Russ makes a fuss
 

WASHINGTON Mar 13, 2006 (AP)— A liberal Democrat and potential White House contender is proposing censuring President Bush for authorizing domestic eavesdropping, saying the White House misled Americans about its legality.

"The president has broken the law and, in some way, he must be held accountable," Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told The Associated Press in an interview.

A censure resolution, which simply would scold the president, has been used just once in U.S. history against Andrew Jackson in 1834.

I keep posting good things about Russ. We are living in bizarro world.

Feingold kicks ass. It is amazing that we've gone from "spend millions to investigate accusations of decade-old sexual harrassment" to "what would Iran think of us if we scolded the President for willfully violating the Fourth Ammendment of the US Constitution".

Right on. I'm sick of this mamby pamby shit. Call Bush on it.
Saw a Feingold for president bumper sticker in the grocery store lot a few weeks back. He's a contender for my vote.

Absolutely. The only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in the first place deserves major support.

He's half a commie and he's still got this Libertarians deepest consideration. These are desparate times.

The old link is broken here is an updated story.

I never understood why so many libertarians preferred Republicans to Democrats. The Republicans somewhat agree with libertarians on money. The Democrats somewhat agree with libertarians on civil liberties. Is the cash really more important?

You answered your own question HM

I never thought Democrats were that committed to personal liberty with their opposition to freedom of association, continuous social experimentation, and lack of comittmentto property rights which are fundamental to personal freedom. How free can you be without any assurance that you'll keep what you create? This gets to the two competing visions of freedom. The libertarians are freedom of people and the Democrats are the freedom from people. The Dems ran a long way from their roots as the limited government party when they had to distance themselves from racism.

I think libertarians got suckered by the idea that the GOP was committed to a smaller less intrusive government. We ignored the dangerous combination of the "Christian" right, the fact that they've been the internal improvements (big government projects favoring their supporters over others) party since the collapse of the Whigs, and the nonsense about inheirent powers which Lincoln started.

:lol2:

Where'd you guys get that crazy idea, anyways? The GOP? Smaller government? Since when?

I'm surprised to find there are still some people that are still under the delusion that the party that parades around as "conservative" is actually interested in conserving anything. I was last told by a GOP supporter that the term applies, and always has, to only "family values". Not spending, not government, not people's rights. Family values.

Well, that cleared up my confusion right there.

...and yet, so many Libertarians leans towards a party that openly shreds the constitution, supports an illegal war and involvement outside the borders, allows the country to bleed away tax dollars, etc, etc.

I second Happy Monkey's confusion in this.

Sure they are. They are interested in conserving their own power/wealth!

None of the parties, not even the Libertarians, will let you "keep what you create". Government has to be funded, and that funding has to come from what the people in the country create (Unless we go back to the plundering of other countries as a revenue stream). The difference is only in how taxes are distributed, and what the total is, not whether you get to keep what you create.I'm not sure what you mean by that.As the Democrats distanced themselves, the Republicans sidled up close. I don't see that as a net loss for the Democrats.

Well, Kits, I am unpersuaded that the Republican Party is actually shredding any part of the Constitution, openly or covertly. The arguments presented for this idea satisfy the anti-Republicans, but no objective observer. The war is not only quite legal (except to anti-Republicans of a fringey nature), it is by definition right: it is being fought by democracy against dictatorship. It is inherently impossible for this to be wrongful. It might be destructive, it might be expensive and push up the national debt, it might be widely lethal.

So was World War Two. I fear, Kits, that your misapplied partisanship will forever make the concept of just war, known and understood by Christians anyway since St. Augustine of Hippo, something unknown to you. Fortunately, my vision is not so blurred.

Nor am I an isolationist, either -- it's unsustainable, and there's no going back to it in this day and age. American isolationism enjoyed a privileged existence for a century and a half or so, for most of that time because of the British Royal Navy's putting up a barrier other nations that might have been inclined to meddle in the Western Hemisphere found insuperable. Isolationism also worked better when the fastest way of moving anything, goods, people, or information, was the sailing ship at about five knots. The steamship and the transoceanic telegraph cable began to erode its viability, and the Roosevelt Administration was far-sighted enough to abandon isolationism around the turn of the last century. I am persuaded they were wise to do so.

