Hey, kids! Did you know it’s Constitution Day? That’s right: It’s the one day we set aside to celebrate the adoption of the Constitution of the United States as the governing document for the 13 formerly disparate colonies that eventually became the good, old U.S.A.

From what we hear, constitutional literacy is on the decline, and not just among people we elected to office. (Actual law adopted in violation of the Constitution: It is illegal in Clark County to stand and watch an illegal street race. True story!)

So we encourage all of our readers to visit the Constitution Center’s website (linked above) and find out more about the amazing document (and its amendments) that has created one of the greatest, most free societies on Earth. One good result of this might be the possibility that citizens can stand up when scoundrels, demagogues and charlatans tell us that we have to give up some of our freedoms for liberty, or simply ignore the principles that must guide this nation when they get a little inconvenient.

Just in the last few years, consider the assaults on the Constitution: The Bush administration has been spying on Americans’ overseas phone calls and e-mails, without warrants, provided they think you’re talking to a terrorist. The Patriot Act has allowed FBI agents to illegally enter your house, search your stuff and even put a monitoring device on your computer, again without warrants. (Significant abuses, to no one’s surprise, have been discovered, with related National Security Letters, which allow the FBI to seize personal records without a warrant.) At least one election — in 2000 — was decided by extra-constitutional means. Treaties signed and executed in accordance with the Constitution have been ignored and violated. Private property has been seized and handed over to developers. A high school kid pulling a stupid prank has had his rights to free speech curtailed.

Here in Las Vegas, courts have allowed casinos to ridiculously claim they can control the public-forum sidewalks in front of their properties. Street preachers, handbillers, petition circulators and protesters have been deprived of their rights to free speech, under laws passed by local governments. And the separation-of-powers concept enshrined in the state and U.S. Constitution has been flaunted.

Worst of all, most of these abuses have been perpetrated by those who have sworn an oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

So check out the Constitution Center, and give the old girl a good read. It takes the animation of the citizens to breathe life into our founding document. Otherwise, it’s just a piece of extraordinarily well-cared-for paper in the National Archives building.

» Speaking of the Constitution, a sure-to-be-interesting lecture is planned for 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Barrick Museum Auditorium on the UNLV campus. University of Texas Professor Sanford Levinson will lecture on the topic of whether the Constitution adopted 220 years ago is still fit to govern a country that’s moved into the Information Age. Should we convene a new constitutional convention? The lecture is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the William S. Boyd School of Law and the College of Liberal Arts. Don’t miss it.

» Still speaking of the Constitution, the Las Vegas Sun published a story wondering about the chances of impeaching President George W. Bush. It’s not likely to happen, especially with the opposition of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Ironically, if Bush were impeached along with Vice President Dick Cheney, Pelosi would become the 44th president of the United States!) But just because the Democrats don’t think they have the votes to do it — and are worried about being punished at the polls if they did do it — doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. In fact, it doesn’t even mean Reid and Pelosi think it’s a bad idea! You can never really tell what those people are thinking.

The Sun went a little further in its coverage, too, asking a constitutional lawyer to actually draft the articles of impeachment. Hell, all somebody in Congress has to do now is cut and paste! Any takers?

» Still speaking of the Constitution, somebody who was mostly illiterate in what it says left high office Friday. Although he served as a judge and as the highest law-enforcement officer in the land, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales once said torture is OK under U.S. law and treaties (it isn’t) and that habeus corpus isn’t an individual right (it is).

But we’re finally safe, since he quit on Friday after he got caught fibbing to Congress in various pieces of testimony about various unsavory things he’d done while in office.

"Over the past 2-1/2 years, I have seen tyranny, dishonesty, corruption, and depravity of types I never thought possible. I’ve seen things I didn’t know man was capable of," he said in his farewell speech.

And that was just in the administration! Bam!

» And still speaking of the Constitution, one of the things the document requires the Senate to do is give advice and consent to the president on nominations to certain federal offices. And we think the Senate is going to have a somewhat harder time doing that for one Henrietta Holsman Fore, a former Las Vegas businesswoman who rose to head the U.S. Mint and become undersecretary of management at the U.S. State Department.

Fore has been nominated to become director of foreign assistance at State, but the nomination has been delayed because she had a role in the huge backlog of passports created when the U.S. government began requiring them for travel to Mexico, the Caribbean and other destinations.

But that’s nothing compared to this paragraph from an October Vanity Fair story about Bush’s bunker-like mentality (and actual bunker): "Or Henrietta Holsman Fore, nominated by Bush to replace Randall Tobias, deputy secretary of state for foreign assistance, after Tobias was forced to resign in an escort scandal? It turned out that Fore once told a college audience that she tried to retain black employees when she was president of a small wire-products company near Los Angeles, but that they preferred selling drugs; that Hispanics were lazy; and that Asians, while productive, favored professional or management jobs. (Her nomination is pending in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.)"

Ouch, baby. Very ouch.