Shadow Government

[waiting for hope]

I saw this earlier while I was looking for examples of a Shadow Government - while what is going on today is not the absolute definition of what a Shadow Government is but it's damn close....this article is from a year ago, amazing what a new congress can do.

Cenk Uygur - via Huffington Post
04.30.2006
The Shadow Government

The Boston Globe is now reporting that the president believes he has the authority to disobey over 750 laws passed by Congress. And those are just the laws passed on his watch. As we've already seen with the FISA statute, the president also feels he has the right to ignore laws passed by previous administrations as well.

If the president feels he is free to ignore a great number of laws - and he is on the record as implementing that belief by disobeying some long established laws - there is a whole different government running the country than we think there is.

There is the government with the laws we think we have. And the government with the laws the president secretly says we have. This secret set of decisions on which laws will and won't be applied is what makes up the new shadow government.

~Snip~

In fact, they're proud of it. They think they are reinstating the real executive powers of the presidency. Powers that the Courts or Congress have never agreed to and that are outside of the plain, or any reasonable, reading of the Constitution, but nonetheless, the administration believes is owed to them.

This makes Nixon's imperial presidency look like child's play. In a democracy, we have a president who is literally saying he is above the law. There are 750 laws he does not have to faithfully execute.

More

[fasttense]

1. John Williams has a site

that tracks shadow government statistics. It provides info on the real unemployment numbers and inflation numbers. But it is probably not what you or your post is talking about. So, I'll just leave a link.

http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/

[waiting for hope]

2. That's really interesting...

thanks for the link - I have never really believed what the numbers were anyway, only believed what my bank account tells me. :)