Tag: Bill of Rights

Should Auld Civil Liberties Forgot

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

You Have No Rights

The Bill Of Rights Has A Very Bad Week

By Charles P. Pierce

Of course, while everyone in Washington, and the courtier press that serves them, were endlessly droning on and on about the Gentle Fiscal Incline, the Bill Of Rights closed out 2012 by having one of the worst weeks it’s had in the two centuries of its existence. But the courtier press paid that little mind, possibly because selling out the Bill Of Rights was done on a “bipartisan” basis, and the denizens of the various Green Rooms would endorse cannibal murder if both parties agreed to subsidize it. [..]

This latest thing was to reauthorize the truly spooky FISA Amendments that were passed in 2008 when the president, in one of the actions he’s taken that really was a naked sellout of his previously enunciated principles, joined with a Senate majority to immunize the telecommunications companies that had participated in the Bush Administration’s lawlessness regarding wiretapping, as well as to authorize sweeping new wiretapping powers far beyond those against which the companies were being immunized. What the president did is not excused by the fact that he was running for president at the time. This wasn’t a flip-flop he took because he wanted to be elected. This was a flip-flop he took because he wanted to do some things once he was elected. [..]

Later, came the release of some FBI documents in which it seemed to indicate at least an unacceptable level of involvement by federal law enforcement in the crackdowns by local authorities on the various outposts of the Occupy movement. The hooley on the Left, which is going on vigorously over in the LG&M saloon, seems to center on whether or not federal authorities directed the activities of the local cops, or whether they simply provided logistical and intelligence support. (There’s also a great deal of swatting at Naomi Wolf, on which I will pass, thanks a lot.) To me, this is a distinction without a difference. [..]

Moreover, the documents also seem to indicate that the FBI was coordinating with the banks and the financial institutions as regards to the burgeoning Occupy movement. This, also, would not be unprecedented. The FBI always has been willing to do private favors for the powerful, and it rarely works out well. [..]

Rule Number One For Daily Living: There is no such thing as an “informal” chat with the FBI.

Reclaiming Our Democracy (Part 2 of 2): Nullification

“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.”
— Thomas Jefferson

What is Government?

Why do we submit to the law?

We can’t run very fast. We have no sharp teeth or claws. Long ago it became obvious that it was in humanity’s self interest to ban together for our mutual security. We each give up a small amount of personal freedom, for the greater good of the whole. That is the basis of the social contract.

As citizens, our responsibility is to uphold the laws of government. The government, in turn, also has obligations. The bare minimum of those obligations are to protect the majority of people from enemies both foreign and domestic. What enemies do we wish to protect ourselves from? At the very least hunger, disease, invasion by hostile forces (external security), and threats to our self-governance (internal security).

So how are we doing in that respect? Lousy.

We all but wiped out hunger in the US shortly after the Kennedy administration (ended 1963), but the government intentionally reintroduced it in the Reagan administration to drive down worker wages. What is left of our health care system is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Foreign NGO’s have been invited by the Supreme Court to financially manipulate campaigns and thus our government. Internal threats to self-governance are too numerous to recount here, and in any case the Supreme Court has abandoned all pretense that this was a democracy and officially ruled the US a plutocracy.

We are in essence living in a failed state. Just because I am writing about the US, don’t think your country is doing any better. Most of the Western world is in the same boat.

Other articles have detailed the complex road we took to get here. That is not the purpose of this series. This series discusses how we get out.

Specifically, how to tell our government “No!”

Barack Obama can blow me

Photobucket

So, rather than prosecuting actual war criminals, the president is letting Congress use an outdated, illicit authorization for giant fucking war crimes devised by mass murderers, crafted by torturers and based on lies to justify taking away the Bill of Rights from us regular law-abiding citizens.  I guess the so-called “evil-doers” and “terrorists” abroad won’t be hating us for our freedoms anymore, after Obama rolls back 800 years of law.  This fascist defensive over-reaction is predictable from a president who himself is guilty of heinous war crimes in multiple countries, not to mention his abetting all-time record-breaking, imagination boggling financial crimes here at home.  No wonder this murdering thief, this constitutional scholar in name only is afraid of the law.  He rightly fears justice.  No wonder his guilty mind led him to pre-emptively brand us potential enemies of the state.  

Is he right?

Comment!

Brings tears to me!

Dillon: Is Foreign Govt. Stopping + Detaining us from looking at our own Country ?!

Is a Foreign Government Interfering with OUR OWN CITIZENS on our own soil?!

