Molly Ivins, I miss you and your sense of humor desperately. The world’s a poorer place without you.

So imagine my surprise when I was walking through Barnes and Noble last week and saw an Ivins book I had not already read at least three times. In the acknowledgements, DuBose writes:

This book was Molly’s project, the Bill of Rights her great love, writing her life’s mission. … From her hospital bed, in a voice so soft it was almost inaudible, she explained how we could best tell the story of Bush administration’s program to quash the First Amendment free-speech rights of American citizens who dared to criticize the president.

Ivins and DuBose also wrote Shrub and Bushwhacked. Bill of Wrongs closes their botanical trilogy. Thank God and Greyhound Bushies time in office is measureable in hours now, but Molly Ivins didn’t live to see it.

Ivins and DuBose review the Bush-Cheney assault on The Constitution in six easy pieces. The first chapter appropriately addresses the free speech aspects of the first amendment, telling the story of Jeff and Nicole Rank on July 4, 2004. President Bush was speaking in Charleston, WV, and Nicole (then a FEMA employee) obtained tickets to the President’s speech on the Capitol grounds. Once there, the Ranks removed their outer shirts, revealing tee shirts with the international NO symbol over the word Bush. The Ranks were arrested. Quelle surprise, non?

Chapter two discusses the so-called ‘free-speech zone’ behind the bus barn in beautiful Crawford, Texas. On May 3, 2003, Ken Zafiris and some friends car-pooled from Austin to Prairie Chapel Ranch. Well, they didn’t make it to Prairie Chapel Ranch, because the route leads through Crawford. In Crawford, they were charged with conducting a parade without a permit. It seems that Crawford passed an ordinance that requires anyone conducting a parade to obtain a permit from the Chief of Police. And the Chief decides what constitutes a parade. I lost of how many provisions in the Bill of Rights were violated by this practice, but Ivins and DuBose apparently had a tally sheet at hand.

The third story is that of blogger and independent video journalist Joshua Wolf of San Francisco. Wolf served over 200 days in Federal prison (minimum security, but prison is prison and there aren’t Club Feds any more, if there ever were.) Why was he in the slam? Because Kevin Ryan (the US Attorney for the Northern District of California trumped up a charge over a broken tail-light on a police cruiser. Wolf was filming a demonstration-cum-minor-riot, and refused to turn his recordings over to the US Attorney’s Office). California has a very strong reporter’s shield law, hence the trumped up federal charge.

The fourth tale is the sad case of the Dover, PA school board and its adventure with The Discovery Institute and Of Pandas and People. Even if you’ve followed the case closely (and I have) there are details here that you probably missed unless you live in Dover.

It’s time to get away from the First Amendment, and onto the Fourth. This is the story of Brandon Mayfield, the Portland attorney who was scooped up in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings. A suspect identification of a partial fingerprint was parlayed into not-so-sneaky searches and wiretaps under FISA and USA-PATRIOT. It also led to a months-long nightmare for Mayfield.

While we’re with USA-PATRIOT and its lovely provisions for National Security Letters that gag their recipient permanently, Ivins and DuBose take us to Connecticut and the case of the Connecticut Library Connection’s encounter with a NSL. Kafka could have written this tale, but when I read Kafka I never thought my homeland would take it as a handbook.

What’s stranger than Kafka? Doestoyevsky, maybe? Oh, say, Crime and Punishment? Ask Murat Kurnaz about his five years as a prisoner of the Bush-Cheney subrosa illegal imprisonment machine. Kurnaz story gets us out of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment and into The Constitution proper. Like all the other Guantanamo detainees, Kurnaz was denied the right to habeas corpus. Without habeas corpus, the other rights are completely imperiled. Without habeas corpus, any of us can be disappeared without recourse to the courts.

Finally, we return to Portland for one last gratuitous slap at the Fourth Amendment. Tom Nelson, an Oregon attorney, briefly defended Brandon Mayfield. But what got him in trouble with the NSA was his work with Al-Haramain of Oregon, an Islamic charity based in Saudi Arabia. Some people affiliated with Al-Haramain at its headquarters were declared "Special Designated Global Terrorists", and this designation made their calls passing through the United States eligible for warrantless wiretaps. Through an act of complete incompetence on the part of someone in the NSA and/or the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, a log and conversation transcript marked "Top Secret" was delivered to Al-Haramain’s U.S. counsel in Washington, D.C. as part of a discovery process. Because she received it, she assumed it was declassified and faxed copies to all interested parties. Unfortunately for Tom Nelson, he was one of the interested parties. Hilarity (only because it’s over now — Joan Rivers’ formula for comedy is tragedy plus time) ensues, as the FBI and other government agents and agencies behave more like The Keystone Kops meet The Three Stooges.

If you haven’t read Bill of Wrongs yet, get it. Read it. Keep it on your bookshelf. If you’re going to send Barack Obama a Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hannukah, or Inauguration gift, make it Bill of Wrongs. Our next President really needs to understand what a complete dog’s breakfast he’s dealing with. And as Mary Poppins told us forty-five years ago, a spoonful of sugar (in this case, Molly Ivins’ deathbed project) does help the medicine go down.