On Your Way Home from Phish…

…you can catch the 2003 John Ashcroft National Tour. The Ashman will be defending the USA PATRIOT Act, which, for some reason, has met with less than universal approval.

Comments

[Anonymous]

EFF declares the USAPATRIOT Act a "rush job"...in a critique published five days after the 342 page bill was signed into law!

I suppose that since - in the nearly two years that the law has been in effect - only two American citizens have been caught in its civil liberties snares, the EFF must be quite pleased today with the effect of their earlier recommendations regarding the implementation of the Act.

[Lefty]

Bullshit, Anon.

Meth labs have been declared terrorist operations, Muslims who visited Afghanistan and immediately returned have been imprisoned, millions of dollars donated to Middle Eastern charities have been impounded, hundreds of anonymous people have been imprisoned outside the jurisdiction of US courts, library records are fair game for more anonymous snooping, on and on and on.

Meanwhile, OBL, Saddam and the anthrax mailer remain at large and Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 hijackers, remains butthole buddies with George W. Bush and his crony, John Ashcroft.

I'm surprised it took EFF 5 days to figure out the Patriot Act was crap. They're slipping.

[joe]

Will Ashcroft put a vacumn cleaner hose on his face?

[Nicholas Weininger]

Interestingly, this WaPo story does not corroborate the NY Daily News story (sorry, don't have URL handy) that said Ashcroft was going to use the tour to promote a new skid mark on the slippery slope, this one called the "VICTORY act". Has that been confirmed by any other source?

[Julian Sanchez]

FindLaw and a few other sources cite it as a not-yet-introduced bill makin the rounds in Congress:
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/allenbaugh/20030813.html