Imperial presidency

Look at the list of stories in the nation & politics section of the Wed. Washington Post. Collectively, they show the expanding powers of the presidency: a man held without trial or lawyer for 8 months, treaties abandoned without Congress being consulted, and the decision to stop telling Congress, which I thought was given the power of the purse by the Constitution, anything about Star Wars expenditures, and an attempt to censor a book, in which the theory is argued in court that the executive’s decision to classify information is unreviewable by courts. Chimp Boy thinks he’s king.

Favorite moment of the farce that is the loya jirga: today, Karzai declared himself elected president by the body, and then had to admit that there hadn’t actually been a vote yet. The US has put god knows what sort of pressure on every rival candidate to drop out, so the election will actually be between Karzai and a woman. I don’t honestly know why we’re even pretending, since even less legitimacy could be granted by this body than by Zimbabwe’s last elections. Colin Powell denied that the US had exerted “undue influence,” but didn’t define what influence he considered to be due the US.

A detail I missed in yesterday’s email: the “treatment” program for sex offenders not only required its unwilling participants to confess to crimes for which they had not been taught, but then polygraphed them.

The European Parliament has voted to ban the import (phased in over ten years) of cosmetics which have been tested on animals. Such testing is illegal in most EU countries, but required in the US. We’ll see if the US dares start a trade war over this.