Archive for the ‘First Amendment’ Category

This story was written by a journalist that was killed in a car accident. Story here. I’m not posting this because of that, just noting his passing and sharing his last story.

The excuse for wiretapping, etc., that it’s to stop terrorism is a bunch of bullshit. All these people in government want is control. 

Control of every aspect of your life and that means that liberty cannot survive if they are to reach their goal.

Why is DHS arming itself to the teeth?

Why are the Dems so hot and bothered on the Second Amendment?

They wiretap millions of people in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

They go after journalists that break stories that are detrimental to them.

They go after conservative groups through the IRS and other agencies to stop any group against the Administration.

Why did Congress draft and the President sign the National Defense Authorization Act with language that summarily removes all of your rights to council and can lock you up without charges indefinitely?

This Administration has done more to curtail our freedom by chipping away at the Constitution than any other, and they do it with a smile on their face, a lie on their lips and and a head fake to keep you guessing.

Up until this point the media has done nothing to stop this man and his allies from running roughshod over this country until they were targeted themselves. But even that hasn’t stopped them from sucking up to this Administration. Obvious lies and obfuscation go unchallenged.

Enough is enough with these people.

Impeach Obama and his cronies.

Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans

Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they’ve tried to hide.

By Michael Hastings

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.

Glenn Greenwald’s exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.

“Everyone should just calm down,” Senator Harry Reid said yesterday, inhaling slowly.

That’s right: don’t panic.

The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems — including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry — have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008.

via Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans.

…are we living Orwell, or Kafka? Either way, it’s freedom that is lost.

The Eyes Watching You

1984 and the Surveillance State

by SARAH SKWIRE

George Orwell. 1984. New York: Plume, [1949] 2003. 323 pages.In the kind of horrifying coincidence that surely would have prompted one of his more acerbic essays, the news that various U.S. government surveillance agencies have been gathering data from millions of citizens’ phones, email accounts, and web searches broke during the week of the 64th publication anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984. As the news reports poured in, and as sales of 1984 surged by an astonishing 6,884 percent, a friend asked me whether the PRISM story strikes me as more Orwellian or more Kafkaesque.

My response? We’d better hope it’s Kafkaesque.

No one wants to inhabit a Franz Kafka novel. But the surveillance states he describes do have one thing going for them—incompetence. In Kafka’s stories, important forms get lost, permits are unattainable, and bureaucrats fail to do their jobs. Like the main character in Kafka’s unfinished story, “The Castle,” if you were trapped in Kafka’s world you could live your whole life doing nothing but waiting for a permit. But at least you could live. Incompetence creates a little space.

What is terrifying about Orwell’s 1984 is the complete competence of the surveillance state. Winston Smith begins the novel by believing he is in an awful, but Kafkaesque world where there is still some slippage in the state’s absolute control, and still some room for private action. Winston says that Oceania’s world of telescreens and Thought Police means that there are “always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape.” But he follows that by saying, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” He also believes that while the diary he keeps will inevitably be discovered, the small alcove in his apartment where he writes his diary puts him “out of the range of the telescreen.”

via The Eyes Watching You : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education.

…in the United States of America.

What happened to my country?

Since 9-11-01 we have been subjected to more and more loss of freedom through the government’s intrusion into our lives.

These intrusions are done in the name of security. There be terrorists here and there and everywhere.

How many terrorist attacks have occurred in the USA since 9-11?

The number is pretty low. And it has nothing to do with the NSA, or the FBI’s surveillance of Americans.

The scandals that keep coming out of Washington are proof that their agenda is to kill liberty in this country.

Didn’t Obama say that the “war on terrorism is over” in one of his hundreds of speeches? If the war on terrorism is over, then there is absolutely no reason for the government’s overreach into our lives.

Remember candidate Obama in 2007? The then candidate gave a foreign policy speech denouncing exactly what this Administration has done. In fact, they’ve expanded the liberty crushing agenda that Bush pulled with the Patriot Act.  Here’s what he said then:

I guess the joke’s on us.

Power corrupts absolutely.

Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the government has expanded its powers immensely. The TSA is the most overbearing and useless organization ever created in this country. They violate our Fourth Amendment rights every time we get into an airport to board a plane. They search 90 year old ladies in wheelchairs under the guise of not profiling Muslims. Guess what morons? Muslim men and women in the age group of 20-40 are the threat. Not some old lady in a wheelchair.

Now we find the IRS targeting certain groups that call themselves the Tea Party, along with other conservative groups against big government, or just wanting to teach the Constitution. Why is that? What end does this government seek?

Control.

This Administration has gone after the First Amendment by targeting the Tea Party and other Conservative groups through the IRS. They have tapped the phones of Americans violating the Fourth Amendment, and they have been going after guns in a vain attempt at taking away our divine right to life, and liberty, by attacking the Second Amendment.

It’s about controlling the masses so that they can enrich themselves and screw the rest of us.

All under the guise of security, or to “protect the children” from harm. If they really wanted to protect the children, then there would be no more gun free zones, and every school in America would have armed staff to stop any idiot that tried to harm them.

Fighting terrorism in America, what a false flag that is.

They keep the stupid people scared in order to run roughshod over the rest of us that know better.

Here’s an interesting article from the NY Times, the fish wrap of record, but they changed it so it wouldn’t be so damning to their messiah.

Via The Daily Caller:

The editorial originally declared that the Obama “administration has lost all credibility” as a result of the recently revealed news that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been secretly collecting call data from American users of Verizon under the authority of the Patriot Act.

The media has been complicit in this whole charade with their idolizing of Obama and their complete lack of integrity. If they had been doing their job from the start, then Obama probably wouldn’t have been elected in the first place, never mind a second time.

I apologize for being all over the map on this, but it really pisses me off.

