Monday, May 12, 2008

Let Me Write the Law. I'll Give Myself Immunity

Man, Tony Rezko would love to be in this situation. I'm sure that the executives from Enron wished they could have pulled this off. As Congress begins to debate the FISA act, our Congressional Democrats are allowing the telecom companies, who clearly broke the law, to write new laws that give themselves retroactive immunity for past illegality.

Think about that for a moment.

The companies that committed the violations are actually writing the laws to get themselves off of the hook. Our President has pushed this. In fact, he has demanded that all new FISA laws contain immunity for the telecom companies. He said he'll veto any new bill that doesn't contain this provision.
After 9/11 our country was rightfully angry about what happened and wanted to do everything possible to prevent it from re-occurring. When the President asked them to tap the phones of Americans, they complied without question. However, they knew very well that this activity was illegal. They have been tapping the phones of criminals for years. However, this spying was always was accompanied with a court order that gave them permission to do so. They knew they were acting outside of the law.

The Bush Administration took advantage of everyone being all lathered up and began to enact several illegal and unconstitutional measures that removed constitutional rights from the citizens and transferred those powers to the executive branch. This is just one piece of a much greater pattern of abuse of powers from this administration and their blatant disregard of the due process that is guaranteed in our Constitution. As they grab power, the people lose.

I'll use this great quote from Reagan to articulate the point.

"I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts."

This government is expanding at unprecedented levels. Our liberties are obviously deteriorating at the same rate.

A Real Conservative Jumps into the Race


Bob Barr, the former Congressman from Georgia has entered the Presidential race as a Libertarian. Mr. Barr is a former Republican that has been very critical of the Bush administration and the way that it has conveniently disregarded the founding documents to the left as it waged the war against terrorism. The complicity of today's Republicans made Mr. Barr abandon the Republican Party in its entirety. He later joined the ACLU to combat the deprivation of civil liberties.

Barr, 59, quit the Republican Party two years ago, saying he had grown disillusioned with its failure to shrink government and its willingness to scale back civil liberties in fighting terrorism.

Although he doesn't really have a real chance of winning the highest office in the country. But, I think his candidacy is much more than winning one election. It's about making a point against the radical exploitation of executive powers by our President and the blind support from the Republican Party that has enabled these abuses. Enough is enough!

Mr. Barr will surely be attractive to the greater than 20 percent of Republican voters who chose somebody besides McCain for President, even when he has already locked up the Republican nomination.

Good luck Bob.