First Amendment survivesFlag-burning amendment fails in Senate

How do you know when it's an election year? When some yahoo puts up a bill for a constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the American flag. Thankfully, that amendment failed yesterday in the Senate, likely laying it to rest until the next big election year (2008).

Now, don't get your blogstress wrong -- she is not a fan of flag-burning. She herself has never desecrated an American flag, or any other sort of flag, or any other sort of symbol, be it prefaced by the words national, religious or sex. Desecration of any sort, she thinks, is an act expressive of such hatred as to visit some mighty bad karma on the desecrator. And karma or not, who wants to live a life animated by a fuel so toxic as rage?

Rage is the fossil fuel of the emotional world; it emanates from a primitive origin, pollutes all who come in contact with it, and generally raises the temperature of a given environment to destructive ends. Your Webwench, though admittedly a hybrid, seeks to shift her energy balance in favor of such alternative fuels as jazz, chocolate and nookie. But enough about her. (As if there could ever possibly be enough about her.)

From Anne Kornblut, The New York Times offers a sidebar on the role of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in the flag-burning debate. You'll recall that Sen. Clinton has proposed criminalizing flag desecration, and yesterday offered a bill that would have done just that as an alternative to the Republicans' constitutional amendment proposal. The essential difference between the Clinton bill and the G.O.P. amendment is that the Clinton bill wouldn't mess with the U.S. Constitution, and could be shot down by the Supreme Court (though given the Court's current make-up, that seems unlikely).

Either way, your cybertrix doesn't buy triangulation as a strategy for the new millennium. She advises sincerity as an alternative to triangulation. One might call it "being on the square."