A Dose of Reality in The Land of Delusion

Privacy in America Is Dead

What in the hell is going on? Have most all in this country lost their minds and their spirit, or concerning freedom, is apathy all that remains? Oh to be a conspiracy theorist! Everything today in actuality is conspiratorial, and those who have been continuously demoralized for their constant suspicions of government are now the only sane ones left. This is evident because "1984" is no longer fiction; it is reality!

The latest crime in a long line of usurpations of liberty by government evildoers has now effectively eliminated privacy as we know it. As reported on LRC and told by Glenn Beck, anyone accessing the "cash for clunkers" program literally gives up ownership of their computer to the federal government...

...Many brutal political "leaders" of the past like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini attempted to monitor and control all citizens and their behavior. The end results were telling, and they were horrible. Mass murder at the hands of the state was the rule not the exception. Starvation was prevalent and sickness was constant. Wars consumed production and economies collapsed. Freedom was unheard of during the reign of these monsters. Can you imagine the political and monitoring capabilities of today being available to those brutal tyrants of the past? There is a reason that the U.S. federal government has taken over and co-opted all the means of society. This same government now controls and monitors all money, banking, transportation, health care, police, and communication, including the internet. Those dictators I mentioned above did not have this capability, and still mass oppression won the day. If this history is any guide, our future looks bleak.

Monumentally Tragic Disappointment on the Horizon

Whenever the herd mentality lines up along a compass point leading to “permanent prosperity,” or a yellow brick road lined with green shoots, or something like that, I tend to see the edge of a cliff up ahead. We are now completely in the grips of the deadly diminishing returns of information technology. The more information comes to us about How Things Are, especially from TV, the more confused or wrong the conventional view gets it.

A broad consensus has formed in the news media and among government mouthpieces and even some “bearish” investors on the street that “the worst is behind us” in this tortured economy. This view is completely crazy. It will only lead to massive disappointment a few weeks or months from now, and that disappointment might easily transmute to political trouble. One even might call the situation tragic, except a closer look at the sordid spectacle of what American culture has become — a non-stop circus of the seven deadly sins — suggests that we deserve to be punished by history.

America the Great ... Police State

For those of us who had hoped that the Obama administration would present us with a rebirth of the old republic that was so rudely erased a few years ago by that team of judicial wreckers, Bush and Gonzales, which led, in turn, to a recent incident in Cambridge, Mass. that inspired a degree of alarm in many Americans. But what was most alarming was the plain fact that neither the president nor a “stupid” local policeman seemed to understand the rules of behavior in a new America, where we find ourselves marooned as well as guarded (is that the verb?) by armed police who have been instructed that they are indeed, once armed, the law and may not be criticized verbally or in any other way and are certainly not subject to any restrictions as to whom they arrest or otherwise torment.

This is rather worse than anyone might have predicted, even though the signs have been clear for some years that ours is now a proto-fascist nation and there appears to be no turning back; nor, indeed, much awareness on the part of our ever-alert media. Forgive me if you find my irony heavy, but I too get tired of carrying it about in “the greatest nation in the country,” as Spiro Agnew liked to say.

How can an entire nation completely ignore reality? How can they blindly take the word of a government that has blatantly lied, time and time again. Despite the obvious, REAL signs of economic, political, and societal meltdown, the majority of Americans choose to believe the official line...you know the one...where they give us a patronizing pat on the head and say that everything will be juuuuust fine if we just believe it to be so. Close you eyes and wish really hard folks....worked for the Germans under Hitler ...right? Or the Russians under Stalin? Or for the...well, I could go on and on with the examples, there have surely been plenty....but we all know don't we...Americans are not a stupid people, we have just made a CHOICE to ignore our troubles in the vain hope that doing so will make them disappear. Well, folks, fairy tales are for children., and these monsters won't disappear when you pull the blankets over your head....facing the harsh realities of life and dealing with them isn't an optional excercise for adults....time to grow up already.

Fascist America: I Live in a Constitution Free Zone...And You Probably Do Too

ACLU Assails 100-Mile Border Zone as 'Constitution-Free'

Government agents should not have the right to stop and question Americans anywhere without suspicion within 100 miles of the border, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday, pointing attention to the little known power of the federal government to set up immigration checkpoints far from the nation's border lines.

The government has long been able to search people entering and exiting the country without need to say why, which is known as the border search exception of the Fourth Amendment.

"It is a classic example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond their proper boundaries – in this case, literally,” said Caroline Fredrickson, who heads the ACLU's Washington, D.C., Legislative Office.

In a video shown to reporters at a national press conference event Wednesday, retired San Diego social worker Vince Peppard complained that he and his wife were stopped at a checkpoint on a road east of San Diego on I-94, many miles after crossing back into the United States with tiles he'd bought in Mexico.

When he refused to let the Customs and Border Protection officer search his car, the officer led him to a bench, called in the contraband dog and then "ransacked" his car.

"I didn't feel like I was inside the U.S.," Peppard said, calling the search on the side of the road embarrassing. "I felt like I was in a B-movie with Nazis asking for my papers."

ACLU attorney Chris Calabrese is certain there are more people who have been negatively affected than have complained.

As an example, he cited Seattle's domestic ferries, where DHS agents ask passengers for ID to check their citizenship and use license plate readers.

"The people who live on these islands are undergoing this extra scrutiny just when they are going to get their groceries," Calabrese said.

Be sure to hit the link and see the map there...You'll be amazed to find that Homeland Security has placed these Constitution Free Zones in such a manner as to encompass two thirds of our population. Obviously it is us, the citizens of the United Fascist States of America that are to be controlled, not immigrants. I too have to pass through one of these checkpoints--100 miles in from the border-- to go grocery shopping, and I drive away fuming each and every time. On several occasions, we've been hauled out of the vehicle to be searched and questioned. Once, in our RV, they claimed that the dogs signaled we might be smuggling an illegal alien...they searched everything, tearing through our luggage and all...apparently they thought I might have concealed a very small Mexican among my clean underwear. This is America? "Your Papers Please" for going to buy food?

Stalin? Hitler? Saddam?...Nope...We the People

Update: Apparently one of her children has been "found"....a twelve year old who the government has now admitted is a "detainee" as well. See link below for more info
PRESS RELEASE: Aafia Siddiqui claims she was held by the US in Bagram for years



FBI concedes Aafia Siddiqui in US custody: lawyer

WASHINGTON, Aug 3: Five years after her mysterious disappearance in Karachi, the FBI has finally conceded that an MIT-trained Pakistani neuroscientist is alive and is in US custody in Afghanistan.

Aafia Siddiqui, 36, disappeared with her three children while visiting her parents’ home in Karachi in March 2003, around the same time the FBI announced that it wanted to question her over her alleged links to Al Qaeda.

Her family’s lawyer Elaine Whitfield Sharp said she believed recent media reports about Mrs Siddiqui’s incarceration increased pressure on the US and Pakistani authorities to divulge more information.

“I don’t believe that they just found Aafia,” she said. “I believe that she was there all along.”

The fate of her three young, American-born children is still unknown.

Before her disappearance, Mrs Siddiqui lived in a Boston suburb of Roxbury and studied at Brandeis University as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In a 2006 report, Amnesty International listed Mrs Siddiqui as among a number of “disappeared” suspects in the war on terrorism. On July 6, 2007, AI listed Mrs Siddiqui as a possible CIA “secret detainee”, although she was still on the FBI’s Seeking Information - Terrorism list. Late last week, Mrs Siddiqui’s photo still appeared on the FBI’s list of people wanted for questioning.

Aafia Siddiqui detained for political reasons: lawyer

WASHINGTON, Aug 4: Elaine Whitfield Sharp, the lawyer representing Aafia Siddiqui’s family, alleged on Monday that the MIT-trained Pakistani neuroscientist was being detained for political reasons.

Talking to Dawn, Ms Sharp also claimed that so far all the allegations brought against Ms Siddiqui had “proven wrong and unsubstantiated”.

The US media reported on Sunday that Ms Siddiqui was in US custody in Afghanistan, but gave no details.

The FBI office in Washington, when asked to comment on the reports, referred this correspondent to the US attorney’s office for New York’s southern district. Rebekah Carmichael, a press officer at the attorney’s office, however, said she had “no comments” to offer,

Ms Siddiqui, 36, disappeared with her three children while visiting her parents’ home in Karachi in March 2003, around the same time the FBI announced that it wanted to question her over her alleged links to Al Qaeda. The fate of her three young, American-born children is still unknown.

Ms Sharp said Ms Siddiqui’s family and lawyer were still trying to locate her and her three children. Ms Sharp, who spoke with an FBI agent on Friday, said the agent told her that she was alive but that injured.

Ms Sharp claimed that “every time that US authorities accused Aafia of something, we showed it was false”.

“They accused her of brokering a diamond ring for giving the proceeds to Al Qaeda. They said she was in Liberia when she did this. We showed she was here in Boston, running a play group with her sister.

“They said she was involved in the production of neuro-chemical to be used by terrorists in the US. We showed that she was not.”

Ms Sharp said US authorities also had accused her of other wrongdoings, but “when ask for evidence, they never gave us any evidence”.

That's OK folks...no need to care...she's just a foreigner...wears one of those rags on her head. .... The fate of her three young, American-born children is still unknown. Is this how we want to live...to be perceived by the world? Who will be next ...me, you, your neighbor? What became of the children? What will they do with yours? How many years will it take for your family to find out where you were taken...will they ever?...DOES THIS SOUND LIKE AMERICA TO YOU? DO YOU CARE YET?

Jungle "Justice": Kangaroo Court Serves the Chimp in Charge

Jury is out for Hamdan -- and the tribunal process

The first person to be tried in a military tribunal at Guantanamo will remain incarcerated no matter the verdict. Concerns remain about the procedure's fairness.

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 4, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA -- The war crimes case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan today goes to a jury of his enemies, hand-selected by the Pentagon official who charged him on behalf of a president who has ordered him imprisoned even if acquitted.

"The eyes of the world are on Guantanamo Bay," U.S. District Judge James Robertson said July 17 in declining to halt the first trial by military commission.

"Justice must be done there, and must be seen to be done there fairly and impartially."

But as the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II draws toward a conclusion, many outside the Bush administration question what they've seen.

Why bother even presenting such a transparent farce of a "trial"?...what a waste of time and money...he won't be released even if found innocent. If acquitted, he will join the ranks of the "detainees" held simply because they have stories to tell...tales of torture and abuse....that cannot be allowed out while Bushie Boy is in residence in the White House. Disgusting.

John Yoo, Totalitarian, By Paul Craig Roberts

John Yoo stands outside the Anglo-American legal tradition. His views lead to self-incrimination wrung out of a victim by torture. He believes a president of the US can initiate war, even on false pretenses, and then use the war he starts as cover for depriving US citizens of habeas corpus protection. A US attorney general informed by Yoo’s memos even went so far as to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Constitution does not provide habeas corpus protection to US citizens.

Yoo’s animosity to US civil liberties made him a logical choice for appointment to the Bush Regime’s Department of Justice (sic), but his appointment as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, shatters that university’s liberal image.

Habeas corpus is a centuries-old British legal reform that stopped authorities from arbitrarily throwing a person into a dungeon and leaving him there forever without presenting charges in a court of law. Without this protection, there can be no liberty.......



.....Writing on the Wall Street Journal editorial page on June 17, Yoo denounced the five Supreme Court justices who defended the US Constitution against arbitrary “energy in the executive.”

Yoo believes that the Constitution and liberty rank below “the nation’s security.” Fortunately, Yoo wrote, a fix is at hand. “The advancing age of several justices” means that President McCain can give us more judges like Roberts (no relation) and Alito who will make certain that mere civil liberties don’t get in the way of arbitrary executive power justified by national security.

In a Yoo-McCain regime, the terrorists you will have to fear are those in your own government, against whom you will have no protection whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I don't think much will change even should McCain be defeated. The Democrats have made no attempt to restore our civil liberties, wanting to be sure that arbitrary executive power is available to them should they win the presidency. Civil liberties are quite inconvenient to the ruling class...whether they happen to call themselves Rethuglicans or Demofacists. We really are screwed aren't we...those of us who care about freedom.

Bush Compares Democrats To Nazi-Appeasers

While delivering an address before the Israeli parliament commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel, President Bush said that Sen. Barack Obama and Democrats favor a policy of appeasement toward terrorists. CNN reports that Bush was comparing Obama to “other U.S. leaders back in the run-up to World War II who appeased the Nazis.”

And he is right, after all they have been appeasing Bushie and his band of fascist thugs haven't they....old Georgie probably still has Pelosi's lipstick smeared on his posterior.

Feds Accuse Student Of "Terror and Espionage" For Talking About Constitution

A student of a large bible college in east Texas was accused by federal agents of committing an "act of terror and espionage" after he gave a talk to a group of Boy Scouts in which he encouraged them to educate themselves about the U.S. constitution.

Jeff, who wishes to remain anonymous at present, is a student of the college and an interim pastor of a small church in Mount Vernon, Texas. He appeared today as a guest on the Alex Jones Show to relate what took place.

As part of his duties as an advisor in the college office, Jeff was tasked with the role of giving a short speech and a tour to a group of Boy Scouts that were visiting the college, with a focus on how patriotism and liberty are emphasized in the teaching style of the university.

Jeff said he told the boys, "It's going to be you who is going to take this country and either make or break it - you need to get back to your constitution, you need to get to know your bill of rights and you need to stand up for them."

Jeff also mentioned that the freedoms enumerated in the bill of rights were fast being usurped by the government and he briefly talked about the USA Patriot Act.

"I said they're stripping us of what we know to be America, what you need to do is re-orient yourself to the constitution because that is the very founding basis of our government and it is the supreme law of the land," he added.

The next day Jeff was called into the main administrative office of the university where he was met by college officials and two men wearing dark suits and sunglasses who did not identify themselves. A state trooper was also guarding the door to make sure everyone stayed inside the office.

Jeff was asked by the men if he talked to the Boy Scouts about the constitution the previous day. Jeff was then shown a transcript of what he said and asked to fill in the blanks.

"I saw the transcript of what I said and every word that those boys had said," stated Jeff.

Jeff speculated that the recording of his talk with the Boy Scouts may have been made by a scout master who looked like a Marine that was taking the tour with Jeff.

After asking the men where they were from, Jeff was told he was committing "acts of terror and espionage" by talking to the Boy Scouts about the constitution and the bill of rights.

Jeff was unable to ascertain exactly where the feds were from but university officials later indicated that DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and the FBI were involved.

Hit the link in the title to read the story in its entirety. We live in scary times when such abuses of our rights happen day after day, only to be met with apathy and indifference by the American sheeple. Those who fought against tyranny at great personal risk to establish the Constitution and our Bill of Rights must be spinning in their graves to see how easily we capitulate to the police state.

Extinguishing Liberty’s Light and Independent Views, By Paul Craig Roberts

What was the greatest failure of 2007? President Bush’s “surge” in Iraq? The decline in the value of the US dollar? Subprime mortgages? No. The greatest failure of 2007 was the newly sworn in Democratic Congress.


The American people’s attempt in November 2006 to rein in a rogue government, which has committed the US to costly military adventures while running roughshod over the US Constitution, failed. Replacing Republicans with Democrats in the House and Senate has made no difference.


The assault on the US Constitution by the Democratic Party is as determined as the assault by the Republicans. On October 23, 2007, the House passed a bill sponsored by California Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, chairwoman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, that overturns the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly.


The bill passed the House on a vote of 404-6. In the Senate the bill is sponsored by Maine Republican Susan Collins and apparently faces no meaningful opposition.


Harman’s bill is called the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.” [ http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-1955 ] When HR 1955 becomes law, it will create a commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas. The commission will hold hearings around the country, taking testimony and compiling a list of dangerous people and beliefs. The bill will, in short, create massive terrorism in the United States. But the perpetrators of terrorism will not be Muslim terrorists; they will be government agents and fellow citizens.


We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract.


Who will be on the “extremist beliefs” list? The answer is: civil libertarians, critics of Israel, 9/11 skeptics, critics of the administration’s wars and foreign policies, critics of the administration’s use of kidnapping, rendition, torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions, and critics of the administration’s spying on Americans. Anyone in the way of a powerful interest group--such as environmentalists opposing politically connected developers--is also a candidate for the list.

......This search for extremist views comes after President Bush and the Justice (sic) Department declare that the President can ignore habeas corpus, ignore the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency. Of course, none of these “patriotic” views are extremist.

The search for extremist views follows also the granting of contracts to Halliburton to build detention centers in the US. No member of Congress or the executive branch ever explained the need for the detention centers or who the detainees would be. Of course, there is nothing extremist about building detention centers in the US for undisclosed inmates.

Clearly the detention centers are not meant to just stand there empty. Thanks to 2007’s greatest failure--the Democratic Congress--there is to be an “Extremist Beliefs Commission” to secure inmates for Bush’s detention centers.

President Bush promises us that the wars he has launched will cause the “untamed fire of freedom” to “reach the darkest corners of our world.” Meanwhile in America the fire of freedom has not only been tamed but also is being extinguished.

The light of liberty has gone out in the United States.

Dark days are ahead for this country, and the public remains oblivious. This is exactly why it matters that history is no longer taught in the schools to any real extent...and surely that is no accident. So many Americans are in for a very rude awakening. How can so many intelligent people be so completely unaware of the world around them? Very frustrating, and incomprehensible to me.

Top Ten Signs Your Country May Be Going Fascist

Creeping Fascism: History's Lessons

“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. ... Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later....”


These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German).

The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as “Defying Hitler.”

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America. ... This is almost unbelievable.”

More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”

The parallels are stunning....but still, we follow like mindless sheep down the path to tyranny, much as the Germans did under Hitler, stepping over the victims of of our criminal government along the way.

Bush Preaches Democracy, Proposes Tyranny-The Fraudlent War on Terror

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Americans had best rethink the "war on terror" while they still have the liberty to do so. For all of President Bush's blah-blah talk about bringing democracy to the world, the Bush administration has proved that it is no friend of liberty at home.

The Bush administration has violated constitutional principles, US law, and the Geneva Conventions as no previous administration has done................

Now the Bush administration wants to take away the American people's freedom to travel within their own country by airplane. Not content with an 80,000 "no fly" list, a subset of a 500,000-750,000 "watch list," the Bush administration's Transport Security Administration has proposed new rules that will require Americans to get government permission 72 hours in advance prior to being allowed to board a domestic flight.


Any agency of the government that can propose such a tyrannical regulation should be abolished. The TSA's mentality shows it to be a far greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.

Even without the "permission to fly" rule, the TSA's practices are ridiculous and unjustified. The confiscation of tooth paste and unopened bottles of perfume, the harassment of US military officers in uniform, the harassment of old people struggling with their walkers, of mothers struggling with small children--none of this makes any sense except in terms of getting Americans accustomed to harassment as a citizen's duty to government and to train a cadre to conduct warrantless searches of fellow citizens.


Set aside the violation of the Constitution and the Soviet-style tyranny of the loss of the freedom to travel and consider merely the practical aspect of the proposal. What American wants his travel plans dependent on a government bureaucracy capable of putting US Senator Ted Kennedy on the "no fly" list and capable of issuing US visas to two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers six months after they allegedly died in the 9/11 events?

If we believe the official story, 9/11 itself reveals a government totally devoid of any competence whatsoever.

The "war on terror" is fraudulent. The cruel war and the deceptive vocabulary that protects it are a cover for expanding US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and for constructing a functioning police state at home. A country in which people cannot make airline reservations without the government's permission is not a free country.

This is definately an article well worth reading in full...We are being locked down in this country ...first the new passport regulations, now this...and who exactly are these "border tightening" policies meant for?....they are ineffective against people coming into the United States....structured to control the population here. Illegal aliens still come in every day, yet activists are stopped at the border trying to leave. The entire immigration debate has been started by these fascists to wind up the bigots, who are begging for tyranny to protect themselves from "those people"....the politicians can surely count on the eager assistance of the ignorant among us to further their police state agenda...they surely seem to outnumber the thinking people who can see through the divide and conquer politics and propaganda....as long as they keep the sheeple's minds occupied fighting amongst themselves, they are free to do as they please.

They Thought They Were Free

Excerpts from "They Thought They Were Free" First published in 1955, By Milton Mayer....from Information Clearinghouse

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next."

"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes."

"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed."

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

Just as the actions of the Bushco regime have closely mirrored the steps taken by Hitler during his rise to power, so too has the reaction...or rather lack thereof ....of the American people mirrored that of the hapless German citizens of the time. Time is growing very short.....

--

Paths Towards Fascism

Talk by Naomi Wolf author of "The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot" given October 11, 2007 at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus.

Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us spend much time thinking about how "the system" they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how dictators in the past have broken down democracies or quelled pro-democracy uprisings. We take our American liberty for granted the way we take our natural resources for granted, seeing both, rather casually, as being magically self-replenishing. We have not noticed how vulnerable either resource is until very late in the game, when systems start to falter. We have been slow to learn that liberty, like nature, demands a relationship with us in order for it to continue to sustain us.

Most of us have only a faint understanding of how societies open up or close down, become supportive of freedom or ruled by fear, because this is not the kind of history that we feel, or that our educational system believes, is important for us to know. Another reason for our vagueness about how liberty lives or dies is that we have tended lately to subcontract out the tasks of the patriot: to let the professionals -- lawyers, scholars, activists, politicians -- worry about understanding the Constitution and protecting our rights. We think that "they" should manage our rights, the way we hire a professional to do our taxes; "they" should run the government, create policy, worry about whether democracy is up and running. We're busy.

But the Founders did not mean for powerful men and women far away from the citizens -- for people with their own agendas, or for a class of professionals -- to perform the patriots' tasks, or to protect freedom. They meant for us to do it: you, me, the American who delivers your mail, the one who teaches your kids.

I am one of the citizens who needed to relearn these lessons. Though I studied civics, our system of government was taught to me, as it was to you, as a fairly boring explication of a three-part civil bureaucracy, not as the mechanism of a thrilling, radical, and totally unprecedented experiment in human self-determination. My teachers explained that our three-part system was set up with "checks and balances," so that no one branch of government could seize too much power. Not so exciting: this sounded like "checks and balances" in a bureaucratic turf war. Our teachers failed to explain to us that the power that the Founders restrained in each branch of government is not abstract: it is the power to strip you and me of personal liberty.

So I needed to go back and read, more deeply than I had the first time around, histories of how patriots gave us our America out of the crucible of tyrants, as well as histories of how dictators came to power in the last century. I had to reread the stories of the making and the unmaking of freedom. The more I read these histories, the more disturbed I became.

Well worth hitting the link and reading in it's entirety....and surely worth thinking about long and hard. We have been very careless with our freedoms in this country.

Cindy Begins to See the Light

Cindy Sheehan is a person with whom I disagree on a number of points, but at least she has begun to realize that Bushco is just a particularity malignant and repulsive symptom of a much larger disease that has been brewing in this country for a very long time. While the Bush regime has drawn a great deal of attention through their aggressive and overt methods, their actions and attitudes are not unique in the halls of American government, nor are they a partisan issue.

Our government has been encroaching upon our personal freedoms at a slow and steady pace for years. Few of the American people have noticed this creeping tyranny, and many have even unwittingly welcomed it, willingly ceding undue authority over their lives to the state...most especially if the law is billed by its proponents as one controlling the behavior of people with whom they disagree or just generally dislike, never thinking it through far enough to realize how those new laws can be turned against them later.

While nearly everyone has complained from time to time about one or two of the restrictive regulations imposed on us...the ones that affect their lives directly....few seem to have a clear view of the overall picture...the way that each of these thousands of little statutes, regulations, laws, executive orders, etc...have woven into a web of state control over the lives of us all.

We seem to have learned nothing from the lessons of history, dismissing the suffering of the countless people who have gone down this road before. The route to tyranny is clearly marked if you study history even superficially, yet we continue to pass those road signs mile after mile without even a pause to consider their implications.

While this has been a fearsome picture when taken as whole for quite some time, the in your face escalation of tyranny that has been apparent over the past several years seems much more ominous. The very fact that those in power don't seem to feel the need to disguise their crimes and abuse of power signifies that they are quite confident that our society no longer has the power nor the will to defend our freedom effectively.


I am VERY afraid that they may be right.

Excerpt of an article by Cindy Sheehan:

Of course the present state of our nation is not as overtly oppressive as the government of Myanmar (Burma), presently where a Nobel Peace Laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi has been under house arrest there for years, but we who have been paying attention to events can see that America is on the precipice of serious fascism and only the brave actions of Americans committed to freedom, democracy and peace will help stem the tide of this rising neo-fascism that doesn’t march through our streets in goose-step and swastikas, but is creeping into our lives like cat’s paws.

According to Chris Rowthorn, in his brilliant article, When America Went Fascist, we went fascist on December 11, 2000 when the Supreme Court appointed George as our unelected, un-democratic and illegal President. Although it is easy and tempting to blame everything on BushCo, this is about the only assertion that I disagree with in his article.

What about during the Clinton regime? Does anyone remember Elian Gonzales or The Branch Davidians in Waco? Let’s go back further. What about when Truman dropped to WMD on hundreds of thousands of innocent victims in Japan? What about Korea? Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex? What about the Gulf of Tonkin? What about Watergate? What about Panama? Kosovo? Nicaragua? Free trade agreements that hurt workers in all countries that are involved in them and what about the abuse of language in this country: Patriot Act; Homeland Security; Clear Water and Clean Skies—and the No Child Left Behind Act that leaves every child behind and is just a funnel to the recruiter’s office?

There are just a few measures that we can use to stop this slide and Rowthorn articulates what has become an important part of my platform. Only vote for candidates that promise the following things…for president, or any other federal elective offices:

* Repeal the Patriot Act
* Repeal No Child Left Behind
* Scale down the Department of Homeland Security and rename it so it loses its Nazi
tone and is brought under civilian control.
* Restore habeas corpus and close all torture camps by repealing the Military Commissions’ Act.
* Repeal all contracts with paid mercenary killer companies.
* Restore the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
* Repeal all BushCo-Presidential directives (especially Directive 51) and review all laws that contain signing statements.
* Restore the 4th Amendment by enforcing warrants for spying on Americans.
* Impeach Bush and Cheney-post presidency so they can’t receive federal benefits.
* Bring all troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and review military needs for other bases around the world.
* Repeal all free trade agreements.
* Kick AIPAC and other lobbyists out of the halls of Congress where they have no business.

One of the most profound ways we can stop this descent into fascism is by impeaching, removing from office and incarcerating George Bush and Dick Cheney, et al. I am very skeptical of a complicit Congress, Inc doing anything about them in this term. I am also very skeptical of a “professional” and fascist military leadership taking their oath of service seriously and above their corporate-military allegiance to the Executive Branch recently and so tellingly revealed by General Betray-Us, so a military coup is out of the question and has the tricky element of becoming a military dictatorship.

Why the US granted 'protected' status to Iranian terrorists

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The US State Department officially considers a group of 3,800 Marxist Iranian rebels - who once killed several Americans and was supported by Saddam Hussein - "terrorists."

But the same group, under American guard in an Iraqi camp, was just accorded a new status by the Pentagon: "protected persons" under the Geneva Convention.

This strange twist, analysts say, underscores the divisions in Washington over US strategy in the Middle East and the war against terrorism. It's also a function of the swiftly deteriorating US-Iran dynamic, and a victory for US hawks who favor using the Mujahideen-e Khalq Organization (MKO) or "People's Holy Warriors," as a tool against Iran's clerical regime.

"How is it that [the MKO] get the Geneva Convention, and the people in Guantánamo Bay don't get it? It's a huge contradiction," says Ali Ansari, a British expert on Iran. "This will be interpreted in Iran as another link in the chain of the US determination to move onto Iran next" in the US war on terror.

For months, Tehran has quietly signaled that it would turn over high-ranking Al Qaeda members in exchange for MKO members now in Iraq. The MKO's new status likely puts an end to any such deal.

The shift also comes as momentum builds in Washington to take some action against the Islamic republic. Wednesday, it was reported that Tehran has broken United Nations inventory seals and may resume work on constructing centrifuges - the machines used for enriching uranium.

Senior European diplomats - who brokered a private deal with Iran last October that included halting suspected nuclear weapons programs, in exchange for Western nuclear power expertise - are expected to secretly meet Iranian counterparts Thursday in London or Paris to see what can be salvaged of their agreement.

"US-Iran relations are drifting into very dangerous waters at the moment," says Mr. Ansari.

Indeed, the Pentagon decision comes amid a string of critical reports about Iran that are causing some US lawmakers to wonder whether the Bush administration's action against Iraq should have been aimed instead at Iran.

But some analysts see the change as related to the US presidential election. "This whole dynamic is tied up with [US] domestic politics...and not about the MKO itself, which is not really a major threat to Iran anymore," says Mohamed Hadi Semati, a political scientist from Tehran University now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"The neocons were losing ground, and this new Iran bashing is seen by them as an opportunity to drum up the theme of terror and the possibility of a collision with Iran - therefore, you need a very decisive leader in the White House," says Mr. Semati. "At the same time, Iran is giving a lot of ammunition to [Bush administration hawks on Iran]."

These morons are determined to invade Iran before the Puppet in Chief leaves office...If he leaves at all...but on second thought, with Hitlary Clinton next in line for the throne, he may wander off peacefully, quite sure that the neocon agenda will progress nicely with her at the helm.

Veterans Disarmament Act To Bar Vets From Owning Guns

Larry Pratt
Sunday September 23, 2007

Hundreds of thousands of veterans -- from Vietnam through Operation Iraqi Freedom -- are at risk of being banned from buying firearms if legislation that is pending in Congress gets enacted.

How? The Veterans Disarmament Act -- which has already passed the House -- would place any veteran who has ever been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) on the federal gun ban list.

This is exactly what President Bill Clinton did over seven years ago when his administration illegitimately added some 83,000 veterans into the National Criminal Information System (NICS system) -- prohibiting them from purchasing firearms, simply because of afflictions like PTSD.

The proposed ban is actually broader. Anyone who is diagnosed as being a tiny danger to himself or others would have his gun rights taken away ... forever. It is section 102((1)©(iv) in HR 2640 that provides for dumping raw medical records into the system. Those names -- like the 83,000 records mentioned above -- will then, by law, serve as the basis for gun banning.

No wonder the Military Order of the Purple Heart is opposed to this legislation.

The House bill, HR 2640, is being sponsored by one of the most flaming anti-Second Amendment Representatives in Congress: Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY). Another liberal anti-gunner, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), is sponsoring the bill in the Senate.

Proponents of the bill say that helpful amendments have been made so that any veteran who gets his name on the NICS list can seek an expungement.

But whenever you talk about expunging names from the Brady NICS system, you’re talking about a procedure that has always been a long shot. Right now, there are NO EXPUNGEMENTS of law-abiding Americans’ names that are taking place under federal level. Why? Because the expungement process which already exists has been blocked for over a decade by a "funds cut-off" engineered by another anti-gunner, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY).

Disarming the public any way they can...I imagine that is because they are well aware that they are pushing us towards following the advice of the founders..."But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security...."

Bush, senators blast MoveOn.org ad against Gen. David Petraeus - cleveland.com

Bush, senators blast MoveOn.org ad against Gen. David Petraeus - cleveland.com:

Republican support for the war in Iraq turned to declarations of disgust as President Bush and a Senate majority Thursday condemned MoveOn.org, the liberal activist group, for accusing the war's top general of betrayal. But 25 Democrats, including Sherrod Brown of Ohio, refused to support the amendment condemning MoveOn's recent ad, which called Gen. David Petraeus 'General Betray Us.' Brown instead voted for a pre-emptive measure that condemned criticism of all military officers - past and present."

My my, that ad managed to get past the Ministry of Truth....Rather reminiscent of the time when we had a free press, doing their part to keep government honest. Interesting that such demonstration of our quaint and antiquated first amendment rights has raised such an uproar in Congress...certainly a sign of the fascist times we live in.

Wheelchair-Bound Woman Dies After Being Shocked With Taser 10 Times

Officers said they arrived to find Delafield in a wheelchair, armed with two knives and a hammer. Police said the woman was swinging the weapons at family members and police.

Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield's death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.

"One, she's in a wheelchair. Two, she's schizophrenic. Three, they're using a Taser on a person that's in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes," Alexander said.

According to a police report, one of the officers used her Taser gun nine times for a total of 160 seconds and the other officer discharged his Taser gun once for a total of no more than five seconds.

A medical examiner found Delafield died from hypertensive heart disease and cited the Taser gun shock as a contributing factor, the report said. On her death certificate, the medical examiner ruled Delafield's death a homicide.

Bush Calls for Expansion of Spy Law

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) -- President Bush said Wednesday that a law hastily passed in August to temporarily give the government more power to eavesdrop without warrants on foreign terror suspects must be made permanent and expanded.

If this doesn't happen, Bush said, "Our national security professionals will lose critical tools they need to protect our country."

"Without these tools, it will be harder to figure out what our enemies are doing to train, recruit and infiltrate operatives into America," he said on a visit to the super-secret National Security Agency's headquarters in suburban Fort Meade, Md. "Without these tools, our country will be much more vulnerable to attack."

And the fear mongering goes on…and on…and on….but that’s because it works every time. The sheeple are so very gullible…Bushco yells boo and they beg for more tyranny. He’ll get his expanded spy program...

A Shocking Moment for Society: Tasering at University of Florida

by Naomi Wolf

Today’s news shows a recognizable shock moment in the annals of a closing society. A very ordinary-looking American student — Andrew Meyer, 21, at the University of Florida - was tasered by police when he asked a question of Senator John Kerry about the impeachment of President George Bush. His arms were pinned and as he tried to keep speaking he was shocked — in spite of begging not to be hurt. A stunning piece of footage but unfortunately, historically, a very familiar and even tactical moment.

It is an iconic turning point and it will be remembered as the moment at which America either fought back or yielded. This violence against a student is different from violence against protesters in the anti-war movement of 30 years ago because of the power the president has now to imprison innocent U.S. citizens for months in isolation. And because, as I have explained elsewhere, we are not now in a situation in which ‘the pendulum’ can easily swing back. That taser was directed at the body of a young man, but it is we ourselves, and our Constitution, who received the full force of the shock.

There is a chapter in my new book, The End of America, entitled “Recast Criticism as ‘Espionage’ and Dissent as ‘Treason,’” that conveys why this moment is the horrific harbinger it is. I argue that strategists using historical models to close down an open society start by using force on ‘undesirables,’ ‘aliens,’ ‘enemies of the state,’ and those considered by mainstream civil society to be untouchable; in other times they were, of course, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals. Then, once society has been acculturated to that use of force, the ‘blurring of the line’ begins and the parameters of criminalized speech are extended — the definition of ‘terrorist’ expanded — and the use of force begins to be deployed in HIGHLY VISIBLE, STRATEGIC and VISUALLY SHOCKING WAYS against people that others see and identify with as ordinary citizens.

Welcome to the Fourth Reich folks….how much more will it take before the American public realizes that we are becoming a fascist police state? This article quoted in this post is well worth reading in its entirety…and passing around to those who have not yet noticed how close we are to complete tyranny.