“Intrusive, Orwellian, incompetent, corrupt, heartless, secretive, and not to be trusted..”

Posted on June 8, 2013 by S

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here…”

Barack Obama isn’t exactly known for his keen political insight or astute observations, but THAT remark has to go down in history as some of the most mindless words uttered by a President of the United States.

Mr. Obama is, of course, referring to the latest of the ongoing examples of the nefarious conduct of HIS administration. As the width and depth of government surveillance on the citizens of this nation continues to expand, he offers nothing more than is trademark, feigned concern and empty words. Despite the origins of the tactics, this unbelievably dangerous conduct by government officials threatens the very roots of our existence as a nation. Yet, we have a President and elected officials in BOTH parties attempting to downplay the severity. The President is right about the fact that we DON’T trust government..especially HIS administration…and we DO have problems! Plenty of them and they’re VERY BIG!

Townhall’s Guy Benson explains further the magnitude of a President who can’t seem to grasp the scope of this threat…

Obama on Surveillance: If Americans Don’t Trust Government, “We’re Going to Have Some Problems”

“He’s right to a large extent, but I’m not sure framing things this way is quite as virtuosic as he might think:

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.” Obama added that the National Security agents behind the surveillance programs “cherish our Constitution…You can shout Big Brother or program run amok, but if you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance,” he explained.

The president went on to say the following about the choices we face as a nation: “You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he continued. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.” I agree, but candidate Obama was a persistent critic of his predecessor’s wrestling match between security and liberty, frequently labeling it a “false choice.” Now he’s fully adopted the “choice” paradigm, and is defending it vigorously. What does that choice entail? The United States of America faces grave, innumerable, and constant threats from foes, known and unknown. The men and women tasked with keeping the rest of us alive shoulder that burden every single day. I can’t imagine it, frankly. In an increasingly wired (and wireless) world, our best and brightest quietly toil to keep our security tools slightly ahead of technology’s cutting edge. Rest assured that our adversaries are doing the same. As a result of these efforts, they’ve quite literally tapped into a genuinely awesome amount of data. Has access to said data helped keep us safe? It appears so. But is the accompanying widespread loss of liberty — current or potential — worth it? My inner libertarian screams, “hell no.” By the same token, let’s say the president had dismantled or scaled back some of these programs, then we got hit hard again. If it later emerged that the president had done away with intelligence-gathering methods that could have prevented the bloodshed, wouldn’t many of us be furious? This is the balancing act to which Obama refers. These are the choices he disdained as a Senator but has since embraced as president.

As citizens, we must decide whether our leaders have chosen wisely. In the case of the NSA ‘metadata’ gathering, every single one of us is affected, but the contents of our communications aren’t monitored. According to people who know what they’re talking about, this program — which spans two administrations and more than a decade — is a “vital” tool in our arsenal. It makes me uncomfortable, but I’m not sure I oppose it outright. As for PRISM, we’re just beginning to learn about that enormous data mining operation. Its ability to review actual content like photos, videos, Skype conversations, and beyond is extremely disquieting. It’s the veritable definition of Big Brother. The government tells us PRISM isn’t being leveraged to intentionally or specifically target Americans. I want to believe them. But even if they’re being mostly truthful, the ways in which PRISM’s capabilities could be misused are obvious and frightening. Given the current climate of scandal, abusive targeting, and maddening opacity from the administration, many Americans’ capacity to trust the government is being pushed to the brink. For instance, like most Americans, I’m generally supportive of the Pentagon and CIA using drone strikes to take out Al Qaeda leadership, within certain limitations. It’s a way to keep us safe and to visit justice upon wanton killers and thugs. But then I read stories like this, and my conscience stirs. I similarly appreciate the president’s point that some of the recently-divulged (or re-divulged) programs operate with both Congressional and judicial oversight. That’s important. But members of his own party have pointed out that he wasn’t fully accurate in his statement and sugges that laws are being violated. I’m momentarily relieved when the president assures us that “nobody is listening” to our telephone calls. But then I recall that no one is actually leveling that accusation. Most Americans are comfortable with the government keeping certain secrets out of the public eye, but that comfort is reliant on a baseline of trust. And that trust is evaporating. Perhaps venerable Washington newsman Ron Fourniercaptures my sentiments best:

Obama himself channeled Orwell on Friday while defending the secrecy surrounding the spy programs. “Your duly elected representatives have consistently been informed,” he said. In other words, trust Washington.Three problems with that logic: Americans don’t trust government; an overwhelming majority of lawmakers were never told about the program; and members of Congress who were privy to intelligence “briefings” say their knowledge was limited. Look, it’s a dangerous world. Obama and his team need to get their hands dirty to protect us. As terrorists grow more dangerous, we need to consider using the flexibility of the Constitution to adapt. But the mandate to keep Americans safe is no excuse to keep them in the dark.

