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The electronic media are abuzz today as they were yesterday afternoon, with the delightful news that the judicial system worked again this week and Paris Hilton is going back to jail where her pampered little ass belongs. I no longer own a television so I am not aware of the coverage there but I'll bet from my glimpses of CNN Headline News while working out that its gushing with Paris news today. One story I saw yesterday showed a correspondent on MSNBC holding a piece of paper that read "We Love Paris"
Who cares??
How many fathers are in jail today for not paying child support on time who would love to have a "medical condition" pop up in the middle of the night that would get them out of the slammer?
While the media run around on another pointless feeding frenzy of another non story (in the league of Britney Spears getting fat and the owner of Anna Nicole Smith's awesome chest dying) there are real issues out there that dont get squat for coverage. CNN recently hired someone to be their celebrity news correspondent. Someone to give the world the latest in Paris News. Give me a break.
If you have read President Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" you are aware of the excoriation he gives (and rightly so) to the media and to the sheeple who promote it for turning non-news into news. Were he alive, Edward R Murrow would be in the cardiac care unit of a hospital if he had to watch what "news" has become. We no longer get news from the news we get sound bites that can be parlayed into advertising dollars.
If the news was really about the news, instead of hiring a All Hilton All the Time correspondent, CNN would have hired someone to cover real issues. Like Bush's threat of martial law. The next time you are drooling over Paris news, why not think about these issues. And ask yourself why you dont see a single mainstream news outlet covering this topic?? The reason you don't is because coverage of real issues that could really affect you doesn't boost ratings and that means lower value of each advertising second on the tube and elsewhere.
Whomever said "Be afraid. Be very afraid" hit the nail on the head.
Martial Law:
Take the administrations approval of warrantless NSA domestic spying. U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that it “undisputedly” violates the Fourth Amendment, “undisputedly” violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, violates the First Amendment, and violates the separation of powers. Not mincing any words, she added: “The Constitution itself has been violated.”
In an editorial on February 19 of this year, aptly entitled “Making Martial Law Easier,” The New York Times wrote: “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.”
Or take his policy of denying U.S. citizens due process. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the Supreme Court in the Hamdi case, said the President does not have a blank check in times of war. “We necessarily reject the Government’s assertion that separation of powers principles mandate a heavily circumscribed role for the courts,” O’Connor wrote. And she explicitly warned about an Executive Branch approach that “serves only to condense power into a single branch of government.”
Condensing power into a single branch is precisely what concerns me about Bush’s new directive.
The directive also uses fudge words that President Bush was fond of while he was trying to find ways to justify torture. The continuity of government directive says it will be implemented in a manner “consistent with” the Constitution and “consistent with applicable law.”
Compare that with Bush’s February 7, 2002, order governing the treatment of detainees: “The war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm. . . . Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm — ushered in not by us, but by terrorists — requires new thinking in the law of war, but thinking that should nevertheless be consistent with the principles of Geneva.”
In that context, Bush used the phrase “consistent with” to justify actions that were antithetical to the Geneva Conventions.
You have to wonder whether he’s using that phrase in a similar way when it comes to the Constitution in times of an emergency.
What’s more, there are the comments by former high-ranking officials in the Bush Administration who have said that martial law is coming if we’re attacked again.
Then there is the revision to the Posse Comitatus Act, which Bush whisked through last October.
Interestingly, some in the Bush Justice Department didn’t believe this Congressional change was even necessary. On October 23, 2001, then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty, then-special counsel in the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a memo to Alberto Gonzales, then-White House Counsel, and William Haynes II, then-general counsel for the Pentagon: “We recently opined that the Posse Comitatus Act, 18 USCs.1385 (1994), which generally prohibits the use of Armed Forces for law enforcement purposes absent constitutional or statutory authority to do so, does not forbid the use of military force for the military purpose of preventing and deterring terrorism within the United States.”
Matthew Rothschild - The Progressive
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