Dec 22, 2005 at 1:39 PM by Political Chase
The rhetoric of this man never ceases to amaze me. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was obviously not in the Yale or Harvard library when George Bush went to school.
“No one should be allowed to block the Patriot Act,” Mr. Bush said in a statement, referring to a bipartisan coalition of senators who last week derailed a measure to update the act, the nation’s main antiterrorism law.
It’s probably best that he not consider starting a new career in sales when he leaves the White House. But, then there was Arbusto –I suppose he’s already tried sales. Didn’t work too well then either.
Tags : George+Bush, politics
Dec 22, 2005 at 3:22 AM by Political Chase
We may have opportunities to do a significant amount of legal research in the near future and I don’t want anybody scratching their head wondering where to go for information. Therefore, links (many categorized) to The Legal Information Institute (LLI), part of The Cornell University Law School, have been added to the TPC Reference Section.
The LLI is a valuable resource - the Constitution, US code, case law, criminal and civil procedure, state constitution and code, rules of evidence, commercial code, WEX (legal dictionary and encyclopedia), and a bazillion other legal reference items.
If you want to give it a test drive, try starting with the Fourth Amendment. You might find it interesting based upon events covering the past few days.
Let me know if you find any links with errors.
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Dec 22, 2005 at 1:49 AM by Political Chase
This post is derived from a request at the Daily Kos. You may already be familiar with the post, requests, and associated activity. For those who are not, I am requesting all readers that believe President Bush made an error in judgment, to whatever degree, please read this post at Daily Kos (after reading this post) and follow the requests and guidelines they propose.
Before you jump over to Kos, please read the following New York Times editorial, if you have not had the opportunity to read it previously. [Emphasis added.]
[President Bush] secretly and recklessly expanded the government’s powers in dangerous and unnecessary ways that eroded civil liberties and may also have violated the law.
In Friday’s Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported that sometime in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order scrapping a painfully reached, 25-year-old national consensus: spying on Americans by their government should generally be prohibited, and when it is allowed, it should be regulated and supervised by the courts. The laws and executive orders governing electronic eavesdropping by the intelligence agency were specifically devised to uphold the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant - just as he had earlier decided to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army regulations when it came to handling prisoners in the war on terror….
Let’s be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.
This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.
The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush’s order, and that is nonsense. The existing law already recognizes that American citizens’ communications may be intercepted by chance. It says that those records may be retained and used if they amount to actual foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material. Otherwise, they must be thrown out.
President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program’s existence. We don’t know if he was right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush’s team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them.
Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it. Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could get the ball rolling.
These are strong words coming from the largest newspaper in the world.
Technorati Tags : George+Bush, surveillance, spying, NSA, FISA, politics, wiretap, Bush+administration
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