Miss Cleo was on the 1942 Supreme Court!

(Hat tip to Powerline)

According to U.S. District Judge Henry Floyd, his decision to mandate that "dirty bomb" conspirator Jose Padilla be charged or released from custody ignored nearly identical precedent from World War II... read on...

(from Michael Billock Washington Times Op-Ed)

...the court completely ignored Supreme Court precedent. During World War II, U.S. citizen Herbert Haupt was captured while trying to blow up bridges, railroads and manufacturing plants for Nazi Germany. The Supreme Court held in its "Ex parte Quirin" decision that Haupt could be tried by military tribunal, and he was subsequently executed. Haupt and Padilla were both United States citizens; both planned acts of destruction on behalf of an enemy of the United States; and both were captured on U.S. soil, oddly enough, in Chicago. Yet the court practically dismissed Quirin out of hand, even stating that "Quirin involved a war that had a definite ending date. The present war on terrorism does not."

Enter Encyclopedia Brown. The boy detective creation of Donald Sobol, Brown could solve any mystery over dinner and before dessert. He once examined a sword that was supposedly inscribed and presented "at the First Battle of Bull Run" in 1861 and immediately classified it a hoax. How so? In 1861, there hadn't yet been a Second Battle of Bull Run, so nobody could know the 1861 battle was the "first," and not simply the only, battle.

So, a question for the judiciary: How did the Supreme Court know in 1942, the year Quirin was decided, that World War II would have "a definite ending date" in 1945?

The Ice Palace Opines:

Can anyone believe the absolute incompetence, if not outright insanity that passes for people on the bench nowadays? And how those on the left will continue to block competent judicial candidates? There is, however, good reason for the desire for judicial incompetence among the left, dear readers... Mediocrity and incompetence are required by the left to have a ready field of "useful idiots" to do their bidding. Pure and simple. With judicial activism being their only resort much of the time to push their agenda, the left cannot much afford to be bothered with judicial competence.