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U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft Resigns
andyring writes "In a move that will undoubtedly make many /. readers jump for joy (although perhaps not myself), Attorney General John Ashcroft announced he will resign, according to multiple news sources. While many here dislike him, others have more favorable opinions of him. He became the point man on the USA Patriot Act, which typically ignites harsh opinions on both sides of the aisle."
Reader cnsc1rtr , referring to the AP's version of the story, writes "He gave Bush a five-page, handwritten letter in which he stated, 'The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.'"
'The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.'
That is the BEST NEWS EVER! How come he didn't tell us about this before?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Tomorrow Cheney!
oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
does that mean i can take off my tinfoil hat?
I thought that it was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein that did that....
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I'm going to commit crimes just to spite him.
./revolution
Good riddance! I wonder how long it will take to undo what he has done.
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
'The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.'
Yey we won! Now we can pull out of Iraq. No more airport security lines. I just hope W. can read script.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."
Phew! Finally. Guess we don't need a DoJ anymore.
At what cost?
In all honesty I can only say good riddance.
It's almost unbelievable that the USA would allow him to work on bills such as the Patriot act.
What I don't understand is why are you guys not protesting?
Have you given up?
-={ Security does not exist - give up }=-
Is it possible that Bush will appoint a more conservative replacement for Ashcroft? That's been the danger, especially since up to four Supreme Court positions may open up this term. How would a more conservative Attorney General affect the US?
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
For the Supreme Court...
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Set them free. Freedom is a good thing, right? :-)
I hear there's a former Iraqi Information Minister who's still looking for a job.
I for one can't wait for his music career to jump off!a shcroft.si ngs.wbtv.med.html
"LET THE EAGLE SOAR, LIKE SHE'S NEVER SOARN BEFORE!"
http://www.cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/
Do you see how my mind works? It's like a laser!
You know, when you look back Ashcroft wasn't so bad. He turned the FBI around and changed its mission radically. While the FBI has had a lot of false positives, it hasn't had many false negatives.
Compare that to the last AG, Janet Reno. The only thing I remember her doing was frying a whole bunch of fellow citizens down in Texas...and refusiing to prosecute/investigate a bunch of Clintonistas.
He resigned because of health problems and exhaustion. Apparently he has been having various medical difficulties over the past year or so. I don't think this one was Bush's decision.
In any case, I don't know whether you were intending to but you've alluded to an interesting point. Justice Ashcroft anyone?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"He gave Bush a five-page, handwritten letter in which he stated"
;)
I have a new found respect for John Ashcroft, it's pretty respectable that he thinks Bush will read five-pages of his letter.
At least he "still believes"
Error 407 - No creative sig found
'The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.'
Am I correct in assuming that his resignation is what is bringing this achievement to pass?
Thank God. I wish Ashcroft could read this.
I am a Christain and a Conservative and I am glad to see him gone. His record on states rights vs federal law proves that the current administration cares nothing about the will of the people and only about the power of Federal law. I dont want the state coming in and telling me what I can and can't put in to my body or who I can have sex with. I could just see this guy dragging homosexuals in if the amendment had passed. I dont want the state to come in to my marrage or a gay marrage anymore than I want the state to come in to my relationship with God.
This guy got his rocks off dragging people in to court over matters that should never have been law in the first place.
See you around John.....
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
And Bush had to have someone read it to him.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
the serious 2- I recall a quote attributed to the then director of the patent office, requesting the patent office be closed, as all concieveable inventions had been made.. both the quote and the historical snip I give seem to have a spooky similarity
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.
Does that mean the Patriot Act can be repealed now?
So they figured out how anthrax from US Army labs was mailed to various members of congress and media outlets, and captured those responsible?
Oh...they haven't done that, eh?
Well, at least gays can't marry.
Like who, Joseph Stalin is dead?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
I knew I should have hurried up with my idea for a four horsemen of the apocolypse t-shirt, now one of the horsemen has resigned....
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Your thinking short term. Now that he isn't a AG, he can be a SCJ.
1) Firefox 1.0 Released
2) Halo 2 Released
3) John Ashcroft Resigns
4).... Profit!!!
What a day it's been!
