Posted on 01/04/2012 8:24:18 AM PST by rashley
With the extension of the payroll tax cut, a few more pages are added to the federal tax code, too. We haven’t been able to unearth the new total... but as of July 1 last year, the Standard Tax Reporter — a database of the tax code maintained by the firm CCH — stood at 73,536 pages.
That’s equal to 62 copies of Atlas Shrugged. It is also nearly three times the size of the tax code in 1984 — when the total stood at a more “manageable” 26,300 pages.
Yet the most-onerous new law signed with little fanfare on New Year’s Eve: The funding bill for the Pentagon in 2012... also subjects U.S. citizens to indefinite detention on the say-so of the president. “With Americans distracted with drinking and celebrating,” writes George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley, “Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country.” According to Bruce Fein, a Reagan-era Justice Department official, Section 1021 of the law “empowers the military to detain for life without trial any American citizen captured in the United States whom the president maintains is ‘substantially support[ing]... al-Qaida, the Taliban or associated forces’ engaged in hostilities against ‘coalition partners’ of the United States.” Unfortunately, “None of the key terms in Section 1021 are defined to constrain the president’s power to disappear Americans into dungeons at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere.” “The words can mean whatever the president, like Humpty Dumpty, wants them to mean. ‘Substantial support’ might be said to include any criticism of the United States government for flouting the Constitution in combating international terrorism.”
Apart from a movement in Montana to recall the state’s U.S. senators, both of whom voted for the measure, the reaction to the news was... well, “apathetic” seems an understatement.
(Excerpt) Read more at agorafinancial.com ...
Go ahead John, make our day and give your kiss-of-death endorsement to Mittens...
Romney should shun an endorsement from McCain for that very reason.
It could become an albatross around Romney’s neck, if he doesn’t distance himself.
Wasn’t McCain one of the loudest complainers about waterboarding? Now he wants the military to have the power to snatch anyone the gov’t deems a terrorist up with no representation or recourse for indefinite detention?
The NDAA is sinister and anyone who signed off on it should be given the boot at the bare minimum. I’m sorry for anyone who went through what he did as a POW but at some point McCain’s war hero card has to get pulled due to his actions. From POW to POS. . .how did it go so wrong?
No need to worry. Incompetanto is probably already plotting out how she can round up all the “domestic extremists” who might vote for any Republican candidate anyway. You know, Caucasian, heterosexual, Christian, males who own firearms (those evil bastards).
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