Well, what a shock. Conservatives Judges say you can’t sue for being spied upon unless you can prove that you have been spied on. Hope you never get tortured.
Later the court ruled that witches that float in water must be executed because only witches float.
CINCINNATI -- A divided federal appeals court rejected a lawsuit Friday challenging President Bush's domestic spying program without ruling on the issue of whether warrantless wiretapping is legal.
In a 2-1 decision with Republican-appointed judges in the majority, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the plaintiffs had no standing to sue because they couldn't prove their communications had been monitored by the government.
So fuck the Constitution. Because everything connected to the War on terror trumps everything connected to the Constitution, or rule of law.
The appeals court vacated a 2006 order by a lower court in Detroit, which had concluded that the warrantless surveillance authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was unconstitutional.
Fortunately there was a dissenting voice.
Judge Ronald Lee Gilman, a Democratic appointee, disagreed, saying the plaintiffs were within their rights to sue and that it was clear the surveillance program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The government had said it sometimes needed to act without waiting for the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established by the 1978 law.
This is the kind of shit we will have to clean up in the country before the damage the wingnuts has done can be erased.
(link here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
There’s one main reason why this country is so fucked up. It’s PRESIDENT CHENEY. Hendrik Hertzberg’s no holds barred account of the Vp in New Yorker is a must read. Keep in mind that this is the source of real power in America.
He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law...
More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of "cruel," "inhuman," and "degrading" treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: "a no-brainer for me"), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.
So it’s not just conservative judges holding up justice. It’s this Darth Vader who should be in a jail cell. Certainly the rest of this country is at the end of their rope.
There’s one main reason why this country is so fucked up. It’s PRESIDENT CHENEY. Hendrik Hertzberg’s no holds barred account of the VP in New Yorker is a must read. Keep in mind that this is the source of real power in America.
Here is an anecdote that shows us even Cheney picks the judges.
After naming John Roberts to the Court and then to the Chief Justice’s chair, the President, for once, rebelled: without getting permission from down the hall, he nominated his old retainer Harriet Miers for the second opening. ("Didn’t have the nerve to tell me himself," Cheney muttered to an associate, according to the Post.) But when Cheney’s right-wing allies upended Miers, Bush obediently went back to Cheney’s list and picked Samuel Alito..... He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law...
Ands if you want to know why we are torturing people. It’s also President Cheney.
More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of "cruel," "inhuman," and "degrading" treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: "a no-brainer for me"), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.
It is clear that the enemy of the Constitution is Dick Cheney. He is the enemy of the entire country and the entire world. Cheney’s crimes are slowly coming unraveled. No matter how many e-mails he dumps, this is going to catch up to him.
( Link here: http://www.newyorker.com/... )