Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional Government in Emergency

Originally posted by CarlosG
There is another thread about a law change in the UK allowing the prime-minister total power in an emergency.

However, if you Look at the E.0. in question it does not afford the President that which many seem to be a$$uming, nor does it allow the Executive Branch total control over All aspects of government.

Read the E.O. in it's entirety and Then form your opinion, don't simply "act/go" on the words of another. Inform yourself, educate yourself, and Then form your opinion.




 

Originally posted by Sean Osborne
intrepid,

Does that frowning apply to NGC2736? I see no reminder to him in this this thread from yourself on what is or is not forwned upon posting material.

Originally posted by NGC2736 :

Personally, I think every third lawyer in America needs to be shot as a rabid beast of prey. The only problem is what the hell to do with the other two to keep them out of mischief.

Let's not be selective in our admonitions, shall we?



[edit on 27-5-2007 by Sean Osborne]

You're joking right? Lawyers have been the butt of jokes since lawyers have been in existance. BTW, that was not directed towards any ATS member, your post was. And I quote:

If, as you leftist loonies are fond of calling them, the "Bushies" were as Nazified fascists as you claim - none of you would be alive at this moment to post such over-the-top insanity.

Can you see the difference?

Hmmm... no point in starting out on a good foot is there? Join right up and be aggressive and belligerent on your first post. Way to go. Really impress the natives that way huh?

Must have taken a diplomacy course from Dick Cheney's "with us or against us" school of foreign policy.

CarlosG, I read that link with great interest. It sure does sound fishy that both nation's would get such self-made powers at the same point in time, relatively speaking.

And grover, my reference to lawyers ought to strike a chord with you, as at one time it was illegal to practice law in your state (then a colony).

Intrpid, sorry to have put you on the spot there, my phrasing does tend to be colorful at times. I will try to wait a couple more posts before I pointedly defend myself.

Virginia is a commonwealth, which is as far as I can figure it out is a place where all those who have the wealth treat the rest of us commonly.

If Virginia is typical of a commonwealth... they are strange places.

You have to fail an I.Q. test or pass a stupidity test in order to run for office here... we have some real winners holding office here... ever hear of Virgil Goode? Talk about a social embarrassment. Can't take him anywhere.

John Warner is a good man though... even if I do disagree with the majority of his stances, he's a good man and no rubber stamp Republican either... he bucks the bushies on important matters... something the Republican party would be far better off with more of.

In their push for party unity the Republicans have lost diversity.

This falls right into place considering that many feel that "they" need another catastrophic event in order to further the cause of the North American Union. They know that Americans will never go for giving up their country, their constitution, indeed, their way of life without some fantastic reason.
So, when they have their next "staged" disaster, they will be better prepared to take total control of the situation. This is scarey!
What amazes me is that Americans are sitting on their duffs doing nothing as opposed to Canadians who are fighting to keep their country. We continue to do nothing, let the "elite" have their way with us and our lives.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if there were plans underway to nuke someplace in North America. I hope I'm wrong but all the signs are pointing to that kind of catastrophic event.

Originally posted by squidboy real question whose the owner of the team

Follow the Money

No, absolutely not. I will not give MC a pass for his comment bashing lawyers. He deserves some heat. And I will tell you why.

The only professionals standing up for those held unlawfully in Guantanamo, the only professionals who have sued this administration for their anti-constitutional acts, the only professionals who have been a threat to this fascism, have been lawyers. And just a minor correction, lawyers don't write the laws - politicians do.

Lawyers ENFORCE the laws.

The Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land. Now, who do you want enforcing it? That's right, lawyers. Good job. Now go back to sleep.

Oh, one more thing - why do you think Bush had all those US Attorneys fired? It's because they were LOYAL to the CONSTITUTION.

Chew on that all you suckers who bash lawyers. And don't call me when you're in a jam.



- seattlelaw

You may be a lawyer but you are wrong, lawyers DO NOT enforce the law, the various branches of government enforce the law. Lawyers represent individuals in individual cases that may or may not involve getting the government to do what it supposed to but that is not the same thing.

seattlelaw, the topic is not lawyers, and I will not debate the merit of said species, as the word so seldom applies. If you feel the need to defend your social status, start a thread on bottom feeding and other habits of the species Litigious Carnivorous. I will be glad to come there and debate the finer points of why I would chose a pimp over a lawyer as a son-in-law.

Now let us return to the OPs subject.

NGC,

Hey bra, if YOU take the thread off topic with ridiculous attacks on the people responsible for TRULY safeguarding your freedoms you better be prepared to take the heat for it. Your weak and unsupportable backhand to your betters does not win you the respect you seek and undermines any past or future arguments you make here.

And Grover, I understand your point but you are also incorrect. Lawyers (whether civil or criminal) prosecute cases on behalf of groups or individuals or corporations or municipalities SEEKING to enforce the law. If they WIN the case for their client(s) they have ENFORCED the law by vindicating their client(s) rights UNDER the law. The law is validated/enforced by the win.

