Friday, May 05, 2006

They are laws unto themselves

Hey, tonight we got to hear Markos from Daily KOS speak at a local bookstore here in Asheville, and that was when I found out that Porter Goss had quit today. The real reasons he quit have not been publicly stated - but we all think it was HOOKERS. I just hope one of them was Jeff Gannon.

When I went to DC last June, I tried to get a press pass to the US Congress. I got pretty far, but in the end, they didn't give me one because I don't make money off of blogging. (Anybody want to send me some money?) But, what I told them was that I was just like Jeff Gannon except that I don't have a pornographic website, I don't run an "escort" service and I write my own stuff. And that's the TRUTH too!

Anyway, I hope 'ole Goss was shagging Gannon/Guckertt/whatever his name is...... then we can all talk about "8 inches cut".... and what that might feel like.

But, I also noticed today that the NYTimes editorial board woke up and noticed that Bush is trashing the constitution (that little war in Iraq actually did it in - that was totally illegal under our US constitution) on a regular basis. They picked this up from reading the Boston Globe and I like to think that the Boston Globe figured it out from my emails from years ago, but maybe not. There has been no sign they ever read my emails to them.

Here's what the NYT had to say:

"Veto? Who Needs A Veto?

President Bush doesn't bother with vetoes; he simply declares his intention not to enforce anything he dislikes. Charlie Savage at The Globe reported recently that Mr. Bush had issued more than 750 "presidential signing statements" declaring he wouldn't do what the laws required. Perhaps the most infamous was the one in which he stated that he did not really feel bound by the Congressional ban on the torture of prisoners. In this area, as in so many others, Mr. Bush has decided not to take the open, forthright constitutional path. He signed some of the laws in question with great fanfare, then quietly registered his intention to ignore them. He placed his imperial vision of the presidency over the will of America's elected lawmakers. And as usual, the Republican majority in Congress simply looked the other way.

Many of the signing statements reject efforts to curb Mr. Bush's out-of-control sense of his powers in combating terrorism. In March, after frequent pious declarations of his commitment to protecting civil liberties, Mr. Bush issued a signing statement that said he would not obey a new law requiring the Justice Department to report on how the F.B.I. is using the Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers if he decided that such reporting could impair national security or executive branch operations. In another case, the president said he would not instruct the military to follow a law barring it from storing illegally obtained intelligence about Americans. Now we know, of course, that Mr. Bush had already authorized the National Security Agency, which is run by the Pentagon, to violate the law by eavesdropping on Americans' conversations and reading Americans' e-mail without getting warrants.

We know from this sort of bitter experience that the president is not simply expressing philosophical reservations about how a particular law may affect the war on terror. The signing statements are not even all about national security. Mr. Bush is not willing to enforce a law protecting employees of nuclear-related agencies if they report misdeeds to Congress. In another case, he said he would not turn over scientific information "uncensored and without delay" when Congress needed it. (Remember the altered environmental reports?) Mr. Bush also demurred from following a law forbidding the Defense Department to censor the legal advice of military lawyers. (Remember the ones who objected to the torture-is-legal policy?) Instead, his signing statement said military lawyers are bound to agree with political appointees at the Justice Department and the Pentagon. The founding fathers never conceived of anything like a signing statement. The idea was cooked up by Edwin Meese III, when he was the attorney general for Ronald Reagan, to expand presidential powers. He was helped by a young lawyer who was a true believer in the unitary presidency, a euphemism for an autocratic executive branch that ignores Congress and the courts. Unhappily, that lawyer, Samuel Alito Jr., is now on the Supreme Court."


NOW they notice how bad Alito is for the US Supreme Court????

Well, if you want to get an idea of what is happening in Iraq, go read my other blog HERE.

Big DFA training weekend here in Asheville, and I'm going, but darn if I know when I will have time to work on anyone's campaign.

No comments: