Myself and dfallon spotted a number of these plaques around the Dublin 8 and Liberties area last weekend. Here’s the story behind them…

Artist Chris Reid set out to create a micro history about Nicholas Street, Ross Road, Bride Street and Bride Road. This history would be centered on audio recordings of conversations Chris had with residents and people associated with the area. This research took place between 2004 and 2008. These oral narratives formed the basis of a subjective local history and heritage that would be placed back into the area. This subjective local history would be for local, resident, and tourist alike.

This history would privilege the human reality of a given situation rather than any factual account.  The oral narratives recorded on minidisks were turned into a series of 220 short texts and a series of 100 longer anecdotes and stories. Each contributor participated alongside chris in the selection of a final 20 short texts for use on the plaques. These were typeset and individually cast on bronze in the form of commemorative plaques and installed on the walls of the aforementioned streets between 7 and 8 foot from the ground.

To view all the plaques and a map showing where they are, log onto http://www.chrisreidartist.com/projects.html. Let’s hope we see more of this in Dublin in the near future.

or: I’ll trade you civil liberties circa 1980, for the right to beat your wife circa 1920

or: If Glenn Beck were a decade, which one would he be?

For almost a year now, and even further back possibly, I have been fascinated with politics and punditry. I have become a self-proclaimed politico and I follow politics and media pretty closely, as closely as my tenuous hold on sanity will allow. In following politics my liberal mind has always been perplexed by the conservative party line of ‘returning to traditional American values’ and trying to recapture the ‘lost spirit of what it is to be an American’. In recent months it as been the loud ram’s horn call of Glenn Beck, and his ever growing audacity matched only by his ever growing audience, that has caused me to pontificate further on this subject. For the past few weeks this idea of lost values and traditional American fundamentals has led me to research where we might have gone wrong. Is there a specific time and place, a particular era that the GOP and other right-leaning hard-liners would want us to return to? If I can put my finger on the ethos that these guiding principles existed in, can we get back there? I delve in to this quagmire of American history to try and find “Glenn’s America”, so that he and others can stop preaching in general broad strokes and say, “we need to get back to what we believed in 19XX (or 18XX as it may be).”

When examining the general party ideas of what I understand to be the GOP’s fundamental idealogical structure I take my understanding from some 25 years on this planet, though you can’t count the first 16. I think that until you turn 17 and start trying to find yourself and begin to shape your views and identity in preparation for voting and contributing to society you are more of a blank slate in terms of personal free thought; up until this point you do not question a source but only try to fit in to the general parameters of ‘normal’ life as to not rock the boat and interfere with the indoctrination that American public schools instill in our youth. My true views have been shaped in my most recent years and as such I have adopted a view of the world quite different from my parents’, a direct result of informing myself for the first time in my life. In my home growing up as a small boy liberal leaders and democratic ideals warranted venom and crass, lewd criticism. The views I set forth will be of my own creation, independent of those I was raised on, either despite or in spite of them, I cannot tell. A crazy person isn’t crazy if he knows he’s crazy. Indeed.

The GOP seems to feel that gays should not marry, and are sinful. This makes no sense to me as sinful is a religious idea, not a political one; though it seems one position is quite often the result of the other. Gun rights should be protected at all costs to personal safety and public responsibility. Abortion is a no-no, ‘nuff said. They want smaller government, tax cuts, reform to let states decide things, though not gay marriage rights or any of the other items I just mentioned. They are for fiscal responsibility. GOP feels that a free market should regulate itself, again smaller government. They claim to fight for the middle class but public programs and universal anything is bad, that’s more government. They hate the environment as far as I can tell. Campaign finance reform (yeah right), education in America (no child left behind has gone so well after all). Prayer in school is ok, capital punishment and the death penalty are pretty much thumbs up, and the Ten Commandments should be at the steps of a courthouse flying the confederate flag. I am pretty close on this, right? So, basically it is a small government that has an abridged copy of the constitution, a cliff’s notes of the Bill of Rights, and a bible as it’s guiding principles. Hmmm, ok.

So, in American history, where can we find this utopia we strive for every day? This shangri-la we lost so long ago would obviously be the one saving grace for this country of godless sodomites. If we could only return to this point in time then everything would be fine. As far as I can tell it is the GOP that can save us if you believe the rhetoric. The liberals and the liberal media have scattered us across the nation and we are divided along partisan lines and are all doomed unless we jump on the Republican band wagon like some lifeboat after the Titanic sank. This is what self proclaimed “libertarian” Glenn Beck would like you to believe. I will give him credit for criticizing the government as a whole, even in the Bush days, though not in such inflammatory terms, but in reality he is like a Liber-publican. So, let’s take a step, Glenn, in to the way back machine and start a search for the time in American history you would like us to return to, as well as all of the Republican nay-sayers.

I want to start by saying that I am skipping the nineties completely being that he wasn’t happy with Clinton either, and it is far too close to the 21st century and the liberal progress this country has made; there is no way anyone wants to get back to how we were in the nineties, not even me and I loved my teen years in the nineties. And I am going to come back to the eighties later, they were too soon as well, but I will look at them briefly. We are sending our way back machine to a time when I think this country went bat-shit crazy and we were in maybe the most turmoil as a nation than anyone today can recall. I want to start out in the era that good old Glenn was born in, and that many of our current figure heads today, that make our decisions, can remember very ‘fondly’…the sixties.

Well I start here, in this decade of utter unrest by trying to illustrate that this can’t possibly be the America Glenn wants back. This cannot be the period in American history we want to recapture. This was a time that the late Strom Thurman must have hated with more zeal than any other period in history. It is hard to decide where to start. The sixties started out innocent enough, Kennedy beat Nixon and became the President, what followed was the Bay of Pigs incident, rumors about Marilyn, the meager beginning of Vietnam, the cuban missile crisis, then the man is assassinated. Further Vietnam BS, Malcolm X is killed, the Compton Cafeteria Riots in San Fran, then Nixon and all his Vietnam BS and his ‘secret plan to end the war’, the massive inflation crisis, MLK Jr. is killed, Bobby Kennedy is killed, the Stonewall riots of ’69, oh and a little thing who was named Manson did some killing. Great decade.

The sixties were a time of massive riots in the black and gay communities. Civil rights on all fronts tore the fabric of this country apart from women liberation, blacks, gays, even the Chicano revolution in this country. Outside of that was the acid wave of the sixties, a complete change in television, film, art, and especially music. The counterculture as it came to be known galvanized this country after the death of JFK, I think. The nice, homely manners of the 50’s were gone in a big way and now came very free thinkers, revolutionaries, protests exploded, demonstrations, inflation choked the middle class as they tried to compete with the changes in the landscape. The sixties were an ugly, hate-filled time, the emerging civil rights movement after the death of JFK was really the catalyst for it all. There is no way we want to return to the sixties as a country. America was in a violent turmoil and unsure of it’s identity and where the road we were on was going to lead us and people were strung out or scared for their lives, or both. I don’t think Glenn wants that back, so let’s move on.

How about we take a step forward and find Glenn in the seventies as a small boy, maybe these are the innocent and moral times he wants back…but I doubt it. Well in the seventies music really got good including the first ‘rap’ song, movies got weird, TV got lewd, and the country just got fucked up worse. This country started watching shows like All In The Family and the Brady bunch, dealing with some of the issues of the day. Vietnam choked the first few years while a little thing called Watergate slipped by the news press during Nixon’s re-election campaign and then killed him by ’74. It was the most embarrassing and shocking scandal in American political history, which in my opinion was the death of politics. I think that Nixon and his escalation of the doomed Vietnam war and his scandal killed the American political system. Outside of the US revolution was abundant across the world. Woodstock was a shining beacon of what drugs and music and mud can do for young people, a complete change from how we started the decade on the campus of Kent State where the National Guard gunned down peaceful protestors of the war on a college campus; unthinkable today, one would hope. The draft was the height of outrage, an unbelievable moment when Ali fought the draft and Elvis went in. Protest and anti-war sentiment was as widespread in this country as pant legs were flared. The Cold War ramped up a bit and this country got really scared, really fast. Our involvement in a few revolutions and military coupes as well as an assassination or two was a continuation of poor foreign affairs decisions. The middle east started down the road to where we are today with Israel, Egypt, Syria, the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan, all starting to kick each others asses.

