LIBERTY above all else.
Yank lll

See, Holder, as head of the DOJ, got paid his salary for while illegally providing guns to Mexican drug cartels. Ergo, the logic follows that ALL of his personal assets (house, cars, money, etc…anything he ever bought while employed by DOJ.gov) should be seized as ‘suspected proceeds’ from his gun running as being material aid to/complicity with drug suppliers.

Goose/Gander and suchlike.

Ugghh–government itself is 100% highway robbers! The primary mechanism of the (lawful) robbery is taxation and monetary controls.

>Correct me if I’m wrong: didn’t we start the idea of law enforcement in the first place to GET RID of highway robbers?

Haha–no. That’s the big superstition. Larken Rose covers the deception at length in his books. Law enforcement exists to violently coerce people into compliance with the highway robbers’ (government) controls and theft. People don’t even realize they are being robbed. Government was created to instantiate the deception. Your question illustrates how well it is working! ;)

When the government acts to take away your rights you can either cry “woe is me, but the other side will do it too” or you can get the petty tyrants out of public office. When the other side does the same thing, you get THOSE guys out of office.

At some point (maybe) they’ll start to learn.

Certain commenters seem to think that the directive gives an ability to the ATF that it didn’t have before. Somebody needed to point out that it didn’t, it merely changed how it went about exercising one it already had.

Certainly, that’s not a good thing–it makes it easier for the ATF to do forfeitures which will likely increase the number that it does–but it is not even close to the evil of letting the ATF have that power in the first place.

But the real disappointment is the American people. Our torture programs, massive domestic spying, rather bloody interventions in other countries, assassination of alleged enemies, civil forfeiture, supermax prisons, drug warrants served via SWAT team, persecution and silencing of whistleblowers–all that is not as widely discussed and known as it should be, but when it comes out in public, it makes very little spash. When torture became a political issue, it was more or less a 50/50 split on partisan lines. Domestic spying and impunity for any kind of war crimes done is bipartisan consensus policy, and this seems to raise very little outcry. People routinely joke about prison rape, which makes me suspect that more knowledge about the horrible conditions some prisons have won’t bring a lot of political pressure for change.

My sense is that these issues aren’t all that popular–that there are more votes tobe lost than won trying to make supermax prisons less godawful or trying to decrease the amount of rape in prisons or prosecuting people for torturing suspected terrorists to death. And basically amoral politicians like Obama and Romney recognize that, and act according to their interests.

Yeah. Obama has been a massive disappointment in the civil liberties department, presumably because he understands that fighting for civil liberties for accused criminals and terrorists is a bad way to get and keep power, and getting into a fight with the intelligence and homeland security and police agencies is a very good way to have power taken from you. (Perhaps, like Russia and Pakistan, the US is a country where it’s simply not practical for a politicians to directly take on the intelligence services.)

Oh! Well then! Nothing to get pissed off about HERE! Forward!

The new directive does not arrogate to the government any new powers. It merely says that the ATF is now allowed to do directly what it once had to ask the DEA to do for it.

Save your outrage for a real government power grab. This isn’t one.

I had hopes that he’d continue promoting due process when he became president. You could argue that he’s made the situation worse (potentially a lot worse) because he’s that ambitious for more power for himself, and I think that’s reasonable, but the other piece is that the public generally either wants an abusive justice system or doesn’t care, and there’s a limit to how much better a politician can be than their public.

My mind boggles…