say whether or not Ms. Nordling is actually defeating her own purpose.

Whatever the case, Mr. Obama himself is happy that, according to Ms. Kantor, several of his youngest supporters have adopted his middle name as their own. “The theory [is], we’re all Hussein,” Mr. Obama has said. Not exactly, though. Last time we checked, Gwyneth Paltrow was African.

oor Richard’s New York City headquarters are split in half, with main offices located both in Queens and in Brooklyn. As of yesterday, our Kings County division has relocated to a more spacious, more southerly address, and while the cat isn’t pleased, we are.

It will take some days before we can resume the full-speed-ahead curmudgeonliness you’ve come to expect. As we unpack, we want you to know that your patience, like your readership, is appreciated.

“Hey, uh, we didn’t get our forty acres and a mule/ But we did get you, C.C.”—Parliament

In a 5-4 decision today the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of American citizens to own their own guns. The court’s decision was instantly and universally hailed as “landmark” by the corporate media—though the overtly conservative Washington Post went instead with “monumental“—and although, to our knowledge, no newspaper or cable channel has yet speculated on the matter, Poor Richard is certain that somewhere in the heavens Our Lord and Savior is also smiling.

But the majority opinion, authored by—who else?—Justice Antonin Scalia, actually set some pretty serious limits on the Second Amendment. Which amendment, Mr. Scalia, in his inimitably scolding tone, described as “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” Furthermore, Mr. Scalia said, “The court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Our immediate reaction at Poor Richard was to wonder what good our newly expanded Second Amendment rights were going to do us, anyway, seeing as how Mr. Scalia still won’t let us bring our sidearms into his office. Then we remembered that Mr. Scalia regularly accompanies his friend and fellow ace shot, Vice President Dick Cheney, on hunting excursions—if, that is, the shooting of animals raised privately for instantaneous in-the-line-of-fire/you-can’t-miss release can be called hunting.

It is anything but a coincidence that today’s decision was made apropos of a 1976 District of Columbia measure intended to outlaw guns, all but absolutely, within our nation’s capitol—a C.C., or Chocolate City, whose non-transient, non-white neighborhoods are among the most improverished and violence-plagued in the nation. No doubt, Mr. Scalia is pleased to have his rack at home legitimized. But he’s also crafty enough to know that the opinion he wrote will kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. The side of Mr. Scalia’s city that he and his cronies wouldn’t deign to visit—or is it dare?—can now be filled, legally, with that many more Saturday Night Specials. Thomas Malthus would have blushed.

he death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken,” writes Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a 5-4 majority opinion today striking down a Louisiana law that permits convicted child rapists to be murdered by the state. ”The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child.”

We aren’t convinced, as Poor Richard’s readers know, that the death penalty is ever a “proportional punishment” in a society that wishes to call itself just. But given that this Supreme Court has lately been pretty enthusiastic in preserving capital punishment, we are amazed that child molesters—who are widely known to be at the bottom of the food chain in the worst of our prisons—are among those they would like to except from the death penalty.

hy, asks a new report from MAPLight.org, did 94 Democrats in the House—a group that includes Speaker Nancy Pelosi—change their position last week? Specifically, why did these Democrats vote for a new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that would grant immunity to the telecommunications companies who helped the White House spy on us, even though on March 14 these same Democrats loudly voted against any such immunity?

Between January 2005 and March 2008, the 94 Democrats who performed a 180 last week received an average of $8,359 in campaign donations from the telecommunications industry, in comparison to their 116 colleagues who voted no and received an average of just $4,987. Put averages aside and look at the individuals who received the most money, and the numbers still look paltry: Ms. Pelosi, for example, the seventh-highest recipient of these funds, took in a mere $24,500 total. In other words, what is depressing is not that the votes of our elected officials may have been bought, but that they may have been bought so cheaply. No wonder Democrats have a reputation for not being able to handle money.

e’ve mentioned before that we’re not too keen here at Poor Richard on Senator Barack Obama’s avowed Christianity or his irritatingly preacher-derived oratory. Still, we do appreciate Mr. Obama’s pointed response to Focus on the Family head James Dobson’s comment that the Democratic candidate is “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter” with a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution.

“Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles,” Mr. Obama said, recommending that folks—say, Mr. Dobson—take a look again at the Sermon on the Mount, “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.” It is similarly doubtful that the Democratic Congress that continues to stand by this phony War on Terror would survive the application either. But then we suspect that Mr. Obama, if elected, won’t be recommending Jesus to his colleagues, or for that matter applying any ideas—Biblical or otherwise—that could be called radical.

alter is moving to a new abode this coming Saturday and is frighteningly behind in packing, so he may be posting sporadically this week. But we’ll do our best to point you to fun reads elsewhere, such as this piece by New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt, in which he admits that his newspaper’s star political columnist, Maureen Dowd, may have written, over the course of the current presidential campaign, some pretty stupid things. But Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the Gray Lady’s editorial page says “a thorough reading of Maureen’s work shows that she [expresses her opinions] without regard to gender, partisanship or ideology.” You know, because she’s a journalist and journalists are objective.

Those of our readers who skate will be duly unimpressed to hear that on Saturday afternoon I jumped a modest staircase on Atlantic Avenue (above) on my first attempt, said staircase only just barely qualifying as a three-stair. Or that later in the day I rode/double hopped a nice little bank to gap to curb to street combo underneath the Brooklyn Bridge and featured in Naughty (the highly recommended, psychedelic NYC street skating video). Or that this afternoon, I was successful in acid dropping off a picnic table on my second attempt, an obstacle that Eric Koston nollies up onto and then nose manuals across for his first trick in his Yeah Right! footie. Still, the haters be damned, it’s been just under a year since I picked up skating again at age 34, and it feels like a serious accomplishment, to me anyway, to be finally developing a respectable ollie.