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Is Mr. DMCA himself, Orrin Hatch.
You will long for the days of Ashcroft.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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Before 9/11, Ashcroft's top priority was targetting pornography. Since 9/11, he has been embarassingly ineffective in capturing terrorists.
...That I get to see lady Justice's boobie again?
That may be worth a trip to D.C. for that alone!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Whoa ... Stalin was an authoritarian communist. Probably the complete opposite of what is considered "conservative".
Take a look at http://www.politicalcompass.org
I think it happened the same day that the war in Iraq ended. Remember Bush in his flight suit costume with the big "Mission Accomplished" banner? You see, the Iraq "war" ended because the US had successfully attacked Iraq, which had bombed the ... oh, jesus, forget it. I can't even keep up with all of the bullshit our government spews out anymore.
I don't respond to AC's.
You are most certainly wrong. I'm not even sure if Palmer was the worst one. With all due (dis)respect to Mr Ashcroft, nothing even remotely like Palmer Raids happened during his tenure. Palmer was the key factor behind the 1917 and 1918 "Espionage Act" and "Sedition Act", comparing to which Patriot Act is a teddy bear. According to this law, an elected member of Congress was refused a seat because of his pacifist views - and sentenced to 20 years of prison just because he didn't believe that America should join the slaughter of World War I (more on Victor Berger you can find here. The Palmer Raids themselves rendered the question of American "constitutional rights" simply irrelevant - it appeared there were none of them. To quote Wikipedia:
Starting on November 7, 1919, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations without warrants, concentrating on foreigners. They arrested over 10,000 people (...) In January, 1920, another 6,000 were arrested, mostly members of the anarcho-syndicalist union Industrial Workers of the World. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 Communists were rounded up in a single night. All foreign aliens caught were deported.
The public reaction to these raids was favorable, stirring up a storm of anti-communist sentiment. In a murder eerily similar to the lynching of Germans during World War I, a group of young men in Centralia, Washington hanged a radical from a railway bridge. The coroner's report stated that the communist "jumped off with a rope around his neck and then shot himself full of holes." For most of 1919, the public seemed to side with Palmer.
I don't want to defend Bush & Ashcroft, but it's simply naive to see them as "the worst that happened". No, it's not the worst in American history. When you look on the whole American history it turns out that only the post-WWII period really resembles contemporary understanding of constitutional democracy (and even then there were authoritarian hiccups of McCarthyism or Watergate).
....Colin Powell is also expected to resign in the near future. So if you are celebrating the fact that Ashcroft, the biggest loonie in the Bush admin, is leaving, also be fearful that the only semi-sane dude in the building will soon be gone, too.
It's an HONORARY KNIGHTHOOD. He's not "Sir". There is no conveyance of title in the order of knighthood that he holds.
From the British Royal Family's website:
http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page489.asp
"Foreign citizens occasionally receive honorary knighthoods; they are not dubbed, and they do not use the style 'Sir'. Such knighthoods are conferred by The Queen, on the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, on those who have made an important contribution to relations between their country and Britain. Foreign citizens with knighthoods include the former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Chancellor Kohl, President Mitterrand and Mayor Giuliani of New York."
So, Doc Smartypants, I guess you need to just STFU until you know what you are talking about.
The resignation was written November 2nd. Election Day. You're right, this is a custom that's been going on for many years.
In this case, I think it to be true. I just saw it on CNN'S site. It mentions some remarks by President Bush in regards to the resignations of Ashcroft and Evans.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
"He gave Bush a five-page, handwritten letter in which he stated, 'The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.'"
I hope he attached an audio book version to the letter.
Something intruiging...
He is a moderate and would go a long way to make Democrats more comfortable.
No, Ashcroft is moving to the bereau of weights and measures to serve as the standard of "Absolute Conservative". As such, it is impossible to appoint a more conservative replacement.
Doubtless, Bush will attempt to redefine the "Absolute Conservative" standard when selecting Ashcroft's replacement, but experts agree that he's likely to appoint a "Facist Extremist" by mistake.
The entire text of the letter is here.
Taken out of context, it loses very little. The man claims we've beaten both crime and terrorism.
