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Mickey at 3 Old Men ruminates on the number of basic elements of the Constitution that seem to be under question recently. Why are we suddenly interested in altering the basic framework of our government?

In line with that, Kevin Drum notes the reluctance of our political leaders to act in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution and obtain declarations of war when it is necessary to use the military for extended periods. The Congress did not actually authorize the Iraq War if you read the bill that was passed, but it refused to hold the President to the limitations contained in the bill.

This leads back to my discussion on habeas corpus: if no war has been declared, where is the basis for suspending the writ?

Djhlights at Exit Stage Left talks about the example of Lincoln suspending the writ during the Civil War, which was the basis for ex parte Milligan. Even though Lincoln was dealing with a rebellion as required by the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that he overstepped the bounds in the case of Milligan.

How difficult is “innocent until proven guilty”? It makes no difference what you call the individual in detention, they have a right to due process, so long as it is available.

The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that those in current control of the government of the United States do not believe in the rule of law.

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First I would like to thank Mustang Bobby and Steve Bates for their valiant attempts to quell the spreading virus of skippy’s deplorable Google bomb for terrorist sympathizer. I commend them for their attempts to raise the tenor of the conversation.

I suspected that George would join the “terrorist sympathizer” bandwagon as he was the originator of the infamous Miserable Failure effort.

Unfortunately Maru and Upyernoz feel that terrorist sympathizer is a justified label and come down with skippy.

More distressingly, Phinky at Ignorant Hussy not only supports the terrorist sympathizer meme, but thinks that a certain odious media conglomerate headed by a noisome Australian cane toad should be identified as an evil empire. While I don’t disagree that many of its subsidiaries do seem to lack any commitment to reality or the concept of the truth, referring to this global spider’s web of disinformation as an evil empire is not very polite. Consider for a moment, these people may not be evil, they could just be incredibly ignorant or, possibly, confused by physician prescribed medication.

If we continue with things like the terrorist sympathizer and evil empire campaigns, people will think that we are totally fed up with being abused by group of ignorant, disingenuous twits and fighting back. This might cause Senator “Blanche” Frist to have another attack of the vapors and feel really poorly, although, probably not a poorly as the young lady he jilted two weeks before a planned wedding.

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There are going to be a lot of embarrassed people around blogtopia™ ^{[skippy the bush kangaroo]}, about their complaints regarding the Shrubbery’s Veterans Day speech.

Via Jillian, the doyenne of dough, at skippy the bush kangaroo, if we thought it was such a terrible speech, why didn’t we complain about it when he gave it at the National Endowment for Democracy on October 6^th, 2005.

Well, now we know that he needs more than a month to learn a new speech. It’s possible that he wore the same suit to both events and it’s the speech that was in the pocket.

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There was a discussion about something the Postal Service did after hurricane Ivan at the Pensacola Beach Blog. They mentioned that the trash baskets had been removed at the Beach post office because people were filling them discarded “junk mail”.

That struck a cord because I had been in my local post office last week and noticed all of the trash cans were missing from the lobby.

So we are wondering if this is a local thing, or the Postal Service has removed the refuse containers to force you to take the bulk mail with you.

If you go the post office, leave a comment about your local area and the presence or absence of litter baskets.

Thanks.

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