More lack of change, and this one is ugly. The Obama Administration has been putting pressure on the court to set aside a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, who are attempting to sue the government over illegal wire tapping. Rather than rehash the whole thing, just read these two articles at Wired. One and Two.
Big Obama is Watching You…
It doesn’t matter that the Guantanamo Bay facility is to be closed in the next year’s time, or that the Executive Order President Obama signed establishes that no prisoner can be treated outside of the what the Army Field Manual states – because the manual currently includes extraordinary rendition, solitary confinement and other methods of isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, and manipulation and creation of fears through what would be call psychological duress. Translation: the prisoners at Gitmo are simply being moved to other facilities and can still be held without charge indefinitely, simply by order of the President stating that the individual is an enemy combatant and can still be held to what some might consider, torturous conditions.
What this amounts to is a shell game, designed to show the American Idle, Obamabots and world leaders that Obama is “living up” to campaign promises, while proving to those who actually read these things that nothing really has changed and the mess is being swept under the rug. No prisoners in Gitmo! Now they’re in facilities in Egypt, other areas of the US, or held on Naval ships at sea etc.
More on the underlying crap involved in this shell game can be found here, here and here.
Not much I can add to this one, other than, “It’s about damn time!” A federal appeals court found the provision in the Patriot Act which prevented recipients of National Security Letters from speaking out about the request, is a violation of the First Amendment.
“We are gratified that the appeals court found that the FBI cannot silence people with complete disregard for the First Amendment simply by saying the words ‘national security,’” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.
See the ACLU press release for more information.
Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of “an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.”
So begins a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which covers some of the uglier reasons why these programs exist. Most Americans don’t want to know this information, but I’d suggest you read the article anyway.
Such are the dreams of tyrants.
As the authors so rightly state, the amount of information, well in the public eye, seems to escape most. Of all the individuals out there, radio personality Alex Jones seems to have his finger on the pulse of the information better than anyone else. His website, PrisonPlanet.com contains a vast archive of documented material that is frankly quite scary to peruse. Though some might discount his personal opinions and rants as “conspiracy theories”, it is hard to dismiss the reams of information he and his team have compiled, with links to sources far and wide. Reputable sources, I might add. If you want a good feeling of uneasiness, head on over and read for a while.
Hurricane Katrina should have taught anyone looking at the government’s response to the disaster, as being the blueprint for action if we are attacked again. From confiscating firearms (they’ll get mine barrel first) to forced evacuations, it is clear that Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution is interpreted broadly. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 has repealed the protection of the suspension of habeas corpus from the Posse Comitatus Act, the military can now be used for imprisoning US civilians without caring about such pesky things as civil rights. The Bill of Rights is officially null and void to the view of the military when dealing with civilians. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s the law. Look it up.
Naturally, such power is useless unless you can station troops within our borders for law enforcement, which the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 specifically does. It allows the President to declare a “public emergency” for any reason he sees fit and station troops anywhere in the US, without the consent of any local authority. It also allows the complete control of any local National Guard units. Again, no conspiracy here. It’s the law.
Everything has been put in place, one piece at a time since 9-11, to create a condition where complete military control of the nation can be had by the President. This allows the Executive branch of the government dictatorial power at whim. And America, for the most part, is oblivious.
If history has taught us any lesson, it is that power taken by government is always used. It’s just a matter of time.
Benjamin Wittes may be a gun-grabbing fool, but he’s at least an honest one.
“The Second Amendment is one of the clearest statements of right in the Constitution,” Benjamin Wittes, a guest scholar at the center-left Brookings Institution, acknowledged in a discussion Monday. “We’ve had decades of sort of intellectual gymnastics to try to make those words not mean what they say.”
Wittes, who said he has “no particular enthusiasm for the idea of a gun culture,” said that rather than try to limit gun ownership through regulation that potentially violates the Second Amendment, opponents of gun ownership should set their sights on repealing the amendment altogether.
“Rather than debating the meaning of the Second Amendment, I think the appropriate debate is whether we want a Second Amendment,” Wittes said.
Read the full article at CNS News.com.
What Mr. Wittes doesn’t understand is that modern society’s apparent ambivalence toward protecting themselves from our own government (the crux of the Second Amendment) is not universal. It is an East Coast delusion, that aside from California, has no solid backing west of the Appalachians.
The Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States was designed from the beginning to protect the rights of the individual from being overrun by the desires of the many. It wouldn’t matter if there was just one person in the USA who still believed in the right enumerated in the Second Amendment, that is enough – the amendment stands.
Of course, law and reality do not walk hand in hand. It all leads back to rights being null and void if they are not backed up with force. This again, is the primary reason that the Framers of the Constitution put down the Second Amendment, to ensure first of all that the government knew that the People had the tools needed to fight for their rights and to establish a societal foundation of personal arms, so that the Second Amendment and others could not be repealed later down the line. It entrenched the concept of personal ownership of weapons into the culture, putting the final say of power directly in the hands of the People, all to back up what the Bill of Rights was enumerating. Without this possession of force by the People, the Bill of Rights is inconsequential and the rule of law is trivially manipulated by the government. The Founding Fathers of this nation knew this and planned for it.