The seventies brought women’s rights to the forefront as the sixties had civil rights for minorities eclipsing women’s rights to some extent. Vietnam ended finally, well our involvement, leaving the North to just wait for us to leave and drop Saigon to it’s knees and claim the country unified again. A sad end to a war we should have not been in and an end that was mostly our fault. Oh and lest I forget the massive recession we were in mixed with oil crises a couple of times resulting in rationing and further middle class stresses that included a very high unemployment rate. Then of course there was Jonestown, about 900 dead there. Idi Amin started his tyrannical, violent rule of Uganda as well. Is this the era we should return to? Hatred, war, violence, and tragedy pock marked this era. The seventies hold within their years scandal, racism, and fear-mongering, of the most epic scale one can imagine. There is no way we want to return to the moral or political views of this era. The seventies were the time for change for sure, but it came at great expense on the heels of a decade of radical change and upheaval. The 70’s continued the massive crime rate spikes that the sixties brought and the country still sat on the edge of it’s seat every day as nothing seemed to get better. Surely we don’t want the seventies back.

Ok, the eighties might be better, the days of Reagan and Bush, this might be the most likely time we want to return to. The eighties would be the most formidable years of Beck’s life; the decade of excess. The eighties brought the yuppie, and with it, all the coke, parties, and BMW’s we could handle. We saw great multinational growth and wall street was glamorous, they were kings then, still total scum, but they had better PR people then. Of course Reagan declared a War on Drugs, the Cold War raged to a massive scale. Sure, communism fell apart as did the Berlin Wall, but we saw the further mishandling of the middle east that is the source of our problems and involvement there today, can’t argue with that. Reagan put a major black eye on his presidency with the discovery of the Iran-Contra debacle that Oliver North was the mastermind behind. This country saw massive economic growth against the backdrop of very complicated and protracted battles all over the world including Asia, the middle east, central and south america, and ever Ireland with ‘the troubles’ brewing. (Only badass Irish would call a modern, religious civil war ‘the troubles’, an understatement to say the least)

The eighties, I think were a time of thinking that we could not be beaten, being the short attention span of Americans forgetting the seventies. We were coked out of our minds, living beyond our means, and we were kicking Commie ass. But the eighties, world wide, were complicated, painful growth, some democratic, but on the whole we saw massive famine and destruction abroad as the industrialized countries were making head way. The middle class of nations was being evaporated as the gap between rich and poor nations grew drastically. Domestic issues were tough though, as it seemed we were trying to use our power for good as a people with things like LiveAid and becoming more aware of issues in Africa and other countries, the eighties saw the rise of the religious right. They really got fired up on the gay issue and the discovery of AIDS, ‘the gay plague’. This country grew in many way, a decent decade I guess, I don’t really remember much of it but it seemed like a lot of people were having a lot of fun, safer fun.

Glenn probably liked the eighties, he used to be a liberal and an alcoholic, he draws a fine parallel between the two in a Katie Couric interview you should look up on YouTube, and this might have been his favorite time. Old enough to enjoy and understand it, he probably had a great time. Conservatives in power, strides made internationally, excess and money everywhere. The eighties were a wild party time, a decade that seemed to be a release of the past twenty years of hard work, growing pains, and controversial conflict. The 60’s and 70’s were going to lead inevitably to a time when we finally just cut loose and took a deep breath after so much bloodshed, upheaval, and serious talk. It was the decade we all remembered fondly on VH1. Music was weird, movies were great, TV was filled with classics we all watched, and standup comedians were making it big; the country was having a good laugh, a bump, and some beer. Not too bad.

I discount the nineties entirely so let’s jump back to a more general era I don’t think we can reasonably go back to, the 50’s to the 30’s. This was another era of massive wars, depression, civil rights injustice, bigotry, no women’s liberation, industrialization, organized crime, et al. These were times when blacks were openly hung from gallows, women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant in front of the stove, except when they were making tanks for the troops overseas for next to nothing wages. A time where minorities were rightfully scared at night of police or white boys out for a joyride. The prohibition, crime in the streets, Bonnie and Clyde, the Tommy gun, the B.A.R., saloons, speakeasy’s, and rampant bank robberies and crooked cops on the beat. This was a different time for this country and I don’t think we can agree with many of the ideals that were held to in this time and apply it today, the role of women alone is too much inequality to bare, let alone the rest.

OK, let’s take a big jump to my favorite era, the old west. You know the times, I’m talking post manifest destiny, pre-FBI. A time of no gun laws, showdowns in the streets, legal prostitutes, and riding in to town on a horse. Tombstone, San Francisco, Indian and cowboys. A time where gold was rushing and crazy white drunks ran amok and contracted TB and polio. Yes, when there were still a few Indians around, you had ranchers with thousands of acres, cattle drives, train robberies, and the men of storied legend lived and died by Winchester, Colt, and Smith&Wesson. I like to think I lived in the times with a town sheriff, shitty beer, floozies, and general martial law over most of the country. A time where you could shoot a man in the street in broad daylight in front of 50 people, and they might actually clap and then go about their day. The good times.

I think this might not be far enough back though. When I hear Glenn speak, he talks about the founding father’s principles. The true foundation of the country as he sees it with the men who earned America through blood, sweat, and tears. Jefferson’s America. OK, well let’s first examine the fact that we are talking late 1700’s and early 1800’s. These are pre-electric, pre-phone times. We are talking Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere, plantations, etc. If this is the time Glenn thinks we need to get back to I want to highlight a couple of things. First off, slavery was alive and well…need I say more? Secondly, this country treated women like shit, there were no civil rights, and it was unindustrialized. This country was populated and run by rich, white land owners, and then there was everybody else. I don’t want anyone to romanticize this era. This country was created, founded, and declared on the bodies of millions of natives and the death and suffering of minority races of people removed from their homes and treated worse than dogs in the time period.

America has never been truly righteous. We revolted for selfish reasons, nothing simpler than that. We turned against the imperialism of the Queen and her rule and declared our independence; the worst “dear John” letter ever. Up to that point we had slaughtered, tricked, infected, raped, and pillaged our way to the Mississippi and thought very highly of white skin and could kill a black man for any reason at any time, or sell them, whatever struck our fancy. What I am about to say is going to piss off the right, but if I could meet George Washington I think I would take the opportunity to shake his hand and then slap the wooden teeth out of his head. These were racist white bigots with an knack for the written word and hard on for ‘freedom’ by their definition as it applied to them as an emerging nation of first class citizens at the top of the shit pile. All due respect, but their ideas and principles were fundamentally offensive and their beliefs of equality were for themselves and those they agreed with. How many minorities or women were running around enjoying their freedom of speech or right to bare arms…or even read? I rest my case.

So maybe Glenn does have a time in mind. Maybe he wants the scandalous, violent 70’s, or the civil unrest and inequality of the 60’s. The old west certainly had smaller/non-existent national government, and the 40’s sure were good times to be a gangster, Nixon would have done well, that’s for sure. The eighties surely had the best coke, and some unprecedented growth, outside of post-industrialized America (without all of these pesky labor laws we got). Maybe he wants the great depression era, maybe to live amongst the greatest generation, or rub elbows with white men who raped their slaves on their plantation as a matter of principle and patriotism. The history of America is short, embarrassing, and seemingly without a lesson learned throughout. Glenn, I dare you and your constituents to point out that shining beacon in American history that is so much better than now, ‘cause I must have missed it. All those moments have led up to now, and I’ll be damned if where we are isn’t a hell of a lot better than where we were; you can pry this progress from my cold dead hands, pal.

