Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Wyden and Merkley make us Oregonians proud. Bravo, Senators!

A follow-up to an earlier post, on how the Congress is wonderfully bipartisan when it comes to stripping away our Constitutional rights; as this editorial in the Oregonian points out:
only one state had both of its senators voting no, on the theory that the constitutional right to a trial by jury actually means that a trial should have a jury.

"Somebody might think that the Bill of Rights is a quaint idea," explained Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. "We think it matters."

Or as Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., pointed out, sounding awfully picky, "The government can sweep you up, and the government decides whether you get to see a lawyer. You are now an enemy combatant under the rules the government sets up and good luck."

Oregon. Things look different here. 
Yes, indeed.

BTW, here is how I can add to another post, which was about how we might already be at war against Iran; here is Glenn Greenwald:
One last point about these we-are-at-War! advocates: The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg yesterday compiled establishment news reports documenting the multiple acts of war directed at Iran: explosions, murders of their scientists, cyber warfare, and he asked: Is Iran Already Under Attack by some combination of the U.S. and Israel? I wrote about the same question earlier this week in the context of Roger Cohen’s New York Times column which essentially argued (and celebrated) that the U.S. and Israel are already waging a covert war against Iran (Cohen wrote that it “would take tremendous naïveté to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israel” effort). Just consider how amazing that is: so war-obsessed is America’s political and media culture that it seems indisputably clear that the U.S. Government — in total secrecy, without any remote legal basis — is involved to some unknown degree in multiple acts of war against Iran, and nobody seems to notice or care or even want to know what the U.S. Government is doing in this regard. If you feel like you need to attack countries in total secrecy, Mr. Commander-in-Chief, go ahead: no need even to tell us. That is what this we-are-at-War! mindset produces.
Yep, why not suspend the Constitution entirely, so that we can have a government that will do nothing but wage war--including against its own citizens too!

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