The line is getting perilously thin.

Think Progress highlights a floor speech by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former U.S. Attorney who spent hours pouring over the classified legal briefs of the Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel. He was “dismayed” by what he uncovered. He got declassified a pair of legal assertions that should make every constitution loving American’s blood run cold. They say, effectively, that the President’s constitutional authorities are checked only by his own interpretations of them, and that he cannot be second-guessed by the Department of Justice. This is, in an acronym, FUBAR:

• The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

• The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.

Katrina meets Bangladesh?

Per Chris Mooney: The strength of a category five, and bearing down on the most vulnerable flood plains on the planet.

Our $9 trillion debt — that’s $9,000,000,000,000 for those of you who like to see the zeros — now costs only $8.373 trillion in Canadian currency.

Poll shows 52% of Americans favor bombing Iran.

What’s wrong with this country that we can’t just have a natural disaster anymore?

What kind of sick people are we that Fox News has linked the Southland firestorm to Al Qaeda, Glenn Beck suggested that this disaster is some sort of divine retribution for those Malibu-ites who “hate America,” while the Huffington Post has seemed all kinds of eager for this to be The Next Katrina — almost rooting on the Santa Anna winds in the dark hope of adding another failed disaster response to the execrable Bush legacy.

Seriously. Take a breath. How did we become this petty and hysterical? Even the LA Times has gotten caught up in disaster porn, breathlessly touting back-of-the envelope evacuation figures — 800,000.. a million! — that in the cold light of day bear little relationship to reality.

These fires are terrible. But all things considered they’ve been handled admirably. California’s a generally rich and competent state. We’ve mobilized resources both to fight the fires and aid the displaced. The governor’s taking charge. We’ve pulled National Guard resources from the border. The president has loosed federal disaster-recovery monies.

The property damage — at a billion dollars or so to date — is no chump change. But let’s not denigrate the suffering of Katrina survivors by making asymmetrical comparisons. The hurricane, along with its sister Rita, inflicted nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars damage on the Gulf Coast. There have been 1,500 homes destroyed in the recent fires? How about nearly 1,500 dead in the storms?

This fire hasn’t yet approached the toll of the 1991 Oakland conflagration. So why must we raise the ghost of “Brownie” and “Heckuva Job”? Why do we have to pin this on the National Guard troops stationed in Iraq. Why must this be Global Warming’s fault. Or Bush’s — it’s always Bush’s fault!

How far gone are we that we so easily turn a firestorm into a launching pad for our pet political agendas. Let’s put out the flames first before we fight over the ashes.

Meantime, go cleanse yourselves with a donation to the victims.

The Los Angeles Times has amazing details of the ordeal suffered by the German man our government disappeared to the “salt pit” in Afghanistan, and who won’t get his day in U.S. court — thanks to the Supreme Courts’ shocking endorsement of the Bush administration’s “state secrets” doctrine:

El-Masri, a car salesman and a father of four, says his ordeal began on New Year’s Eve 2003 when he was pulled off a bus after it crossed the Serbian border into Macedonia. His passport was taken, and he was questioned for days by agents who said he was a terrorist. They refused his request to contact German authorities.

After 23 days, he was blindfolded, taken to the airport and turned over to U.S. authorities…. “I was led into a room. The door closed behind me and I was beaten from all sides for about one minute. They bent my arms to my back and cut off my clothes…. I saw seven to eight men all dressed in black and wearing masks…. They put me in diapers and a dark blue sweatsuit with the legs and sleeves cut out.”

His appeal to the court says he was then put in a plane, “chained spread-eagle to the floor,” injected with drugs and flown to Baghdad and then on to Kabul, Afghanistan. He spent the next four months in a CIA-run prison, the appeal says.

In late May 2004, U.S. officials had apparently concluded they had the wrong man. El-Masri was loaded onto a plane, blindfolded, put into the back of truck and dropped off on a hillside in what turned out to be Albania. From there, he made it back to Germany, where an investigation was launched.

When I was a kid, growing up in the waning days of the Cold War, we were Americans, the good guys, exactly because we’d never condone an act like this. Now our government is hiding behind the cover of “state secrets” to avoid making reparations to a man we put through five months of hell. Just another day in the Bush Era.

Nothin more to add. A license plate is worth a thousand words.

North Carolina couple arrested for “defiling” flag after hanging it upside down in protest.