How America’s Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties

by Prof. Alfred W. McCoy, for GlobalResearch.ca

In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could “reverberate for generations,” warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.

Don’t be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja, and Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don’t ever claim that nobody told you this could happen — at least not if you care to read on.

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Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home, a process historians of such American wars can tell you has been going on for a long, long time. Counterintelligence innovations like centralized data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed during the Army’s first protracted pacification campaignin a foreign land — the Philippines from 1898 to 1913 — were repatriated to the United States during World War I, becoming the blueprint for an invasive internal security apparatus that persisted for the next half century.

Almost 90 years later, George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror plunged the U.S. military into four simultaneous counterinsurgency campaigns, large and small — in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (once again) the Philippines — transforming a vast swath of the planet into an ad hoc“counterterrorism” laboratory. The result? Cutting-edge high-tech security and counterterror techniques that are now slowly migrating homeward.

As the War on Terror enters its ninth year to become one of America’s longest overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an uncomfortable question: What impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and the atmosphere they created domestically — had on the quality of our democracy?

Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state — with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling “the homeland.”

Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington, the ongoing Global War on Terror has helped bring about a massive expansion of domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up several billion private documents from U.S. citizens into classified data banks. Abroad, after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the Pentagon began applying biometrics — the science of identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal or iris patterns — to the pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts for instant intelligence and the split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South Asia.

In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack, Washington could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant battlefields, to create an instant digital surveillance state.

The Crucible of Counterinsurgency

For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of counterinsurgency, forging a new system of biometric surveillance and digital warfare with potentially disturbing domestic implications. This new biometric identification system first appeared in the smoking aftermath of “Operation Phantom Fury,” a brutal, nine-day battle that U.S. Marines fought in late 2004 to recapture the insurgent-controlled city of Falluja. Bombing, artillery, and mortars destroyed at least half of that city’s buildings and sent most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding countryside. Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless hours under a desert sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris scans. Once inside the city’s blast-wall maze, residents had to wear identification tags for compulsory checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.
The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify Baghdad’s far larger population of seven million came in April 2007 when the New York Times published an eerie image of American soldiers studiously photographing an Iraqi’s eyeball. With only a terse caption to go by, we can still infer the technology behind this single record of a retinal scan in Baghdad: digital cameras for U.S. patrols, wireless data transfer to a mainframe computer, and a database to record as many adult Iraqi eyes as could be gathered. Indeed, eight months later, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had collected over a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans. By mid-2008, the U.S. Army had also confined Baghdad’s population behind blast-wall cordons and was checking Iraqi identities by satellite link to a biometric database.

Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology can do, by early 2008, U.S. forces were also collecting facial images accessible by portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. “A war fighter needs to know one of three things,” explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. “Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?”

A future is already imaginable in which a U.S. sniper could take a bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond to transmit the target’s iris or retinal data via backpack-sized laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.

Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward claims the success of George W. Bush’s 2007 troop surge in Iraq was due less to boots on the ground than to bullets in the head — and these, in turn, were due to a top-secret fusion of electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting in May 2006, American intelligence agencieslaunched a Special Action Program using “the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government” in a successful effort “to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias.”
Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed “every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence” for “lightning quick” strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him “orgasms.” President Bush called it “awesome.” Although refusing to divulge details, Woodward himself compared it to the Manhattan Project in World War II. This Iraq-based assassination program relied on the authority Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld granted JSOC in early 2004 to “kill or capture al-Qaeda terrorists” in 20 countries across the Middle East, producing dozens of lethal strikes by airborne Special Operations forces.

Another crucial technological development in Washington’s secret war of assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, whose speedy development has been another by-product of Washington’s global counterterrorism laboratory. Half a world away from Iraq in the southern Philippines, the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces  conducted  an early experiment in the use of aerial surveillance for assassination. In June 2002, with a specially-equipped CIA aircraft circling overhead offering real-time video surveillance in the pitch dark of a tropical night, Philippine Marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao (a.k.a. “Abu Sabaya”).

In July 2008, the Pentagon proposed an expenditure of $1.2 billion for a fleet of 50 light aircraft loaded with advanced electronics to loiter over battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing “full motion video and electronic eavesdropping to the troops.” By late 2008, night flights over Afghanistan from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt were using sensors to give American ground forces real-time images of Taliban targets — some so focused that they could catch just a few warm bodies huddled in darkness behind a wall.

In the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency, CIA Predator drone strikes have escalated in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission, and digital imaging to kill half of the Agency’s 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets in the region. Just three days before Obama visited Canada last February, Homeland Security launched its first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast, empty North Dakota-Manitoba borderlands that one U.S. senator has called America’s “weakest link.”

Homeland Security

While those running U.S. combat operations overseas were experimenting with intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics, inside Washington the plodding civil servants of internal security at the FBI and the NSA initially began expanding domestic surveillance through thoroughly conventional data sweeps, legal and extra-legal, and — with White House help — several abortive attempts to revive a tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens spying on suspected subversives.

“If people see anything suspicious, utility workers, you ought to report it,” said President George Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice Department had launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), with plans for “millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others” to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans. Such citizen surveillancesparked strong protests, however, forcing the Justice Department to quietly bury the president’s program.

Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan’s former national security advisor (swept up in the Iran-Contra scandal of that era), was developing a Total Information Awareness program which was to contain “detailed electronic dossiers” on millions of Americans. When news leaked about this secret Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing eye logo, Congress banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key data extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype System, migrated quietly to the NSA.

Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI, and NSA turned to monitoring citizens electronically without the need for human tipsters, rendering the administration’s grudging retreats from conventional surveillance at best an ambiguous political victory for civil liberties advocates. Sometime in 2002, President Bushgave the NSA secret, illegal orders to monitor private communications through the nation’s telephone companies and its private financial transactions through SWIFT, an international bank clearinghouse.

After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps in 2005, Congress quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive program and then granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil suits. Such intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after Congress widened the legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008, the NSA continued to push the boundaries of its activities, engaging in what the New York Times politely termed the systematic “overcollection” of electronic communications among American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA database called “Pinwale,” analysts routinely scan countless “millions” of domestic electronic communications without much regard for whether they came from foreign or domestic sources.
Starting in 2004, the FBI launched an Investigative Data Warehouse as a “centralized repository for… counterterrorism.” Within two years, it contained 659 million individual records. This digital archive of intelligence, social security files, drivers’ licenses, and records of private finances could be accessed by 13,000 Bureau agents and analysts making a million queries monthly. By 2009, when digital rights advocates sued for full disclosure, the database had already grown to over a billion documents.
And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United States a safer place? In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic surveillance in these years, the inspectors general of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligenceissued a report sharply critical of these secret efforts.

 Despite George W. Bush’s claims that massive electronic surveillance had “helped prevent attacks,” these auditors could not find any “specific instances” of this, concluding such surveillance had “generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.’s overall counterterrorism efforts.”

Amid the pressures of a generational global war, Congress proved all too ready to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt offering on the altar of national security. In April 2007, for instance, in a bid to legalize the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps, Congressional representative Jane Harman (Dem., California) offered a particularly extreme example of this urge. Sheintroduced the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing “star chamber,” to “combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States.” The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404 to 6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate somewhat more mindful of civil liberties.
Only weeks after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, Harman’s life itself became a cautionary tale about expanding electronic surveillance. According to information leaked to theCongressional Quarterly, in early 2005 an NSA wiretap caught Harman offering to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced charges against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage. In exchange, an Israeli agent offered to help Harman gain the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening House Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi with the loss of a major campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone, she said, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman’s every word soon crossed the desk of CIA Director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI investigation that, in turn, was blocked by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. As it happened, the White House knew that the New York Times was about to publish its sensational revelation of the NSA’s warrantless wiretaps, and felt it desperately needed Harman for damage control among her fellow Democrats. In this commingling of intrigue and irony, an influential legislator’s defense of the NSA’s illegal wiretapping exempted her from prosecution for a security breach discovered by an NSA wiretap.

Since the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the auto-pilot expansion of digital domestic surveillance has in no way been interfered with. As a result, for example, the FBI’s “Terrorist Watchlist,” with 400,000 names and a million entries, continues to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.

In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a new military cybercommandstaffed by 7,000 Air Force employees at Lackland Air Base in Texas. This command will be tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks or counterattacks aimed at U.S. computer networks — with scant respect for what the Pentagon calls ”sovereignty in the cyberdomain.” Despite the president’s assurances that operations “will not — I repeat — will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic,” the Pentagon’s top cyberwarrior, General James E. Cartwright, has conceded such intrusions are inevitable.

Sending the Future Home

While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq (and ramp up in Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home to apply their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances here.
Indeed, in September 2008, the Army’s Northern Command announced that one of the Third Division’s brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its new mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need help with “civil unrest and crowd control.” According to Colonel Roger Cloutier, his unit’s civil-control equipment featured “a new modular package of non-lethal capabilities” designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals — including Taser guns, roadblocks, shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.

That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With 250 officers from all services participating, the military war-gamed its future coordination with the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local authorities in the event of a domestic terrorist attack or threat. Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an expedited freedom of information request for details of these deployments, arguing: “[It] is imperative that the American people know the truth about this new and unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs.”
At the outset of the Global War on Terror in 2001, memories of early Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration plans to create a corps of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes. However, far more sophisticated security methods, developed for counterinsurgency warfare overseas, are now coming home to far less public resistance. They promise, sooner or later, to further jeopardize the constitutional freedoms of Americans.

In these same years, under the pressure of War on Terror rhetoric, presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to unchecked electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror suspects, and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat more slowly, innovative techniques of biometric identification, aerial surveillance, and civil control are now being repatriated as well.

In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on American life.
If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers, mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those millions upon millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives inside a biometric database akin to England’s current National Public Order Intelligence Unit, sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling for an arrest or an armed assault.

By the time the Global War on Terror is declared over in 2020, if then, our American world may be unrecognizable — or rather recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What we are proving today is that, however detached from the wars being fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays far from home for long. It’s already returning in the form of new security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture, among other works. His most recent book is Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press) which explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations throughout the twentieth century in spreading ever more draconian internal security measures here at home.

  Global Research Articles by Alfred W. McCoy

Monday night’s episode of The Daily Show raised an important issue, as only Jon Stewart could – replaying moments from the ridiculous media frenzies surrounding high-profile trials in this country, as a prelude to the upcoming trial in New York City of the 9/11 terrorists.

Click image to view video

When the 9/11 trial does begin, no one will be laughing. We are already seeing a profuse amount of punditry on the television screen, radio waves Internet and print news, sending an ominous signal of the media barrage to come. The trial itself will be a drawn-out, exhausting process for the nation. But it’s the impending, non-stop, circus-like media coverage that will undoubtedly be the test of the endurance of the American spirit. If past examples show us anything, it’s that the media will forever believe more is better in their rabid pursuit of ratings and readers.

Jeanette Pryor recently wrote an in-depth piece for NewsRealBlog.com on the choices facing journalists going into this controversial trial. In her article, she asks journalists, “Will you join the perpetrators by facilitating their release onto the streets of New York, thus preparing yourselves to be the sure victims of their Jihad? Will you be worse, will you be a bystander and miss your chance to prosecute, by ink and by words, the men who cut a fellow writer into pieces?”

Pryor’s questions caused me to pause and consider for a moment my training and education as a journalist in the military – having learned the same fundamentals as any civilian student of journalism. One of these fundamentals is a clear definition of the role of journalists – to cover the stories that matter to their readers/viewers/listeners with objectivity and a vigilant focus on the facts.

A common criticism of judges – Supreme Court, Appellate or other – is a perceived tendency among some jurists to decide cases before them in a manner that rewrites law, rather than deciding cases based on the law as it is written. It’s called judicial activism.

“Will you be worse, will you be a bystander and miss your chance to prosecute, by ink and by words, the men who cut a fellow writer into pieces?”

In her passionate plea, Pryor is calling for what I would term Journalistic Activism – asking journalists to lay their judgment on the content of events, rather than cover the events in a factual manner consistent with ethical journalism. Such practice is more commonly known as trial by media or trying a case in the court of public opinion.

The events of 9/11 have caused Americans to question – more deeply than any event in recent decades – the proper balance between our liberties and our security. Some might argue we have already given up too much in the form of American ideals and liberties, in the wake of the Patriot Act for example, in reaction to an attack by fanatics.

Calling on journalists to act as mouthpieces for our darkest fears and anger would not likely impact one word or decision inside the walls of the courtroom where these zealots will be tried. But it would certainly be, for America, yet another compromise – another thread pulled from the fabric of the America – in the names of fear and retribution.

To paraphrase a comedian, you know you are a redneck when RNC is trying to emulate you…

RNC was caught with egg on their faces: Republican women had actually access to reproductive rights where the Democrats were happily shutting that door! The shame! They were left behind by bigoted Democrats in the war against women!

According to several Cigna employees, the insurer offers its customers the opportunity to opt out of abortion coverage – and the RNC did not choose to opt out.

And they soon corrected that

Money from our loyal donors should not be used for this purpose,” Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement. “I don’t know why this policy existed in the past, but it will not exist under my administration. Consider this issue settled.”

Playing catch up with the Democrats is hard to do these days, as they are out-republicaning the Republicans

Pheeeew! For a minute there I was worried. There was a brief moment in time – last year when they were all defending Palin and were pointing – rightly – the sexism of the attacks from Obama & his B0bots – they almost looked like human beings. I wasn’t really fooled, but I still enjoyed listening to their words about respecting women.

Now, that the “issue” has been discovered it was swiftly addressed, women lives be damned:

“The policy does not cover abortions unless the life of the mother is in danger,” the NRCC spokeswoman said.

You women should die rather than embarrass the party and that’s that! After all, you’re Republican women, you should be used to that by now!

And from death to prison – Pelosi wasn’t able to answer how comes it’s fair for people to go to prison if they don’t fork their contribution to Obama’s contributors: the insurance companies

Stone: Do you think it’s fair to send people to jail who don’t buy health insurance?

Pelosi: … The legislation is very fair in this respect.

Whether you call it “Obamacare” or bailout to insurance companies, a fairness argument is impossible to make – so slogans are stuttered instead.

Not unlike their hypocrisy in the support for women

While 64 Democrats voted for the amendment, the majority did not – and the Democratic Party’s 2008 platform says the party “unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.” The Democratic National Committee provides abortion coverage to its employees, the committee said.

We’ll see what Stupak will do about that!

And, since this article has a “today in Irony” theme, here’s Katha Politt’s “I could have been a contender” (h/t bostonboomer at the Confluence)

Women Democrats have taken an awful lot of hits for the team lately. Many of us didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary because the goal of electing a woman seemed less important than the goal of electing the best possible president. Only a self-hater or a featherhead didn’t feel some pain about that

I simply cannot comment on the enormity of that statement.

No sooner did we have to deal with Stupack’s disbelief that   defunding women’s rights to choose was so easy, a new story confirms my suspicions.

According to NPR

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is investigating whether some private colleges discriminate against women in admissions. The commission says it’s acting because in recent years, some colleges have admitted significantly larger percentages of male applicants to their freshman classes than female applicants.

Seems it’s not just in presidential debates, but

As a group, women have been outperforming men in college for years. Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights wants to know if colleges have begun admitting less qualified men instead of more qualified women because those colleges fear their campuses might become overwhelmingly female.