So anyway, the Republicans, for all their manifold sins and wickedness (and these will happen to the Libertarian Party too, once it's actually responsible to make and execute policy to any large degree), are occasionally a lot nearer libertarianism in not only their thinking but also their doing than the entire pack of icky socialists clogging the arteries of the Jackass Party ever will be until they kick the socialists out and themselves embrace libertarianism. (Memo to self: Continue, do not interrupt, respiration.)

So what's your take on Bush's displeasure in the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine? Is he inherently wrong for opposing the results of a democratic election?

My bad - we're not actually at war, anyways, so I guess this point didn't matter. The president is simply involved in a very large scale police action that involves the US military and didn't need an actual declaration of war or anything like that. Nope -- we're perfectly legal here! Carry on!

1. Axis powers attack American soil by bombing a Hawaii Naval Base. US enters WWII to fight them.
2. A "spy" we're not even sure exists provides false information about Iraq WMDs that did not exist and were shown not to exist by UN inspectors again and again. US enters Iraq.

I don't understand your comparison, here.

I'm not all about isolationism, either. I just know that the US getting its grubby little hands into every country in the world is a bad idea. From the small scale CIA "interventions" in Central America that have gone oh-so-well to the bigger issues we're dealing with these days, it is very clear to me as to why the US is getting involved and it has zero to do with the administration feeling the need to spread democracy. We would have swept into many, many other countries long ago if we felt we were the great savior of people in need of fair government and we would have taken care of North Korea had we truly felt threatened by WMD. Hey, not only do we know the dictatorship of North Korea has a developing nuclear program, they were even threatening us with it before the Iraq ordeal began.

Who did we elect to use our military might against?

No matter how much the Administration is rolls this one in sugar, we're not in Iraq to "spread democracy" and "save the people". I fail to see how a true Libertarian can support these actions.

I'd like to see the Jackass party at least grow a pair and stand up to what the administration has done (wiretapping, PATRIOT act, etc), but it seems they can't even stand on their own feet or actually express any solid goals at this point.

I seem to recall a fellow named Hitler getting elected too -- once, anyway. And Hamas has a similarly genocidal bent, just to enhance the resemblance! Surely you are not so naive as to expect something good to come out of the genocidal shitheads coming out on top?

Does anyone even expect civility and good order of a state run by Hamas? I'd say the evidence is all the other way: these are people who by their own words are committed to making a people vanish, and from a land they once had, yet, and had it before the current batch of "look at us, we're the victims here" bomb makers. (I don't buy it when somebody claims he's the victim, but behaves like the perp.) Anyone who thinks the Israelis will quietly go along with Hamas' genocidal program has slipped the bonds of reality in a large way.

It's absurd to get grabby over a former Ottoman province that amounted to nothing until a bunch of highly motivated Jews moved in and made a success of the place. Now, we get "give it back!"

Eddie Izzard

I agree with your last point, Kits, though not with much else. While the Democrats haven't been selling anything I've wanted to buy for sixteen years now, and that's a looooong time for a major party in a democracy to lose my interest, the Dems seem to me particularly untrustworthy nowadays. They just keep getting worse and worse, to the point where I am no longer aghast at their antics but merely disgusted. Look at them: tax and spend is still their shibboleth. Socialism and economic illiteracy their policy and watchword. They have no plan to win the war better than the one the Republicans are implementing, so any war-winning effort and policy will be the Republican package with a big donkey sticker on it -- not exactly truth in advertising, is it?

All this says to me, "Friends don't let friends vote Democratic."

I knew I was doing some bad writing there but I had to get to work. I was referring to the LPs comittment to the Bill of Rights and to FDR's famous "freedom from" speech. Two different concepts of what constitutes freedom.

I already heard this ridiculed and lambasted on Fox 'fair and balanced'. One guy even used the 'T' word again.:eek:

They're the same concept, really. You can't have one without the other in any meaningful way.

No. That is a very personal thing. What you are calling freedom I'd call security and it comes at the cost of others' freedom. I would say that the first generation of Americans were more free than we are now but by the "freedom from" definition they were less free. People chose the frontier because they were free to risk ashedding the limitations of their society. This is why the federal system had so much potential before it was essentially destroyed, folks could choose the level of risk they were willing to take by living in a place that matched their personal definition. I understand that we live in a mass society now and the frontier is closed but people are the constant.