this great nation of ours

I'm repulsed, and angry, and sad, and ashamed. How could this country have sunk so low? How could the great divide between its rhetoric and its actions have become so completely disconnected?

These are rhetorical questions, of course. The answers are complicated and simple, obscure and all around us. They all add up to... we move to canada.

If you can't read Jane Mayer's article "Outsourcing Terror," in this week's New Yorker, you can read Bob Herbert's column about it. Mayer reports on "an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America":

It's a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as "extraordinary rendition."

This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.

On the other side of the coin, today Paul Krugman writes about the Bush tax code, and wonders if the Dems - who have recently found their spines to save Social Security - will be vertebrates about this too.

It may sound shrill to describe President Bush as someone who takes food from the mouths of babes and gives the proceeds to his millionaire friends. Yet his latest budget proposal is top-down class warfare in action. And it offers the Democrats an opportunity, if they're willing to take it.

Both of these issues are indefensible. That's why the neocons can only attack critics as unpatriotic. The last resort of scoundrels.

Lucky Guys. Inspector Lohmann and Steve the Shameless Antagonist both left comments that turned me several shades of envious green. They've both been able to live and work in Canada while their Permanent Resident applications were (and still are) being processed. That is so cool! If that were possible for us, we'd have been long gone. But we can't work without our PR cards, and Buster's gotta have his biscuits.