The House tells Ashcroft to Stick It

Found this link on Say Uncle:

Could somebody please tell John Ashcroft that we're not all potential criminals?

Fortunately, the House of Representatives has fought back, ever so much, by rejecting the Ashcroftian Urge "To Protect My Stuff from the Bad Guys by Taking The Bad Guys Out First."

The House overwhelmingly voted to roll back the provision in the Patriot Act that allowed law enforcement to do "sneak and peek" searches of private property.

From the Post article:
The move would block the Justice Department from using any funds to take advantage of the section of the act that allows it to secretly search the homes of suspects and only inform them later that a warrant had been issued to do so.

Ummm...Good. It's nice to know that somebody else recognizes the fact that the law doesn't just pertain to the terrorists; John Ashcroft doesn't have magical powers (as much as he might believe that he does) to recognize terrorists, and that the authorities could just as easily search your home, as part of Ahab...er...Ashcroft's quest to unearth the "bad guys."

And don't give me that crap about "if you have nothing to hide you having nothing to worry about."

Isn't it my right to live my life and have a private area where only I tramp? I just don't want people messing around up in my stuff, digging through my undies, looking at my comic books and unearthing my trove of porno just because I don't fit somebody's mold of what's normal. I thought that's what separated America from...I dunno...a fundamentalist regime.

I don't know how good an argument I'm making. I'm not terribly political, so making a political argument, to me, is kind of like wearing a suit made of out noodles. It's unnatural. I just feel like the more and more you want to see the devil, the more you're going to see him. Like looking at the pattern of a wood grain that looks vaguely like a face....the more you convince yourself of it, the more you're going to see the face.

And anybody (even law enforcement) can convince themselves that something looks suspicious if they think about it long enough. Even Big Stupid Tommy.