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  #1  
Old 04-16-2007, 03:38 PM
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Alberto Gonzales

Nice letter from a group of prominent conservatives (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1610767,00.html):
Quote:
AMERICAN FREEDOM AGENDA
910 SEVENTEENTH STREET, NW SUITE 800
WASHINGTON, DC 20006
WWW.AMERICANFREEDOMAGENDA.ORG



April 16, 2007


Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500


Honorable Alberto Gonzales
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001


Dear Mr. President and Attorney General:

We, the undersigned co-founders of the American Freedom Agenda, urge the Attorney General to submit his resignation and the President to accept.

Mr. Gonzales has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances.

He has brought the rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm.

He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice.

He has embraced legal theories that could be employed by a successor to obliterate the conservative philosophy of individual liberty and limited government celebrated by the Founding Fathers.

In sum, Attorney General Gonzales has proven an unsuitable steward of the law and should resign for the good of the country.

The President should accept the resignation, and set a standard to which the wise and honest might repair in nominating a successor, who will keep the law, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.

Sincerely,

Bruce Fein, Chairman Richard Viguerie David Keene Bob Barr John Whitehead
I particularly like this part:
Quote:
...He has brought the rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm...


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  #2  
Old 04-16-2007, 03:49 PM
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Gonzalez serves at the pleasure of:

1. Congress
2. President
3. Media
4. My dog ate my homework
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  #3  
Old 04-16-2007, 04:08 PM
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Bruce Fein...a prominent conservative?
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  #4  
Old 04-16-2007, 04:24 PM
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Fein's prominent enough for a dummy like me to recognize him. He got his mug on TV during some controversy a few years back. Iran-Contra perhaps?

I'm not asking anyone to agree or disagree with him. It's just a nicely written letter from a bunch of guys who were probably delighted to see W get elected back in 2000.
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  #5  
Old 04-16-2007, 04:40 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dculkin View Post
Nice letter from a group of prominent conservatives
D--don't act so hurt--you kind of asked for it with your opening line.

Bob Barr? Didn't you read Diego's thread about how he was now a paid lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project and had simultaneous with getting that gig, declared he was now a libertarian?
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  #6  
Old 04-16-2007, 05:16 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John Doe View Post
D--don't act so hurt--you kind of asked for it with your opening line.

Bob Barr? Didn't you read Diego's thread about how he was now a paid lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project and had simultaneous with getting that gig, declared he was now a libertarian?
Libertarian is conservative, no?
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  #7  
Old 04-16-2007, 05:22 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dculkin View Post
Fein's prominent enough for a dummy like me to recognize him. He got his mug on TV during some controversy a few years back. Iran-Contra perhaps?

I'm not asking anyone to agree or disagree with him. It's just a nicely written letter from a bunch of guys who were probably delighted to see W get elected back in 2000.
Despite my smart-assed response, I agree with those guys. I'm closer to the Bob Barr types than to the Bush types.

B
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Old 04-16-2007, 05:26 PM
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Originally Posted by Old300D View Post
Libertarian is conservative, no?
No. Libertarian is libertarian and conservative is conservative.

For example, libertarians generally believe in abortion, are against dope laws, believe in a defense force in the true sense of that word, believe that the national government should be designed as outlined in the constitution and have a truly federal relationship with the states.

Libertarians believe in free markets, free trade, deregulation of all industries, no proffessional standards (ie, get rid of PE's and the Bar).

No, not conservative by any stretch. Many conservatives agree with some of the libertarian philosophy as do many liberals. Both groups tend to pick the parts they like and think the rest are too wacky.
B
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  #9  
Old 04-16-2007, 06:11 PM
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Originally Posted by Botnst View Post
No. Libertarian is libertarian and conservative is conservative.

For example, libertarians generally believe in abortion, are against dope laws, believe in a defense force in the true sense of that word, believe that the national government should be designed as outlined in the constitution and have a truly federal relationship with the states.

Libertarians believe in free markets, free trade, deregulation of all industries, no proffessional standards (ie, get rid of PE's and the Bar).

No, not conservative by any stretch. Many conservatives agree with some of the libertarian philosophy as do many liberals. Both groups tend to pick the parts they like and think the rest are too wacky.
B
Well, I follow that, I suppose I was thinking in the right/left sense. But in a 2D map, I suppose Libertarian is on the right/anarchist and "Conservative" is on the right/authoritarian. Not to get too technical or removed from reality I hope...
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  #10  
Old 04-16-2007, 06:22 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dculkin View Post
Fein's prominent enough for a dummy like me to recognize him. He got his mug on TV during some controversy a few years back. Iran-Contra perhaps?
Not everyone who claims to be a Conservative is, in fact, one.

