Senate report concludes: no proof of contact between

[kandrathe]

And how do you know that by not going into Bosnia it wasn't going to effect our security? If Europe had destabilized due to what was going on in the former Yugoslavia and it spread to other nearby countries, that could easily affect US security interests. You and I do not have all the information, so arguing whether there was a clear security interest for the US to be involved or not, neither of us can truly answer.

I would liked to have seen Europe try and fail before the president, after asking Congress, authorized the use of American troops in Europe. It felt more like a "world army" exercise to me.

And, as I posed to Occhi, what happens when you have someone in a position where they can stone wall justice from our court systems, be it civilian or military? Who's to enact justice then?

When has this happened? If it ain't broke...

If you believe that that is the way the government has worked for the last 100+ years, you're being naive. Ever since the late 19th century, our government has basically been for the money by the money (look back to TR when he was a state senator in New York). While there has been a fight to deal with corruption, it's never gone away and it never will, not until the people in power cannot receive any kind of perks from any special interest group.

How much money did you get to vote last Tuesday? Ultimatly, WE do make the decisions if we engage our brains, feet and fingers to exercise our voting rights.

Again, look to my comment to Occhi about this along with what Pete said below. The language of the 2nd Amendment leaves a lot of room for different interpurtations. And as I noted to Occhi, I see no issue with people owning hand guns and hunting rifles, what I see as an issue is giving people access to military grade hardware. There is no reasonable excuse for John Q. Citizen to have military grade hardware.

Some room, not a lot of room. It was obviously in response to having a tyrrant King George attempt to pacify the colonies by making citizens owning weapons illegal. Here is a quote by St. George Tucker who was appointed as a US District court judge by Madison;

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty... The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

No, they haven't made encryption illegal. Otherwise things like PGP and other forms of encryption would not exist. Does the government allow all levels encryption be available to everyone in the US and the world at large, no. What you don't understand about encryption and breaking it is the amount of time it takes. While the NSA has some very powerful systems, breaking encryption isn't a quick process.

We have access to simple encryption, for which the government has known methods for decoding. I've been in the NSA, and you have no clue as to the power of hardware in their employ. It's massive, parallel, and thousands of times faster than anything you or I use.

Someone I use to work with decided to play around with the government (he was former Border Patrol) and knew some people in Sweden. He convinced them to give him an email account on some University system there. He encrypted a file using PGP that basically said, why are you decrypting this and sent it from that Swedish email address with some kind of Russian exercise and sent it to his email in the US. The message took 12 hours to reach his US mail account when previous emails were near instant (about a minute at most). So for something as stupid as PGP, if the email was intercepted, and it probably was, it took NSA several hours to break PGP. Someone at NSA probably got their ass chewed for wasting that much computer time on a stupid PGP message like that.

Or, maybe it just took that long and the NSA never looked at it.

And this is a never ending aspect that has been going on since the inception of the US Government. Just about every President since Washington onward has used them (very few Presidents, and mostly the early ones, never used an EO). State's rights have eroded for a very long time, saying that Clinton or any recent President has been the originator of it shows a lack of history on the Executive Branch. As I mentioned, every branch has done it's utmost to get a leg up on the other branches, this is nothing new and each has their little things they can do.
How much have you looked at EOs by various Presidents? Did you realize that Bush, the present President, has issued 600 EOs since taking office, twice the total EOs of all prior Presidents from Washington to Clinton? If you want to talk about someone who has abused the power of the EO, look no further than our sitting President, all prior ones are meer schoolboys compared to him on the use of EOs.
Again, you're being naive if you think it's only Clinton that did/does this. I suggest you sit down and take a good long look at the history of the Presidents and the things that they have done "for the common good". And if you really want to see how much the Constitution has eroded, ask some Constitutional Scholars about when the erosion began and when it's eroded the most. You will get a lot of interesting comments then.

My original point to Pete was that the erosion of liberty was not limited to the recent regime, but that it extended to democrats and republicans alike.I'm not claiming that Bush is lily white. The number of EO's has nothing to do with the abuse of power. They would not be abused if they are used by the president to direct the executive branch, or the nation in an emergency. I believe that "A State of Emergency" does currently exist, and was put into effect legally after September 11th. Which ones do you think are an abuse of powers? Bush EO's