"I'd knock your head off for half a crown,"

... said the surly groom, bolting one half of the gate.

"Couldn't afford to have it done on those terms," rejoined Sam.

Ah yes, the pure greatness of Sam Weller. I am put in mind of The Pickwick Papers (which I intend to re-read without delay) as a result of this post on the Balkinization blog. I don't suggest you read the post unless you are either a chronic law-dork or deathly ill with boredom. Balkinization is a legal blog run by a bunch of ivy-league egghead law professors and suchlike. They get into some really abstruse topics (some of it, even HipHopLawyer himself don't entirely understand), but they often discuss Issues of Interest, and are always scholarly, intellectually honest, and generally apolitical. (try finding those three qualities in a blog. go on, I dare you.)

But anyway, in describing an opinion by Samuel Alito during his time at the Office of Legal Counsel (ummm, I think this jackass has since been appointed to the Supreme Court, if you can believe it), an opinion which argues for extraordinarily broad executive powers in the face of a duly enacted federal statute expressly limiting executive power in precisely the same exact circumstances, Professor Marty Lederman says: "the OLC opinion is an exercise in statutory construction only in the Pickwickian sense that it assigns meanings to the words Congress enacted."

Funny! Well, ok, maybe only to about 4 people living, now, on this earth, but it made me spit Memorial Day beer onto my keyboard.