"When you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power"

larisa offers a very sobering perspective on just exactly where we stand today in the united states of america...

When the ABA found out about the signing statements, ... they called a meeting to review the legality and Constitutionality of the President's pretend-play at being fully the decider. After they found that most of the signing statements were in direct violation to the separation of powers, they issued a memo.

I wonder what would have happened if legal minds, practicing attorneys, and DOJ officials stood in peaceful protest to any number of extra-legal activities of this administration? It would be a wonder to behold. In Pakistan, that is what the attorneys did [protesting the removal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry by President Pervez Musharraf], still in their best court room apparel, when they were attacked by the police. The violence now is in reaction to the government violence and it will beget more violence - such is the cycle.

It would really be a something to see our legal scholars, practicing attorneys, DOJ officials standing together, and dressed for court and we the people watching from the national jury pool. Not even when habeas corpus was suspended and left up to the interpretation of the President (The Military Commissions Act) did our legal minds leave their offices to stand together on the sidewalks.

Perhaps the difference between the two countries is best summarized by a quote from one of my favorite writers,  Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

"You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power -- he's free again."

We have not yet lost enough it seems, but do we want to get to that point?  I don't. Do you?

i push this same theme so frequently that i sometimes just want to throw up my hands in frustration... the current criminal occupants of the white house have been amazingly successful in their ceaseless campaign to destroy the very things that the united states was founded on and, yes, the bush administration is under siege but not nearly to the degree that it SHOULD be and so richly DESERVES to be...

i spent friday evening and all day yesterday standing in front of a room of graduate students, all of them close to finishing their mba degrees... it was a good class, solid people, salt-of-the-earth people, smart people, and we not only learned a lot together, we discussed important topics, topics like dignity, equity and integrity... we also had a good time... moreover, during the long, 600-mile round trip drive, i enjoyed the stark, often dramatic scenery of the great basin... it was easy to slip into a sense of ease, a sense that all is as it should be, that the world continues to turn, and that the sunsets are always beautiful... and, yes, all of that is true... but...

how much better things could be if we could just get our country on the right track... think of the possibilities... i gazed out over the amazing beauty of the vast and empty high desert and speculated about how much better it would be if we could speed from place to place WITHOUT leaving a trail of hydrocarbons in our wake, how much better it would be if we had all of our needs met WITHOUT leaving mining scars scattered across the rugged, sage-covered ridges, how much better it would be to be able to travel our highways WITHOUT being part the endless parade of giant trucks ceaselessly shuttling largely unnecessary consumer items from coast to coast, how much better things would be if we could bring our necessities home WITHOUT seeing the plastic shopping bags we carried them home in pinned to tumbleweeds and barbed wire fences...

i know this much... as long as power and money-addicted people are running our country and the governments of virtually all of the other countries of the world, we are never going to get there... we simply HAVE to toss these bastards out... if we are ever going to get to where we all so desperately want to be, and, yes, NEED to be, they have to go...

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