Oh, the horror! What would Laurence Summers say?

And why is it so important to have this “gender balance”? Why, iy’s the boys needs, silly:

And the people who work on these campuses say that boys, frankly, are not at their best where they are outnumbered two to one by girls.

And if this is not bad enough, here comes a blog ironically called reason.com asking this question

One further observation: If it’s OK to discriminate in order to enhance racial and ethnic diversity, why is it wrong to discriminate in order to enhance gender diversity?

Answer: It is never wrong to discriminate against women for any reason. Just check out the Health Club for men. Or this

Now my personal experience has nothing to do with college, but middle school. My daughter and a group of her friends were all applying to this public school which attracted big competition citywide. There was a group of girls – all exceptional students in this class, and some – not quite so good students amongst the boys. In the end  an even numbers of boys and girls made it. But what aroused my suspicion was when one of the boys was told at the interview: you are in, welcome to our school. The girls had to wait for months and months for an answer.

So, don’t fret, reason.com boys, you get a helping hand early on – with even nurseries and elementary schools discriminating to “enhance gender diversity” (what an euphemism, huh?)

New rule: when a boy debates a girl, the girl has to always answer first.

On the bright side, we at least have Terry O’Neil

It’s ‘Not Acceptable’ for President Obama to Achieve Health Care Reform ‘By Pushing Women Back Into the Back Alleys to Die’

.update

I just want to quote here one of the comments at “reason.com” which ties nicely education and health club for men

bubba|11.11.09 @ 11:00AM|#

For graduate programs, there’s also the observation that male students are less likely to divert to a mommy track. So, if they want to produce the next generation of tenured professors, and maintain their own reputations, they might consider tossing in a few men.

..

The Stupak amendment was not exactly a surprise to anyone, but those who should have defended women’s rights.

It has been submitted – and defeated- in committee back in July – and nobody heard or wrote a thing about it.

Not NARAL, not Planned Parenthood, nor any of the people who asked women to protect their reproductive rights by voting for Obama

And as all so called progressives in Congress were laying down for Stupak for Saturday’s vote – because how could they harm Obama?

the author himself was incredulous how easy it was and amazingly declated:

“It’s more than what we thought we would get.”

Not more that Obama thought they’d get though, as he repeated his statement in the healthcare speech in his interview with Jake Tapper yesterday. Tapper asked the very question:

when you gave your joint address to Congress, that under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions. This amendment passed Saturday night which not only prohibits abortion coverage in the public option, but also prohibits women who receive subsidies from taking out plans that — that provide abortion coverage. Does that meet the promise that you set out or does it over reach, does it go too far?

And Obama, speaking with both sides of his mouth leaves this much:

this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill. (not anymore!) And we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.

And I want to make sure that the provision that emerges meets that test — that we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions

And then, Mr Changey talks about …not changing the status quo.

B0bots and pro-choice organizations, I have a picture for you to look at.

In the chants of victory over the passing of the so called reform, (as drafted by insurance companies)

very little will be said about the price of the agreement in the House

party leaders broke a weeks-long impasse over abortion by agreeing to hold a vote on an amendment — offered by antiabortion Democrats — that would explicitly bar the public plan from` covering the procedure. The amendment, approved 240 to 194, with 64 Democrats in favor, also would prohibit people who received insurance subsidies from purchasing private plans that covered abortion.

I find it interesting how every time there is an “impasse” it’s the so called progressives who give in.
here’s a better explanation of the law’s implications from Stateofdisbelief at The Confluence

This amendment extends the exclusions of the Hyde amendment restrictions on women’s reproductive needs to any health plan that receives federal subsidies, credits, or has any other financial connection to federal tax dollars.  This will mean virtually every healthcare plan available now, reaching it’s offensive tentacles of deprivation further than ever.  Women who currently have this coverage will have it terminated because of the new law.

Whatever happened to the promise that if you like your coverage you have now, you can keep it? Right, that would be only for menfolk. All present coverage can be maintained. Except the one for reproductive care. Because that one is a “moral issue”

It’s also clearer why we couldn’t have a woman president – remember, Obama promised this way before it happened

in his best heckled speech:

And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”

so Pelosi is right that this couldn’t have happened without Obama’s “vision”

The House merely followed. Still, I will copy here the list of those who personally shoved our rights, courtesy of Firedoglake

Altmire
Baca
Barrow
Berry
Bishop (GA)
Boccieri
Boren
Bright
Cardoza
Carney
Chandler
Childers
Cooper
Costa
Costello
Cuellar
Dahlkemper
Davis (AL)
Davis (TN)
Donnelly (IN)
Doyle
Driehaus
Ellsworth
Etheridge
Gordon (TN)
Griffith
Hill
Holden
Kanjorski
Kaptur
Kildee
Langevin
Lipinski
Lynch
Marshall
Matheson
McIntyre
Melancon
Michaud
Mollohan
Murtha
Neal (MA)
Oberstar
Obey
Ortiz
Perriello
Peterson
Pomeroy
Rahall
Reyes
Rodriguez
Ross
Ryan (OH)
Salazar
Shuler
Skelton
Snyder
Space
Spratt
Stupak
Tanner
Taylor
Teague
Wilson (OH)

I shall of course skip the delusional call to battle from people who help elect a President who engineered this. It’s not like elections are worth squat in this country. Wall Street and other big business will tell the parties whom to have us vote for.

So, women, unless you have the cash, when you’re feeling blue carry that baby (you’re punished with) to term!

Democrats are in charge,! Woo-Hooo!

Remember when Roe was Obama’s “ace in the hole”?

How do the women who played that poker game look now?

The Reclusive Leftist calls this “Healthare reform for men”

Oh, and the Nobel peace prize laureate

Obama leaning toward 34,000 more troops for Afghanistan

Now go back there and celebrate!…

3400523    ปัญหาขั้นสูงทางสิทธิเสรีภาพมหาชน    Advanced Problems in Public Rights and Liberties

การวิเคราะห์ทฤษฎีว่าด้วยสิทธิเสรีภาพ อันได้แก่ แนวคิดและทฤษฎีพื้นฐานเกี่ยวกับสิทธิเสรีภาพและปัญหาสิทธิมนุษยชนทั้งในระดับภายในและระดับระหว่างประเทศ โดยเน้นการศึกษาวิเคราะห์หลักกฎหมายและแนวปฎิบัติในด้านการให้ความคุ้มครองแก่สิทธิเสรีภาพประเภทต่าง ๆ ได้แก่ สิทธิเสรีภาพในการดำรงชีวิตและร่างกาย สิทธิเสรีภาพในมโนธรรมและการแสดงความคิดเห็น สิทธิเสรีภาพในการรวมตัว ตลอดจนแนวคิดใหม่ ๆ ว่าด้วยสิทธิเสรีภาพทางสังคม เศรษฐกิจ และวัฒนธรรม

(Analysis of the theories of rights and liberties including basic concepts and theories of right and liberties and human right problems at both national and international levels, With emphasis on legal principles and practices in the protection of some public rights and liberties : right to life, freedom of conscience and expression, freedom of assembly and some modern concept of economic, social and cultural rights.)

(3400523 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

3400524    กฎหมายเกี่ยวกับข่าวสารและสิทธิเสรีภาพ    Law On Information And Liberties

ทฤษฎีและแนวคิดเกี่ยวกับข่าวสารและเสรีภาพของประชาชน โดยเฉพาะดุลยภาพระหว่างเสรีภาพในการแสดงความคิดเห็นด้านข่าวสารกับสิทธิเสรีภาพของบุคคลในชีวิตส่วนตัว และเสรีภาพในการแสดงความคิดเห็นกับการได้ข่าวสาร การคุ้มครองสิทธิเสรีภาพของบุคคลในชีวิตส่วนตัว โดยเฉพาะกรณีการใช้คอมพิวเตอร์กับการเก็บข้อมูลข่าวสารที่อาจกระทบถึงสิทธิส่วนบุคคล และกฎหมายทั้งหลายที่ควบคุมการใช้คอมพิวเตอร์ทั้งระดับระหว่างประเทศและในประเทศ

(Theory and concepts of information and public liberty, especially balance between freedom of information and individual liberty in privacy, freedom of expression and of acquiring information; protection of individual rights, especially the use of computer to collect information which might affect individual rights and laws controlling the use of computer at international and national levels.)

