Obama sounds what should be the death knell of his public/political career.

Remember that "Thought Crime" legislation that I wrote about not too long ago? If not, scroll down and educate yourself. Barack Obama supports this legislation, and this fact alone should end his political aspirations. We have had enough fascist legislation foisted upon us in the last eight years; we do not need any more. This truly sickens me, and I hope that you will take up the torch of liberty and engage in this battle as well. Obama to Support Homegrown Terrorism Bill By Jessica Lee, The Indypendent Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama says that he will support the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (S. 1959). According to the automatic email responses constituents are receiving from his office, Obama appears to be straddling the fence between preserving civil liberties and being tough on terrorism. “The American people understand that new threats require flexible responses to keep them safe. They also insist that our responses to threats respect the constitution and do not violate the basic tenets of our democracy,” Obama’s email said. Several people who have written to Obama have posted his response on various blogs, including “Justin” who’s personal blog was picked up on diggs.com. “I wrote Senator Obama (my senator from Illinois) about this act, which is now in a committee of his (the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs). I asked that he read the bill (not to insult his intelligence, but after the Patriot Act it appears this is a necessary request for most senators), and that he recognize the dire consequences that could result from its vague language,” Justin wrote Dec. 6 below the post of Obama’s email. “He’s quite eloquent, you’ve got to give him that. This act ‘includes provisions prohibiting the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts from violating civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens.’ Didn’t we used to have something like that? What was it called? Oh right… The Constitution.” The House version of the bill, H.R. 1955, passed Oct. 23 by a vote of 404-6 under the “suspension of the rules,” a provision that is available to quickly pass bills considered “non-controversial.” Obama is on the 17-member Senate Committee for Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, where S. 1959 was introduced by Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) Aug. 2. “I will keep your important comments in mind as I work with my colleagues on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. I will work to ensure that this legislation helps to achieve our domestic security objectives while protecting civil liberties and constitutional rights,” Obama stated in his email to Justin. Many scholars, historians and civil liberties experts say they fear that the proposed bill will set the stage for future criminal legislation that be used against U.S.-based groups engaged in legal but unpopular political activism, ranging from political Islamists to animal-rights and environmental campaigners to radical right-wing organizations. “This bill fits the pattern we are seeing coming out of Congress – both Republican and Democratic – of a continued campaign of fear, which gets into heads of Americans that we now need to start criminalizing ideology,” said Alejandro Queral, executive director of the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center. He said he is very concerned about the bill’s vague definitions of “violent radicalization,” “homegrown terrorism,” and the terms within the definitions including “extremist belief system,” “violence” and “force.” “What is an extremist belief system? Who defines this?” Queral questioned. “Planes flying into the World Trade Center is an extremist belief, but are anti-abortion activists extremists? Are individuals who liberate mink extremists? These are broad definitions that encompass so much, which need to rather be very narrowly tailored. It is criminalizing thought and ideology, rather than criminal activity.” Jules Boykoff, an assistant professor of politics and government at Pacific University and author of Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States, told The Indypendent said he is concerned about how the government is broadening the definition of terrorism. “Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act is a law that created a new brand of terrorists, the ‘domestic terrorist.’ Under this definition, the civil rights work Martin Luther King, Jr. did could have been construed as an act of ‘domestic terrorism,” Boykoff said. In a Nov. 30 Common Dreams article, ‘Homegrown’ Suppression of Dissent,’ Boykoff provided a historical-based critique of who could be included under the umbrella definition of terrorism. “Even a cursory look backward through U.S. history reveals heroic figures who could be dubbed ‘violent radicals’ or ‘homegrown terrorists’ under the proposed bill, from U.S. revolutionaries like Sam Adams to gun-toting slavery abolitionists like John Brown to militant civil-rights organizers like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.” Kamau Franklin, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), also expressed concern that H.R. 1955/S. 1959 will foster a legislative momentum on criminalizing a broad range of dissident voices. “The Commission’s broad mandate can lead to the ability to turn civil disobedience, a form of protest that is centuries old, into a terrorist act,” he said. “My biggest fear is that they [the commission] will call for some new criminal penalties and federal crimes,” says Franklin. “Activists are nervous about how the broad definitions could be used for criminalizing civil disobedience and squashing the momentum of the left.” “It’s possible that someone who would have been charged with disorderly conduct or obstruction of governmental administration may soon be charged with a federal terrorist statute,” Franklin said. Many activists and civil liberties advocates have expressed concern across the nation on blogs and radio shows about how the bill’s use of vaguely defined terms can be seen within a historical pattern of sweeping government repression of dissenting voices throughout the history of the United States where citizens have been targeted for their political beliefs. Two generations of Americans experienced first hand the two “Red Scares” (1917-1920 and 1940-50s) and the FBI’s secret Counter Intelligence Program, nicknamed COINTELPRO, which enabled the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” domestic protest groups for “subversive activities” and “potential crimes.” To many, the similarities between COINTELPRO and the bill are unsettling. The proposed legislation calls for the National Commission to “examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism and ideologically based violence in the United States” in order to develop policy for “prevention, disruption and mitigation.” This investigation is needed, according to stated Congressional findings, due to possible threats to national security. The secret program continued until it was discovered COINTELPRO was investigated by a U.S. Senate select committee on intelligence activities (commonly known as the Church Committee) which convened in 1975. The Church Committee found that from 1956 to 1971, “the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.” In the last 30 years, significant evidence has surfaced about how the FBI and local law enforcement disrupted non-violent social and political movements, even “neutralizing” individuals through target assassinations. The secret program was vast, with agents monitoring and agitating people involved in the “New Left,” including anti-Vietnam War efforts, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican independence groups, popular musicians and counter-cultural and revolutionary independent newspapers. OTHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE VIEWS ON THE BILL Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said that he believes the proposed bill is unconstitutional. Speaking to a crowd of supporters in New York City Nov. 29, Kucinich took several questions from the audience, including my question asking why he voted against the bill. Kucinich was one of only six representatives to oppose the bill on Oct. 23. “If you understand what his bill does, it really sets the stage for further criminalization of protest,” Kucinich said. “This is the way our democracy little, by little, by little, is being stripped away from us. This bill, I believe, is a clear violation of the first amendment.” Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul was one of the 22 House members not present for the vote. A small demonstration against S. 1959 took place outside Senator Hillary Clinton’s office in New York City Dec. 10. Her office did not return an Indypendent’s call for comment. – Read Jessica Lee’s Nov. 16 article on HR 1955: “Bringing the War on Terrorism Home: Congress Considers How to ‘Disrupt’ Radical Movements in the United States.” Blog Update Dec. 2 — Kucinich Opposes H.R. 1955 Blog Update Nov. 27 — Opposition to the Bill and how the Legislation would Target the Internet Read the proposed Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act: H.R. 1955 S. 1959 This article was taken from The Indypendent

Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all. Tuesday April 24, 2007 The Guardian Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody. Article continues They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps. As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have. It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise. Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US. 1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end." Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth. It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms. 2. Create a gulag Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place. At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well. This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising. With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street. Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately. But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too. By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions. 3. Develop a thug caste When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution. The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities. Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order". 4. Set up an internal surveillance system In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny. In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent. 5. Harass citizens' groups The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone. Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition. 6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list. In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens. Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list". "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee. "I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." "That'll do it," the man said. Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life. James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest. Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list. It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off. 7. Target key individuals Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors. Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933. Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them. Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job. Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow. 8. Control the press Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already. The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration. Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career. Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers. Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers. You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit. 9. Dissent equals treason Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution. Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade. In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors". And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.) We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR. Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now. 10. Suspend the rule of law The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens. Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'." Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction. Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion. It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster." As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone. That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs". What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise. What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite. Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world. We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now. "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry. Keep in mind, it's all just hyperbole and things being blown out of proportion and taken out of context. We're being alarmist and emotional. Sorry I didn't post this earlier, I was going through some files and found this awesome article.

Stutter stepping toward complete abolishment of the Patriot Act.

This is why the states hold the power, and some would-be dictator finally gets his balls in a vise, but not after making as many people suffer as humanly possible. A federal judge in Oregon ruled yesterday that two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional, marking the second time in as many weeks that the anti-terrorism law has come under attack in the courts. In a case brought by a Portland man who was wrongly detained as a terrorism suspect in 2004, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Patriot Act violates the Constitution because it "permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment." Click Me For The Full WaPo Write-up

LET'S START A WAR!!! The 60 Minutes you weren't supposed to see.

There's some Ron Paul stuff at the end of this item. You're either pro Ron Paul or you're not, but that's not the issue of this post. The 60 Minutes segment speaks for itself.

Lions and Tigers and Bears... OH MY!!!

See that image up there? Keep coming back to it in the coming days. In four days it will be the 6th anniversary of 9/11. Now, you know me, I don't like to use 9/11 as an example for anything, and even more so, I despise the media and the White House for using 9/11, Sept. 11, and any other reference, when attempting to justify the further usurpation of the Constitution. Here's the rub. Osama, is supposed to magically make a State of the Union to the American people on 9-11-07. Convenient, huh? The propaganda machine is running overtime and extra oilers had to be hired just so this machine wouldn't burn itself to the ground. The machine is fabricating fear and apprehension in order for you to support anything that they may say or do. You'll be teary eyed in remembrance, you'll be afraid that something terrible is going to happen, because that bad man bin Laden is making another speech. Never mind the fact that we haven't heard from Osama in years. But hey, his showing up on the anniversary of a crime that he's been accused of and you should be afraid, right? Never mind that after he had served his purpose and we were in the full run up to the invasion of Iraq that Mr. Bush stated, when asked about bin Laden, "I don't know where he is. I don't know and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." OK, whatever you say. Seems that we're making a pretty large fuss over a man who isn't important, and not our priority. Oh, wait, damn... He wasn't important then, because we had used him as a straw man to create fear and hatred in the hearts of the American people. He wasn't our priority because we put him back into the box to be used another day. Well, that day is coming up folks. Your about to get a dose of bin Laden with your breakfast, lunch, and diner. Why? Because you don't really buy the, "Let's invade IRAN!!!" line... Yet. You have to be stormed in on during the middle of the night by cardboard bin Ladens in order to placate you and send you back to your remotes and the latest episode of whateverthefuck you watch. Remember, the New York Times told you earlier this week that you should get over 9/11 already, damn. You need to let go of the past and just stop worrying about what happened. You just keep your eye on that image up there. And while you're looking at it, take notes on the complete line of shit that you're being spoon fed. Just fucking pay attention and stop toeing the party line. There is no party anymore. Anyone who holds on to the party line and tells you that they'd be glad to give up some freedoms to keep the lifestyle that they currently enjoy is a fucking five-gallon-bucket full more dangerous than a straw man put up by the propaganda machine in order to put doubt and fear in your hearts. Osama? The last bin Laden video was in October 2004, shortly before the U.S. presidential elections. Convenient? As Buggs would say, "Meh, could be." Oh, and by the way, Michael Chertoff says that your 'unequivocally' safer now than you were before 9/11. Now, don't you feel better? What will make you feel even more safe? Grounding every single USAF plane that is tasked for the protection of the US should do it, right? When? Sept. 14, 2007. Look that one up on your own. In the words of a couple good men: "Good night, and good luck."

What the fuck?!!!!

