Actually, that would be one of the reasons TO make it.

It's like it's easier to toss a Starbucks venti paper cup in the trash when its job is done than it would be a Mil-Art coffee mug with your unit logo on it.

Win... funny. You let me know when they tell you what that means, then we can talk.

Win away, don't touch the Constitution or Bill of Rights. It is not their place.
Americans know that is the reason we fight... not to lose them and what they stand for. Get rid of them, may as well give-up.
May not know how we can win, but that is how they do.

Maybe you should ask those flaming liberals at the Cato Institute (note sarcasm).

We're already abusing 'war on drugs' forfeiture. Now we want to introduce forfeiture based on vague definitions of undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq. According to Fox News, %20 of the U.S., and some members of the administration, that includes anyone who criticizes the war in Iraq.

Since when is a war in Iraq a 'national emergency' in the U.S.?

To paraphrase a hero of Urbane's, they'll seize my assets from my cold dead hands.

Exactly on target.

HOUSTON (AP) -- A U.S. citizen convicted of receiving training at a terrorist camp alongside al-Qaida members in his efforts to help overthrow the Somali government was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison.

Daniel Joseph Maldonado, 28, a Muslim convert also known as Daniel Aljughaifi and Abu Mohammed, also was fined $1,000.

Maldonado admitted to traveling in December to a terrorist camp in Somalia, where he was trained to use firearms and explosives in an effort to help a group called the Islamic Courts Union topple the government and install an Islamic state. Members of al-Qaida were present at the camp.

Maldonado was captured by the Kenyan military while trying to flee Somalia in January and brought back to the United States in February.

Ten years was the maximum prison sentence Maldonado could have received. He faced a fine of up to $250,000.

Federal prosecutor Gary Cobe said after the hearing that the sentence was just.

"We're fighting a war against terrorism. We need to send a message that anyone who gets involved with terrorism will pay the price," he said.

"He wants it to be known he never intended to hurt Americans," Newton said.

Maldonado, who grew up in Pelham, N.H., lived in Houston for four months in 2005 before moving with his wife and three children to Cairo, Egypt, then Somalia. Just before his arrest as he and his family tried to leave Somalia and go to Kenya, they became separated. His wife, Tamekia Cunningham, later died of malaria. His three children are being cared for by his parents in New Hampshire.

Defense attorneys described Maldonado as a man who, driven by anti-Muslim sentiment in America after the Sept. 11 attacks, moved away with his family so they could live in peace as Muslims.

-> -> 10 years is the maximum for training to be a terrorist, yet they can seize your assets if they SUSPECT you are helping terrorists. That makes NO sense.

Your rights seem to decrease in an inverse proportion to the amount of evidence they have against you.

Oh my God.

You have no concept of: the rule of law, checks and balances, the value of our Constitution.

You believe in: the end justifying the means and letting other people think for you.

You are a fanboy.

Now now. I know fanboys, I've shared the same convention center with fanboys. I wouldn't pin the "fanboy" label so lightly on someone such as UG with a proven track record of coherent sentence structure.

The penultimate problem I have with this order (other than an inarguable contradiction with established legal boundaries) is the assumption of infallibility it takes on the part of the government. This EO - and others like them - would work and would be tolerable, if the powers-that-be exercised its force only upon the criminal element of society.

Government is a human creation, and by definition, fallible. The cost of both an error made by the government under the terms of this order and the effort to reverse it would be life-altering, if not life-ending. As Rich brought up before, the cost of confirming your innocence in the light of a false accusation, then reclaiming your lost property and assets, all while trying to keep yourself fed/sheltered/clothed during the process could run into the tens of thousands of dollars - perhaps even the hundreds of thousands for the first, precedent-setting case.

I am a registered Democrat. I do believe in an effective and central government. However, this kind of power is just too much for any government of any partisan or ideological stripe. In any expansion of the government, one has to weigh the pitfalls against the promises. What I have to ask is what is this government - that trumpets its prevention of attacks since September 11th - unable to do now, against those that would wish us harm, that they could do under this new authority?

If all I can see are the new dangers, it is because no one has shown me the new benefits.

I can't help thinking that this isn't even going far enough to describe the danger. To me, the real danger is that we enact these things with all good intention, and they are carried out by a well-meaning government for a few years, MAYBE have a few high-profile success stories, touted to justify their existence; but THEN, as the political winds shift, and the original purpose is forgotten or glossed over, somebody comes along behind the scenes and figures out a way to pervert them, to use them to the advantage of questionable purposes.

And this is a very generous, almost BEST-CASE scenario.

Being such as these things are, these "trust us" laws, we have absolutely no reason to believe that they will not be abused, except blind faith. As Reagan said, government programs have three phases, "a beginning, a muddle, and no end" - we don't trust the government with good reason.

In addition to your well founded objections, Chewbaccus and Flint, there is the implied lack of confidence in our system as it exists today.

I don't know if either of you are a parent, but you've certainly been a child at some point. Do you remember being confronted with the reasoning "Because I'm the <strike>decider</strike> daddy, that's why!" in response to your questions as to why you couldn't do something? As a very generous, almost BEST-CASE evaluation of this parenting strategy, this is weak. It shows laziness, ineptitude, surrender and/or ignorance, or worse. It is the justification of (next to) last resort. The next step is just smacking the kid.

I am no kid, yet Bush arrogates to himself the authority and attitude of a weak parent. There may be those adult citizens among us who crave this kind of paternalistic governance--"Save me daddy!"--but I am not among them. Count me out! I find it highly insulting, to me as a citizen and to my country. I don't like his reasoning and I damn sure don't want to be smacked next.

If you can't get the job done with the tools at hand, we have a well established, properly functioning method for making new tools. Wholesale edits of our Constitution with the Executive Order pen is not one of them. He doesn't cotton to Congress's "running this war", but he blithely writes new laws to suit himself.

Chewbaccus: You've clearly been here a long time, so I don't mean to lecture you. Do not confuse his loquacious sesquipedalian logorrhea for mere coherence. But I don't lightly pin the label "fanboy" on UG. With apologies to fanboys the world over, I would pin it on him with a sledgehammer.

He's not "young", though...

"fan-guy"?

And V..."loquacious sesquipedalian logorrhea"?

You. Me. Scrabble. It's go time. :)

UG is often Fanboyish, but the anti-Bush crowd is the most Fanboyish I have ever seen.

For example, you often see headlines written with the most inflammatory exaggerated take possible, and then when you read the article, it turns out to say nothing of the sort.

And when someone asks WTF, or asks specific directed questions about the topic in simple disagreement, they're called names -- as if to simply beg the question is a sign that one is somehow inferior.

Thankfully, this sort of thing doesn't happen here. I'm talking about Digg and Reddit and places like that. Not here.

I would not have expected that would be a thread-killer.