The PUNISHMENT phase of the process (which is I believe what you refer to), whether by enforcing (collecting) a civil judgment or enforcing (imprisonment) a criminal sentencing enforces the JUDGMENT reached. That phase is about reparation or punishment. The law has already been enforced whether or not the civil defendant is judgment proof or whether the criminal defendant has died prior to commitment under the sentence.

Without lawyers to enforce it the rule of law is merely speculative philosophy. So don't follow MGC and take the easy road of brainlessly clubbing the very people who chose a career out of their honor and respect for the Constitution and the Rule of Law upon which your very freedoms rest. Remember, the pen is mightier than the sword - and thank your lucky stars for that.

[edit on 30-5-2007 by seattlelaw]

seattle, it's that damn pen that has us worried in the first place. And I will leave off arguing with you the merits of lawyers. As a matter of fact, I DID over-generalize by some measure. Not all lawyers can be bad or evil, but it seems that a disproportionate number make it into politics.

And this new proclamation by the shrub is surely open to be interpreted by some to be legal authority to act as he will.

Originally posted by seattlelaw

Without lawyers to enforce it the rule of law is merely speculative philosophy. So don't follow MGC and take the easy road of brainlessly clubbing the very people who chose a career out of their honor and respect for the Constitution and the Rule of Law upon which your very freedoms rest.

While I'm not a lawyer, I have taken several law courses in college and I can vouch that this is what we were taught.

There are many of us who have fought against this dark dictatorship which now descends across our country, so I respectfully ask you, seattlelaw, what are you and your fellow lawyers doing to help us save our Constitution?

All help apprreciated.

NGC, based upon your previous remarks I can only wonder how your personal experience influences your opinion of an entire class of professionals. Bad divorce?

Dubya is interested in using whatever he can to enforce his agenda. Necessarily this requires that he undermine the law or control it by controlling who is prosecuted for what regardless of what the facts show. When the US Attorneys, each of whom were appointed by Dubya, refused to so undermine the rule of law they were terminated.

What he has done is worthy not only of impeachment but imprisonment IMO.

Denis Diderot was right.... to "hang the last lawyer with the guts of the last priest"... of course there have been comments like "First we kill the lawyers" since Roman days... can you just feel the love? There is a good reason why lawyers drift into politics... there are not many career paths for the morally challenged.

Remember Roberto Gonzales is a lawyer who has used the devil given talent of talking out of both sides of his mouth to justify, among bush minor's so many crimes, the use of torture.

OK seattlelaw, since lawyers seem to be germane to this thread after all, because we must look at how a legal 'face' might might be put on this document, I will delve into why lawyers make most people want to wash their hands.

Unlike doctors, whose creed is to do no harm, the lawyers seem to follow the creed of do no harm to those who pay the best. There is no moral basis to avarice. Lawyer X will fight tooth and nail to get every drug peddling, throat slitting, gangster off the hook who has the ill gotten gains to pay through the nose. He will stand in court and tout the worth of the lowest scum this planet has to offer, for a fee. And defend his actions by saying that he is simply fulfilling his duty to provide defense for a person as it is their right under the Constitution.

Then, after some successful years of defending people he would never willingly associate with, he quits the practice of law and goes in to politics. The usual model is to run on an anti-crime platform. Here he will scream and decry the lose of American values, and the danger to citizens that crime presents. He will seek to obtain, through the same oratory tactics that won so many cases in the past, a cushy well paid job at taxpayers expense.

Upon election to office he will do things like introduce more laws, that cost outrageous amounts to enforce, and vote him and his cronies a pay raise, along with a cost of living increase. All the while he will be schooling himself on more and better ways to make a profit through graft and corruption.

Eventually, provided he has the talent to rise high enough in the cesspool, he will be in a position, on some committee or advisory board, to effect national political policy. Here is where the big bucks roll in, because the lobby lizards of D.C. will shovel it on him till he's ass deep in green, with an offshore bank account to prove it.

All the while, election after election, he will trot out his old skills as an actor/liar that served him so well back when he started as a defender of the Constitution, when he was just another huckster defending pimps and perverts. He sees nothing wrong with a lifetime spent using his talents and energy in service to the highest bidder, be they murderers or the innocent. Because his best service was always for sale, he lacks any moral depth to even see the error of such actions. And always he will think, and tell anyone who will listen, what a noble patriotic thing he has done, and how he has contributed to our nation.

Then, when it seems that he can go no higher, when it seems that his worldly wealth needs no more bolstering by larceny and kickbacks, he will get the final chance to be a powerful person. Some succubus in that group that are the real powers in the world will convert him, soulless husk of humanity that he is, to write one final lawyerly document, to be used by the President of the United States. A presidential directive putting America in the hands of the monsters.

Yeah, gotta' love that class of people who make a business of selling their souls, and all the while feeling hurt because they don't get enough love.

NGC,

Your view of the system is quite shallow and based in the myth of Law and Order, Boston Legal, and other such television dramas.