Have we?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Tomorrow it's almost certainly Colin Powell. There is general agreement that he will leave, having been forced into an outsider's viewpoint by the ranks of the neoconservative faction of the Bush administration, i.e. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz to name just a few.
While I am absolutely elated that Ashcroft has resigned, I have no doubt that we will most certainly see four more years of the same foreign policy that has dogged the US since Bush's first inauguration. That, combined with the fact that Ashcroft has already done significant domestic damage viz. the PATRIOT act paints a rather bleak picture for the US in the coming years - even if the inside players are different.
The stage has already been set.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
Gee, it must suck to have a label like "conservative" misappropriated and turned into an insult meaning "authoritarian". See how it feels when the President does the same with the word "liberal", which has been turned into an insult meaning essentially "communist"?
Cry me a fucking river. After the besmirching that my state, Massachusetts, got from nutjob Shrub, I really feel bad for the poor conservatives that their ideology has been wrested from them by authoritarian whackjobs like Ashcroft. Boo-fucking-hoo.
Sheesh, I am getting so tired of hearing this "dead man" crap. It reminds me of the dirty hippie "the sky is falling - I mean, floating away - I mean, evaporating" environmentalists.
Yes, Ashcroft is a choad. Yes, it's a good thing he resigned (maybe - we'll have to wait and see if he ends up on the Supreme Court which would suck even harder). But please - there are FAR better reasons to call Ashcroft a nimwit other than this stupid whiny "but he lost to a DEAD MAN! *gasp*" nonsense.
For anyone who hasn't heard the full story - the dead man referenced above died shortly before the election. His wife said she was going to fill his seat but they couldn't replace his name on the ballot with her's because of a procedural holdup (apparently he died too close to the election). It was very well publicized that his wife was going to hold the seat and the governor went so far as to declare that he would appoint her to the seat if her recently deceased husband won the election and she was still, somehow, procedurally barred from filling his seat.
Jesus, get the story right - Ashcroft lost to a dead man's wife (w00t! Go Dead Man's Wife!).
Stalin's at the top left, Ashcroft's at the top right. They're both on the top, which is the "authoritarian" side. They differ on economic issues, but that's irrelevant, because the attorney general's job is not an economic one. On the relevant issues, they're similar.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
My guess would be everybody's favorite ex-Mayor Rudi Guilliani. He's got government experience. He's a former district attorney who fought the mafia. He's conservative. AND he's been shilling like hell for Bush the last few months.
My guess is that this has all already been worked out and the resignation and nomination were all worked out weeks ago. All part of the plan to groom him to run for Prez in '08 or '12.
--
RumorsDaily
Conseravatism is a very subjective word. I wouldn't consider any neo-con to be a conservative, but I tend to use it in casual conversation to mean someone that tends to vote Republican.
... and before I get flamed, fascism is simply authoritarianism on social issues and a corporatist economic policy.
In my opinion, Ashcroft is a fascist
His legacy lives even now; check the front page of CNN.com.
You'll see a huge photo of Ashcroft's face under the main headline, next to another headline, "Airport X-Ray Sees Through Clothes."
Paging Dr. Freud.
Halle-FUCKING-lujah!!
Eisenhower, Bradley, Halsey, MacArthur, etc all were permitted to accept honorary knighthood from the Brits. It's just something cute nowadays. Back in 1787 it was a real consideration.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It's unlikely that Ashcroft would make it onto the Supreme Court, but Bush might use him as a stalking horse. Nominate him, watch the country go crazy, watch the Democrats use up all their time and political capital fighting off Ashcroft... then when everyone is worn out from blocking the Ashcroft nomination, Bush appoints a relative unknown who turns out to be as bad or worse.
The Democrats need to watch out for this, and keep up the resistance against anyone on the right wing that Bush tries to put on the Court. We still have 45 seats in the Senate, that's enough for a filibuster. The ability to filibuster is there for a reason -- to stop a President and 51 Senators (or in this case 55) from the same party from putting an extremist on the Supreme Court. The Democrats need to make sure Bush comes up with nominees that are at lease somewhat moderate.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Sure, they differed on economic principals, Stalin wanted his government to own everything and run all the companies, Ashcroft wanted the coporations to own everything, and run the government. Though I would bet that Stalin would have been just as happy to have a capitalistic system under him, as long as he was in charge and could rule with an iron fist.
