Yee-haw! Led by Scalia, Supreme Court overturns gun ban.

That sound of gunfire you hear isn't coming from Iraq, for a change. It's from right here in the U.S. of A., celebrating the Supreme Court's monumental decision overturning a D.C. handgun ban.

Used to peppering our backsides with buckshot, Dick Cheney's hunting partner, Justice Antonin Scalia, aimed his pistol at us and issued this opinion:

His actual opinion on behalf of the majority went like this:

Hey, somebody's knockin' at the door — Jimbo, throw me my pistol. I'll go see who it is.

Bulked-up right-hander grabs a bat to square off against crafty lefty

It's hard not to get pumped up about Wednesday's hearing on Capitol Hill about the baseball steroids scandal. Go ahead and hoot when California congressman Henry Waxman mispronounces the names of players, but the bespectacled little lefty will likely stand in strong against Roger Clemens's high hard ones.

Last week Clemens toured the grandstand — congressional offices — to glad-hand. Such brazen lobbying hasn't been seen since the last AIPAC national conference and schmoozefest.

Baseball's Mr. (Suspiciously) Big is still making his rounds, rubbing the bellies of various Congress members. Waxman, however, is not the kind to roll over to be petted into submission.

He injected himself into the steroids scandal three years ago, summoning pecs' bad boys in March 2005 for a round of what turned out to be Mark McGwire's most musclebound moment.

Tune in Wednesday when Clemens trudges up the Hill to throw out his first bitch, but while you're at it, see what else Waxman is up to. Go to the California congressman's site, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and you'll see that he's not shirking his other duties.

Remember the Iraq War?

Last Friday, Waxman subpoenaed documents on the colossal Baghdad embassy project. In case you've forgotten, this is what Waxman's panel uncovered last October:

Telegenic Waxman isn't, and that's too bad, because he's been the most consistent gadfly since the start of the Bush-Cheney regime's reign of error.

He's likely to get more press out of this steroids probe than from the more serious issues he's probed. So use this as an excuse to probe what else Waxman is probing.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Bush isn't checking his e-mails. Or maybe he is.

While George W. Bush has spent a record amount of time vacationing at his ranch, he hasn't been checking his e-mail. Or maybe his stooges did check it — in the sense of a hockey player checking an opponent by slamming him into the boards and destroying him — and thus prevented that flood of messages from ever seeing the light of day.

The numbers game for America's numbest president are eerie: A report released by watchdog congressman Henry Waxman — judging by his performance, Waxman works 24/7 — reveals that 473 days of White House e-mail are missing. At the same time, Bush is on pace to have spent 499 days on vacation during his two terms. Most of it has been spent hunkering down in his Crawford, Texas, bunker.

The Washington Post's Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson report this morning:

Now go back to Julie Mason's story in the August 9, 2007, Houston Post:

Mason's smart story notes Bush's record-breaking non-performance:

Do the math: Bush had taken 418 days of vacation in his first 6.7 years in office. That works out to 62.4 vacation days a year — a little more than 12 work weeks, which is probably slightly more vacation time than you get. On the other hand, think how much more damage Bush could have done if he hadn't taken so much vacation.

Anyway, multiply 62.4 days a year by eight and you get 499 total days of vacation.

Compare that with the 473 days of e-mail missing. All Bush's handlers have to do to keep pace is destroy 26 more days of e-mails. They can probably handle that.

The performance of Britain's new PM gives a hint of what the post-Bush era may be like.

George W. Bush's British manservant, Tony Blair, is someplace in the Middle East doing little more than meets-and-greets with Israelis and certain selected Palestinians. It's nothing more than Blair's trying to sweep the shards of broken Iraq under the rug — he helped break it, so he should try to clean it up.

"Manservant" is too distinguished an image. Much of the world will continue to see the bubbly Blair as the Bush regime's loyal little puppy. But now that Gordon Brown is the new British PM, we've entered an era of what John Feffer of the Institute for Policy Studies calls "post-poodle politics."

Brown (left, with Bush) is a different animal. He won't faithfully yip with joy around Bush. He's known to be sober and reserved, more of a St. Bernard than a feisty, cute terrier like Bush's pal Barney.

More importantly, Brown may be more like a St. Bernard, but he won't be coming to the Bush regime's rescue. The British PM is more likely to take several dumps on Bush's carpet.

The way Brown practices foreign policy — even what he's already done as he tries to extract his country from the Iraq debacle — gives us a preview of what a post-Bush regime could look like.

Unfortunately, one step Brown has already taken — halting the influence of his advisers on career civil servants — will probably never happen in U.S. presidential politics. As Ian Davis notes in Foreign Policy in Focus:

In Dick Cheney's Bush regime, a small coterie of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rove, and the like ran roughshod over more pragmatic types like generals Eric Shinseki (on the number of troops needed to "conquer" Iraq) and Tony Zinni (who believed that the road to peace led through Jerusalem instead of Baghdead).

Brown's more likely to rely on his military people in the field than has Blair, let alone the Bush regime. And that means a quicker exit by the Brits from Iraq. Davis says:

Blair's regime didn't seem to have much faith in its people on the ground. Back in 2005, Blair thought so much of his Foreign Office career diplomats that he immediately canned his ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, after Murray — a boil on Blair's butt — had the audacity to denounce Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov's torture tactics.

Don't expect to see any photos of Gordon Brown chatting about the "war on terror" with Cheney on the steps of 10 Downing Street, as Blair did in 2002 during the secret plotting of the Iraq invasion.

And as for Iran? No matter how much Cheney and his crew are itching to pull the trigger, this dog Brown won't hunt. As Davis says:

Finally, Brown won't be stirring up the populace to support the current war on Terra. More from Davis:

Which U.S. presidential candidate sounds the most like Gordon Brown? Well, it ain't Hillary Clinton, who's in thrall to the right-wing American-Israeli lobby. Is it Barack Obama? At least he talks about talking with our dastardly enemies. Like Brown, Obama has little experience in directing foreign policy.

For once, a newspaper editorial — a British one, in the July 30 Daily Mail — sums things up nicely when it comes to the shift from Blair to Brown:

By the time our presidential election rolls around, Brown will have been in office for about a year. His performance should at least give us an idea of what — and who — it may take to start undoing the damage of the Bush era.