The fact is that 99% of those charged with criminal offense have no cash for decent threads, let alone lawyers. Those individuals (and I know many) who work for the disenfranchised poor in this society, fighting it out with criminal prosecutors who have the state's resources at their fingertips (including professional witnesses) are indeed noble souls working for peanuts.

Now there are corporate lawyers who defend the insurance, tobacco, firearms and other industrial giants of the world who do quite well. Some of them earn between $300-500,000 each year. Not bad wages. But that's a small percentage of the total. And, like Alberto Gonzales, they have sold their souls to the devil. Every profession, from your daughter's future husband the pimp to presidents of the US of A, has such people.

Whaddya gonna do?

But make no mistake, as in most lines of work, while there are lawyers making a killing at what they do and the vast majority work hard for their clients to earn bread and pay their mortgage. Those who attend law school as a vehicle to get rich quick are sure to be disappointed.

You have a very large opinion about something of which you know next to nothing based upon what you have stated.

Have you denied ignorance or embraced it?

NGC,

Now I know better than to believe that a few posts can remove someone's bigoted biases, but I thought I would introduce you to one of the many lawyer-politicians who are not bought and sold and who are not beholden to this administration. Here is an individual who had the cajones to vote against the recently passed funding for additional terrorism in Iraq.

He has also done much to push politicians towards supporting funding new renewable energy technology development which would remove much of whatever terrorist threat actually does exist. In other words, he's just another selfish lawyer turned politician, lining his own pockets.


www.house.gov...

seattlelaw, I must beg difference with you on the shallowness of my views. It is your own over inflated view of worth and ego that cause you to see things in this light. I am scarce some 'still wet behind the ears' babe in the world, relying on TV trash to form my opinions.

And I agree that most lawyers don't step right into the lap of luxury and a new Beamer. Like any guild, you need first prove your worth with a lowly apprenticeship. This shows your masters your loyalty to the system that spawns such. How else will the overlords of sleaze know whom to reward with the perks of ill got booty? Your loyalty to the overriding principle of soulless behavior is thus proven, and your future worth judged.

And in your drudge work, you give the value to those you serve it's due by lackluster effort, most often using the torture wheel of plea bargaining to lessen the load on you and your higher placed cousins. All the while dreaming of the coming salvation of a place in the bowels of a firm like Dewey, Cheatum, & Howe when you are elevated to a suit and tie that isn't bought at K-Mart.

As to the 99% who never pay, that is at variance with studies on recidivism that shows a marked relationship between crime and the amount of attorney fees owed. Sure, the poor and downtrodden, in their rags are a fact, but they scarcely constitute much of a burden on prosperity. They are simply the practice cadavers on which you learn your trade.

And at least my son-in-law the pimp has a job where he speaks English, as opposed to a dead language, and his clients are willing, and usually leave with a smile, which is more than most people do from any legal entanglement. And though, like your customers do, he is paid ahead of time, he doesn't find most of his clients in a dungeon.

And what of those of your ilk who do work for the state, with all of it's resources? Are they not lawyers too? And yearly, as the new political drafts create vacancies, are not some of you from the minor leagues called forth to battle on the other side of the fence? Does it not speak volumes for your morals that you can go from defense to prosecution in such ease? To ooze from one moral position to another with scarce a tremble or shudder can hardly endorse you as paragons of virtue.

And speaking of these stalwarts of safety, what good is this plea bargain system? It is not justice for either faction. If a man is guilty of a crime, then it is injustice to lessen his punishment out of laziness. Conversely, it is horror to force the innocent to choose between forever and a much lesser time in the dungeons of the beastmasters. All it serves is the conviction rate, so highly publicized when prosecutors go on to run for office.

Now the law of averages says that there must be a few good apples in every rotten barrel, and throughout this missive I have used the pronoun "you". Please understand that I do not mean that in a personal way, using it only as representative of those you proudly associate with in your chosen line of work, and not as a slander towards yourself. (Can't be to careful with you tricky lawyers, even on the faceless internet.)

But even you must admit, and perhaps take perverse pleasure thereby, that the reputation of lawyers cannot be without fact. If you are not getting your fair share of the loot and perks, then you are in a minority, and perhaps ought see if someone is cheating you of your due. Then again, you may not yet have passed to being a journeyman in your craft.

And about that last comment on my embracing ignorance, at least I was not lured to such a seedy profession. I am sorry that you are tarred with the same brush as your fellows, but it was your choice to become a loathsome creature in the eyes of most men with an ounce of morality in their souls.

So, knowing our respective positions on this matter, can we let it rest? Can we return to the constructive give and take of the thread? I for one hope this is so.

Jay Inslee seems to be a fine person in a hard job. There is no grudge on my part towards those who use their gifts and talents towards the betterment of mankind.

I never said, and still don't, that ALL lawyers are lowlifes. We could joust till hell freezes over, bringing up arguments to bolster our position, but let us not bore the rest of those who follow with off subject statements.

Again, let us concentrate on the ideas that the OP started this thread with.