Quote:
Originally Posted by dculkin View Post
...from a bunch of guys who were probably delighted to see W get elected back in 2000.
I would have to see the record on that.
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  #11  
Old 04-16-2007, 11:20 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BENZ-LGB View Post
Not everyone who claims to be a Conservative is, in fact, one.
Right. John Ashcroft and Tom Delay are two prime examples of non-conservatives. Neither of them respects tradition. Fein, on the other hand, appears to me to be a true conservative. One illustration of his conservatism was the following article he wrote just before the recent elections explaining why true conservatives should not fear a Democratic Congress (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.fein.html):
Quote:
Restrain this White House

By Bruce Fein

Suppose Democrats capture control of one or both chambers of Congress in November. A conservative would instinctively cringe. On the domestic front, Democrats still don’t get Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which teaches the superiority of free markets to government-regulated markets euphemistically styled “industrialization policy” or otherwise. Smith lacerated the economic philosophy of modern Democrats: “The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.” With Democrats controlling Congress, we could expect command-and-control laws requiring windmills on every farm, photovoltaic cells in every home, and hydrogen fuel in every car.

In foreign affairs, Democrats are stalled in the horse latitudes. They have no philosophical starting point. They sport no strategy for confronting the nuclear ambitions of Iran or North Korea, the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the growing friction between Japan on the one hand and China and South Korea on the other. Beating swords into plowshares and making war no more is not a strategy but utopian faith.

So conservatives should weep if Democrats prevail in the House or Senate.

But perhaps not.

The most conservative principle of the Founding Fathers was distrust of unchecked power. Centuries of experience substantiated that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Men are not angels. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition to avert abuses or tyranny. The Constitution embraced a separation of powers to keep the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in equilibrium. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.”

But a Republican Congress has done nothing to thwart President George W. Bush’s alarming usurpations of legislative prerogatives. Instead, it has largely functioned as an echo chamber of the White House.

President Bush has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) for five years by directing the National Security Agency to target American citizens on American soil for electronic surveillance on his say-so alone. The president has defended his warrantless domestic spying with an imperial theory of inherent constitutional power that would empower him to open mail, break in and enter homes, or torture detainees, even in violation of federal criminal statutes. He has concealed details of the spying program indispensable to rational congressional oversight—for example, the number of Americans targeted, the earmarks employed to select the targets, or the intelligence yield of the spying. He has never explained to Congress why FISA could not have been amended to accommodate any unforeseen evasive tactics by al Qaeda in lieu of simply disregarding the law. Indeed, Congress has amended FISA six times since 9/11 at the request of the White House, and the Senate Intelligence Committee was informed by Bush’s Justice Department on July 31, 2002, that FISA was working impeccably. The president has also refused to disclose what legal advice he received to justify the NSA’s warrantless domestic spying at its inception. And Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has confessed that President Bush is operating other intelligence collection programs that are unknown to Congress and the public and that will never be revealed, absent leaks to the media.

Republicans in Congress have bowed to the president’s scorn for the rule of law and craving for secret government. They have voted against Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold’s resolution to rebuke Bush for violating federal statutes and crippling checks and balances. They have resisted brandishing either the power of the purse or the contempt power (with which it can compel testimony) to end the president’s violation of FISA and to force full disclosure of his secret foreign-intelligence programs. Indeed, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, is sponsoring a bill that in substance endorses President Bush’s FISA illegalities and authorizes an electronic-surveillance program warrant that would enable the NSA to spy on Americans indiscriminately without the particularized suspicion of wrongdoing required by the Fourth Amendment.

Republicans in the House and Senate have been equally invertebrate in the face of presidential signing statements that usurp the power to legislate. In approximately 800 cases, President Bush has both signed a bill and declared his intent to disregard provisions he believes are unconstitutional, the equivalent of a line-item veto. For instance, he signed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 prohibiting torture while issuing a signing statement declaring his intent to ignore the law in order to gather military or foreign intelligence.