Is it any wonder that some would love to see this right repealed?
As the creeping fascism in this country grows in power, the Second Amendment is going to be put to the test. What those like Benjamin Wittes are counting on, is the American Idle, sitting back and crying about their guns being taken away: doing nothing of value, while popping open another beer and flipping through the channels, trying to figure out why things went the way they did.
What Wittes and the rest of the statist clan don’t want to think about, are people like me: who are more than willing to take up the arms they have against those who would take them from us. We’re a pretty serious bunch, many of us with military or police background, who know what we’re doing with these weapons, who understand small arms combat tactics and practice such. If a small percentage of unskilled and untrained Iraqi’s are keeping our military pinned down, using crappy AK-47′s and some improvised munitions: try to imagine what kind of force America’s enthusiastic firearms owners, with their highly refined rifles, quality sidearms and US military or para-military training can do…
It is the primary reason that the Soviet Union never attempted an invasion of the States. It is the primary reason that those who work to usurp rightful power from the People to the state, have had to move so very, very slowly and carefully to do so.
Waking up this groggy giant would be a very dangerous thing to do.
I have honestly been disappointed with America’s patriots. We’ve been sitting down and accepting things for far too long now. We’ve watched our rights being whittled away, bit by bit, from both of the major parties and have done nothing. Though Witte and others believe this to be a sign of indifference, I hope that it is instead a sign of lingering faith in the democratic process – a hope that things can be resolved without firing a shot.
However, that inaction will not last. At the rate things are going, soon we will know for certain whether indifference or lingering faith has held America’s patriots from action.
Doug Soderstrom’s latest rant, cuts through the current problems facing the USA with a surgical precision that’s rarely seen these days. It is definitely worth the read!
The ultimate problem as I see it, is not so much that we have serious social issues which need to be worked out, an administration which is going overboard in its power grabs and a judicial system which is coming apart at the seams; it is a problem of populace complacency.
Soderstrom lays out a great deal of the psychology behind America’s inaction, but I feel that he’s missed one very important factor – sheer laziness.
As long as Joe Sixpack is comfortable, sitting in his sofa with the game on the tube, he won’t move to change anything. He’ll instead shrug his shoulders and claim, “There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m insignificant. Why bother?” Only when he is uncomfortable, very, very uncomfortable, will he rise from his seat for something other than a plate of nachos and a beer.
It is going to take a tragic economic collapse to motivate Joe Sixpack. I’m not talking the inability to afford cable TV, or having to put off buying a new car this year – I’m talking about the fear and consternation of not finding food to place at the table and wondering whether or not the house is going to be foreclosed.
The American Idle, as I refer to them, are content in the trinkets they’ve bought and cannot stop to think about what processes are already in motion to reduce their life to that of a serf, or worse. One large factor at work which is finally being recognized, is our porous border with Mexico. The very thought of illegal immigrant amnesty is appalling! I feel for those who are trying to find a better way of life and would likely try the same if I was in the same position, but there is a process to get here legally and it must be followed. We cannot afford to pay for million’s health and welfare, off of the taxes reaped of the legal populace.
The second factor at work here is the dismantling of the American industry. We’re making fewer and fewer products, switching rapidly to a service economy. That works out fine as long as the population can afford to pay others to do what they’d rather not, but when the economy itself is taking a downward turn, who can then afford to pay someone else for the efforts? With tangibles, there is always a need somewhere in the world for the product.
It gets worse. With our current government trillions of dollars in debt and the world oil producers poised to change over to the Euro or other currency for petrol trade – we are going to get that economic collapse sooner than you might think. Right now, all it would take to topple the dollar’s value would be to drop the requirements for oil trade to be held in US dollars. That’s it. It is the artificially constructed weight of the dollar against oil in an agreed world court, which gives the dollar value. Like Monopoly money, the only reason it has value is that the players agree that it does. We long ago abandoned the notion that our economy was based on anything truly tangible, like gold. Take away the dollar as petrol currency and the world doesn’t think much of it anymore.
China is already moving to dump the dollar out of their reserves and Japan is following suit. They know what the American Idle ignores – that the US dollar is going to be dumped by the world’s oil industry and anyone holding it will be caught for pennies on the note. Our own government knows this dynamic is at stake, which is our real purpose in our Middle East wars. It’s either a hostile takeover (a very hostile takeover) of the oil industry, or a complete collapse of the American economy.
These are desperate times and our desperate government will take any steps it can to remain in power. They cannot do so when the American Idle are idle no more. This is why the Democrats haven’t made any real move to stop our Iraq efforts, or dissuade the Bush interest in taking on Iran. Politicians may be stupid at times, but they are also power hungry and willing to sell their souls to keep that power. They know that the only way to keep our artificial economy afloat, is to keep the US dollar as the only recognized oil currency, no matter how much blood it takes to lubricate that process.
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