Back In The USSR USA

Good trip, but also good to be home with the kitties, missed those little guys a lot! Trip uneventful save entering the USA was no fun at all. Compared to entering the UK or the Netherlands, reentry here was a bear, even for those of us with nothing to declare - the lines were way too long and the immigration folks seemed hostile & somewhat suspicious. It's done, however, and I'm back...

The tabloids in London were horrid, for a week it was all about the 'teddy bear teacher' - what a sensationalized load of rubbish! That ate up 4-5 days worth of the news cycle then it was the 'mysterious canoe guy'. Again, what a bunch of excrement! Not a peep as to how many people were killed in Iraq or how many US soldiers died or injured, no, that stuff one had to dig for. The US media is pretty sorry these days but I feel for those in London as theirs is worse. Yipes.

As usual there were way too many stories back home (and quite a few writers far better than I to explain them) but there was one in particular that got my attention - U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) did some digging into GW's use of executive orders and popped out a bombshell of a speech on December 7^th, unfortunately December 7^th was a Friday so of course his speech missed the media for the most part but Ms. Marcy (among others) nailed it pretty well - Sen. Whitehouse had a pretty good summary near the end with regards to GW's concept of what the law is and how it applies to GW as president of the United States of America:

In a nutshell, these three Bush administration legal propositions boil down to this:

1. “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.”

2. “I get to determine what my own powers are.”

3. “The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.

10 years ago the US was gripped with hundreds of special counsels investigating uncountable numbers of Clinton Chronicles Crimes including the 5^th or 6^th investigation of the Vince Foster suicide. Today we are investigating exactly 0.000% of GW's bushwa, can you believe it? And now we have GW & his bunch reinterpreting Marbury vs. Madison, a Supreme Court decision I thought was settled back in 1803. Assuming you know about GW's celebrated Unitary Executive philosophy, can anyone out there tell me it is any different from 1933's famous Führerprinzip? The claim to fame of the USA was always that we were a nation ruled by laws, not by men. What happened between 1945 and 2007, eh? Or more contentiously, who really won WWII or the Cold War?