Or is this a Dispersant Cover Up story ?  WDSU channel 6 News/  Fired BP Contractor talks to  Adam Dillon 7/11/10


Scott Walker of WDSU News: ” During our visit to a Grand Isle beach in June (on the 11th) to see clean up workers, a WDSU photographer and I  blocked from getting with in a hundred yards of them.   (This was the infamous Talon security people who are threatening journalists, bloggers, and regular folk down in the Gulf )

Adam Dillon, who was fired from BP, was a cleanup contractor from North Carolina, now talks to WDSU.com. ”

video here:   http://www.wdsu.com/video/2420…

http://scottwalkertv.com/2010/…

Adam Dillon

Adam Dillon, fired by BP, now a whistleblower

more video transcript:


Dillon:  …. after the way BP treated me, I am telling you now, you deserved an answer.

Scott Walker of WDSU News:  Shortly after our beach run in, Dillon was promoted.   Now he says he was fired because he was seen as a threat to his superiors.

Dillon:  I Became a liability to their operation up there because of the info I found out

News:  Does BP have anything to hide ?  Something other than the cleanup effort going on here ?

Dillon:  I saw something when I was out there. I took pictures of something. I  brought it to the attention of the command structure.  And,  Whatever I took pictures of, 12 hours later, I was gone.

News: he believes those photos showed equations related to the used of dispersants used on the oil in the Gulf.  While Dillon has harsh words for those in charge and questions,   he is just as quick to credit the thousands of workers who are working hard to clean up our shores.

Dillon:  At the command center, I worked with some really great people. I worked w/ some great hardworking individuals in there. but the bottom line it’s just about the money.   There are some very cutthroat individuals in there they are not worried about cleaning up the spill, as is.

News:  this former special ops soldier says lost all faith in BP

Dillon:  I will never have loyalty to  this company. (BP)  I will always have loyalty to my country and my country comes first.  What this company is doing to my country is wrong.

News:  No comment from BP,  Will attempt to reach out to those in charge.   More coming Monday in my interview with Dillon, where he tells me, He was confined and interrogated almost an hour.

This is an excerpt of the last part of the video



Adam Dillon, quote:   “What this company is doing to my country is wrong.”

Friday: Fairwell to Habeas Corpus, Greenwald on Obama’s Win on Indefinite Detention

This is a must read review in Salon of today’s court ruling on “Boumediene vs Bush”  written by Glenn Greenwald, which gives the history of the creation of Bush’s prison gulag in 2006 with the Military Commissions Act, and background and then says:

  Congratulations to the United States and Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.  

If you’re secretly kidnapped by, say,  a military for profit contractor and shipped off to Gitmo, the Bush DOJ contended that the detainee under Boumediene has a right to a hearing (when they get “around to it,” years later, if you survived the torture) but when you’re secretly kidnapped by Only God Knows What or Who and shipped off to Bagram’s Secret little hell holes in Afghanistan, then the non existent detainee has no rights to any such kind of hearing.  

Greenwald:


 In other words, the detainee’s Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged.  One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers “told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.”

But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram.  

But which Bagram are they being shipped to ?  The known Bagram Prison, or the one Gen McChrystal’s Secret Special Forces and the CIA and Blackwater Xe’s operations aren’t admitting the existence of ?  

Morning Migraine: It’s Elena Kagan for the Supremes

President Barack Obama, on a roll after his Attorney General floated the idea to the Sunday morning talkie tubes that the Miranda rule should be optional in the War on Terra, had his anonymous spokesperson let loose with the news late this evening that Elena Kagan would be his Supreme Court pick to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.

Elena Kagan, a Clinton era leftover,former Dean of Harvard Law School, and current Solicitor General, would be the 3rd female on the Supreme Court at the same time, which presumably would signal the Beginning of the End Times for certain fundamentalists.  Kagan has never been a judge.

Like most things in the Obama administration which start out sounding wonderful, there has to be a catch:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36…

Her nomination is unlikely to cause a damaging fight in the Senate ahead of congressional mid-term elections in November or distract the Obama administration from other issues like jobs, financial regulation and climate change legislation.


http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com…

Has plenty of ties to Obama and his administration. In addition to being solicitor general, was hired by chief White House economics adviser Larry Summers to be dean of Harvard Law School. And while at the University of Chicago, Kagan tried to recruit Obama — then a part-time lecturer in constitutional law — to a full-time job in academia.

***  Seven Republicans voted for her confirmation: Coburn (OK), Collins (ME), Gregg (NH), Hatch (UT), Kyl (AZ), Lugar (IN), Snowe (ME). Newly minted Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter voted against her.

Won praise — from both liberals and conservatives — during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law. Hired some of the best law professors in the country, including Obama friend (and administration official) Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago.

Larry Summers, Orin Hatch, and Cass Sunstein.  It’s like the Bermuda Triangle.

And Arlen Specter doesn’t like her, but remember, the Tea Party hates Arlen Specter.

One reason why she’s the nominee:


http://www.thedailybeast.com/b…

Yesterday, I read everything Elena Kagan has ever published. It didn’t take long: in the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she’s published very little academic scholarship-  three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. Somehow, Kagan got tenure at Chicago in 1995 on the basis of a single article in The Supreme Court Review-a scholarly journal edited by Chicago’s own faculty-and a short essay in the school’s law review.

