18-01-2014, 04:42 PM
The latest from Richard Raznikov:
http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2014/01/1...-17605614/
The entirety runs forty-three minutes and eight seconds. It's available on the White House website if you're in the mood for severe self-abuse and nails in your eyes just aren't enough.
Psychologists are aware that when children are constantly exposed to behavior which diametrically opposes what they're being told, they develop serious emotional disorders and intense confusion about other people. That's the situation of loyal Democrats these days, five years of speeches going one way and policies going the other. A Nobel Peace Prize winner who exports more arms than any other President in history and boasts of it. A President who wants to end the nuclear arms race while budgeting more than $1 trillion for future nukes. An environmentalist who sabotages the EPA and air quality rules, supports nuclear power and fracking in the face of Fukushima and the poisonous disasters of hydraulic fracturing. A man who decries the influence of lobbyists while appointing more of them to positions in the White House and in his cabinet departments than any President in history. It's a common sight these days: Democrats who still defend Obama becoming increasingly irrational, shrill, defensive, and morose. Look, I voted for him in 2008. I was wrong.
One thing you can count on with a Republican President: a unified Democratic Party defending the Bill of Rights and harsh in its criticism of incursions out of the White House.
Barack Obama gave his much-anticipated speech on the NSA today and managed to justify destroying the Constitution and constitutional principles in order to "prevent" another 9-11.
Never mind that earlier claims out of the NSA and its congressional screwheads like Mike Rogers about how applying the Nazi Greatest Hits as a domestic security theme song has prevented or averted "more 9-11s," have been thoroughly discredited by every investigation and study, including the one by Obama's own advisers and another by the panel he appointed to bring him recommendations. The President assures the nation that we can fix this little problem of massive surveillance by tightening a couple of bolts and adding a layer or two of Saddler's Neatsfoot Oil.
The speech on the website features a large photograph of Obama flanked by the requisite enormous national flags, and this: "President Obama delivers remarks presenting the outcomes (sic) of the Administration's review of our signals intelligence programs, and how, in light of new technologies, we can use them in a way that optimally protects our national security while supporting our foreign policy, respecting privacy and civil liberties, maintaining the public trust, and reducing the risk of unauthorized disclosures."
For those without their horseshit-to-english dictionaries, here's what he meant:
"We're not going to stop the massive spying on American citizens. We're going to expand the operation and adopt new methods of preventing more whistle blowing. We're going to obliterate the constitution in the interests of the security state, and of foreign policies designed to maximize access to the resources of other countries on behalf of the corporations who own my ass. I'm going to tell you I'm protecting your civil liberties while my Justice Department goes to court every day to attack them…"
Hint: anytime a President whose poll numbers are in free fall says he wants to maintain a public trust he's already lost, the sirens should go off in your head.
The President wants to protect our civil liberties. That's why he's initiated a program in all federal departments and agencies which require employees to inform on one another if they have reason to think a fellow worker is disloyal or is simply depressed. It's called Insider Threat.
I can readily believe that many members of Congress are just that stupid that they really believe all the terrorist threat' nonsense. Mike Rogers is an obvious example. But Obama isn't. He surely knows that there is now, essentially, zero terrorist danger in America.
I can buy that many members of Congress are cowards so rattled by 9-11 that they'd happily cede all their rights, burn the Constitution itself, if someone would only keep them safe. Their minds are so far gone that they can't grasp the reality, which is that people are more at risk from peanut butter allergies, falling in a bathtub, or being struck by lightning than they are from terrorists.
We've turned airports and, increasingly, bus stations, trains, and public highways into routine physical searches of Americans without probable cause, a wholesale violation of the 4th Amendment, all because, we officially claim, nineteen guys with box cutters and who couldn't fly a Cessna managed to hijack four commercial planes and then elude for more than an hour the most sophisticated and powerful air defense command in the world. It's a ludicrous story, of course, but being repeated relentlessly by the media it's found its way into the nation's lore.
Nobody seems to believe that America's air defense command could easily stop any future such terrorist attack. Perhaps nobody mentions this because it raises embarrassing questions about the first one.
One deceit Obama especially likes has been adopted by quite a few progressive' Democrats. That is that we need to "balance" our liberties with the requirements of security. This particular lie is very dangerous because it sounds so reasonable. If we fail to examine it, the equation sounds true, like one of those balancing acts we uncritically accept such as work and play.' But there is no such balance. Freedom is not secured by taking it away.
The framers got it. They knew this day was likely to come. They knew that tyrants bled the people dry by officious rules and overbearing laws. They knew that tyrants wanted to scare the people into giving up their freedoms for an illusion of safety. Benjamin Franklin warned us of this precisely. Those who would trade their liberty for that illusion, he said, deserved neither.
When Americans talk at all about their Constitution, they usually do so from a profound ignorance. Schools don't teach it anymore. Politicians misstate its terms and purpose. It is not surprising, then, however alarming, that most Americans think the Fifth Amendment is the hiding place for subversives and criminals, that the Fourth doesn't apply in times of crisis. They think the First offers protection to their own views but does not shield the ideas they find hateful or which dissent too strongly from the government's policies.
Those whose vision is so ideologically crabbed that they want to shelve the meaning of the 2nd Amendment the revisionist view is that it was designed to assist slave states in suppressing rebellion like to say it couldn't possibly have meant automatic weapons since the framers couldn't have envisioned them, but are silent on the question whether the framers envisioned urban police forces armed to the teeth and directed at ordinary people as if they were an occupying army.
We have a black Democratic President who campaigned against the policies he implements every day. When the first Snowden documents emerged, he looked like a deer in the headlights, unable to coherently frame a public response. Much of his party in the Congress then fell into line, with such liberal' stalwarts as Durbin, Schumer, and Franken issuing reassuring statements about how agencies such as NSA keep us safe.'
The Constitution is not negotiable. The First Amendment itself can't be compromised or we lose our country. But the existence of mass NSA spying against Americans the mere existence, not its rules or the absence of a flimsy oversight' such as the fig leaf the President is trying to sucker us with the existence alone makes a free press impossible. Reporters and journalists can't investigate and no one will speak to them; everyone is under surveillance. If people inside this government are not dissuaded by the unmistakeable message of Insider Threat,' they are going to worry that the reporter's phone calls, email, and internet search history are being intercepted by government spooks, or that their own are.
Fools that a lot of Americans are, we heard the predictable commentaries: no one should be troubled if they aren't doing anything wrong; the government has to do these things to save us from danger. But those who own America want to kill the free press, and this certainly does it.
Obama endorses the complete abandonment of the Fourth Amendment. Compare his rhetoric with this:
"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 he persons or things to be seized."
Is any part of that hard to understand? No Warrants shall issue' does not mean that the government and the cops can make it easier on themselves by skipping the Warrant business entirely. Warrants are required before you can go snooping into people's private business, and that includes their mail, their pockets, their personal address books, their luncheon conversations, their sexual habits and proclivities, what they read, who they see, and where their curiosity takes them. Before you can do any of that you're required to get one of those Warrants, and for that you need something called probable cause,' which is one of the cornerstones of American jurisprudence and any lawyer knows it, and before a judge gives you one of those you have to make a showing. You can't just say, Judge, we're suspicious of three hundred million people.
The NSA operates secretly and, for reasons known only to the country's more egregious fools, its Warrants' are issued by a secret court on the kind of presentation typical of a 2nd grader at Show-and-Tell. The secret court, hilariously, was created in order to provide safeguards' for our liberties. I know, but that's what they say, even now.
The President gave us big lies about security and a sleight-of-hand on privacy, saying he'd like to move some of the data stolen from all of us into the control of private companies. This is supposed to reassure us. What happens when private companies and public government begin to resemble one another? Look it up on Google. There's a word for it.
That's the situation. It turns out you can go before a secret tribunal and get permission to spy without probable cause or even a Warrant under the obvious meaning of the Fourth Amendment. You can spy on everyone in the world, including foreign leaders, members of Congress, future Presidents, business leaders, anyone you might want to blackmail.
You can get a Warrant to eavesdrop on and open the mail of everyone. Everyone. Which makes this operation endorsed by Barack Obama the greatest criminal act in history. No country can be free when the secret police compile dossiers on everyone, to be accessed and used against anyone who causes trouble or otherwise comes to the attention of the monster we have created.
http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2014/01/1...-17605614/
The entirety runs forty-three minutes and eight seconds. It's available on the White House website if you're in the mood for severe self-abuse and nails in your eyes just aren't enough.
Psychologists are aware that when children are constantly exposed to behavior which diametrically opposes what they're being told, they develop serious emotional disorders and intense confusion about other people. That's the situation of loyal Democrats these days, five years of speeches going one way and policies going the other. A Nobel Peace Prize winner who exports more arms than any other President in history and boasts of it. A President who wants to end the nuclear arms race while budgeting more than $1 trillion for future nukes. An environmentalist who sabotages the EPA and air quality rules, supports nuclear power and fracking in the face of Fukushima and the poisonous disasters of hydraulic fracturing. A man who decries the influence of lobbyists while appointing more of them to positions in the White House and in his cabinet departments than any President in history. It's a common sight these days: Democrats who still defend Obama becoming increasingly irrational, shrill, defensive, and morose. Look, I voted for him in 2008. I was wrong.
One thing you can count on with a Republican President: a unified Democratic Party defending the Bill of Rights and harsh in its criticism of incursions out of the White House.
Barack Obama gave his much-anticipated speech on the NSA today and managed to justify destroying the Constitution and constitutional principles in order to "prevent" another 9-11.
Never mind that earlier claims out of the NSA and its congressional screwheads like Mike Rogers about how applying the Nazi Greatest Hits as a domestic security theme song has prevented or averted "more 9-11s," have been thoroughly discredited by every investigation and study, including the one by Obama's own advisers and another by the panel he appointed to bring him recommendations. The President assures the nation that we can fix this little problem of massive surveillance by tightening a couple of bolts and adding a layer or two of Saddler's Neatsfoot Oil.
The speech on the website features a large photograph of Obama flanked by the requisite enormous national flags, and this: "President Obama delivers remarks presenting the outcomes (sic) of the Administration's review of our signals intelligence programs, and how, in light of new technologies, we can use them in a way that optimally protects our national security while supporting our foreign policy, respecting privacy and civil liberties, maintaining the public trust, and reducing the risk of unauthorized disclosures."
For those without their horseshit-to-english dictionaries, here's what he meant:
"We're not going to stop the massive spying on American citizens. We're going to expand the operation and adopt new methods of preventing more whistle blowing. We're going to obliterate the constitution in the interests of the security state, and of foreign policies designed to maximize access to the resources of other countries on behalf of the corporations who own my ass. I'm going to tell you I'm protecting your civil liberties while my Justice Department goes to court every day to attack them…"
Hint: anytime a President whose poll numbers are in free fall says he wants to maintain a public trust he's already lost, the sirens should go off in your head.
The President wants to protect our civil liberties. That's why he's initiated a program in all federal departments and agencies which require employees to inform on one another if they have reason to think a fellow worker is disloyal or is simply depressed. It's called Insider Threat.
I can readily believe that many members of Congress are just that stupid that they really believe all the terrorist threat' nonsense. Mike Rogers is an obvious example. But Obama isn't. He surely knows that there is now, essentially, zero terrorist danger in America.
I can buy that many members of Congress are cowards so rattled by 9-11 that they'd happily cede all their rights, burn the Constitution itself, if someone would only keep them safe. Their minds are so far gone that they can't grasp the reality, which is that people are more at risk from peanut butter allergies, falling in a bathtub, or being struck by lightning than they are from terrorists.
We've turned airports and, increasingly, bus stations, trains, and public highways into routine physical searches of Americans without probable cause, a wholesale violation of the 4th Amendment, all because, we officially claim, nineteen guys with box cutters and who couldn't fly a Cessna managed to hijack four commercial planes and then elude for more than an hour the most sophisticated and powerful air defense command in the world. It's a ludicrous story, of course, but being repeated relentlessly by the media it's found its way into the nation's lore.
Nobody seems to believe that America's air defense command could easily stop any future such terrorist attack. Perhaps nobody mentions this because it raises embarrassing questions about the first one.