Where they show a particular similarity is on the way they approched dealing with criminals, take them off the streets, throw them in a hole and deny them any sort of due process. Yes, Stalin tended to just kill them, but I'm convinced that Ashcroft would have done the same if he thought he could get away with it. The guy seemed to have a wet dream about the US being a police state. The fact that he is now gone is a good thing for the US.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
...Ashcroft's statue was seen disrobing upon hearing of his resignation!
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Ready. Set. Code.
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A Bush presidency, sans Ashcroft and with Arafat dead, or as good as. That sounds just about right to me.
This being Slashdot, I'll likely get modded down for expressing heretical opinions, but I approve of Bush's hardline foreign-policy stance. It's his domestic policies I don't like -- cutting taxes while there's a war on, raising (some) trade barriers, and of course, the Patriot Act.
Actually, I should qualify that: I don't even oppose the powers given to the FBI. What I object to in the Patriot Act is the lack of transparency -- specifically, the lack of judicial oversight. If the FBI need certain powers to successfully prosecute the fight against terrorism, fine: but USE THEM IN THE OPEN. This National Security Letter bullshit is just that.
It seems to me that Ashcroft, with his "phantoms of lost liberty" speech, was the driving force behind the damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead approach that built the Patriot Act without the necessary democratic safeguards.
I'm heartily glad he's gone.
Now, if Arafat would only hurry up and die...
Better the devil you know ..
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After arresting scores of innocent people at the instigation of this and other war criminals and convicting the big amount of 0, zero, zilch, nada of activities related to terrorism.
In one case the damning evidence was a video of the alleged terrorists spending time in Disneyland.
And the only ones the neo-ayatollahs have any hope of "convicting" of any terrorism related activities they have safely guarded them in Guantanamo or Abu Gharib, were confessions can be conviniently extracted at the pleasure of the torturers and kangoroo courts will sentence in accordance to the public, on record wishes of the reelected Orwellian master overlord.
And the poster of the article still has the indecency to find something good to say about this individual.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Can the president read five full pages?
But none of the desire. He stated during the campaign that he doesn't want to be part of Bush's cabinet. Hence my comment regarding dreaming.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Ah, got you at last, ZiakII! You finally show up on our radar screens, and our agents will be at your door within minutes. Please cooperate fully. Thank you.
Oh, wait a second, they didn't do that either.
This being Slashdot, I'll likely get modded down for expressing heretical opinions,
No, you'll get modded down by attempting to preempt.. (but not by me, obviously)
but I approve of Bush's hardline foreign-policy stance. It's his domestic policies I don't like -- cutting taxes while there's a war on, raising (some) trade barriers, and of course, the Patriot Act.
This isn't K5, the commies haven't yet taken over the asylum.
I'm heartily glad he's gone.
I am as well, largely because I felt his religious enthusiasm created an appearance of nonsecularism in the judiciary leadership, and even though I don't know enough of what he did to see whether or not he ended up weakening secularism the appearance of hostility to secularism is enough to cause concern.
OTOH, I find Spencer Abraham more obnoxious, and him in concert with Cheney have halted any useful conservation, tax, etc policies on energy, which I find stupid and inexplicable.
Now, if Arafat would only hurry up and die...
They _still_ are having difficulty figuring out what brought his illness on.. I wouldn't put it past the Mossad (the CIA is too incompetent IMHO), but yeah, I think Thomas Friedman got it right in his last editorial on Arafat's legacy.
I have issues with Bush and his policies, but I have to say, watching leftists mope, wail and gnash is much more entertaining. I recall rightists during the Teflon Don Juan (Clinton) administration going off the deep end, but I don't think they have the mercurial creative bipolar thing that the more touchy-feely, sensitive leftists have. Also, watching naive college students who really REALLY care get deflated is kind of entertaining in a purely guilty Nelsonian-Schadenfreude way.
inwhich they said that it is tradition for all of the President's staff to turn in their resignations and then the President decides whose he'll accept.
This is too late in the discussion, but I just saw it a little while ago and Ashcroft strikes a nerve. So here goes.
