Grace Notes, Ghost Notes, and Justice

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

In the midst of the hullabaloo around Lieberman et al, I’ve succeeded, so far, in not tearing my hair out although I am kind of sick to my stomach.

While driving my kid to School this morning, an hour early for Band Sectionals, I listened to her telling me some silly story about her Band chums that she found rather funny. In the telling of her tale, she found she had to explain to me (since I don’t read music or speak theory) the concept of Grace Notes. They are merely extra little notes thrown in for… no reason, just extra, you don’t have to play them, but you can if you want to… [according to my kid]. They’re there for the taking, and they embellish the tune. Not to be confused, apparently, with Ghost Notes.

Ghost notes, however, are not simply the unaccented notes in a pattern. The unaccented notes in such a pattern as a clave are considered to represent the mean level of emphasis–they are neither absolutely emphasized nor unemphasized. If one further deemphasizes one of these unaccented notes to the same or a similar extent to which the accented notes in the pattern are emphasized, then one has ‘ghosted’ that note. In a case in which a ghost note is deemphasized to the point of silence, that note then represents a rhythmic placeholder in much the same way as does a rest. This can be a very fine distinction, and the ability of an instrumentalist to differentiate between what is a ghost note and what is a rest is governed largely by the acoustic nature of the instrument.

There’s metaphor to be had here, I just know it! Give me a minute. heh.

It becomes more and more obvious, on a daily basis, that Justice and Rule of Law in our country has been ghost noted.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

~  Groucho Marx

And it’s being actively ghosted by The Man Himself. Fact.

See CCR Press Release, Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Suit Seeking Accountability for Guantanamo Torture:

December 14, 2009 – Today, the United States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo. The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By refusing to hear the case, the Court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

You can read more on this case if you want, head over to wonkland aka SCOTUSBLOG here.

digby gets in in a nutshell:

So torture is a forseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants. I guess it’s official.

Everyone in the world should be advised that if they don’t want to be tortured, they shouldn’t let themselves be suspected of being an enemy combatant. And if they foolishly allow themselves to be suspected enemy combatants, they should realize, regardless of any laws or treaties to the contrary, that they’ll be tortured. After all, nobody can be expected to know ahead of time which people are legally “persons” or which prisoners are allowed constitutional rights. It’s up to innocent people not to allow themselves to be caught in this Catch 22 in the first place. Good to know.

Slight topic adjustment.  Go to Chief GhostBuster Greenwald who has some interesting state secrets stuff at his blog.

He includes the requisite Obama Hating Truth graph, of course:

One last point:  when the Obama DOJ first began invoking the very same version of the “state secrets” privilege that infuriated progressives for years (as well as Obama himself), two defenses were typically offered by some Obama supporters:  (1) Obama was only doing this because he secretly hoped to lose and thus give us the gift of good precedent; and (2) this was the fault of hold-overs from the Bush DOJ, not Obama appointees.  Yet now, the Obama DOJ is aggressively seeking to have vacated one of the best judicial rulings ever that limits the state secrets privilege.  Moreover, its own internal guidelines now require the personal approval of Eric Holder before the “state secrets” privilege can be asserted in a judicial proceeding, meaning that Holder himself approves of the positions on this appeal.  That ought to conclusively prove how wrong those excuses were.  There’s simply no getting around the fact that — as TalkingPointsMemo thoroughly documented — the Obama DOJ is vigorously advocating the exact same “state secrets” privilege as the Bush DOJ created, and is doing so with the same result:  to shield the Executive Branch from judicial review when it breaks the law.

And the band played on.