If Bush can unilaterally nullify an Act of Congress with a signing statement, doesn't it follow that he cannot pardon a person held in contempt of Congress? After all, turnabout is fair play. If Congress can't interfere on his turf, he can't interfere on Congress's turf.

I took my 12-year old daughter to Al Gore's book signing in Chicago a few weeks ago. Gore was harried, as book signers usually are, but couldn't have been more gracious to me and her. The experience left her puffed up for a week.

Jessica should have decked him.

Anybody who cites the conclusion of a law review article in support of anything either knows nothing of the law or is a fool. Lawyers' core competency is the ability to make the best possible case for either side of a dispute, and law review articles reflect that tendency. For every law review article, there is an equal and opposite law review article.

Unlike ordinary academic subjects, law develops and grows in the real world -- by lawyers in court -- not in the academy or in the lab or in the journals. Law reviews' principal value is as training for the students on their staffs. To the extent that there is useful information in the articles, it's in the analysis. Nobody cares about the conclusion.

I've been thinking that the day the wheels came off the Straight Talk Express was the day after McCain said he'd been out strolling in Baghdad, when the extend of his bodyguard and body armor was revealed. It was no longer possible to deny that he's either a liar or severely delusional.

If there's no war, then the only shred of legitimacy attaching to the Bush-Cheney executive power grab is gone. How's he going to stonewall Henry Waxman without war powers to cite?

Therefore, whatever else happens, the war will continue until January 2009. Q.E.D.

THE ONE AND ONLY PRINCIPLE OF OUTSIDE EXPERTISE: Consultants' and other outside experts' stock in trade is a smoke screen of theory offered to justify whatever the client wants to do.

I'm getting tired of all this hand-wringing. Everybody, progressive bloggers included, knows that the name of the game is flexibility, not credibility. Stop whining!

The Very Serious People who talked up the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003, and who now deny that they ever did so, are being 100% consistent with the Expertise Principle. The winds have shifted, and their analyses have shifted with it. If anything, their willingness to deny what they said in the past makes them more marketable, because they are demonstrating their shamelessness -- that they're willing to say just about anything to pitch the client's line, irrespective of what they learned in school or what they said yesterday. Shamelessness is a physical trait every bit as pertinent in their line of work as height is in the NBA. So they show it off.

BJEdwards -- I was just going to post this very same fact! I went to high school with Clark Barr (class of '72) and knew his sister Candy slightly. Now if one of them chimes in here. . .

Like Felicia for a girl (say it over and over) and Ransom for a boy? Ransom? Are they hoping he'll be kidnapped?

And families can be cruel even with common names. My given name, Stuart, was bestowed on me as I was born shortly after my cousin, Stuart, died in infancy. And they never let me forget that fact.

I'll omit my usual rant about girls colonizing boys' names -- my ex-wife's nephew, now about 18, is constantly fighting the perception that his "Cameron" is a girl's name-- and incorporate it here by reference.

You're apparently not an Elton John fan. (Me neither, but you couldn't get away from this song thirty years ago.) "He named the baby Jesus/'Cause he liked the name."

But does his family want to spend more time with him?

The thing is, Glenn, that the idea that the United States can attack other nations at will has been in place at least since the Mexican War in the 1840s. I'm not saying it's morally right, just that Iraq and our current dilemma is really just a symptom of the Bushies' habit of pissing in the punchbowl. The government has always been run by tacit modii vivendi permitting those in charge to sidestep the law in various ways as long as it is done circumspectly and in small doses. The Bushies have ruined these gentlemen's agreements by spotlighting and overusing them, to bizarre and absurd and terrifying lengths, as elements of national policy.

And, just to brighten everybody's day, here's Tom Lehrer, 1965:

When someone makes a move

Of which we don't approve

Who is it that always intervenes?

UN and OAS

They have their place, I guess

But first -- SEND THE MARINES!

. . .

For might makes right

Until they've seen the light

They've got to be protected

All their rights respected

Until someone we like can be elected. . .

Even if pit bulls were naturally twice as vicious as their reputation suggests, it would still be the human owners' fault. People who train a good dog to be vicious are scumbags. People who provide a market for vicious breeds are scumbags, too -- were it not for them and their kind, a lot of the doomed pups would never have been born.

I doesn't matter how the dog got to be vicious. In either case there's a high likelihood of an injured or killed person and a dead dog.