At any rate, it’s still a decent article for this rag.

President Obama’s Dragnet

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

via President Obama’s Dragnet – NYTimes.com.

…what an excellent job.

…comes from an American Thinker article. It’s about the history that I watched. Senator Rand Paul has got a pair of balls that Congress hasn’t seen in decades. America will not tolerate a tyrant, nor will it tolerate the loss of freedom.

I stand with Rand!

The quote:

Rand advanced his strategic goal. The entire filibuster episode portrayed a radically different image of Barack Obama. Even among low information voters, Obama’s public image just took a serious hit. Instead of being the cool guy who loves you, Obama is now the tyrant who reserves the right to kill you any time he feels like it. On an emotional level, Rand Paul undid in one day years of spin about Obama.

This comes from Rand Paul Shifts Political Orbit.

Government by the people.

…exists in America.

You can thank Congress and Obama for taking away your freedom of speech and Obama signed this in secrecy.
It is time to rise up people. Why is the MSM not reporting on this?

They are taking away our rights one by one and then when they are all gone then what?
Are you going to be a sheep and go along with this shit?

It is time to fight back against the slow creeping destruction of our basic liberties.
Freedom is in the balance.

…this is a must read!

Please share it!

Open Letter to the President Barack Obama

Mr. PresidentToday, there are families who question the direction of the nation. There are fathers and mothers trying to figure out how to pay the bills, to put children through college, to just get by everyday when wages have been depressed by overwhelming unemployment. I know it is at 7.8%, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Your economists understand what I am saying.We are a nation saddled with many bills and deficits that are not realistically ever going to be repaid. For example, the treasury receives around 2.3 trillion dollars in revenue every year, but spends nearly 5 trillion, or 5,000 billion dollars. There are concerns that to continue to operate the federal government, social security, medicare, medicaid, etc., the government is going to have to devalue the dollar. QE 1&2 didn’t do it. The Stimulus package went largely to government entities as grants and such. This is not a criticism, but it is a fact. That money did not filter down to small business.

I believe that at some point the government is going to have to crash the dollar to pay off some of the bonds already held in order to borrow more money to pay the bills. This is not radical, I think it is something you already know is necessary. I think you proved that by excercising Quantitative Easing 1& 2. It will be an accounting correction to you and the federal government, but it will destroy the lives of millions of Americans. I will cede that the damage was not done by you alone, far from it, but it will fall to you to make that fateful decision.

via TL In Exile: Open Letter to the President Barack Obama.

…and it’s a doozy.
I keep asking the same thing. There once was a time when Democrats wanted liberty and freedom. What happened?

There was once a time when the media wouldn’t allow this to happen in America. What happened to them?

Here’s the quote:

Where is the liberal outrage? Where is the liberal suspicion about powerful, unchecked governments? Where is the liberal unflinching devotion to individual liberty?

That gem is the opening to this:

HURT: Gun edicts put personal liberty under fire
By Charles Hurt

Where is the liberal outrage? Where is the liberal suspicion about powerful, unchecked governments? Where is the liberal unflinching devotion to individual liberty?

We have a president who has radically reshaped the landscape of American government so that it is more of a behemoth than at any time in history and more involved in every aspect of our lives. It is also more unanswerable than ever before.

Now this president is issuing 23 new edicts aimed at curbing individuals’ gun rights. At the same time, his federal agencies are stockpiling more and more weapons and ammunition.

And for what, exactly? To go hunting? To shoot the Chinese when they come to collect their debts? To shoot Mexicans tumbling over the Southern border? To shoot the Canadians?

What does the Department of “Homeland Security” suddenly need 1.4 billion more rounds of ammunition at the very point the same government is making it harder for citizens to arm themselves?

There are only 300 million of us. How many bullets do you need? That’s more than four bullets for every American man, woman and child. Is your aim really that bad? I mean, have you seen us lately? We are too fat to run very far.

You can say these concerns are some sort of Alex Jones, wack-nut, black helicopter paranoia or you can simply ask, “Why does the government need a billion more rounds of ammo just as it is trying to disarm citizens?”

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…and voting for moron liberals is dangerous to the Constitution of the United States and our freedoms.
Here’s a prime example of why voting for a Democrat is a bad idea.
They want to control you and everything you do, including what you say.

This comes from NewsBusters:

…with a win for Christmas!
Every year around this time, the douche bags that get offended by religion come out of the woodwork and try to shut down any and all displays of Christmas on public land. They have the misguided notion that the Constitution denies religious expression on government ground. It doesn’t. There is no such thing as separation of church and state. The Constitution is explicit in that the government will not establish a religion. The government isn’t establishing a religion when it allows displays of religious items on government property. It is allowing the “owners” of said government property to utilize it for their benefit. Nothing prevents the anti-Christmas crowd from creating their own displays.
Here at least there is a win for Christmas. America needs more of these wins.

Court rules in favor of public nativity scene- Despite reports, Pope has not canceled Christmas
By Todd Starnes

A federal court ruled that a Michigan family has a constitutional right to display a public Nativity scene, marking an end to a four-year court battle that started when militant secularists objected to the 60-year-old tradition.

“Every December, militant secularists declare war on Christmas celebrations,” said Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center. “This is one battle they lost.”

The Law Center represented John Satawa, of Warren, Mich. Since 1945 his family had erected a Nativity display on a public median in their town.

In 2008 the Macomb County Road Commission received a threatening letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation – claiming the display violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

The following year, the county denied Satawa’s Nativity permit because it “displays a religious message.” That denial led to a four-year court battle that culminated with a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in favor of the display.

A spokesman for the roads commission told Fox News they will not appeal the ruling – and will grant Satawa a permit for the display.

As far as the county is concerned – the case is closed.

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