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Tuesday, February 20, 2007 |
NYTimes: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration's behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.
The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president's use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights.
The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any 'other condition'.
Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation's governors.
There is a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, and backed unanimously by the nation's governors, that would repeal the stealthy revisions. Congress should pass it. If changes of this kind are proposed in the future, they must get a full and open debate."
RawStory: "In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Salon columnist Joe Conason says that the changes in political power set in motion by President George W. Bush have brought the United States closer to a future in which authoritarianism is possible. Conason warns that for the first time since Nixon, Americans have 'reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country'.
The excerpt comes from Conason's new book It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Conaston states up front that the idea of an American slide into authoritarianism is not based in any paranoia, but comes because the current president 'has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold'."
AlterNet - Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic: "The total of America's military bases in other people's countries in 2005, according to official sources, was 737. Reflecting massive deployments to Iraq and the pursuit of President Bush's strategy of preemptive war, the trend line for numbers of overseas bases continues to go up.
By the end of the 1990s, the neoconservatives were developing their grandiose theories to promote overt imperialism by the 'lone superpower' - including preventive and preemptive unilateral military action, spreading democracy abroad at the point of a gun, obstructing the rise of any 'near-peer' country or bloc of countries that might challenge U.S. military supremacy, and a vision of a 'democratic' Middle East that would supply us with all the oil we wanted."
Journalismus: "Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his business/political/media/religious organization have avoided prosecution for a shark poaching scam despite evidence of Moon's direct involvement.
Moon, who has poured billions of mysterious dollars into pro-Republican media and into financial support for prominent right-wingers, got the benefit of the doubt again from Bush administration prosecutors. They seem incapable of recognizing an 'ongoing criminal enterprise' when they see one, at least when it's done lots of favors for the President and his family."
AlterNet: "A question that seems to be on everybody's mind these days turns out to be: Is George Bush the worst President in American history?
One of the criteria for being worst is how much lasting damage the President did."
What Bush did is treason.
11:43:21 AM 
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© Copyright 2007 Hetty Litjens.
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