The Presentment Clause of Article I, Section 7 gives the president but two options when presented with a bill passed by Congress: sign or veto the bill in its entirety. That was the holding of the Supreme Court when it found a line-item veto statute unconstitutional in 1998’s Clinton v. City of New York. The president is obligated to veto a bill that he believes to be unconstitutional; Congress may override that judgment by two-thirds majorities. In the 217-year history of the United States under the present Constitution, Congress has overridden only 28 constitutionally based vetoes, and on only one occasion did the override engender a constitutional battle between the president and Congress. Presidential signing statements further usurp the legislative power by resulting in the enforcement of laws that Congress has not passed. Members vote on all the provisions of a law collectively in the expectation that all will be executed if the president approves.

Signing statements also flout the president’s obligation in Article II of the Constitution to execute the laws faithfully. The Founding Fathers were acutely aware of the example of King James II, whose practice of suspending or dispensing with laws he believed encroached on royal prerogatives eventually occasioned his overthrow in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. With such precedents in mind, the framers of the United States Constitution directed the president to execute the laws without fail. The Republican Congress, however, has acted as a disinterested spectator while President Bush has stolen its legislative authority in plain view and exercised the tyrannical power of making, executing, and conclusively interpreting the law and the Constitution.

The most frightening claim made by Bush with congressional acquiescence is reminiscent of the lettres de cachet of prerevolutionary France. (Such letters, with which the king could order the arrest and imprisonment of subjects without trial, helped trigger the storming of the Bastille.) In the aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Bush maintained that he could pluck any American citizen out of his home or off of the sidewalk and detain him indefinitely on the president’s finding that he was an illegal combatant. No court could second-guess the president. Bush soon employed such monarchial power to detain a few citizens and to frighten would-be dissenters, and Republicans in Congress either cheered or fiddled like Nero while the Constitution burned. The Supreme Court ultimately entered the breach and repudiated the president in 2004’s Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Republicans similarly yawned as President Bush ordained military tribunals to try accused war criminals based on secret evidence and unreliable hearsay in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention. The Supreme Court again was forced to countervail the congressional dereliction by holding the tribunals illegal in 2006’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

Republicans have shied from challenging Bush by placing party loyalty above institutional loyalty, contrary to the expectations of the Founding Fathers. They do so in the fear that embarrassing or discrediting a Republican president might reverberate to their political disadvantage in a reverse coat-tail effect.

Democrats, for their part, likewise place party above the Constitution, but their party loyalty at least creates an incentive to frustrate Bush’s super-imperial presidency. This could help to restore checks and balances. For the foreseeable future, divided government is the best bet for preserving both the letter and spirit of the Constitution. If Democrats capture the House or Senate in November 2006, the danger created by Bush with a Republican-controlled Congress would be mitigated or eliminated.

But that only applies to the next two years. If Hillary Clinton wins the White House in 2008, conservatives should be equally zealous for Republicans to recapture Congress.
IMHO, that is an honest conservative position.
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  #12  
Old 04-16-2007, 11:29 PM
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the libertarians sound pretty good to me until they start talking about foreign policy.

then....yikes!

tom w
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Old 04-20-2007, 06:50 PM
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Originally Posted by t walgamuth View Post
the libertarians sound pretty good to me until they start talking about foreign policy.

then....yikes!

tom w
That's where I tend to diverge from strict Libertarian dogma as well....

But hey... nobody's perfect.

As political parties go, the Libertarians are ABSOLUTELY the "lesser of the evils". By far.

Mike
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Old 04-20-2007, 09:16 PM
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Originally Posted by mikemover View Post
That's where I tend to diverge from strict Libertarian dogma as well....

But hey... nobody's perfect.

As political parties go, the Libertarians are ABSOLUTELY the "lesser of the evils". By far.

Mike
Yep, you and I are remarkably close in our political views.

I doubt that the Libertarian Party will ever be a serious contender simply because the members are so damned independent. Republicrats bemoan the lack of party discipline within their organization but what they have now, I doubt the Libertarian party will ever have, because I cannot imagine (small l) libertarians compromising principles for power. While the Demopublicans compromise like the crackwhores they are.

B
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Old 04-20-2007, 09:34 PM
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Originally Posted by Botnst View Post
I doubt that the Libertarian Party will ever be a serious contender simply because the members are so damned independent. Republicrats bemoan the lack of party discipline within their organization but what they have now, I doubt the Libertarian party will ever have, because I cannot imagine (small l) libertarians compromising principles for power. While the Demopublicans compromise like the crackwhores they are.

B

Unfortunately that's probably true for the near-future, at least.

But it won't stop me from trying.

...and increasing numbers of people ARE getting more and more fed up with the status-quo....

Mike

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