"Doug Miller" wrote in message
et...
In article , "JoeSpareBedroom"
wrote:

"We" have not decided that a certain level of mercury from power plants is
OK. That was decided in meetings with attendees whose identity has been
CLASSIFIED by Dick Cheney. They decided what mercury levels they could
afford to release or control.

I think you need to renew the lining in your tinfoil hat, Kanter.

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)


News, carefully hidden from fools like you, Miller. All based on facts. Next
time there's a moth in your house, ask it to read the newspaper aloud for
you.


The New York Times

December 23, 2005

Editorial

Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency



George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it
would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never
told his vice president that this was a joke.



Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in
2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers
of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil
executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as
a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American
citizens.



It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades.
Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the
Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the
presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney
looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful
enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.



The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you
will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said
this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program
that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.



Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal
structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of
the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an
antimissile shield that doesn't work but makes military contractors rich.
Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton
to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret
meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr.
Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on
important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was
not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with
him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he
had recently amassed a fortune.



The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking
advantage of a national consensus that the president should have additional
powers to use judiciously against terrorists.



Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the
intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq
and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal
briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the
president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain
them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National Security
Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And when Senator
John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American
military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment,
but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.



There are finally signs that the democratic system is trying to rein in the
imperial presidency. Republicans in the Senate and House forced Mr. Bush to
back the McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan to legalize torture by
intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress also agreed to extend the Patriot
Act for five weeks rather than doing the administration's bidding and
rushing to make it permanent.



On Wednesday, a federal appeals court refused to allow the administration to
transfer Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been held by the military
for more than three years on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, from
military to civilian custody. After winning the same court's approval in
September to hold Mr. Padilla as an unlawful combatant, the administration
abruptly reversed course in November and charged him with civil crimes
unrelated to his arrest. That decision was an obvious attempt to avoid
having the Supreme Court review the legality of the detention powers that
Mr. Bush gave himself, and the appeals judges refused to go along.



Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have insisted that the secret eavesdropping program
is legal, but The Washington Post reported yesterday that the court created
to supervise this sort of activity is not so sure. It said that the
presiding judge was arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges
and that several judges on the court wanted to know why the administration
believed eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants was legal when
the law specifically required such warrants.



Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are tenacious. They still control both houses of
Congress and are determined to pack the judiciary with like-minded
ideologues. Still, the recent developments are encouraging, especially since
the court ruling on Mr. Padilla was written by a staunch conservative
considered by President Bush for the Supreme Court.