Letters to the Editor
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Remember Remember....
Remember, remember, the 5th of November...
http://www.ronpaulgraphs.com/
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/donate
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@John PM
If you take the two paragraphs in Article II that have to do with Presidential duties and authorities, and stare at them for a week and a half without stopping, a form of sensory deprivation occurs allowing you to hallucinate and believe you have seen many more things there than most other people see.
If you then further imagine that Alexander Hamilton was an advisor to Caesar Augustus before being appointed to write the Constitutional Apocrypha, you can see what Dick Cheney sees when his defibrillator isn't working well.
The fact that those channels are dark in Pakistan is due to protest: They are allowed to broadcast as long as they say what the government wants, so they choose not to. Think the kind of American news corporations that would toss Sami al-Haj and Bilal Hussein under the bus without much comment would be willing to do that?
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Tyranny for Dummies
...or another short-cut to tyranny.
Even women who have been raped have to face who they are accusing, even though I imagine for most women, next to the actual rape, it has to be the worst experience of their lives to once again re-experence the rape with public testimony in front of the man that brutalized them. We force women to go thru this because the Constitution demands over everything else, the right of the accused to face their accuser.
Imagine a person accused of rape, being held in custody but never tried because the state does not want to further hurt those they believe to have been raped. This is a valid concern emotionally, but then this means the accused have been sentenced without being tried.
Which is what we do with "non-combatants". ("non-combatants" - nice term which has no meaning outside of what Bush says it means at any given point in time.) The state makes an accusation, and then declares we cannot prove our case because it would hurt the state. Nice. And I say so what. Figure it out and take the pain as necessary. For those who have been raped, they know justice is messy and painful, and a fuk of a large burden is placed on them and the state in order to convict. But that is the price of living in a free society under the Constitution of the U.S.A. Those blind to this, are nothing more than petty wanna be tyrants.
On the behalf of national security, we do not want justice and the Constitution melting into a puddle of... I don't know what, but it's something pretty goddamn smelly.
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hopeless @ mukasey
"Please write about Feinstein and Schumer's move to annoint Mukasey!"
Why?
"It seems almost cynically timed to crush the Liberal hopes and energy, much the same way the neoCONs have been doing for the past seven years."
Feinstin's simply following pattern. Did anyone who has been following her votes really think she'd vote against him? And Shumer came out early for him. Did anyone really think Shumer would recommend him early, then vote against him?
Hope is good. Hope is essential. But one needs to guard against unreasonable hopes. And it is unreasonable to hope that this SJC would vote against him, unless he did something really horrible at a hearing. Such as devour a live infant. I mean a real american infant. A white one. Or beat Robert Byrd's little dawg.
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ondelette...
I heard or read another story about how the news coverage in Pakistan can all of a sudden become very bland... and that it's how people know when the censorship light is on.
* * *
By that measure, we should have been wondering for awhile now if our press has been protesting for lo these many years. [/sarcasm]
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John PM
It seems strange to me that those judges and legal scholars who have argued for "original intent" and "strict construction" when it comes to "activist judges" finding new rights within the penumbra of the Constitution (e.g., privacy, abortion) now seem ready to (1) grant President Bush sweeping powers on the basis of his authority as "Commander in Chief," even though such term is vague and undefined; and (2) ignore actual provisions of the Constitution in order to provide these powers to President Bush (e.g., declaring American citizens enemy combatants, suspending habeus corpus). The goal is, and has been at least since the time of Richard Nixon, absolute power.
"Now seem ready"? Has something happened in recent weeks to make you say this? I'm not saying that it wouldn't happen, but what makes you say this now? Surely you don't mean that our SCOTUS takes its cues from General Musharraf?
While I find much to worry about the five conservatives on the court right now and the future decisions they will make, one thing I do commend them on is how they've consistenty ruled against such broad claims of Article II presidential power. E.g. Hamdi, Rasul & Hamdan. While they've made all sorts of very conservative rulings since Bush took over, they've yet to make a ruling that definitively affirms the Yoo/Addington/Cheney unitary theory of executive power to my knowledge. So I wonder why you think that this is about to change.
One other thing to keep in mind when assuming that this SCOTUS will affirm the unitary theory of the executive is that, not only have its past rulings--both recent and in the past--all gone against this theory, but, from a purely selfish and institutional point of view, there are good reasons to assume that they won't change this any time soon. Because if they did, they would only be weakening themselves as a branch. Every time they further empower the executive branch, they weaken the other two, which of course includes themselves. And I'm not sure that John Roberts wants to preemptively render the next 25-30 years of his chief justiceship impotent at the outset--especially when the next president likely to be a Democrat.
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A tiger by the tail
There are a lot of detainees at Gitmo who cannot be released because they've seen too much. A journalist who's spent x years at Guantanamo Bay, and you're going to let him go out in the world where he can write and talk? Faggeddabouddit.