Fournier concludes that the administration’s depth of secrecy and non-transparent spin on a host of issues is lending momentum to the toxic narrative I’ve been discussing all week. Many Americans, Fourier writes, now view the federal government as “intrusive, Orwellian, incompetent, corrupt, heartless, secretive, and not to be trusted.” Indeed. The events of the last month have been a nonstop real-time advertisement in favor of limited, smarter, more restrained federal power.

UPDATE – I think it’s important to reiterate a point I made yesterday. The president undercut his rationale for maintaining these programs in his speech at NDU last month. You can’t argue that these pervasive measures are necessary, but “large scale” threats are no longer an issue.UPDATE II – And here’s why skepticism reigns:

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials. “

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The War at Home…

Posted on May 28, 2013 by S

As Barack Obama continues to coast through the scandal gauntlet, it could be sadly reported the President’s “fundamental change” notion has firmly taken root. Mr. Obama and the Democrats have successfully managed to change the rules from ideas and debating the issues to simply demonizing ANY opposition as evil, hateful, and downright demonic. That practice has convinced the ever shrinking minds of so many Americans on practically any concern. An alliance with the media has been the largest component in convincing the weak and the willing that THIS President can do no wrong. Despite the reality of just how WRONG his administration is on so many fronts.

Barack Obama’s disdain and disregard for what used to be worthy aspirations of the nation as a whole is propped up by his claim that those values are so yesterday..so old fashioned..so close minded…so discriminatory.

A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times – Dispatch outlines how the President has declared war on the Constitution. You know..that document which WAS the basis for law in what USED to be a nation of laws…

OBAMA’S WAR ON THE CONSTITUTION

The President, who first campaigned on a claim to constitutional expertise, is now the document’s biggest threat.

“A physician’s expertise makes him capable of inflicting great harm, noted Plato a couple thousand years ago, and no one is better positioned to steal than a guard. So perhaps we should not be surprised that the most conspicuous foe of liberty and the Bill of Rights turns out to be a former professor of constitutional law.

As a general rule, politicians tend to whipsaw between two poles. Conservatives try to increase economic liberty but show less regard for civil liberties. Liberals care deeply about civil liberties while trying to restrict the economic kind.

But the Obama administration is remarkable for its degree of disdain for both.

The president’s principal first-term achievement was the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The law greatly increases government’s role in health care and includes an expansion of government power unprecedented in American history: a requirement that all citizens purchase a consumer good irrespective of their personal behavior.

The administration also has pressed relentlessly – and successfully – for tax hikes, which shift control over economic resources from private hands to government. It also has indulged a regulatory binge, which shifts control indirectly, by cranking out burdensome new rules at a rate far faster than the Bush administration ever did. (This holds true even if you count only “economically significant” rules – those costing $100 million or more – and rely only on administration-friendly accounts.)

The result: Government not only is taking more of your money, it increasingly is telling you how to spend what’s left. A recent study estimates the cost of regulation at nearly $15,000 per household. This means the three principal drains on the family checkbook, in order, are: (1) taxes, (2) housing, and (3) regulation. And Washington is working hard to move regulation into the second slot.

While trends like these drive conservatives nuts, they gladden liberal hearts. Yet liberals are not happy with the Obama administration these days – for exceptionally good reasons.

Most saliently, the Justice Department has been trolling through the phone records of reporters for the Associated Press and, even worse, has accused a reporter (Fox News’ James Rosen) of acting as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the unlawful leaking of classified materials. Rosen’s offense was to do what reporters are supposed to do: break a story. This, too, is unprecedented, and it goes too far even for Obama’s most knee-jerk defenders. The New York Times views the investigation as “threatening fundamental freedoms of the press.”

The Rosen matter alone would suffice to disqualify the administration from any Friends-of-the-First Amendment society. Yet it is only one of several such assaults. Others include the administration’s campaign, through its insistence on a contraception mandate underObamacare, against religious liberty, and the president’s suggestion after Citizens United that “we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process” to limit the free-speech rights of persons who incorporate their social organizations; and its thuggish targeting of its political opponents.

If the IRS’ treatment of tea-party groups were an isolated story, you could swallow the explanation that a few low-level bureaucrats went rogue. But that account does not explain why the EPA has been far more generous to freedom-of-information requests from liberal groups than from conservatives. Or why, shortly after the Obama campaign slimed Romney supporter Frank Vander Sloot as a disreputable fellow, he was audited three times – twice by the IRS and once by the Labor Department. Or why, after Texas resident CatherineEngelbrecht started a Tea Party group, she received scrutiny not just from the IRS but also from the FBI. And OSHA. And, just for good measure, the ATF. Or why the IRS took 17 months to respond to an initial tax-exempt status from the conservative Wyoming Policy Institute. Or why it shared confidential files from conservative groups with the liberal ProPublica. Or why. . .

Enough on the First Amendment. The president also has tried with considerable vigor to undermine the Second, and has succeeded in subverting the Fourth: Under Obama, who has gone to court to defend warrantless wiretaps he once condemned, warrantless “pen register” and “trap-and-trace” monitoring has soared to unprecedented heights.

In 2011 the president signed a reauthorization of the Patriot Act with just one regret: Congress approved an extension of only one year, while Obama wanted three. He signed into law a defense reauthorization bill allowing the indefinite detention, without charge, of American citizens, thereby gutting the principle of habeas corpus. Granted, he issued an executive order promising not to exercise that power. But the order does not constrain future presidents or, technically, even him.

From a civil-liberties perspective, Obama has carried forward nearly every one of the war-on-terror powers that led liberals to denounce George W. Bush as a goose-stepping fascist, and in fact has made many of them worse. When he retires from public life, perhaps he will return to teaching the Constitution. That should be much easier work – given how little of it there will be left.

This article originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

All over the place!….

Posted on April 23, 2012 by S

That’s a good way to describe the antics of President Obama’s supporters, in and out of the Administration, this morning….

It’s beginning to take shape now. Their desperation, that is. A month or so ago, the media had Mr. Obama riding high…well ahead of Mitt Romney. Well, seems matters are not so rosy for this President and his minions. I’ve always held the belief they are not as invincible as portrayed. Their policies simply DO NOT reflect the views of the vast majority of the American people. Barack Obama, the Democrats, and various other progressives have this unrealistic, misguided mindset of creating a utopia. Based on “fairness” and “sharing the wealth” along with other dribble. What you don’t see, unless you have the forethought to uncover it, is the diabolical madness to their method. Any means to achieve the end result.

Witness this editorial from National Review Online regarding the so called “People’s Rights Amendment”….the name alone should send shivers down your spine! And who’s right in the middle of it? That moronic Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)…a woman whose stupidity should be declared a national threat!….

"If the crap that comes out of my brain doesn't frighten you...well...you don't have one..."

Keep the First Amendment – The Editors – National Review Online

The phrase “stunning development” is used far too often in our politics, but here is an item that can be described in no other way: Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats, frustrated by the fact that the Bill of Rights interferes with their desire to muzzle their political opponents, have proposed to repeal the First Amendment.

That is precisely what the so-called People’s Rights Amendment would do. If this amendment were to be enacted, the cardinal rights protected by the First Amendment — free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances — would be redefined and reduced to the point of unrecognizability. The amendment would hold that the rights protected by the Constitution are enjoyed only by individuals acting individually; individuals acting in collaboration with others would be stripped of those rights.

The Supreme Court and U.S. law have long held that Americans do not surrender the rights they enjoy individually when they act in association with one another. This has been a fundamental feature of U.S. law since the very beginning, and even before that, inasmuch as the notion that collective action does not deprive us of our rights goes back into the Common Law as well. U.S. court cases going back to the 18th century recognize that fact, as does federal statute: 1 U.S.C. §1 reads in part: “the words ‘person’ and ‘whoever’ include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.”

Strange things give the Left the heebie-jeebies, and “corporate personhood” seems like a strange thing. But “corporate personhood” is simply the notion that incorporated groups — businesses, political parties, unions, nonprofits, etc. — are single entities under the law. One would think that the Left would find this convenient: If Monsanto is not a “person” under the law, it cannot be regulated, taxed, sued, or fined, because for the purposes of the law it does not exist. Without the ability to treat enterprises as a single legal entity, there would be no redress for damages caused by a defective GM vehicle except to file claims against each individual owner of the 1.57 billion shares of GM stock outstanding.

