inkbluesky

50 Years Ago This March

County Solicitor Lacy Mahon Jr. announced two people would be tried in criminal court on bootlegging charges. The defendants were accused of selling a pint of whiskey without a license at the Dutch Mill Club on Philips Highway during a “striptease show.” Later in the week, Mahon filed an injunction to close the club as a public nuisance and “a den of iniquity.”

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Halting Illegal Spying on Americans 

During an astounding press conference on February 28, 2008, President Bush was jarred by the veteran and habitually-reserved CBS correspondent, Bill Plante, who asked point blank: “I know it’s unintended to spy on Americans, but in the collection process information about everybody gets swept up and then it gets sorted. So if Americans don’t have any recourse, are you just telling them when it comes to their privacy to suck it up?”

Stunned by the question, Bush delivered a condescending non-sequiter: “I wouldn’t put it that way, if I were you - in public. You’ve been around long enough.” (The President never disputed Plante’s premise that everyone’s information is vacuumed up by the government.)

Visibly angry, the President blamed everything on his favorite target - trial lawyers: “You cannot expect phone companies to participate if they feel like they’re going to be sued… class-action plaintiffs attorneys, you know - I don’t want to try to get inside their head; I suspect they see, you know, a financial gravy train - are trying to sue these companies. It’s unfair. It is patently unfair.”

The phone companies probably have little to fear as far as civil liability. Its funny that given how the Party of Small Government (fifty years of truth in advertising violations) other wise called Republicans awarded Qwest Communications, the only telecom that refused to cooperate with Bush’s illegal domestic spying with a contract to act as its official communications provider for the GOP convention.