Talk about a bunch of doggerel: six hundred billion dollars for “defense.”  They used to call it the War Department, before 1945; unless there was a war, they didn’t really have all that much to do.  But defense?  Ah.  Everyone’s against war, but nobody can be against defense, or you’re anti-American.

Well, the Senate just passed a big expenditure authorization which includes, among other things, assurances that no Guantanamo Bay inmates will be tried in American courts.

America is engaging in one of the most obvious and despicable acts of civil rights violation that has ever been perpetrated by our national government since the involuntary internment of over 110,000 Japanese Americans during the Second World War.  And nobody has the courage to demand an end to it.  So it is with the decline of an empire.