Ashcroft reminds me of Ministers of Interiors in Third World dictatorships. He is a tool for the dictator and the regime, and not there for his main job, that is protect the people.
His argument that he did achieve his objectives in protecting America from crime and terror is much like the guy who sprayed pepper on his front lawn, to ward off elephants. When his neighbor told him there are no elephants here, he says : "See! It works!"
Not a single case in the past 3 years was prosecuted successfully as a terrorism case, with conviction. All of the high profile arrests where Aschroft made press conferences with huge pomp, touting them as major victories in the war on terrorism, are just for show. For example, the Lakawanna Six (Buffalo, NY) Yemeni-Americans all pleaded to lesser charges and were convicted. The case of the African American bunch in Oregon is similar. The same goes for the Holy Land Foundation in Texas, and other Muslim charity cases. Most cases that Ashcroft said to be terrorism end up getting convictions for immigration irregularities or ID fraud (SSN, Driver License, Food Stamps, ...etc.). No terrorism at all, except the constant drumming up of fear in the masses, and no one remembers what happened to the poor souls who got caught and made examples of.
Of course, the Patriot Act, Secret Evidence, and the eroding civil liberties that goes with it, is exactly what is wrong, since terrorists have achieved an objective with these things.
There are other incidents that show his short comings as well, such as making a big deal of a statue with the bare breast, his fundamentalist view, him attacking Islam while in office, and more.
Someone should really make up a web site about Ashcroft Watch or something, lest people forget all this.
Well, his letter of resignation says "I believe that my energies and talents should be directed toward other challenging horizons." What does that mean? Is a Supreme Court Justice position waiting for him (despite the poster above who said that it has to be someone with judge qualifications)?
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Remember the Clipper chip? Ashcroft sided with the ACLU in opposing it. Even more ironically, Kerry supported it.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
*One time* foreign terrorists killed 3000 people in the US. It's a terrible tragedy, but so are the 45,000 people who died in car accidents that year. And the 700,000 people who died of heart disease.
:-(
We have gone insanely overboard in how we handle terrorism. America is founded on the freedom of the people. So much so that these freedoms are written into our founding document - the Constitution. When someone tells me that we need to "protect America" from something that had a negligible statistical effect by taking away my Constitutional rights, I'll rightly tell them they're stupid, crazy, or very ignorant.
1st amendment - "right of the people peaceably to assemble" - except near the Republican National Convention in 2004.
4th amendment - "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause" - except when the Patriot Act says it's OK.
5th amendment - "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" - except if we can find some way to call them enemy combatants, or we declare they can't be tried publicly due to security considerations.
6th amendment - "accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial" - see above.
8th amendment - "nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" - except in Abu Ghraib, or (maybe, how can we know?) Guantanamo.
10th amendment - "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." - this one's been shot to hell for ages
If I tried to live by the Constitution, I'd end up shot by federal agents inside of five years.
Now that he's gone, those terror alert level colors have simply got to go. I mean, helllloooo, ever heard of earth tones? And everyone knows pink is the new red. Sheesh.
His work here is done.
From the CBS.com report:
"Several names have emerged as possible successors to Ashcroft. The biggest is Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York."
Oh, that's a good idea. Let's let Giuliani do for America what he did for New York City: turn it into a police state in the name of reducing crime.
America's homeless^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hterrorists be warned -- you will be shown no mercy.
Fuck. I miss Ashcroft already.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Does anybody else think a five page handwritten letter sounds a bit psychotic?
PREDICTION: Unless Bush has problems passing a law allowing Corporate America to loot social security (instead of the neo-cons looting it), the "Alert Level" thing is going to quietly fade away.
Wow, troll bait, but I have to bite. If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Social Security has seen a bigger surplus in the first 4 years under Bush than it saw under all 8 years of Clinton.
Click here to see the numbers for yourself.
You'll also see that we only saw one year of REAL surplus under Clinton - 2000. There was an 86.6 billion surplus in the budget. 1.9B the year before, but that's not anything to have a party over.
One other interesting thing you'll see is that the national debt, in terms of GDP, was higher under Clinton than under any other President in the presented data. Under Bush, the national debt has fallen from 49.5% GDP at Clinton's highest point to 36.1% in 2003.
