Schöne Grüße aus Lippstadt!

At some point Tuesday night past, the distinguished members of the U.S. Senate managed to put an * on the Bill of Rights and should you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Constitution to see what that bugger means, we'll put your ass in jail as a terrorist and let you out when we damn well feel like it.

Welcome to the New Age America. Or is that New Age, America? No matter. Here's what has happened, most of which you know but the details get drowned out by Kim's divorce and who's ahead on The X Factor. If news takes more than a minute to read, listen to or watch, we won't and we don't. Anyway, while you were out....

The legislative and executive branches of the federal government refuse to play together which is at the root of why we're so dysfunctional, fiscally, philosophically, ethically and morally but wait, there's more. The Federal Government's fiscal year should have started 1 October, and it did, but there's no federal budget, just stop gap funding (that's what all that Super Committee hullabaloo was all about) especially for the big ticket departments like the Department of Defense.

This time of year, people of all faiths are familiar with Christmas Trees. In our nation's capital, that's the term when you take one piece of legislation, let's say NASA's budget, and add to it a rider making this National Peach Month, and another mandating the use of the imported air in balloon animal creation stations and perhaps one granting pony rides to those with birthdays. A little something for everyone under the motto of 'you get along by going along.'

Right now, the pinata, so to speak, is the Department of Defense funding authorization bill and lots of different sticks are needed to whack it. But it's not a clean bill-there's all kinds of stuff (nothing about peaches or pony rides but much many in between) but read this, and you'll see immediately where my concern is and why. I'll wait right here unless or until I get arrested.

Allow a former nearly altar boy to give you a quick lesson in Latin, habeus corpus. The most fundamental of a right each of us has under the Bill of Rights that, without putting too fine a point on this, makes every other right in our Constitution work. During the Civil War, a misnomer of epic proportions, Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus arguing exigent circumstances. The result was nearly as tragic as the war that precipitated its invoking. It seems only the current President can remember history.

So alarmed by what the Senate of the United States hath wrought, I wrote to both my Senators, assuming someone on their respective staffs could and would read the letters. From Dick "Ready for My Close-Up" Blumenthal I heard nothing. From Joseph "How Can We Miss You when You Never Go Away?" Lieberman I got a bristling, self-righteous defense of his vote that added new meaning to 'a guilty conscience needs no accuser.'

And since I cited Lincoln, let me be a bit more contemporary in a country where history is a dirty seven letter word. What we are hurtling towards we've already had-at least our grandparents did, in another time and place, Germany in the Dark Years of Nazism. The Third Reich called the process our Senate has created 'nacht und nebel' (night and fog) because it was the legal justification into which dissenters disappeared often to end up in a KZ and then dead.

Once you're arrested, that 'fact' is proof of your guilt. Instead of operating under a presumption of innocence as we have since our beginnings, we will be a nation of suspects. And, says Senator Lieberman and other like-minded thugs, we have no choice. We must do this in the name of homeland security.The line between homeland and Fatherland gets more blurred with each goose step.

Before this country was founded (while we were losted?), Benjamin Franklin offered “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I'd conclude with that before the Thought Police show up and I start asking my cellmates 'does this orange jumpsuit make my ass look big?' but when I begin thinking about nacht und nebel I always end up at Martin Niemoller. I just hope it's not where WE end.

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist; then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me."
-bill kenny