*Ordung!*

"Sign zee papers, old man!"** Glenn Reynolds notes, in his latest Tech Central column, that "... if you haven't been convicted of some felony or other, it's probably because no prosecutor has tried to put you away, not because you haven't committed one, whether you realized it at the time or not." Indeed. We have reached the point where the only thing standing [between] a citizen (like maybe a pushy, perhaps even obnoxious, broad, say, Martha Stewart?) with rights and a convicted felon whose rights have been stripped, modified or severely curtailed is the time, personal taste and/or whim of a prosecutor. That means that, in essence, what we think of as rights are really only priviledges temporarily granted by a government that can strip us of those rights any time it truly wishes to do so. And nearly as bad as "felony inflation" as laws seem to grow like vicious and rabid tribbles, is the actions of judges who issue new law (usually, it seems, after reading tea leaves and goat entrails) by fiat, as Thomas Sowell notes in the first of three recent articles dealing with trouble on the bench: "While people in various countries in the Middle East are beginning to stir as they see democracy start to take root in Iraq, our own political system is moving steadily in the opposite direction, toward rule by unelected judicial ayatollahs, acting like the ayatollahs in Iran." Welcome to the Imperium. **(My thx to Cheech n Chong for the perfect image of the new order: "Sign zee papers old man!"... "But I cannot sign the papers"...much intervening dialog... "Why not?" "Because you have cut off all my fingers!")