Finally, if you look at total government spending in terms of GDP, we're spending on average less now than we did under Clinton.
The compartmentalization of agencies was most certainly not for no good reason. It was to make law enforcement less effective, which was a good and important goal of our governmental design.
The thing that Mr. Ashcroft and the rest of the executive branch have forgotten is that we need to be at least as suspicious and limiting of our government as of the people from whom our government is supposedly protecting us. Instead, the executive branch has taken the absurd view that their enemies are "Evil", and thus that their own actions are--definitionally--Good.
This is a dangerous premise. History has taught us that governments very reliably stray from Good. Every single act undertaken by a government must be carefully evaluated with questions like, "Does this make us the bad guys? Is this worse than what we're trying to solve?" And even after such questions have been asked, we need to still assume that they've been answered incorrectly, and place harsh limitations on the fundamental things a government can do.
This is the origin of bans on interdepartmental cooperation, statutes of limitation, limitations on search and siezure, the specificity of of search warrants, and so on. After all, if your government were always the good guys, you wouldn't need any such protections, right?
Godwin is watching.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
- How could you tell how much of it was lies? It
might be true that the average human being was better
off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only
evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own
bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in
were intolerable and that at some other time they must have
been different. -- George Orwell "1984"
Really. So constitution democracy includes locking people away without charges, trials, or lawyers? Constitutional democracy allows for the FBI to write themselves a warrant, plant bugs and video cameras in your home, and install a key logger in your keyboard for 6 months without telling you. Constitutional democracy intended for the 'Miami Model' of silencing peaceful demonstrations and public protest?I'll see your free speech suppression and raids on ______ists via the Sedition Act of 1918 and raise you secret searches and the elimination of habeas corpus via the "War on Terror".
"well, he's just now resigning...."
Clearly due to the fact that his stint as Attorney General was interfering with his duties as Sith Lord.
is more appropriate:
Thank The Fuck Christ!
None of the above percentages are relevant - the bottom line is the government is spending MORE than it is taking in. The ongoing spending binge is going to catch up sooner or later.
Unfortunately until there are harsh consequences directly to the politicians that overspend, there is no forseeable end to this practice.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
Video of Ashcroft singing.
What I hate most about it is not the Act itself (though it has its despicable parts) - but the fact that as a citizen, I wasn't represented by my congressmen when they passed it. It came out of the blue, it was voted on, and nobody read it...
Worse, my fellow citizens don't seem to care about this important fact: that a law so broad and reaching as this Act became law without their so-called representatives reading it, understanding what it said, and debating its merits! This isn't what these guys were elected for, right?
But this is what America has become - don't read the fine print on that contract you sign - and don't read it if it only likely will affect others who elected you - fuck 'em, right? Because you are now in office, and who gives a damn about the people, right? Just give me some more cash, err, donations - Ms. Rosen and Mr. Valentti, all will be OK. The people - screw them!
Who cares about the people - they'll elect me again, right? Shit, Bush is the dumbest motherfucker on the planet (you know they are thinking this) - yet the people spoke up for him again, too. Me - I'm a shoo-in!
Damn - I would at least have a little more respect for my so-called representatives had they at least read it (how many pages was it - 500?), questioned it, debated it, discussed it - and then, only then - voted on it in full conscience on what they were voting for. Hell - you would have thought at least one of them (well, there was one guy - Russ) would have had issues. I also wonder why no one even bothered to ask how such a large piece of legislation just "suddenly" appeared out of thin air - like it was waiting in the wings for just this sort of thing (9/11) to happen.
Assuming, of course, that nothing more meets the eye on that little bit of history either - I still have my doubts on the why's, how's, etc of that day - questions that have yet to be fully answered in my opinion - things don't add up.
But maybe, just maybe, if we close our eyes, plug our ears, and scream "nyha, nyha, nyha!!!" - it will all go away - ya think?
