Some of you know how much I love Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch. Now in its third season, the show follows the lives of 5 or 6 crab boat crews as they fish for crab during the brief but extremely competitive (and extremely lucrative) crab seasons on the ultra-treacherous Bering Sea. (You want real reality TV? Ditch your pansy “Survivor” crap and watch Deadliest Catch. It’s real. People actually die on this show. Ships actually sink. They’re not voted off the island.)

The job is called the “deadliest catch” because of the extreme nature of the job: sometime during their career, 1 in 10 crab fishermen will die on the job, and the injury rate is 100%. So when I was watching a National Geographic special called Inside the U.S. Secret Service (I know, I watch all the cool shows), a statistic jumped out at me: 1 in 4 U.S. presidents are attacked by assassins, and 1 in 10 die at their hand.

Wait a minute: 1 in 10? Yeah…we’ve had just over 40 presidents, and 4 of them have been assassinated: Garfield, Lincoln, McKinley, and Kennedy. Statistically, that makes being the President of the United States every bit as deadly as fishing for crab in the violent Bering Sea (although being president is probably warmer and drier). I have no witty remark here, I just find it an odd comparison that the two deadliest jobs in the country are the lowliest and the mightiest.

A mere 41 years after the first anti-lock braking system was introduced on the 1971 Chrysler Imperial, the NHTSA will finally require the technology on all model year 2012 and later vehicles. The requirement is actually a side-effect of a new mandate that all 2012 and later vehicles be built with anti-roll technology. Such technology employs ESC (electronic stability control), which in turn uses ABS — hence, anti-locks will have to be on every vehicle.

The anti-roll measure was created because although rollovers occur in a small number of accidents (only 2%), they account for 40% of all accident-related deaths. Requiring ESC and ABS on all vehicles is expected to reduce rollovers by up to 84%, saving 10,300 lives and preventing 238,000 injuries per year.

For a technology that’s arguably the most significant safety invention since seat belts and safety glass, the government certainly took their time with this one. At least ABS doesn’t have potentially negative side effects like certain other things the NHTSA has mandated — airbags have injured quite a lot of people, yet they’ve been required on vehicles since 1998 — and it’s really cheap: $111 per vehicle, by industry estimates. A small price to pay for saving so many lives and preventing a lot of accidents. Automakers were headed there anyway, but there are still a significant number of models under $25k where ABS is only an option (which rental companies don’t always opt for on their fleet vehicles, as we have learned firsthand).

Some of you may have heard by now that despite having spent almost $1 billion establish a well-known brand image, Cingular is changing its name (back) to AT&T effective immediately. This is because SBC, which owned Cingular, bought AT&T, which had sold off it’s AT&T Wireless division two years ago to Cingu…wait, you know what, why don’t I just let Stephen Colbert explain it. Funny, but entirely accurate.

Finally, evidence that at least one branch of our government is still operating as it should. Today, a federal judge ruled that the free-ranging wiretapping program ordered by the White House to spy on Americans without a warrant is unconstitutional, and ordered that it be terminated immediately. Even though this is kind of a “duh” moment — I would think it is self-evident that wiretaps without warrants are illegal — it is a victory for those of us who still value the Bill of Rights.

The Bush administration, naturally, disagrees with the ruling and has already appealed the decision.

Read the article on CNN.

It doesn’t get more sickly ironic than this…the Bush administration is currently seeking to pass legislation that will protect them from prosecution for violations of the War Crimes Act passed by a Republican House and Senate in 1996 that criminalizes violations of the Geneva conventions for conduct during war and threatens the death penalty for those that violate it.

Everyone read that sentence again to make sure it sinks in.

Specifically, the legal shield they are trying to establish is for conduct in 2002, for actions taken under a presidential order that the Supreme Court has already declared illegal. The order was illegal because it arbitrarily declared current prisoners of war exempt from the Geneva conventions and authorized torture as a means to extract information. Since the order was illegal and the president and his administration have actually violated the Geneva conventions on torture, they are technically guilty of war crimes and can be prosecuted and held to the death penalty! However, that is what this new legislation they are trying to pass will prevent.

How can any other nation on earth possibly respect us anymore? We are no longer a nation of laws. We are a nation of thugs, our top leaders are now clearly above the law, laws that they have made, free to violate it without punishment and who even have the balls to make new laws exempting themselves from the law. Between this and the spying on American citizens without a court order and trying to control the press…our country looks, sounds, and smells like a fascist dictator state. What happened to democracy? What happened to this ideal that we were raised to love? What happened to balance of power? Oh that’s right, we handed the whole country over to a single party, one that’s controlled by irrational right-wing idiots who would choose fear and war-mongering to run the country over reason and logic any day of the week. People, your vote counts more than ever. Give power back to moderate, reasonable people, people who can fight terrorism without violating every other article in the Bill of Rights and without killing hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens in other countries. The midterm elections are coming up this fall, and you’d better get out there and vote if you want any resemblance of the America you once knew to remain by the time Bush finally leaves office.

In an unprecedented move, Bush has blocked the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) from obtaining clearance for gathering evidence on the illegal NSA surveillance program. Effectively, the president has blocked the Justice Department’s investigation into who authorized what and whether or not it was illegal, proving once again that apparently this administration is above the law and no one’s going to do anything about it. His denial to the OPR is the first of its kind in history. From the article:

“Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels,” chief lawyer H. Marshall Jarrett wrote in a memorandum released Tuesday. “In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation.”

I think it’s quite clear at this point that Bush has abused his power at least as much as Nixon. Why, then, isn’t anything truly being done about it? Welcome to the new communist state. The government gets away with anything under the guise of “national security.”