But if GM and Monsanto can be sued, then they can defend themselves from suits. If they can be taxed on their property, then they can own property. If they have liabilities under contracts, then they have rights under contracts, too. If they have liabilities under the law, then they have rights under the law.

But the Occupy Left and the Democrats who sympathize with those ignorant misfits resent the fact that some business enterprises oppose their political agenda and support their opponents. (And some don’t: Wall Street gave generously to the Democratic party, and to Barack Obama particularly, in the 2008 election cycle.) The Left controls the unions, the government bureaucracies, most of the media, and the educational establishments, but its dreams of taxation and regulation do not sit particularly well with many who have to pay those taxes and suffer the regulation. The answer, in the mind of Pelosi et al., is to strip those opponents of their political rights.

The so-called People’s Rights Amendment would have some strange consequences: Newspapers, television networks, magazines, and online journalism operations typically are incorporated. So are political parties and campaign committees, to say nothing of nonprofits, business associations, and the like. Under the People’s Rights Amendment, Thomas Friedman would still enjoy putative First Amendment protection, but it would not do him much good inasmuch as the New York Times Company, being a corporation, would no longer be protected by the First Amendment. In short, any political speech more complex than standing on a soapbox at an intersection would be subject to the whims of Nancy Pelosi.

Representative Donna Edwards, a Maryland Democrat, nonchalantly concluded that the amendment would of course strip even political campaigns of the First Amendment rights: “All of the speech which, whether it’s corporations of campaign committees and others engage in, would be able to be fully regulated under the authority of the Congress.” The entire point of having a Bill of Rights is that there are some things Congress may not do. “Congress shall make no law” is a phrase that Democrats cannot abide, apparently.

One of the great dangers of such efforts to regulate political speech is that it puts incumbents in charge of setting the rules of the game under which their power and their position may be challenged. That is a recipe for abuse and corruption, and for smothering those critics who would draw attention to abuse and corruption.

Nancy Pelosi proposes to amend the Constitution the way the iceberg amended the Titanic. The First Amendment has served us well. Nancy Pelosi has not, but she has led her Democrats to a disturbing place in their quest to secure power, even at the cost of cashing in the Bill of Rights.

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We also have that idiotic mouthpiece for the Administration, David Axelrod, postulating about the Republicans and the possibility of a “reign of terror”…It blows my mind that the outrageousness of these disgusting and integrity free individuals is never challenged by the media…well, the mainstream …a.k.a. worthless media….

"The President said I should just spout off whatever comes to mind..of course, with my mind, that could be anything...because desperation knows no limits...and Barack Obama is desperate for a second term..."

AXELROD: A ‘REIGN OF TERROR’ FROM THE FAR RIGHT – Townhall

"I am gonna do everything I can to f**k this country up..whether Barack Obama wins re-election or not..."

And we also have the frighteningly dangerous Van Jones, a former Administration official, who would much prefer you keep quiet…

from his book ‘Rebuild the Dream’:

“What does “love” of country mean to you?

It means I love Americans—the people who actually live here, who look all kind of different ways, who pray all kind of different ways, who love all kinds of people. And I challenge the people who are the opponents of my values to explain how they get to be patriots. As I say in the book, they seem to distrust the American government. They seem to dislike most of the American people. They seem to resent most of America’s achievements over the last century, including unions and public education and environmental protection and so many of the things that made the American century the American century. So I don’t get why we don’t just tell them to sit down and shut up. They can complain if they like, but we have another century to win. We have another century to win!”

This is also the same Van Jones who claims conservatives want to “kill children for jobs”…or some garbage like that…more can be seen here:

VAN JONES: CONSERVATIVES WANT TO KILL CHILDREN FOR JOBS…OR SOMETHING – Townhall

Theses are just a few examples of how ugly things are going to get over the next couple of months. If Mr. Obama’s re-election prospects continue to dim…we can only hope….you are going to see some pretty nasty stuff from his campaign and his supporters. These people managed to pull a classic snow job on the country in 2008 and they are not relinquishing power without a fight. And to them, there are no rules. Anything and anyone is fair game. My only hope is Republicans are ready for the fight. YOU have to be ready for the fight. They are coming after everything millions of Americans hold dear. Our families and livelihoods are at risk. Barack Obama holds dear his belief that you need to be punished..punished for your beliefs and your achievements. He will continue to pander to the numbers of Americans who look no further than the federal government for their very existence. You do not. That means YOU are a threat to HIS future. Remember that!