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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (8973)	1/13/2006 1:23:01 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541385

At least there's a check, an impediment to unfettered rule by secret and unelected bodies. I wasn't proposing not having a check in the form of warrant issue. And I've been explicitly advocation additional checks. I've been trying to communicate that warrants don't provide any assurance that abuse won't happen nor are they an all-purpose check suitable to all aspects of the process. Once you acknowledge that, then you can move forward to considering other/additional/more tailored checks and penalties and to coming to terms with the fact that, in the final analysis, you have no absolute protection just as you have no absolute protection against murder. I engaged this discussion because there were people who were treating warrants as the be-all-and-end-all of this issue while calling irrational those who think presidential protection from the evil-doers who want to kill us all is the be-all-and-end-all. I submit that they are two sides of the same irrational coin. There is supposed to be at least the occasional wave a centrism on this thread and I was trying to introduce it for this topic. I would be happy to talk about what level of protection is needed, how that might be accomplished, what authority should be given and to whom, ways to catch them if they abuse their authority, appropriate penalties for abuse, societal implications of abuse, governmental implications of the authority given, etc. if anyone would like to. But first we have to get away from the dueling bookend mantras. Hopefully we have done that or at least receptive to doing so. (as it eventually will) I'm not so sanguine about that.