HappySqurriel said:
My concerns about this are whether it is appropriate for the President of the United States to do this, whether the President has the authority to do this, and whether these investigations are being performed for political reasons (and not legal reasons) ... There are already several organizations which are supposed to perform these types of investigations and have the means to perform them in a systematic, non-political, methodology which makes me believe the worst case for all of my concerns.
While I will never convince Obama supporters of the dangers of centralizing more and more power around the presidency while he is in power, I would suggest that they consider what the risk of actions like this is if an "Evil" Republican president was elected in 2012/2016 and decided to use these new-found powers to investigate companies because they decided to heavily support their opposition.
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There is a lot of anti-trust legislation out there. This is well within the executive branch's power. When Congress passes laws, they are TELLING the executive branch to enforce them. Otherwise, The President isn't complying with his duties in the Constitution. Frankly, it raises more questions that Bush was asleep at-the-wheel on anti-trust policies. That's not faithfully executing the law.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