One deceit Obama especially likes has been adopted by quite a few progressive' Democrats. That is that we need to "balance" our liberties with the requirements of security. This particular lie is very dangerous because it sounds so reasonable. If we fail to examine it, the equation sounds true, like one of those balancing acts we uncritically accept such as work and play.' But there is no such balance. Freedom is not secured by taking it away.
The framers got it. They knew this day was likely to come. They knew that tyrants bled the people dry by officious rules and overbearing laws. They knew that tyrants wanted to scare the people into giving up their freedoms for an illusion of safety. Benjamin Franklin warned us of this precisely. Those who would trade their liberty for that illusion, he said, deserved neither.
When Americans talk at all about their Constitution, they usually do so from a profound ignorance. Schools don't teach it anymore. Politicians misstate its terms and purpose. It is not surprising, then, however alarming, that most Americans think the Fifth Amendment is the hiding place for subversives and criminals, that the Fourth doesn't apply in times of crisis. They think the First offers protection to their own views but does not shield the ideas they find hateful or which dissent too strongly from the government's policies.
Those whose vision is so ideologically crabbed that they want to shelve the meaning of the 2nd Amendment the revisionist view is that it was designed to assist slave states in suppressing rebellion like to say it couldn't possibly have meant automatic weapons since the framers couldn't have envisioned them, but are silent on the question whether the framers envisioned urban police forces armed to the teeth and directed at ordinary people as if they were an occupying army.
We have a black Democratic President who campaigned against the policies he implements every day. When the first Snowden documents emerged, he looked like a deer in the headlights, unable to coherently frame a public response. Much of his party in the Congress then fell into line, with such liberal' stalwarts as Durbin, Schumer, and Franken issuing reassuring statements about how agencies such as NSA keep us safe.'
The Constitution is not negotiable. The First Amendment itself can't be compromised or we lose our country. But the existence of mass NSA spying against Americans the mere existence, not its rules or the absence of a flimsy oversight' such as the fig leaf the President is trying to sucker us with the existence alone makes a free press impossible. Reporters and journalists can't investigate and no one will speak to them; everyone is under surveillance. If people inside this government are not dissuaded by the unmistakeable message of Insider Threat,' they are going to worry that the reporter's phone calls, email, and internet search history are being intercepted by government spooks, or that their own are.
Fools that a lot of Americans are, we heard the predictable commentaries: no one should be troubled if they aren't doing anything wrong; the government has to do these things to save us from danger. But those who own America want to kill the free press, and this certainly does it.
Obama endorses the complete abandonment of the Fourth Amendment. Compare his rhetoric with this:
"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 he persons or things to be seized."
Is any part of that hard to understand? No Warrants shall issue' does not mean that the government and the cops can make it easier on themselves by skipping the Warrant business entirely. Warrants are required before you can go snooping into people's private business, and that includes their mail, their pockets, their personal address books, their luncheon conversations, their sexual habits and proclivities, what they read, who they see, and where their curiosity takes them. Before you can do any of that you're required to get one of those Warrants, and for that you need something called probable cause,' which is one of the cornerstones of American jurisprudence and any lawyer knows it, and before a judge gives you one of those you have to make a showing. You can't just say, Judge, we're suspicious of three hundred million people.
The NSA operates secretly and, for reasons known only to the country's more egregious fools, its Warrants' are issued by a secret court on the kind of presentation typical of a 2nd grader at Show-and-Tell. The secret court, hilariously, was created in order to provide safeguards' for our liberties. I know, but that's what they say, even now.
The President gave us big lies about security and a sleight-of-hand on privacy, saying he'd like to move some of the data stolen from all of us into the control of private companies. This is supposed to reassure us. What happens when private companies and public government begin to resemble one another? Look it up on Google. There's a word for it.
That's the situation. It turns out you can go before a secret tribunal and get permission to spy without probable cause or even a Warrant under the obvious meaning of the Fourth Amendment. You can spy on everyone in the world, including foreign leaders, members of Congress, future Presidents, business leaders, anyone you might want to blackmail.
You can get a Warrant to eavesdrop on and open the mail of everyone. Everyone. Which makes this operation endorsed by Barack Obama the greatest criminal act in history. No country can be free when the secret police compile dossiers on everyone, to be accessed and used against anyone who causes trouble or otherwise comes to the attention of the monster we have created.