Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 2259 Editor's Choice: 19
-
@nlacey
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]David Bauder. From Marietta GA, has a blog at DavidBauder.com, couldn't find out any more without a lot more work.
-
@WT
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, but.
If I'm doing emergency medicine, and if you are alert, oriented, competent, and informed, you are allowed to decide to refuse treatment, and I have to obey (quarantine would be an exception).
But I'm allowed to decide whether you're alert, oriented, competent, and informed.
Expertise should always have its limits, it is a public servant. But the public needs to be well enough informed to understand when it needs to delegate authority in its own best interests. There is a time and a place for redeciding that delegation and I'm all for doing so, as Richard Daley said, "early and often". But probably not in the moment, and probably not every time a decision gets made. And if its going to take 10 minutes to inform you and 5 minutes for you to bleed to death, don't expect to get asked.
-
@WT
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree. I just think there is a terrific need to be careful and make distinctions, and ferret out nuances in anything as complicated as the health care system. It isn't a free market entity, it doesn't mix well with political philosophy, and it would be really pretty easy to break.
It really is a sign of how broken the thing is that we have such distrust of the doctors, though.
-
@Jim White
[Read the article: Impeachment? It's not just for Kucinich anymore]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](acknowledge I haven't gotten to GG yet)
Properly done, the previous remedies for restoring habeas corpus have included revolution and beheading the king. Impeachment would be getting off easy. Our country was founded because some people literally went to war to end arbitrary search, seizure, incarceration, and criminalization. Congress should remember that, when dealing with the habeas corpus problem.
Voters should remember it when dealing with the McCain problem.
-
Full disclosure and the MCA
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn --
While I am happier than I can easily relate that you've taken up the habeas corpus restoration, and attempted to give full disclosure on how the MCA came into being, full disclosure requires you to also detail the writing, passage, and voting of its predecessor, the DTA (Senator John McCain is the only person to have been a co-sponsor of both pieces of legislation).
Restoration of habeas corpus to the MCA status quo ante will not restore habeas corpus entirely because it was already circumscribed by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, though less harshly than in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The vote in the Senate was 90-9. So much for blaming the battered wife.
-
@saltmeat
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And if those views are rejected, brave enough to let America sink into its own fetid, paranoid fantasies. Let Americans experience a police dictatorship. Let America truly experience the disease of fascism that we have been flirting with. Just let it happen.
Alcoholics often talk about hitting bottom. Only when they are at the bottom, can they see how truly they have fallen. Only then can they see the destruction they have wrought on themselves and the people around them. And only then can they pick themselves up, admit that they caused this, and attempt to change their ways and rebuild their lives.
Not to nitpick or pull you away from your core argument, saltmeat, but "hitting bottom" is not considered to be a good or necessary part of rehabilitation of addicts in modern addiction medicine (See the HBO documentary "Addiction").
The reason holds a nugget for America and her problems, which you very eloquently expressed: On the way down, the addict is destroying his/her body and his/her social relationships -- in essence destroying both the strength and the social fabric necessary to support him/her when recovering.
Were America to go all the way to the bottom, the country's strength, and its relationships with the rest of the world would be gone, and with it, all that this country has done that is good, and all that it could do in the future as good.
We have plummeted a long way, as we can see from the MCA and DTA, from Abu Ghraib, from the fact that good and educated people like Alan Dershowitz now defend the use of torture.
But we can still be a nation of laws, we can still be the driving force behind human and civil rights initiatives, we can still be a force of good in the world and repair our relations from where we are now, and we should, before we hit rock bottom.
What is really necessary is to get over the "September 11 Syndrome": We really should have been asked to sacrifice, and the sacrifice that each and every American should have been asked to make is that we must live with being less safe, less secure, and less sure of ourselves and our future, in order to stand tall and say that we will not change our belief in civil and human rights and the rule of law, in what is right and what is wrong, no matter how many planes hit our buildings.
-
@casual_observer
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Actually, ex parte Milligan goes further than that, it says that the President can only suspend habeas corpus if the courts cannot function (what your article cited as "closed"), and must restore those rights to the parties for which it was suspended when the courts resume functioning. It doesn't say he can try them in lieu of the courts at all.
-
@e_five
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The following is excerpted from the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005:
(e) Judicial Review of Detention of Enemy Combatants-
(1) IN GENERAL- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
'(e) Except as provided in section 1005 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider--
'(1) an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; or...
(the ellipses at the end are mine)