At least, it seems that is how the rest of America is...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If you were the CEO (President) of a corporation (US Government), and you were spending money (invasion of Iraq), leveraging assets (tax cuts and financial deals that will be dealt with in 5-10 years...) and giving away products or just slashing prices faster than Walmart (read: cheap timber sales, VERY cheap land deals for mineral extraction due to archaic federal law that seems impossible to get rid of, etc), the Board of Directors (Congress) would have your resignation secured in about two days.
But I suppose all these good businessmen Republicans who want to run Government like a business (I think that means, suck all the $$$ out of it, pay your employees as little as they will tolerate while working them to the bone while you're "managing" at your vacation home or playing golf) have got it right. Yep.
But farmers aren't businessmen, either. So what do I know?
No. Justice Clarence Thomas' major experience was as in-house corporate counsel for Monsanto, a company noted for repeatedly obtaining fraudulent government licenses to market harmful chemical products.
But Ashcroft won't be a Supreme Court nominee. Bush will want a much younger person, so the appointment will have a longer effect on society.
Bless the lord for the gifts that we receive. All at once: Firefox 1.0, Fedora Code 3, John Ashcroft resigning.
namely, Asscroft...
Blogging because I can...
...does that mean that Ashcroft will have to come back?
You must think in Russian.
The Power of nighmares
This is a bbc documentary series that questions the Bush administration spin.
The federal constitution supercedes state constitutions. Many states do not carry the death penalty on their books and do not execute anyone accused for a crime that is convicted by state courts. However, cases in the federal government's jurisdiction are, by definition, not tried under state (or protectorate) law but under federal law. See separation of powers...
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Wait, you say - there was no terrorist attack at Y2K new year. Exactly! When Richard Clarke made the same warnings to Clinton that he made to Bush, Clinton began meeting with him every morning, and they established measures to help hinder terrorists.
What I'm telling you is that Bush did a bad job of preventing the terrorist act that actually happened, that he had advisors telling him to watch out for it, and that the American people rewarded him for his willful ignorance.
See:
It just goes to show the sort of people who are appointed to the top Gestapo office in the USA.
John Ashcroft is a member of Opus Dei, an ultra medieval Catholic cult approved by the Vatican. The Pope is a member and approves this organization which has only recently opened a major new address in New York, a new building near the UN.
Opus Dei, from what I've learned about them from Gore Vidals writing, is a sick cult of neofascist ultra fundementalists who have gone back into the Dark Ages as inspiration for a secret religious ideology where members are expected to reject modern science, feminism, and humanity as anti-god. Like thier medieval inspirations, members subject themselves to blood rites.
Ashcroft himslef is said to wear a spiked brace that cuts into his skin as a symbol of his original sin and Christs suffering on the cross.
That's kind of silly rubbish that runs the highest offices of law in the USA.
The USA is insane. Run.
Does any one notice that he hand wrote his note because he felt that his computer was not secure enough to keep his resignation a secret until he was ready? Does this not epitomize the whole problem? The Attorney General of the United States of American can not trust his own computer.
I have to take exception to your analysis of the data presented by the CBO. Good data link, but I think your analysis is wrong.
Under Bush, the national debt has fallen from 49.5% GDP at Clinton's highest point to 36.1% in 2003.
No, that drop occurred under CLINTON, largely between 1995 and 1999. The debt was at 49.5% GDP in 1993, just after Clinton took office. When he left office in 2000, it was at 35.1% GDP. Under Bush, the public debt as a percent of GDP has floated between 33.1 % and 36.1% - pretty much about the same as when he took office.
You will also note that the public debt value listed does include social security. When social security is excluded (see the column labeled "on budget"), you see that, as a percentage of GDP, under Clinton the yearly operating deficit of the government fell from a 1992 value of 5.5% to a 1999 value of less than 0.05%, while under Bush it has risen to 5.0% of GDP.
If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Social Security has seen a bigger surplus in the first 4 years under Bush than it saw under all 8 years of Clinton.
True - it has. This was to be expected as the Baby Boomers haven't retired yet. That money will be needed for their retirement benefits later. If you think that Social Security ought to be counted towards whether the government has a surplus or deficit, I hope you aren't expecting checks when you get older. I don't know if you remember Gore talking about a "lock box", but that is exactly what he was talking about. As you can see, the money ~is~ being spent now, and will have to be borrowed back later to pay the Baby Boomers.