Thursday, May 31, 2007
We're Back
I'm all moved in, though I'll be living out of boxes for a few weeks.
Thanks to Ed McGonigal for keeping RT readers up to date over the last couple of days on the emergent Fred Thompson candidacy.
It's only appropriate for my return to note this column from Cato Institute's David Boaz on Rudy Giuliani:
I couldn't agree more.
The New York magazine incident, by the way, is particularly troubling because it underscores the how petty Giuliani could be.
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Thanks to Ed McGonigal for keeping RT readers up to date over the last couple of days on the emergent Fred Thompson candidacy.
It's only appropriate for my return to note this column from Cato Institute's David Boaz on Rudy Giuliani:
As mayor, Giuliani had many successes. Crime came down. He cut taxes and held down spending. But his prosecutorial personality sometimes threatened personal freedoms. He cracked down on jaywalkers and street vendors. His street crime unit used aggressive tactics to confiscate guns from city residents, resulting in wholesale searches and detentions of citizens, especially young minority males, and occasional tragedies like the shooting of the unarmed Amadou Diallo.
When a police officer fatally shot another unarmed black man, Patrick Dorismond, Giuliani had police release Dorismond's sealed juvenile arrest record. The city later settled with Dorismond's family for $2.25 million.
And it should distress many conservatives that Giuliani took umbrage at affronts to his dignity, perhaps most notoriously when he tried to stop city buses from carrying a New York magazine ad saying the publication was "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." The First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams notes in his book, "Speaking Freely," that "over 35 separate successful lawsuits were brought against the city under Giuliani's stewardship arising out of his insistence on doing the one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids: using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of government itself."
As a presidential hopeful, Giuliani's authoritarian streak is as strong as ever. He defends the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. He endorses the President's power to arrest American citizens, declare them enemy combatants and hold them without access to a lawyer or a judge. He thinks the President has "the inherent authority to support the troops" even if Congress were to cut off war funding, a claim of presidential authority so sweeping that even Bush and his supporters have not tried to make it.
Giuliani's view of power would be dangerous at any time, but especially after two terms of relentless Bush efforts to weaken the constitutional checks and balances that safeguard our liberty.
I couldn't agree more.
The New York magazine incident, by the way, is particularly troubling because it underscores the how petty Giuliani could be.
Labels: GOP 2008 President, libertarian, Rudy Giuliani