(3400524 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

In Medieval Europe, politics often involved a monarchy that controlled their territory through agreements with regional warrior nobility, who then controlled the local people. The warrior nobility lived in castles and took elaborate steps to protect themselves from competing warrior nobility, from the local people in case they might rise against them, and even from the monarch. The only safe place for the warrior nobles was inside their castles; the warrior noble could do as he pleased in his own castle, and entering it uninvited was considered a potential act of war.

There was a large income disparity between warrior nobility and the local people (peasants, serfs, etc). Writings from the late 1500s indicated the common belief the everyone’s home was in effect their castle; people were free to live without the constant watch of the warrior nobles in their own home (no matter its size) and entering uninvited was not to be done. In his 1581 work “The Stage of Popish Toyes: conteining both tragicall and comicall partes” Henri Estienne states that “youre house is youre Castell.” In the same year, Richard Mulcaster wrote in “Positions, which are necessarie for the training up of children” that “He (the householder) is the appointer of his owne circumstance, and his house is his castle.” Within your home, you have the right to expect privacy.

In 1604 the “castle” terminology was first written into law by Sir Edward Coke, then the Attorney General of England. Sir Edward wrote in Semayne’s Case (77 Eng. Rep. 194; 5 Co. Rep. 91) that “the house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose.” He added “in all cases when the King is party, the sheriff may break the party’s house, either to arrest him, or to do other execution of the K(ing)’s process, if otherwise he cannot enter. But before he breaks it, he ought to signify the cause of his coming, and to make request to open doors.”

Sir Edward Coke’s writing in Semayne’s Case became an important factor in English law, and its concepts later became the basis of the knock-and-announce principle in American law and more importantly of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fourth Amendment states “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” There is no King or warrior noble now; in America the federal government or its agencies should not invade your home or your privacy without probable cause and without a warrant.

The Fourth Amendment was one of the Bill of Rights, written by James Madison in 1789 and passed into law in 1791. At that time a primary concern of warrants and seizures in the colonies had been the home invasions and seizing of colonists’ property by British government tax collectors. In the mid 1700s this had been a huge problem, and in 1761 a five hour court petition by James Otis Jr. passionately denouncing British government and government agent practices made him such a hero that he was later elected to the Massachusetts General Assembly. John Adams was in the room at the time and concurred with Otis, labeling the events Otis described “as the spark in which originated the American Revolution.” Later, with the revolution finally won, an American’s home would be his or her castle too, and Americans would have the right to expect privacy when inside their homes.

Two hundred years later America still has the Fourth Amendment, but it is being interpreted in entirely new ways. Kings, warrior nobles, tax collectors or government agencies no longer have to knock down your door in order to invade your castle. Instead, they record your internet traffic, list your credit card purchases, tape your telephone calls, copy your bank records, and film and photograph you day and night. “Reasonable search” and “probable cause” are also open to interpretation. On October 28, 2009 the New York Times quoted Valerie Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel as stating “Those who say the F.B.I. should not collect information on a person or group unless there is a specific reason to suspect that the target is up to no good seriously miss the mark… The F.B.I. has been told that we need to determine who poses a threat to the national security — not simply to investigate persons who have come onto our radar screen.” In other words, investigate everyone until you find someone suspicious.

This is the nature of the Patriot Act, which was signed into law on October 26th, 2001 by George W. Bush. This legislation was rushed through Congress in the six weeks immediately following 9/11 and was passed though some Senators and Representatives openly admitted having not read it. Such was the need at that moment to quickly do something, anything to heal.

What happened on 9/11 was so counter-intuitive that our normal emergency responses might not have been effective. We knew how to address the immediate impact, but were confused by the twisted minds of those who had caused the event. How could we bring justice? As people tried to figure this out some action taken was heroic, and other action was ineffective and occasionally contemptible. In hindsight the spirit of Patriot Act is admirable and gives greater power to those who are supposed to protect us. The Patriot Act clearly allows liberties to be trampled though. Denying the liberties of American people in order to protect the liberties of American people makes no sense whatsoever. Liberty is not a three dimensional object; it is not something that can be cordoned off and stored in a secure facility while criminals are caught. Liberty is a concept, is lived as an experience, and is expressed through actions. Liberty comes with risks. It sounded risky to King George III, who used his military against American colonists, and it sounded risky to George W. Bush, who in signing the Patriot Act began to use the FBI and other government agencies against American citizens.

The USA Patriot Act is still law now, and has come back into the news again because the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide has been made public. This Guide shows us the criteria the FBI uses to determine which Americans should be considered potential suspects, and therefore targets for spying. Originally, reasonable suspicion and a warrant were necessary in order to invade the home of a suspect. Now, the FBI appears to be suspicious of all Americans, and warrants may or may not even be needed for the spying to begin.

It has now been eight years since 9/11, and eight years since the Patriot Act began formally allowing for our privacy to be invaded. My sincere hope is that our newly elected officials will revise the Patriot Act so that it respects the liberties guaranteed to American citizens in our Constitution. My gut feeling though is that after eight years of invading our castles, our government is highly unlikely to pull its eyes and ears out of our bank accounts and bedrooms and every single other nook and cranny of what we thought were our personal lives.

To read the Hill account about the upcoming House vote to block abortion funding you’d think the culprits are the Republicans, or at least Congress:

House Democratic leaders will allow an up-or-down vote on an amendment blocking any money in its healthcare overhaul from funding abortions, risking the votes of members who support abortion rights.

and then

Stupak, flanked by a bipartisan coterie of abortion opponents, argued for consideration of their amendment that explicitiy (sic) prohibits federal funding of abortions under the Democrats’ healthcare bill before the Speaker’s select committee.

Very dramatically convenient – drawing the women ire to the usual suspects.

But it ignores the many signals that we have a misogynistic administration (for those who lived in a cave during the elections).

So let’s remember a few, shall we?

Back in January Obama asked democrats in congress to dump contraceptives pay from the stimulus, much as appeasing the GOP wasn’t a political need.

Back in April, during SOTU (or some other bestest speech) Obama declared that unlike what he promised during the campaign,

FOCA wasn’t his priority and abortion is not a freedom issue but a moral one

I think abortion is a moral issue and an ethical issue. I think that those who are pro-choice make a mistake when they — if they suggest — and I don’t want create straw men here, but I think there are some who suggest that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations.

And most pertinent, during his bestest hackled speech on healthcare Obama declared

And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”

It should be noted that neither NARAL nor Planned Parenthood were heard from on all those occasions. Predictable though, Planned Parenthood is piping in now – and quickly, when non-Obama culprits can be found:

The agreement was quickly condemned by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which called the amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) a “de facto abortion ban.”

Sorry, PP – it comes from the president you foisted on us.

And for comic relief, a comment from a – Democratic-  congressWOMAN from Pa

“This doesn’t change the law at all, it’s not outlawing abortion today; a majority of abortions are paid for with cash,”

Yup. Cuz women are cash cows – everyone knows that.

And speaking of the rich and selfish, another piece of news that I needed mentioned: Obama’s real base, the Wall Street CEOs hogged the swine flu vaccine from hospitals and schools. Reminds me of that disgusting commercial with pigs eating ham.

But the Democrats are on the case! They will hold an investigation! Right after they deal with those cash cows abortion fiends, that is!

Update

Mind you, by showing the source of the anti-choice policies I was in no way trying to defend Congress. How could I – with headlines like this one

House Leaders Meeting Now with Bishops To Discuss Health Care Bill, Abortion

Seems separation of church and state is being ditched along with the women

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer are meeting right now with representatives from the Conference of Catholic Bishops in an attempt to come up with compromise language that would mollify most of the moderate Democrats who are unhappy with what they consider the House health care bill’s permissive stance toward public funding for abortion

It’s all about the mollifying!…

I was going to leave this just an update to my previous post, until I noticed a trend: Bobot defends the producer of “V”, essentially saying – he couldn’t have, he is one of us!

liberal supporter of the President who worked for and donated money to the his campaign

So, that explains the downfall of the quality of his work which was stellar in The 44oos and mediocre here.

On the other side of the aisle we have the ombudsman of PBS having to answer for Oscar the Grouch’s words

The episode, which aired Oct. 29, involves one of Sesame Street’s scores of colorful creations, the Grouch News Network, in which muppet Oscar the Grouch is the host, pursuing GNN’s dedication to “all grouchy, all disgustin’, all yucky” news. But another character feels that the Grouch is not grouchy enough and threatens to switch to “Pox News, now there’s a trashy news show,

I like what the ombudsman concludes

I don’t know what was in the head of the producers, but my guess is that this was one of those parodies that was too good to resist. But it should have been resisted. Broadcasters can tell parents whatever they think of Fox or any other network, but you shouldn’t do it through the kids.

And what do those two pieces of news have in common? Well, the Sesame Street storm, as the Ombudsman said

It’s a parody, a play on words, and has a timely feel to it at this time, especially, because of the battle now going on publicly between Fox and the White House.

I suppose the Sesame Street writer felt it safe to carry the White House agenda into a kids show.

Not as safe as the alleged anti-B0 writer should feel.

The “V” defense was also mounted in response to a similar threat – it may have come from Gawker, but it was so out of character there, it had to have deeper roots :

“keep picking on the president and the only letters that V will get are D.O.A.”

Pretty nifty threat, huh? Reminds me of 2001 and Ashcroft’s speeches about phantoms of lost liberties and the “you’re either with us or against us. What kind a democracy is this where the campaign donor card of the writer has to be waved to prove he didn’t attack the president? (reminds me of certain internet forums)

Will this become a required test for everyone pitching a show on TV? Or is this already in place? And no matter who the show creator donated to, isn’t this the society the Vs are trying to create? This is interesting

Unfortunately for Mr. Peters, this isn’t the first time in his career that fans or critics saw things in his work he didn’t intend. Some fans of “The 4400” saw hidden meaning in those episodes too.

yup. Good writing usually serves like a Rohrshack test. That B0bots saw themselves in “V” is  a riot. Willingly or not, the story seems to have hit a nerve.

Anyway, a Gawker commentator came with the solution yo this

And if we’re going that far, couldn’t Ana (so sorry Morena Baccarin) be Sarah Palin? The pretty lady (reptile in sheep’s clothing) who attempts to convince everyone she means no harm, but underneath there’s really just a heinous (stupid) monster out for self and self only?

See? Cherchez la femme! As long as you channel the hatred to approved targets, everything is A-OK! And no danger of Gawker – or the Secret Service ever coming to your house.

On a totally unrelated topic, I just had to have this headline

Paterson Empowered By Obama’s Election Woes

.Update

The “V” story goes on and on. They actually asked Gibbs about the alleged portrayal of Obama as an alien
I confess I liked his answer

that would “be one of the least worst things he’s been called today.”

and also

If that makes me fairly un-cool, I tend to watch more ‘SpongeBob’ than ‘V.’”

I was sitting in the library, procrastinating on Facebook as usual before I actually sit down and do work, when a woman came up to me. Very nicely, she said, “Excuse me, do know which way is North, and which way is East? I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I told her the directions I thought they were, and let her know I wasn’t completely certain. She didn’t seem too worried about it, and asked, “Do you mind if I pray here?” I didn’t mind at all and said, “Of course, go right ahead.” And that was the end of it, so I thought.

I started thinking about it and said to myself, Wow, that was really considerate of her to ask….. Wait a second. Why should she have to ask? She wasn’t encroaching on my space, we were a few feet apart, and wouldn’t cause a bother to anyone.

The more I thought about it, the more confused I was. Why, as Americans, can we accept the most annoying things as commonplace, yet a woman felt she needed to ask *my* permission if she could honor her God in my mere presence. This makes me feel both sad and angry. Sad, because why should someone have to ASK to do something that would/should not affect anyone else around her just because it is religious in nature and she is a Muslim? No Christian or Jew would feel the need to ask to cross themselves, or throw a hebrew prayer out.
I’m Angry because as Americans, we always preach equality, and freedom, yet those freedoms are limited to only those like us. Why? Is our entire culture a hypocrisy of the foundation our forefathers built for us? I just can’t believe that the people I most of the time feel so proud of, could be like this. Maybe I was naive to think this way, but the inequalities are just staring right in my face now.

If Americans are so great, so understanding, so free, why don’t we grant the same freedoms to ALL of the people in this country. Now, this could go one of two ways. de facto, and de juro. By law, yes these people have the freedom to practice their religion. But socially, culturally, do they have all of the freedoms we do? I don’t think so, not anymore. The more I look into the subject, the more I am convinced. The fact that they even need to ask if I feel comfortable for them to pray near me says two things: One, she *is* very considerate, to ask. Because I wouldn’t have. And two, She shouldn’t have to ask. Period. Ever. Unless it would cause a disruption to the people around her. in which case, she can ask, but I would still do it even if they said no–unless there was a viable alternative.

This has just got me thinking. Something needs to be done. Raising awareness that all people are equal. Or maybe nothing can be done, and it’s all a personal thing, that everyone individually needs to work on. I’m not sure.

Maybe I’m just naive for thinking everyone is equal, no matter who they are? I never thought of it as a radical notion, but I’m beginning to feel like it is thrown around in theory a lot more than it is in practice.

Just a few thoughts of mine today.

It seems like only a day has passed since the White House was bragging in its blog

Transparency like you’ve never seen before

It seems like yesterday because only a day has passed. Maybe Halloween has something to do with it, because this very transparent White House (after public clamoring for the records for months) is totally opaque when it comes to FISA lawsuits..

Obama Administration Invokes State Secrets Privilege…Again

In a class suit action  brought against Bush administration’s wholesale surveillance

in which they were unjustly caught because they regularly made phone calls and sent emails to individuals outside the U.S., specifically in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Norway.

Obama the transparent sent Eric Holder to  close the case because

even addressing or attempting to refute the plaintiffs’ claim would require the administration “to disclose intelligence sources and methods, or the lack thereof.”

Which prompted one of the lawyers to say

“The Obama administration has essentially adopted the position of the Bush administration in these cases,”

Ah, but maybe he should read the memo on transparency Or the examples from Tapper articles from the campaign demagoguery where they were criticizing Bush for doing same and promising they wouldn’t.

And as Obama becomes more W in front of our eyes, so does the GOP slides to the right. The conservatives just forced out of the race the RNC candidate, a moderate republican who happened to be a woman, in favor of a more extreme one.

It’s a good thing the earth is not flat, or all this slide to the right would tilt us of it….

http://wp.me/pzfHB-gD

Among the most famous of quotations attributed to Thomas Jefferson, is this one:

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around  them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.“

But did Thomas Jefferson really say that? That’s what I had thought, especially after hearing it repeated by so many people on so many different programs and web sites. Then, one day, I decided to verify it for myself, and was surprised by what I found.

Bartleby, famous for its books of quotations, states:

“Although Jefferson was opposed to paper money, this quotation is obviously spurious. Inflation was listed in Webster’s dictionary of 1864, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but the OED gives 1920 as the earliest use of deflation.“

Another authoritative dictionary, Merriam-Webster, reports the first use of the word deflation, in any context, dating back to 1890 — 64 years after the death of Thomas Jefferson.

As Bartleby hints at, one shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Even if Jefferson didn’t say that, in whole or in part, it’s consistent with his beliefs and actions.

The full significance of this quotation will be addressed in several subsequent articles.

Richard Fernandez at PajamasMedia is the kind of blogger I would like to be but never have the time.  Take this post on the Catholic Church’s opening to disaffected Anglicans.

Not mentioned was that the seeds of the Anglican Church’s demise may very well have been laid at the time of its very creation as a political ploy by a power crazed king to pretend to be a Church comparable to Roman Catholic church.  Despite all of the political intrigue and governance over large tracks of Europe for most of a millenia, the Roman Catholic Church was created as a purveyor of Faith and since the beginning of the 20th Century and the loss of the Papal lands has largely returned to that role.

It would be interesting to see a major reunification of Christianity after centuries of the Reformation.  A Re-Reformation.  Will the Catholic Church continue to offer sanctuary to the smaller christian sects, drawing them back to the Mother Church the way the townspeople would race into the castle when enemies threatened?  Would it open its arms to the Jews who’s ancestry begat Christianity?  To use Fernandez’s Tolkien analogy, will an alliance of Judeo-Christian traditions face off against the Statists and Muslims at the foot of Mount Doom to preserve the classical liberal traditions of the Western World?

I am not religious, but I strongly support religious expressions, especially Christianity.  I suspect that is the only way that the inalienable liberties, the founding principles of the Republic, who’s only defense is that they are God given, will survive.  Neither the Muslims or the Statists/humanists believe in them.  There will be no defense of them there.

In Perpetuum Rights blog has drafts of Petitions to Recall United States Senators. 

These Recall Petitions will be a main topic at the Continental Congress 2009 for the Delegates to vote on as a solution to our Governments refusal to answer our Petitions for Redress of Grievances.

Jerry James Stanton (“Unalienable”) is the patron and creator of the petitions, and as such needs financial support.  Please visit http://inperpetuumrights.blogspot.com/ to learn more about this fantastic constitutional site!

…The We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education and We The People Congress have well discovered the reality of the present “intrencehed power” that has demonstrated that “the ways of reform are closed” and “it cannot be dislodged by legal means…” and thus the call of a Continental Congress is well at hand with legal options closed.

The work of these Petitions for Recall of U.S. Senators well fits into the function and purpose of the Continental Congress 2009, and as this author has found in the Constitutions of so many States, it is clear:

“…frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty.”

“All power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety and happiness; for the advancement of these ends they have at all times an inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform or abolish the government in such manner as they may think proper.”

“rights … ought never to be violated on any pretence whatsoever.”

Do you want a Revolution?

You have been living in one and suffering under it for over 100 years.

Do we want to undo Liberty?

No.

We do not want a Revolution.

We do not want to violate the principles of our constitution/fundamental law. Our government has been doing enough of that, and such action cannot bring about it’s return, except perhaps the exile and banishment of the Revolutionaries in government and their families, and friends, from our beloved Nation, FOREVER.

Such action appears to be reasonable in the end, and in keeping with the right “to alter, reform … the government in such manner as they may think proper”, so that the diseased thought of the Revolutionaries/Tyrants has no home in this Nation ever again.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Illinois Petition

Posted by Unalienable at 2:02 PM     

What made news yesterday was the slashing of CEO’s compensations.

What was newsworthy was that this was a move decided by Obama’s pay czar on his own, without even briefeng the White House on it

But on Wednesday night, administration officials said that the president of the United States didn’t have all that much to do with a decision that will, in many ways, come to define his relationship with Wall Street.

In fact, sources within the administration say the decision to cap corporate pay was Kenneth Feinberg’s, and his alone. A senior administration official tells POLITICO that Obama did not sign off on the pay master’s decision.

Click here to add text

Click here to add text

Which reminds me of another newsworthy story that barely made news: the much praised decision to set a dateline for closing Guantanamo, was made by the White House Counsel Greg Craig. Since now, even CNN fact checking SNL had to give Guantanamo to them, it is Craig who is being scapegoated.

in the case of the CEO pay slash, we are in the celebration phase, so the pay czar us being used as ammunition in the “war on Fox” – with the White House trying to bar Fox from interviewing him and all the other networks refusing to join in the shunning. Maybe they are now understanding the meaning of the White House reserving the privilege of deciding what’s news and what’s not

In other news, Cheney is at war with the White House on the war with Afghanistan. This is not a pretend war like before Among other things Cheney accuses Obama of taking credit for their plan

“bears a striking resemblance” to the one announced by President Obama in March.

Bush administration handed Obama’s transition team a policy review of the Afghan war conducted last fall to meet the new challenges posed by the Taliban.“They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt,” Cheney said.

And it is true that Cheney did praise Obama in March, when stealing their plan

Leaving aside the dithering – not dithering debate, when Gibbs was asked about Cheney’s remarks – and delivered some – deserved attacks, the  non-answer on the stolen strategy was interesting

“I have not looked at that review,” Gibbs said. ”I don’t know whether what he describes is accurate.”

oops! Seems that like in the debates, Obama got to say “I agree with what they said”. Only he didn’t, he just pretended he said it.

So, the Nobel peace prize laureate, just stole Cheney’s war! Now, if he only could figure out what to do with it!

After dreaming up the super charisma/Messiah/bestest speaker ever, the fans can’t explain the hangover they are feeling.

MoDo has it so bad that at the end of a a full column filled with all the usual spews at Clinton, she ends up comparing Obama unfavorably to her Nemesis

Bill Clinton may not have cared any more about contributors than Obama does, but he was such a talented politician that he made them feel as though they were in “a warm bath,” as one put it.

Obama is more like a cold shower.

I thought being declared worse than Palin was the bottom, but poor Darcy is in real doodoo this time…There’s no worse insult in M0Do’s universe than that.

But will she hate him obsessively, for centuries too? Stay tuned.

Sullivan is still on koolaid, furiously mixing metaphors

In all this, Obama reminds me of George H W Bush in government, and of Ronald Reagan in campaigning. It’s a dream combo in many ways.

But Politico dedicated it’s Arena” to the search for the missing charisma

Obama’s charisma: Where did he leave it?

And there are a few still fans, a few who were always opponents and the lucid ones such as Mary Frances Berry

thoughtful people are contrasting his words with what they know. He now has a history of uneven policy success- greedy financiers engorged with the taxpayers money, a lingering recession, a health reform bill that will become law but leave many of his supporters feeling unfulfilled, more war in Afghanistan, peace more elusive in the Middle East, and the Iran nuclear problem unresolved

or Drew Westen who wonders

Does he believe that women and couples should make their own decisions about when to start their own families? All of his actions say no. Does he believe that gay people are full American citizens, or are they 3/5 of a man? His actions say the latter. Does he believe that all Americans should have more choices in their health care? No, he isn’t expanding any choices for the majority

and for that reason, former supporters

Many of the Democrats and Independents I know who voted for him now say they turn off the television when they see him on because they’re tired of the pretty words without any evidence of genuine passion or commitment behind them a week later

And as the koolaid wears off, more Jr.jr signs burst all over. As Don Siegelman, victim of Rove and now Obama observes

“There’s really been no substantial change in the heart of the Department of Justice from the Bush-Rove Department of Justice,”

Indeed. The guy who sold his senate seat and cavorted with Rezko, believes Rove proved corruption when framing Siegelman.

No kidding! Just ask a satisfied customer, Blackwater who got the same preferential treatment as during W’s times

And why not? They are doing such a bang up job in Pakistan!

And not even signing the land mine treaty

To quote Mr Fish

- in that cartoon was published in late 2007/early 2008:

“And I hope to bring fresh charisma to Doomsday”

Doomsday? Check. Charisma? They’re still looking