I’ve said before that I’m a conservative. My vision of a future that involves police monkeys raining fury down upon hippies should be sufficient evidence to drive that point clearly home.

So it pains me to see our Republican president and government (weren’t they supposed to be conservative?) gobbling up powers for themselves over and over again. Keith Olbermann, a man with whom I don’t always agree, has addressed this issue on his television show repeatedly. Now President Bush has signed into law a bill that waves Habeas Corpus - the king of all governmental power grabs. This is not a bad joke - this really happened and it really does have consequences. I think that the following two videos are important to see.

The first video gives the background into which the second video will more easily fit.

We now face a situation where we must pray the government doesn’t misuse the powers that it has granted to itself - no longer are they bound by anything other than their own discretion. This is a very bad situation indeed and true conservatives and patriots should be taking notice.

The actual law is available here or from Thomas. An analysis of the law is available from Wikipedia. A quick synopsis is this: terms in the law that appear benign, such as “unlawful enemy combatant”, used to specify to whom this law pertains, have been applied to US citizens several times in the past. Those persons that have been labelled thusly in the past were naughty, but America should relish and embrace the chance for justice to be served openly, not behind a cloak of secrecy. Denying due process blurs the line between us and the despots we criticize.