oppose nomination of John Ashcroft

[Tim May]

At 9:00 AM -0500 1/20/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>Reno probably didn't expect the situation to, um, blow up in her face.
>
>It is also undisputed that if they wanted to avoid a show of force, 
>they could have nabbed Koresh during his jogs around the property 
>line or whatnot in the morning. Reese, you blather too much.
>

I also believe that neither Waco nor Ruby Ridge were expected to go 
down as they did. Neither Reno nor Clinton gained anything from these 
debacles.

What I fault is the general trend toward "militarizing the police," 
especially the trend toward using federal police instead of local 
sheriffs and law enforcement. In both cases, Waco and Ruby Ridge, 
local law enforcement was bypassed, even "kept out of the loop." This 
should not be acceptable in a constitutional republic consisting of 
states.

There are also fundamental problems with the War on Some Weapons, the 
War on Some Drugs, and the War on Some Religions. Claims that Randy 
Weaver had sawed an inch or so off a shotgun, part of an entrapment 
by Feds who wanted his cooperation in other matters, tell us how 
close we are coming to being a police state (though we are not yet 
there in any plausible sense). Claims that David Koresh was mingling 
in unapproved ways with young women, or was selling weapons illegally 
(never proved, even after the ashes had been sifted), should have 
been handled locally, not by calling in federal ninjas.

As for Ashcroft, we'll see. Bush won, so Bush gets to appoint his 
staff. The whole "review by the Senate" thing is a relic of the 
McCarthy era, actually, and should be done away with.

--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns