Hey baby....I just want to hear you say it....

2007 Obama debates 2013 Obama on Civil Liberties !!

Here's an interesting video of what Obama's 2007 teleprompter told him to say vs. the same machine in 2013. 


This document still matters, you know....

Nice collection of NSA posters, memes, cartoons and stuff

Libertarian Reddit has been having a great time with Barack's NSA/Domestic Spying scandal. 
(For those living overseas, it seems that some of Barack's Boyz have been tracking phone calls, looking at emails, and doing other stuff contrary to the letter and spirit of our 4th Amendment.)

This will be out of date by the time some of you read it, but you can go here to read some of the in-depth links and articles.  Good stuff.  And gloriously ironic when you consider that The Teleprompter Jesus supposedly taught Constitutional Law. 

This one does make you wonder which enemies they're tracking, doesn't it??

Yeah.  Turn over all your emails. 

For the remaining few loyalists who still think there's little difference between GWB and BHO....

Heh....

My online buddy Dan McCall came up with this parody of the NSA logo, and it's a good one. 

AND THEN HE GOT A CEASE AND DESIST LETTER FROM NSA ATTORNEYS!!  The dumbasses don't know that parodies are a legally protected form of speech. 

Amazing.  Truly amazing. 
If you care about liberty, freedom of speech, and privacy, you'll post this thing on Facebook, your website, or print off copies to give out at work.  Lord have mercy, what a bunch of tone-deaf, bureaucratic, statist munchkins. 

 

Libertarians And The TSA

Garry Reed at The Libertarian Examiner recently emailed me about a bill going through the Texas House of Reps, allegedly designed to minimize TSA patdowns and groping.    

What is the Libertarian Party's stance on fondling by the TSA?  

Well, the LP's stance matches what everybody's stance on this question oughta be. 

The Fourth Amendment. 

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.

If a private organization wants to require that anyone entering their property be searched, patted, x-rayed, or probed, that's between them and their guests/customers. But the government cannot be involved in that activity without probably cause.


Pretty simple.  Glad I could clear that up for everyone. 

Rupert Murdoch attacked by pie assassin - Who will be the next victim?

It looks like Rupert Murdoch's media empire is infested with reporters who illegally hack into phones and emails. 
Any reporter doing this in the U.S. should be locked up, and the key should be thrown away. 
Here's a video of a protester trying to hit Murdoch with a pie during some testimony before Parliament.  Murdoch's wife intervenes before the pie-chunker can get too close.


 
In the U.S., we're supposed to be protected from warrantless wiretaps by the Fourth Amendment:

The wording is straightfoward.  Unless George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove have a warrant, they don't have any business going through your papers or "effects".  "Effects" would be your email or your cell phone. 

But during the Bush administration, we went into a blind panic and surrendered our rights to some people who wanted to go through our stuff without a warrant.  It was all for our own protection and safety. 

And it continues.  Here's the Wall Street Journal on Obama's "evolving" stance on listening to your conversations:

....we're beginning to wonder if the (Obama) White House has put David Addington, Mr. Cheney's chief legal aide, on retainer. The practical effect is to prevent the courts from reviewing the legality of the warrantless wiretapping program that Mr. Obama repeatedly claimed to find so heinous -- at least before taking office. Justice, by the way, is making the same state secrets argument in a separate lawsuit involving rendition and a Boeing subsidiary.

Hide the children, but we agree with Mr. Obama that the President has inherent Article II Constitutional powers that neither the judiciary nor statutes like FISA can impinge upon. The FISA appeals court said as much in a decision released in January, as did Attorney General Eric Holder during his confirmation hearings. It's reassuring to know the Administration is refusing to compromise core executive-branch prerogatives, especially on war powers.

....Then again, we are relearning that the "Imperial Presidency" is only imperial when the President is a Republican. Democrats who spent years denouncing George Bush for "spying on Americans" and "illegal wiretaps" are now conspicuously silent. Yet these same liberals are going ballistic about the Bush-era legal memos released this week. Cognitive dissonance is the polite explanation, and we wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Holder released them precisely to distract liberal attention from the Al-Haramain case.

Hit the link to read the whole thing. 

So....  who would you rather have illegally listening to your phone calls and reading your emails?  Rupert Murdoch or Barack Obama? 

And is Michelle Obama prepared to step between Barack and a pie? 

The pic of the Obama Pie came from here. 

Government employees forbidden to visit the Wikileaks site without proper security clearance

From The New York Holy Times:

WASHINGTON — In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left, the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.

“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority,” said the notice sent on Friday afternoon by the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to agency and department heads, urging them to distribute it to their staff.

I guess if they want to know what's in the Wikileaks cables, they'll have to get a neighbor or any literate 8th grader to tell them.....

The directive applies to both government computers and private devices that employees or contractors might have, as long as they are accessing the documents on nonclassified government networks. It does not advise agencies to block WikiLeaks or other websites on government computer systems, a White House official said Saturday. And it does not prohibit federal employees from reading news stories about the topic. But if they have “accidentially” already downloaded any of these documents, they are being told to notify their “information security offices.”

And on a slightly unrelated but equally ridiculous topic, Wikileaks is slowly starting to reveal documents about the Climate Scam:
Go here for details. 
This is amazing.  Truly amazing. 

It's kinda like the TSA body scans, or any other illegal government search and seizure, but reversed. 
Come on, Uncle Sam !!!   You shouldn't worry about breaches of privacy if you have nothing to hide !!! 

The pic of the horse that got through the barn door came from here.  This lady makes some great pics, BTW.  The picture of Uncle Sam having his privacy violated came from Daily Kos. 

Why I don't like foreigners

There are lots and lots of reasons to dislike foreigners, immigrants, and people who aren't like us. 
Look what we're having to put up with, courtesy of WGN in Chicago:

An elderly couple says Cook County sheriff’s police on a drug raid smashed into their Southwest Side house late Thursday night, terrorizing them before admitting they had the wrong house.

With her husband already asleep, 84-year-old Anna Jakymek was just turning out the lights when she heard loud noises at the back and front doors about 11:30 p.m.

Ok, let's start there.  What kind of name for an American is Jakymek?  Americans should be named Smith, Jones, or Patterson.  

Her initial thought was that her 89-year old husband had fallen out of bed, but she realized something else was happening when she looked into the front room.
“I see maybe 20 guys come in and see the door knocked open,” she said…
Son Andrew said the most potent drug in the home is aspirin.

Right.  With a name that sounds like something from a bad brewpub?  Jakymek?  I'm not buying it. 

“They don’t smoke, drink or even watch TV. They believe in America,” he said.
He added that his father, Andrij, suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease and has terminal cancer.
“He won’t even take pain medicine,” he said…

Andrij ??  Andrij ?? Someone named Andrij isn't rolling up a fat one every night?  Gimme a break.

His mother, he said, called him after the raid at the request of the supervising sergeant on the scene. When he got there, he said he was told the officers had raided the wrong home.

“When I arrived the officer explained they had misinformation, but said his job was over, and he was leaving. They left a copy of the warrant, but he absolved himself of any responsibility for the raid or the damage,” Andrew Jakymec said.

Don't these freakin' foreigners know that there's a drug war going on?  And that we're in a constant battle to save people from....themselves? 
Can Andrew Jakymec pull his Eastern European head out of his rear end long enough to see the truth?  We need to preserve the monopolies of the Mexican Drug Lords and the Afghan Opium Poppy farmers. 
Every once in a while, somebody's gonna get hit with friendly fire.  Don't try playing the victim card just because you have a funny name.
We're in a drug war.  Love it or leave it.  

He estimated the damage to broken doors, locks and windows at up to $3,000.
“Everything was violently opened. Cabinets were ripped open, clothes and sheets were everywhere, and pieces of wood where the doors were rammed were all over the place,” he said.

Radley Balko is claiming that the Jakymeks came here in the 1960's from the Ukraine.  Something about escaping Soviet oppression. 
Well, if they're going to be bitching and moaning every time our police bust up the wrong house looking for small amounts of marijuana, they can take their asses back to Russia. 
How are we going to justify building a border fence without a drug war, Mr. Radley Balko? 
How can we "save and create" jobs for border patrol guards unless we continue our twin policies of drug prohibition and sharia law? 
Do you think we can continue fighting in Afghanistan for the next century without giving our enemies a monopoly on opium products?  Why, if we were to end prohibition, the Taliban would go broke in a month.  Then who would we fight?  
Now that I've had time to think about it, what kind of name is Balko?  It doesn't sound Texan.   

Remember: Foreigners bad.  Drug war good. 

Why bother with a court order, when your intentions are so good and wholesome?

From the Washington Post, here's something else for your "Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss" file:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

I don't know about you, but to me this sounds like a 4th Amendment violation. 

 Your communications, whether written (papers) or online (effects) are not Barack Obama's business, and he cannot have access to those communications without a court order. 

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.

It really is that simple. 
No one will ever convince me that Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor. 
Freakin' fascist. 
Pic came from a post-Blownstar event.  I like houses that have the 4th Amendment in a frame on the wall. 

An Army officer comments on the Columbia Missouri drug raid

This video has now been seen by more than 1.2 million people.

Go here for my thoughts on why we continue to put up with government employees breaking down a door in the middle of the night, shooting two of the family dogs in front of a 7-year-old boy, finding a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, and then charging the homeowner with "child endangerment".
(It's because we're sheep.) 



Here's an email to Radley Balko from an army officer serving someplace in Afghanistan:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.


For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they're after is present at the location, and that it's too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I'm a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call "cordon and knock": they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn't happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we're going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don't have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don't see any reason why they can't use similar methods.

And here's Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit on the officer's comments:

Quite different from using door-busting tactics to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders. Of course, one difference is that we care about winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan . . . .