Category: Rant

Roughly a year after President Bush’s illegal (yet unfortunately still unprosecuted due to Congressional “leaders'” lack of backdone) wiretap program, the President has granted himself the authority to now open mail from and to American citizens without a warrant. Apparently, the whole checks and balances concept doesn’t apply to the current administration.

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

. . .

“Despite the President’s statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people’s mail without a warrant,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.

. . .

Most of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane reform measures. But it also explicitly reinforced protections of first-class mail from searches without a court’s approval.

In this, we learn that President Bush believes he can write law merely by adding on to bills he signs, while simultaneously failing to understand the bills he is signing. For those that don’t know, it is true that with a signing statement additional measures can be added to laws when they are signed. However, it is also true that the Constitution does not give these signing statements any actual legal significance. Historically, signing statements have been used to clarify or limit signed bills, but never to extend them.

Folks who think that judges legislating from the bench are bad should be extremely riled up by this, but I predict that won’t happen. Many will fall back to either “It has no actual legal force” or something effectively equivalent to “He’s trying to protect Americans so it is OK.” Neither of these statements work for me, because President Bush will use this new illegally granted power as if it were really the law, and I only hear that second statement used by people already supporting the President. If a Democrat takes the White House in the next election (scary though that thought is, it currently seems very probable), I can’t see many of the people I know who now say that of President Bush being OK with President {$Whatever_Liberal_Wins}. If the President wants to protect Americans, I think that laws and the Constitution should be more important rather than less important than they used to be. Without our laws and Constitution, we’re not the America we were 10 or 20 (or more) years ago. It makes me agree with this recent comic:

Now I open up the floor for all supporters of President Bush to tell me why I’m wrong.

[tags]President Bush ignores Constitution; creates laws on his own, Legislating from the White House[/tags]

For years now, I’ve been told that it’s the liberals who hate America. But it’s the conservatives I’ve been seeing lately doing things that seem counter-American (illegal wiretaps, authorizing torture are two examples that matter to me). The latest of these seemingly America-hating conservatives is Newt Gingrich, who feels that freedom of speech must be done away with to fight terrorism.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.

Continue reading “Apparently, Newt Gingrich hates America”

A man is shot dead by police in New York hours before his wedding, and so far, not a lot is known about the shooting. That hasn’t stopped the narcissists from trying to get their faces on television so they can admire themselves a little more.

Early Sunday morning five undercover police officers fired a hail of 50 bullets at three men as they left a bachelor’s party at a night club in a neighborhood in Queens, N.Y. One of the men, Sean Bell, a 23-year-old delivery man and father of two, was killed just hours before his scheduled marriage ceremony.

. . .

The police have claimed that the undercover officers identified themselves and fired only after Bell’s car rammed two police minivans. But witnesses at the scene say the police failed to identify themselves and that the young men thought they were fleeing thugs from within the nightclub.

Continue reading “Media whoring, publicity grabs, after questionable New York shooting”

Participating in the worldwide task of protecting flyers from implausible security risks, screeners at an Auckland airport denied a diabetic man the right to take his clearly labeled insulin on a plane with him. Thank goodness all the other passengers were spared the risk of a man preventing himself from suffering severe medical problems.

Mr Russell said check-in staff at Auckland Airport told him he could not take his medication on board because it was dangerous.

When flight crews found out that Mr. Russell was having medical problems but that he had been denied the right to take his medicine on the plane with him, they were upset with airport screeners and worked to give him what care they could.

He started feeling ill during the flight last month and called a flight attendant.

“They asked where the insulin was, and they weren’t very happy when they found out I wasn’t allowed to bring it on board.”

Mr Russell praised cabin crew who tried to keep him conscious and gave him oxygen until they arrived in Christchurch.

But he fell into a coma shortly before the aircraft landed and spent two weeks in Christchurch Hospital.

But at least airline officials apologized

Qantas yesterday apologised to Tui Peter Russell, who had a severe attack on the plane and was in hospital for two weeks.

I just wonder how many times this sort of thing has to happen before the sheep who support the current anti-liquid, anti-traveller, screw-safety-but-put-on-a-good-show for folks-who-don’t-realize-this-is-not-security “security” will accept that the false positive rate for this security method exceeds the old way’s false-negative rate by such a huge margin that we are likely to lose more lives to this than to actual attacks. I don’t understand how people can support putting human lives at risk every day because doing so might (but probably won’t) prevent an attack every few years (or hell, let’s say every few months, which still leaves the lives risked far worse with current security than with old security).

The story isn’t totally negative, though.

Mr Russell said Qantas had offered him a free return flight from Auckland to Christchurch, but he also wanted help from the airline to recover $500 in hospital and medication bills.

[tags]Liquid security threat causes diabetic to suffer coma, Thanks for keeping the water off the plane – I’ll fly again after I get out of the hospital[/tags]

Hmmmm, I haven’t had a good Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) story in a while. Let’s fix that now.

Microsoft, 2 years after launching MSN music store, is now moving its anti-consumer-technology efforts into making the Zune as unfriendly as possible for restricting consumer rights. Continue reading “Microsoft – Bought DRM music from us? Fools!!!”

A recent co-worker posted a link to this article on one gun-owner’s experience at CostCo when he carried his gun into the store and wore it openly. When he was leaving, a member of the store staff saw the gun and told him that store policy was that members had to leave firearms outside the store. Rather than agreeing to follow the company and store rules which he agreed to when he joined as a member, it sounds to me like he was rude and acted rather childishly. I’ve known a lot of gun owners/permit holders/gun carriers. None of the ones I’ve known seem to me likely to act this way, but maybe I’m mispercieving them. Continue reading “Do a lot of gun owners act this way?”