Category: Soap Box

Intelligence Czar Can Waive SEC Rules – BusinessWeek Online – MSNBC.com

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.

Five bucks says Halliburton is the first to get a free pass. I’m sure there will be some patriotic anti-terrorist reason for doing this. There has to be, since we have a tough talking wartime president in office who wouldn’t dream of doing anything that wasn’t in the best interest of each and every citizen, providing they make at least $250k/year, vote Republican, and are in a traditional marriage consisting of one man and one woman…

Why was the SEC created? To police corporations for fraud and abuses of the market. Laws and agencies like the SEC are created as a result of need, and if we needed the SEC before you can bet that we need it now. Can you imagine if the NSA had given Enron a free pass because as an energy company their business was a matter of national security? How much longer might they have dragged out their soul sucking demise and how many more lives would have been ruined by an even larger implosion?

In 2003 Dick Cheney stated on NBC that he had severed all ties with Halliburton, and this claim was refuted in a report by the Congressional Research Service. Would it have been possible to determine that our vice president was still in the pocket of Halliburton if they had their SEC requirements lifted? How will we know when, where and by whom our politicians have been bought if those companied get a free pass by one of Bush’s henchmen?

While the article above only describes the power to exempt from SEC requirements, it makes a chilling proclimation in the beginning: “President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security” I wonder what else is contained within that ‘broad authority’. What other gotchas are waiting around the corner? Will protestors be declared “political combatants” and have their rights stripped?

The world changes in lots of little steps. Even technological changes take time to spread and be adopted. Our government changes in the same way. Large radical changes are resisted, while the small nips and cuts go largely unnoticed. If we ever did get a political party in power that cared for the people, it would take several terms of office just to find all the points of corruption that have been slipped into various bills, laws, and presidential orders. A frequent theme in science fiction is a world where corporations rule and the government has a token presence. Looks like the future is just around the corner.

Researchers surprised to find no link between marijuana, lung cancer / Study’s findings apply even to heavy pot smokers

Now all we need is a study to determine whether naturally grown and unprocessed tobacco has a direct link to cancer. The assumption has always been that it is the naturally occuring tar in the smoke that causes cancer; but since marijuana contains tar as well it either isn’t the direct cause or its effects are negated by something else in marijuana smoke. With all of the chemicals added to American cigarettes during the curing and manufacturing process, it would be of little surprise to me if the cancer causing agent was a result of chemical processing and not part of the tobacco leaf’s natural makeup. It would be an interesting twist if tobacco, as smoked by Sir Walter Raleigh, is safe and that it is actually tobacco companies that cause cancer. 🙂

-Chris

First and foremost, I am not what you would call a conservative; my views have varied from Anarchist to Libertarian to Federalist. I want to have as little to do with the police myself, and I certainly don’t want them barging into my house. On the other hand, I do believe in due process; and if the police can meet the criteria to satisfy a judge that there is sufficient cause for a search warrant that they should be able to obtain one and execute it promptly.

The Supreme Court has been arguing a case this week that was referenced in an Associated Press article titled “Police Search May Divide Supreme Court“. When I first saw the title I assumed it was yet another Republican driven erosion of our rights and freedoms. Yet, when I read the article I was surprised to find that it wasn’t about police entering a residence on weak probable cause, or a warrant obtained without sufficient supporting evidence. No, this case, which has made it all the way to the supreme court, is about whether the police entered the house ten to fifteen seconds too soon after announcing themselves. The defense is not arguing that the warrant was illegal, they are arguing about seconds of time.

Pardon me if I find this a little petty. Pardon me if I find myself pissed off that the most important court in this country is debating how many seconds the police, executing a legally obtained warrant, need to wait outside. They waited three to five seconds, and the defendant believed he deserved fifteen seconds, and for this his conviction based on evidence in his house should be thrown out?

Our president believes he can personally authorize phone taps, bypassing the legally established FISA court whose job is to vet the supporting evidence presented with phone tap requests. Our president authorized, and implemented via the NSA, a program to analyze the call records of millions of Americans, without a warrant and in violation of federal laws regarding carriers sharing telephone records. Someone in the White House leaked the identity of an active CIA agent. We invaded a country based on faked intelligence, proving that nobody in the white house is able to judge the merit of presented evidence. The 2000 election was won on a technicality, because the Supreme Court ruled a recount could not be completed by an arbitrary date. Our president believes that as a ‘wartime president’ he has been elevated to King and that he can now make decisions normally beyond the scope of the executive branch, and he can’t even imagine a day where he is called to task for illegally starting the war that embued him with these powers in the first place.

We have much bigger problems in this country than whether legally obtained search warrants require five or fifteen seconds between the police announcing themselves and entering a residence. If the powers that be in this country continue to argue that they know better than the courts in regards to authorizing phone taps, you can bet that searches are next in their sights. Our system is based on checks and balances, and we have kept from teetering over the edge into a police state by the separation of powers where the executive branch must petition the courts to issue search warrants. An unchecked police/CIA/NSA would search first and file paperwork later. (If you have any doubt of this just search Google for ‘warrantless eavesdropping‘.) At our current rate of progress in Operation Freedom Erosion the police won’t even need to think the word warrant to sift through your phone records, bank records or underwear drawer before GWB is even out of office; assuming he doesn’t declare that the two term limit doesn’t apply to wartime presidents…

Right now I want to see the Supreme Court taking the Executive Branch to task for their unconstitutional behavior, not debating how many seconds it takes to flush a baggie of coke down the toilet. I appreciate the freedoms and rights we have in this country, and I know that Booker Hudson Jr. deserves the full benefit of due process, but his case seems pretty petty when I see our rights being flushed down that same toilet sometime in the next ten to fifteen seconds on the political clock.