America: You are making us sad.

What is a blatantly political posting doing on this otherwise happy go lucky blog about a foolish twenty-something couple selling most of their stuff, packing up, and moving to New Zealand? It turns out that American politics are unavoidable even on the other side of the globe.

After the dozenth person asked Peter last week at work, "Hey, Peter, did you hear that the US just suspended habeas corpus?" you start to think that there might be something wrong.

Actually, we've been of the firm belief that something has been wrong for some time, however, things are clearly getting out of hand. The fact that the Bush administration now has the means and the motive (and one can assume the intent) to disappear U.S. citizens merely by having them declared "enemy combatants" is shocking and should never, ever happen in a country which professes to value liberty.

Let's not go on at length about this one here, but we're merely going to refer you to Keith Olbermann's eerily direct essay, ""Beginning of the end of America".

The second scary realisation came this weekend when we read about new provisions in the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" that erode the previously rigourous controls on the president's ability to use the US military against US citizens living in the US. As this article points out, there is a technical definition for this: martial law.

Now, whether you believe that Bush intends to abuse this power or not, is immaterial. Maybe he won't. But do you trust the next president, or the president after that not to?

Even legal powers can be abused. In this sad, scary blog a college grad student is harassed by the FBI. His crime? He pointed out that certain airline security measures could be circumvented by someone with the computer skills of the average 12 year old or an above average chimp. Never mind that Bruce Schneier pointed it out in 2003, or that Senator Charles Schumer did in 2005. Fiction? We wish we could say it were. From Mr. Soghoian's blog:


I didn't sleep at home last night. It's fair to say I was rather shaken up.

I came back today, to find the glass on the front door smashed.

Inside, is a rather ransacked home, a search warrant taped to my kitchen table, a total absence of computers - and various other important things. I have no idea what time they actually performed the search, but the warrant was approved at 2AM. I'm sincerely glad I wasn't in bed when they raided the house. That would have been even more scary.


All this, and the security theatre last time we visited the US, has us wondering about the collective health of our nation of birth. The kiwis that we meet here are pretty uniform in their opinions. Most seem to like America and Americans very much. However, they are equally of the opinion that our government was fraudulently elected and is now running roughshod over it's own citizens and the rest of the world.

If this is all a bad dream, how do we pinch ourselves awake?

Roni & Peter