…. joining Harvard as a visiting professor of law in 1999. While there she published two articles, but since receiving tenure from Harvard in 2001 (and becoming dean of the law school in 2003) she has published nothing. (While it’s true law school deans often do little scholarly writing during their terms, Kagan is remarkable both for how little she did in the dozen years prior to becoming Harvard’s dean, and for never having written anything intended for a more general audience, either before or after taking that position.)

Kagan’s handful of publications touch on topics like regulating offensive speech, analyzing legislative motivations for speech regulations, and evaluating the process of administrative law-making. But on the vast majority of issues before the Court, Kagan has no stated opinion. Her scholarship provides no clues regarding how she would rule on such crucial contemporary issues as the scope of the president’s power in wartime, the legality of torture, or the ability of Congress to rein in campaign spending by corporations.

(updated)Lower Merion School Webcam SnooperGate, PA-06, Welcome to TerraWar, Kids!

(ARC note: Multiple edits were made to this because the Lower Merion Township, PA School District website, where this correspondence was posted publicly, did not allow the text to be cut and pasted successfully into this format, so I retyped all of it and did not hyperlink. )

(Update Mon April 19, 2010, 8:25 pm see end of story)

(PA-06. It’s not the Onion.  It’s my in- law’s congressional district.  I live in CA. That way they can’t visit easily. )

Feb 18, 2010  Lower Merion School District Initial Response to Invasion of Privacy Allegation (yes, it says that right on their School’s webpage at www.lmsd.org  )  


Dear LMSD Community,

Last year, our school district became one of the first school systems in the United States to provide laptop computers to all high school students. This initiative has been well received and has provided educational benefits to our students. The District is dedicated to protecting and promoting student privacy.  The laptops do contain a security feature  intended to track lost, stolen, and missing laptops. This feature has been deactivated effective today.

/snip

We regret if this situation has caused any concern or inconvenience among our students and families. We are reviewing the matter and will provide an additional update as soon as information becomes available.

Sincerely,  

Dr. Christopher McGinley,

Superintendent

Private vs Public Options — What’s the Difference?

Private vs. Public Schools: What’s the Difference?

Your goal is to find a school that will meet your child’s needs. But how do you choose between a public school and a private school?

[… interesting list of Pros and Cons …]

The Bottom Line

There are a few fundamental differences between public and private schools, but here’s the bottom line: There are great private schools and there are great public schools. The trick is finding the school that best fits your child’s needs. You may also want to consider public charter schools or homeschooling. It’s a good idea to research the schools that interest you and, to get a true picture of the school, visit in person.

(emphasis added)

http://www.greatschools.net/cg…

Has Competition from Public Education “killed” the thriving Industry of Private Education?

Hardly!

Neither will Competition from a Public Option in Health Care, “kill” the thriving Industry of Private Insurance — assuming they actually have a Product, that People are willing to pay for!

and if they don’t …?

What are Progressive Values?

Progressive Values?

Howard Dean – Fairness, Responsibility …



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

What does the Democratic Party stand for?

Howard Dean lists these “Core Values” of the Democratic Party

1) Fairness and Equal Rights for all

2) Strength and Toughness

3) Fiscal Responsibility

These are demonstrated by providing Health Care for all.

Dean stresses the urgent need for us to express these values, on an emotional level, and not just in Policy Statements.

“People vote on their Values — NOT on Position Papers!”

The Presumption of Innocence, and other Quaint Ideals

The Presumption of Innocence, and other Quaint Ideals

Presumption of Innocence

(Innocent until proven guilty)

A principle that requires the government to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant and relieves the defendant of any burden to prove his or her innocence.

The presumption of innocence, an ancient tenet of Criminal Law, is actually a misnomer. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the presumption of the innocence of a criminal defendant is best described as an assumption of innocence that is indulged in the absence of contrary evidence

[…]

the presumption of innocence is essential to the criminal process. The mere mention of the phrase presumed innocent keeps judges and juries focused on the ultimate issue at hand in a criminal case: whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the alleged acts. The people of the United States have rejected the alternative to a presumption of innocence-a presumption of guilt-as being inquisitorial and contrary to the principles of a free society.

http://legal-dictionary.thefre…

The Bill of Wrongs

Cross posted from my morning Open Thread on WWL this morning.

Finally had time to cross it! Have a grin. (kind of)

I am thinking about the slaughter of the Bill of Rights. Of course, when written it only inferred itself to rich white men anyway; now it blatantly applies to rich white men.

(Hat tip to Mentarch for sending me off on this tangent a couple times this week!!)

Being in a snarkilicious mood, lets examine these shall we? I’m dying to see what I come up with, and dying to see if you can find a better, more humorous way to re-define them in the comments.    

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