Someone’s itching for a fight.

“We will submit legislation to the United States Senate which will…authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements with the view to having the president’s acts declared unconstitutional,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said on the Senate floor.

Specter’s announcement came the same day that an American Bar Association task force concluded that by attaching conditions to legislation, the president has sidestepped his constitutional duty to either sign a bill, veto it, or take no action.

Bush has issued at least 750 signing statements during his presidency, reserving the right to revise, interpret or disregard laws on national security and constitutional grounds.

“That non-veto hamstrings Congress because Congress cannot respond to a signing statement,” said ABA president Michael Greco. The practice, he added “is harming the separation of powers.”

Bush has challenged about 750 statutes passed by Congress, according to numbers compiled by Specter’s committee. The ABA estimated Bush has issued signing statements on more than 800 statutes, more than all other presidents combined.

Signing statements have been used by presidents, typically for such purposes as instructing agencies how to execute new laws.

But many of Bush’s signing statements serve notice that he believes parts of bills he is signing are unconstitutional or might violate national security.

My first thought was that Specter was preparing to distance himself from the President with midterm elections coming up this November, but a quick Google search reveals that the Pennsylvannian Republican was elected in the last election cycle, and won’t be standing for another until 2010. That’s actually reassuring. Instead of being a way for a Republican to distance himself from an unpopular leader of his same party — election politics — this is, I’m sure, motivated by Specter’s honest disgust at the President.

So I mailed in a payment to Dell, which was due July 7th. Forgetting, because I’m an absent minded douche, that there was a Federal holiday, I neglected to get the bill into the mail until the fifth.

I had a not unreasonable expectation that the check would not be recieved until after the 7th, and I’d get hit with a service charge. Fuck that. So I logged onto Dell.com and set up an online payment for the minimum due amount. Better safe than sorry, and all that jazz.

Got my bill due August. Well, I played, gambled, and won. The online payment processed on the 7th, as did the payment I’d mailed only two days earlier.

I’d also been assessed a $13 “Convenience Fee” for using Dell’s online payment option.

MOTHERFUCKER.

I’m a little steamed at this. Online payment is easy to set up, easy to use, and, yes, very convenient, presuming you remembered to bookmark the log-in sites and don’t have to click “Forgot Your Password?” everytime you want to make a payment, but the real convenience isn’t to the consumer, but to the company, who can spend that fewer dollars on labor for someone to manually recieve the mail, open the envelope, and stamp the check. It seems to me that, by using online payment, I’m the one doing Dell the favor, not vice-fucking-versa.

I have a Best Buy credit card. I don’t use it often, but when I do I will frequently log into their “account center” and quickly dash off a payment. They’ve never charged me a “convenience fee”, probably because they don’t want to waste the labor on customer service phone reps promising “convenience fee” refunds (which, although I haven’t yet spoken to anyone at Dell about this bullshit, will be!).

The nametags at the Franchise are produced by some corporate sweat-shop, emblazoned with the company logo, and have our names label-printed on, usually at some cockamaney angle. (Please, feel free to discuss the merits of how I’ve chosen to spell “cockamaney” in the comments). In addition to all of this, they also include, written in small (practically illegible, really) type, “Drivers Do Not Leave the Store With More Than $20.00.”

The theory behind this policy — because in this case, while the name on my tag might in fact read “Han Solo”, the money policy is in fact as described on the tags — is, I believe, a very sound policy, which boils down to this: if a thief wants to go out and rob delivery guys, he’s going to rob those most likely to be carrying a wad of cash around on them. If Corporate and its Franchisees are successful in limiting the cash their drivers carry, then thieves will target employees of delivery businesses with laxer security.

(Here’s an example: back when I lived in Towson, I ordered Chinese — General Tso’s, of course — from Bruce Lee’s in Timonium. Dude shows I up, I pay, and he’s flipping through a wad of hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens and fives to get to his singles. I was counting as he was flipping, and he had at least a grand on him. If I was going to rob a delivery guy, do you think I’d rob some corporate lackey carrying $20 in change and whatever he got from the last delivery, or the Chinese dude with a grand? Duh!)

There is a lady who lives in the Franchise’s area who we deliver too infrequently. She has apparently never been informed of the company’s policy on change, and a large part of that is because we’ve a.) never told her and b.) are much to lax on this, and I’m as much to blame as any of the other drivers.

Friday night she paid with a crisp, clean $100 bill for a $27 order. She turned her back to dig out the correct coin change, and I emptied my pockets frantic because I’d made a drop back at the store — in technical terms, a “drop” is when you put money into your safe-box — and I was worried I didn’t have enough change for her. As it turns out, including a twenty and a ten I’d had in my wallet, I had $69.

She wanted $70 back.

And she was pissed.

As I said, she orders rarely, and I’ve delivered to her on several occasions. She’s always been pleasant and nice and a great tipper. When I told her I was low on change, she became quite irritated — I tried explaining the policy to her, and it really was like no one had ever explained this to her ever (which I guess no one had). I felt badly for a couple of reasons:

One — this is the first time she’s ever had trouble paying with large bills. Not her fault. Usually it’s either I or Chewbacca delivering to her, and we both know she likes to pay with large bills and make sure we’ve got a little “extra” on us to help cover the difference.

Two — her attitude towards me when I tried to explain the company’s policy made me feel bad, not to mention her snort when I handed her close to thirty bucks in singles (hey, it’s cash ain’t it?) It isn’t my policy, I’m just the fucking driver (albeit, I seem to be in your case, anyway, an enabler). If you’re that upset about it, write the CEO an angry letter. I guarantee you he’ll write back a very polite “Thanks, but go fuck yourself” in such polite language you’ll want to suck his toes.

I didn’t feel bad about having to go back out to my car to get an extra dollar to make up for my shortage. Thank goodness for vast pools of spilled change under my driver’s seat — that’s a buck in good dirty quarters.

When I got back to the store, I pulled up her order form and inserted a new comment under the driver notes: “Expect to be paid in large denomination, bring change.” Except there’s a letter limit, so it was probably closer to: “EXPCT LG $, BRNG CHNG.”

Yes, another post of an interesting fact I learned reading William Manchester’s The Last Lion: Visions of Glory.

When you speak about Ghandi, it’s impossible not to see the man as a symbol of peace, the guy who preached about non-violent resistence and led his nation to freedom while the crowds cheered. Surely, everyone in India knows who Ghandi is, and what role he played kicking the British out?

But an observation by the author on page 856 tells us, that while he (Manchester) was living in Delhi and working as a foreign correspondant, “social scientists began a comprehensive poll of Indian villages to determine how many natives knew British rule had ended in 1947. The survey was aborted when it was discovered that a majority didn’t know the British had even arrived.”

Of historical note-worthiness is that the British had been in India for three hundred years. And a shitload of Indians were like, “The British? Er, who the fuck are they again?” Except in whatever dialect of whatever language it was they spoke, since they most likely weren’t speaking the language of their recently departed imperialist leaders who they hadn’t even known had arrived.

And if they didn’t know the British arrived, they probably didn’t know who Ghandi was. Which is just kind of interesting, since most Americans — even the stupid ones — know who George Washington is, and while the two men are hardly alike, they’re both viewed by western civilization as the “fathers of their countries” and the “harbingers of freedom” etcetra.