Last Post on politics - for today

Just a few hits here and I got to get back to the day job:

Hannity and Colmes shown to lying about Pelosi? Oohhh, so much for fair and balanced. (As if Ann Coulter could be fair and balanced about anything short of Mussolini). Are these guys really this dumb or is it something pushed on management who think us so dumb not to distinguish fantasy from reality?

Thanks to Professor Bainbridge who provides the link to this article on PoliBlog: On Congressional Supremacists, Democracy and Madison. The discussion starts with the current debate on Congress legislating the withholding of funds for Iraq and then gets even more interesting.

However, the post that Honza uses to prove my Congressional “supremacism” is one in which I critique the notion that a president (any president) ought to have the right to arrest and detain a US citizens sans any outside review of that action. To me that is, at best, an authoritarian exercise of power that we ought not allow in the United States. People arrested should be arrested as the result of a suspected breaking of a given law (i.e., under the aegis of existing legislation) and the charges should be adjudicated by a court. These are fundamental rights that all US citizens have. To concentrate all that power in the President is to afford the office with, by definition, tyrannical powers.

Quite few people do like that concentrating that power in the President (and I am referring to the office and not to the present idiot occupying the office): Vice President Cheney, John Yoo, and the usual neo-con suspects. Even a few commentators to this post. Quite scary. Mussolini got the trains running on time. That was efficiency. Now just how efficient do you want your government to be? Think about that when reading the comments to the PoliBlog post. A certain inefficiency may not be good for economics but it may be just perfect for liberty.

Advance Indiana posts on Eric Miller's finances which is picked up by Taking Down Words. This Eric Miller is a piece of work. Why does he remind me of D.C. Stephenson? Moral hypocrisy, lust for power, and greed? Yeah, that might just be it.

I noticed Bainbridge has a post titled "Is the Army Broken?." Short post linked to another another article but reading the comments just gets my head shaking. Some still tie Iraq to al-Quaeda.

Everybody have a good weekend and stay warm.