Grab a damned box and throw it in the bloody harbor

My Userland blog is still broken -- one heckuva way to start this new year, and late at that. Thanks to those of you who've pinged me and asked about me. I am returning, but slowly; there is a lot of work going on here in the background cutting into my blogging time. I hope I am not going to further break my other blog with this same post, but here it goes, a new Blogger blog to mirror the broken one and a post to the old one.

All-consuming my resources right now is the Tea Party; perhaps we could call it another Boston Tea Party in honor of Senators Kerry and Kennedy, but whatever the title, another Tea Party it is.

The subjects have greatly tired of the taxation without representation -- and by taxation I mean reductions in privacy, reductions in future prospects, assessments for a war based on lies, all the other general nastiness that comes of a neo-imperial presidency.

These subjects now choose to throw the tea in the harbor, to make it clear to the powers that be that we will not accept willingly this abridgement of our rights. Judge Alito represents yet another attempt to bolster the neo-imperial presidency, unable as Alito is to draw a bright line between the powers of the excutive office and those of the co-equal branches of government. He was chosen for this reason, among others; his views on an unitary (read: unilateral) executive are untenable, whether for this particular president or any president in the future, regardless of politics. He must not be confirmed without further debate on the issue of the unitary executive alone, if not for the simple purpose of preventing his confirmation.

Senators -- other than the Republicans who so readily lockstep and rubberstamp the imperial presidency as they have for five years -- are somewhat at odds, not having had a series of meetings to discuss plans of action or developed talking points or even selected a pointman, and most definitely not finding someone sent to them from whatever authoritative body to which they look for leadership.

But this being what it is, a rebellion of angry subjects, there was no advance meeting, focus groups or conference on policy, no memo sent, no Powerpoint presentations. There are simply hundreds of thousands of us -- maybe more -- boarding the ships and seizing boxes and throwing them, with all the passion we feel, punctuated with great war whoops, into the dark and salty winter waters.

To the Senators who are not yet fully on deck, I say, grab a damned box and throw it into the bloody harbor. To hell with the King.

[Picture credit: The Project Gutenberg, The Yankee Tea-party, by Henry C. Watson]