Unfortunately, my currently functioning technology isn’t capable of the preferred cut & paste routine for the whole article, so I would like to present a recent piece featured on antiwar.com by John Whitehead by asking you monkeys to activate the four neurons it takes to click a link.
http://original.antiwar.com/jwhitehead/2012/11/12/obamas-first-term-track-record-on-civil-liberties/
FT says:
This actually made it to The Huffington Post, which surprised me. Of course, it didn’t make it there until after the election.
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14th November 2012 at 8:42 am
Hope@ZeroKelvin says:
And the very people that put Obama in office, minorities, young people, single women are the very people whose futures have been destroyed by these policies, among others, of this administration.
You can’t fix stupid.
I told you last year of my interview with a Hospital Liason, a young, recent college graduate who “proudly” voted for Obama in 2008. She was in her early 20s and though that TSA pat downs (groping), security scanners, NSA fusion centers and big government debt WAS THE NORM. It was as much of her life as her iCrap and a 52 in plasma screen teevee.
She thought that the fed.gov SHOULD be in the business of providing “benefits to people that are in need”. She had no idea where those benefits come from. She had zero understanding of the role of the government under the Constitution, the 3 branches of government and what the fuck the Federal Reserve was.
I can’t remember what fine college produced this mush brained idiot, I hope to God it wasn’t one in Texas.
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14th November 2012 at 8:55 am
card802 says:
I gave up during the election. I have many young nieces, nephews, and friends who are smitten with obama and his view of what the government is, and what it provides.
So true, none have any clue, or even the comprehension as to who pays for all the free shit.
I’m done trying to convince or provide information as to how to prepare. It’s all about me and my immediate family now.
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14th November 2012 at 9:20 am
Thinker says:
There has been much written about the growing ‘imperialism’ of the presidency and this piece is one of the best I’ve read. Combined with other indications, like the Obama camp saying they plan to “just force” people to accept their ideas and policies and Valerie Jarrett stating it’s “payback time,” I do fear we’ve seen the end of freedom as we know it.
But we all know nothing is going to change as long as people don’t care. That’s why protests like the secession petitions are valuable — they at least send a message that not everyone is happy with the direction of the country. Even then, there are others who issue similar petitions threatening to strip secessionists of their citizenship, claiming that petitioning the government for redress of grievances is equal to treason.
We are a divided nation, and it will only intensify during this 4T. What remains to be seen is which side will win.
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14th November 2012 at 10:08 am
Stucky says:
For your convenience ……… the article linked by ecliptix543
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Obama’s First-Term Track Record on Civil Liberties
by John W. Whitehead, November 13, 2012
“I was a constitutional law professor, which means, unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution.” ———–– Barack Obama, March 2007
Four years after Barack Obama was elected on a platform of “change you can believe in,” he’s now promising America that the “best is yet to come.” However, on almost every front — fiscally, militarily, politically, socially — the country is in a state of disarray.
Most troubling, however, is the state of our freedoms. Indeed, during Obama’s first term, our civil liberties were utterly and completely disemboweled. The great irony, of course, is that this happened with a self-proclaimed constitutional law professor at the helm — a man who was supposed to understand and respect the rule of law as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
Not only did Obama continue many of the most outrageous abuses of the George W. Bush administration (which were bad enough), including indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance of American citizens, but he also succeeded in expanding the power of the “imperial president,” including the ability to assassinate American citizens abroad and unilaterally authorize drone strikes resulting in the deaths of countless innocent civilians, including women and children.
Obama has a lot to account for over the course of his first four years in office, particularly in terms of the erosion of our civil liberties. Just consider some of the assaults on our freedoms that took place under Obama’s watch, either as a result of his continuing Bush’s policies, enacting his own misguided policies, or simply because he did nothing to counter them.
In March 2009, only two months after being elected, Obama defended Bush’s unconstitutional National Security Agency spying program in court. Obama went so far as to insist that actions authorized by the president, including illegally spying on American citizens, should be free from any judicial scrutiny whatsoever.
In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security launched a program, Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.” Coupled with the DHS report on “right-wing extremism,” which broadly defines right-wing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government — whether it be an Occupier, Tea Party supporter, or a free-speech protester.
In July 2009, Obama threatened to veto an oversight bill that would have required the president to inform lawmakers about covert CIA activities.
In December 2009, Obama, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, announced his intention to ramp up the military-industrial complex’s war in Afghanistan and subsequently followed through on his plan.
In February 2010, the Department of Defense issued a U.S. Army field manual detailing the prospective internment and resettlement of American citizens in the event of another terrorist attack or natural disaster on U.S. soil. The leaked document confirmed the fears of many government critics, “from the Patriot movement on the right to Occupy on the left to Anonymous, anarchists, organized racists, survivalists, and plain old conspiracy theorists in between.”
In March 2010, the Department of Homeland Security began rolling out controversial full-body scanners to American airports. Despite an initial outcry about the invasive nature of the scanners and the enhanced patdowns of American citizens, government officials continued to tout the machines as safe and effective. A year later, an investigative report by ProPublica/PBS NewsHour, revealed that six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines, which were purchased with Obama’s stimulus funds.
In July 2010, the Obama administration arrested 23-year-old Army soldier Bradley Manning on charges that he leaked classified military and diplomatic documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Held in maximum solitary confinement for close to a year, treatment normally reserved for the most violent or dangerous of criminals, Manning has yet to be put on trial. His treatment was intended to send a clear warning to all those who would challenge the military empire — “DON’T EVEN CONSIDER IT.”
In May 2011, Obama expanded the war effort, with bombings in Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Later that month, Obama signed a four-year extension of three controversial provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that authorize the government to use aggressive surveillance tactics — even against American citizens — in the so-called war against terror. That same month, the U.S. Supreme Court in an 8-1 ruling in Kentucky v. King effectively decimated the Fourth Amendment by giving SWAT teams more leeway to break into homes or apartments in search of illegal drugs when they suspect the evidence might be destroyed. The court, at the urging of the Obama administration, sanctioned warrantless raids, saying that police had acted lawfully and that was all that mattered.
In June 2011, a Department of Education “SWAT team” forced their way into the home of a California man, handcuffed him, and placed his three children in a squad car while they conducted a search of his home, allegedly over falsified student loans. Raids of this type are becoming increasingly common — more than 50,000 such raids occur every year in America — with federal agencies such as the State Dept., Dept. of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service laying claim to their own SWAT teams. Also in June 2011, the FBI granted its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers, allowing them to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing suspect American citizens, without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing.
In September 2011, two American citizens were killed during a drone attack in Yemen as part of a government “kill list” operation in which Obama personally directs who should be targeted for death by military drones. Drone strikes, a signature policy of the Obama administration, have tripled since Obama took office.
In December 2011, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which mandates that anyone suspected of terrorism against the United States be held in military custody indefinitely. This provision extends to American citizens on American territory. It was quietly signed into law by Obama on New Year’s Eve.
In February 2012, Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act, which opens up American skies for the domestic use of armed surveillance drones, a $30 billion per year industry. Incredibly, no civil liberties protections for Americans were included in the legislation. By 2020, it is estimated that at least 30,000 drones will be crisscrossing the nation’s skies equipped with anti-personnel weapons and surveillance devices.
In March 2012, Congress overwhelmingly passed and Obama signed the anti-protest “Trespass Bill” — legislation that makes it a federal crime to protest or assemble in the vicinity of protected government officials. The bill’s language is so overly broad as to put an end to free speech, political protest and the right to peaceably assemble in all areas where government officials happen to be present. That same month, Obama issued an executive order stating that in the case of a war or national emergency, the federal government has the authority to take over almost every aspect of American society.
In April 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court — again at the urging of the Obama administration — declared that any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.
In July 2012, the Obama administration began allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to store and “critically assess” information on innocent Americans for up to five years. Data recorded by the NCTC includes “records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records,” among other things.
In September 2012 and in the months preceding it, in major cities across the country, including Boston, Miami, Little Rock, and Los Angeles, the U.S. military carried out training exercises involving Black Hawk helicopters and uniformed soldiers. The exercises occurred in the middle of the night, with the full cooperation of the local police forces and generally without forewarning the public.
In October 2012, it was revealed that the Obama administration has been “secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the ‘disposition matrix.’” The matrix goes beyond the president’s kill list to detail suspects beyond the reach of American drones. This disposition matrix is also overseen by the NCTC.
So what does the future hold? Unless President Obama changes course — and drastically so — freedom as we have known it will become extinct.
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14th November 2012 at 11:06 am
ecliptix543 says:
Thanks Stucky.
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14th November 2012 at 6:38 pm
Eddie says:
My favorite old Jew, Nat Hentoff, wrote a good article in WND I read today.
On Sept. 12, 2001, President George W. Bush assured us: “We will not allow this enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms.”
The enemy has certainly tried, but it was President Bush, following the advice of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who began the extensive attack on our individual liberties through the Patriot Act, which passed on Oct. 26, 2001.
Then, President Barack Obama went far beyond his predecessor’s administration to become the most destructive uprooter of our Constitution in our nation’s history.
Growing up as a student at Boston Latin School, one of whose alumni was Samuel Adams, a firebrand of our American Revolution, I read American history with excitement. I learned how we always overcame grimly looming threats to our self-governing republic to become a beacon to the world.
But never did I even imagine that an American president, without insuring due process in a court of law, would – as Obama does – use a kill list to target suspected terrorists for assassination. So far this list has also included three American citizens.
Obama has taken advantage of ever-advancing digital technology, using bottomless databases that keep track of those Americans he considers persons of subversive interest. During the presidential debates, did you hear anything about our vanishing privacy?
The secrecy with which Obama discards the Constitution to rule over us is evident in his dictatorial use of the “state secrets” privilege, which actually prevents judges from even hearing cases brought by citizens who claim their fundamental constitutional rights have been expunged by the president’s censors.
I now share with you, fellow American citizens, this chilling description of the essence of four more years of our maximum leader. In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, Kurt Volker shows what that portion of the electorate who cared enough to vote gave us and the rest of the world. This is what America has now come to stand for:
“What do we want to be as a nation? A country with a permanent kill list? A country where people go to the office, launch a few kill shots (from pilotless drones) and get home in time for dinner?
“A country that instructs workers in high-tech operations centers to kill human beings on the far side of the planet because some government agency determined that those individuals are terrorists?” (“What the U.S. risks by relying on drones,” Kurt Volker, The Washington Post, Oct. 26).
A country also where its president makes the final choice for his faceless killers to rub out their targets.
I was not surprised to learn from a recent Washington Times column by Ilana Freedman that “the latest (dictator) to publicly announce his support for the commander-in-chief’s re-election bid was Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who … assured he’d vote for Obama if he were from the United States. …
“Earlier in the year the government-official daughter of Cuban military dictator Raul Castro proclaimed her country’s support for Obama during a visit to the U.S. ‘I believe that Obama needs another opportunity and he needs greater support to move forward with his projects and with his ideas, which I believe come from the bottom of his heart’” (“Chavez, Castro, Putin: Four more years!” Ilana Freedman, times247.com, Oct. 2).
In that dictatorship, Raul’s daughter surely spoke with permission from her father and uncle. It takes one to know one.
Freedman’s news story includes Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a member of the professed group “Dictators for Obama.” But I have no direct evidence of that. I’ll keep you abreast of any other dictators joining the celebratory chorus.
In any case, Obama is once more exultantly justifying anything he chooses to do from now on, because “We won!”
The fateful questions for the future of this nation are why did he win, and will his re-election show the victorious way for future presidents to come?
Many Americans’ choice to discard the Declaration of Independence reveals an alarming ignorance of their history, including why their country is – or is supposed to be – unique among all other nations in the world.
The depth of this ignorance explains why throughout the long, fiercely divisive presidential and congressional campaigns, there were hardly any references to Obama’s persistent contempt for the Constitution. This was the case among loyal Obama Democrats, of course, but also among Republicans and independents.
What makes us Americans was not an issue!
How grotesque it was for Obama to say in September – as he presented his beliefs for maintaining the principles of America’s rule of law while strengthening national security – that in going after American citizens involved with al-Qaida: “They are subject to the protections of the Constitution and due process” (“Death from afar,” The Economist, Nov. 3).
Had I been there looking at him, how could I not have burst out laughing?
How can we specifically get our country back? Whether you’re elderly or not, keep in mind that Obamacare could soon be coming after you full force – as it decides whether it costs his government too much to keep you alive!
In January 2003, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke about the balance between liberty and security. “The security side is going to outweigh the other” – unless “people come forward and say we are proud to be living in a land that has been more free, and we want to keep it that way” (my book, “The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance,” Seven Stories Press, 2003).
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14th November 2012 at 7:14 pm
TeresaE says:
I read this this morning, first thing, cried and then went to work to keep my mind off it.
How did I wake up and find myself surrounded by morons that think this shit is great because O enacted it?
Just how did our society collectively lose more IQ points than wealth in the past eight years?
We are soooooooooooooooooo over. Put a fork in us, cue the fat lady, we be done.
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14th November 2012 at 8:35 pm
ecliptix543 says:
TE – We’re medium rare, actually. The store was out of charcoal and the gas got cut off ’cause we couldn’t pay the bill.
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14th November 2012 at 2:38 pm