Don’t Point that Cannon at Me

Bill Moyer’s Now continues to be “must-see” TV for me. Tonight’s show focused on proposals coming out of the the Justice Department, proposals that would make the measures enacted in the original USA Patriot Act mild by comparison.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, these proposals have been kept under tight wraps. Only Republican House Majority Leader Dennis Hasert has received a copy of the new proposals. Now if the thought of an ex-gym teacher being the only member of Congress to have oversight over the Justice Department doesn’t scare you, you can probably stop reading this entry right now.

The scariest of these proposals is the ability to make “secret arrests,” something never before allowed in America. People would just suddenly disappear without any official notice. This might not be all bad if it could somehow make Attorney General Ashcroft or President Bush disappear, but it seems unlikely that such stalwarts of freedom would be affected by such laws.

Instead, it seems far more likely that those opposed to Bush and Ashcroft’s assault on the Constitution would be likely candidates of being disappeared. I’m surprised that Moyer and his guest from the obviously unpatriotic Center for Public Integrity weren’t disappeared before tonight’s show.

If political events continue in this vein, I may have to adopt Raye’s methods of dealing with the news.