It seems that the train has derailed and the wheels are flying off in every direction. This is a bit of a recap. I've been busy. Q So you need those Australian troops there. THE PRESIDENT: We need all our coalition partners. And I would hope that -- and I understand, look, everybody has got their own internal politics. My only point is, is that whether it be Afghanistan or Iraq, we've got more work to do. We, the free world, has got more work to do. And I believe those of us who live in liberty have a responsibility to promote forms of government that deal with what causes 19 kids to get on airplanes to kill 3,000 students. Yeah, you read that right. The President of the United States now states that the 3000 people killed on 9/11 were students, and the alleged hijackers were "kids". Kids? I know, you're saying, "Wrench, you've got to be kidding! We know that you're down on the administration and pretty much any Republican or Democrat who violates the Constitution, but this is insane!" Hey people, I couldn't make this shit up. FOLLOW THE LINK... IT'S THE THIRD QUESTION DOWN Ok, on to other items that need to be addressed. Anyone who has spent more than 45 minutes in the 21st century knows that information, especially the electronic kind, not only does not get lost, but cannot be destroyed. Regardless of that knowledge, the White House says that you're all dipshits who have no idea how these magic computer thingies work and that once an item is lost/deleted, there is no recovering it. Oh, and by the way, "Hey America, it's none of your fucking business who the company was who handled the information, because if you knew the name of the company, you could subpoena their records and actually find the missing stuff that we told you magically disappeared and cannot be retrieved! Now, go fuck yourself!" LINK TO ABC ARTICLE ON HOW STUPID THE WHITE HOUSE THINKS YOU ARE NEXT!! "You're suing us because we violated your rights? Well, tough shit, Mr. Bush says that your law suits and your legal rights don't count, because we're the next in line to get immunity from you, the American people, and we don't have to answer to you or your government officials! Now, go fuck yourself!" LINK TO MSNBC ARTICLE ILLUSTRATING THE QUICKEST WAY TO SHUT YOU UP As if it isn't clear, there is a running theme to my post today. I'm not sure how many people actually read my blog, but I urge you, even if there is just one of you, to not take my word for anything, take my links and see for yourself.

What do you mean there's a war on? With who...? Really?

Remember back in the day when we were going to war because we were attacked and we would not rest until we found the bad guys, al Qaeda/Taliban/Osama bin Laden, that attacked us, and how we would hunt them to the ends of the Earth and punish anyone who was harboring them? No? Maybe you'll remember that Saddam, not bin Laden (because he isn't a threat or interest), was linked directly to al Qaeda and 9/11 and how we had to invade Iraq to dispose of Saddam and his WMDs before we were attacked again, by Iraq and al Qaeda? No? It's ok, apparently no one else does either. Seems that the whole(new) reason that we invaded Iraq so that we could be at the central front in the fight against he Sunni Muslim extremism of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Shiite extremism fueled by Iran. Don't believe me? CLICK THIS LINK TO BE LIED TO AGAIN. Oh, and get ready for... Wait for it... Ready for more Fearmongering Propaganda? Wait... !!!!!'Nuclear Holocaust'!!!!! That's right friends, prepare to be misled, fearmongered, and propagandized into complacency/lock-step, the dreaded fear of a nuclear winter has been brought back, just for you, so that you can feel safe, while the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is pulled out from under your feet like a table-cloth. But, there's a bright side. There's all kinds of new American Idol and America's Greatest Dipshits lined up to keep you exactly where they want you. Oh, and be a good American damnit!!! Go buy something, because that's exactly what the terrorists don't want you to do. Buy a house, buy a car, buy anything that will make a feeble attempt to stabilize a crippled economy, because Islamic Fundamentalists want to disrupt you as you go to Best Buy to buy that HD Plasma Wide Screen Flat Panel.

Don't want a National ID? DHS says, FUCK YOU!!

In a thinly veiled attempt at circumventing Congress and not making a public scene, the Department of Homeland Imprisonment, ahem... Security is working with, so far, a couple of state houses to implement a new ID. Where's the harm in that? Seeing as how Congress is against a National ID, because WE THE PEOPLE, are against a National ID, that is the harm in that. How does this equate to a National ID? If DHS implements it in all, or a majority, of states, then what we effectively have is a National ID. Once that happens, Congress will bend to the will of DHS and the state houses because, "Well, it's already in place in most of the US; might as well push it through." And just like that... You've been tagged with a National ID. Oh, and ummm, that's the MARK OF THE BEAST for you end-time/Revelations types. For the rest of us, it's total control of personal information/finances. No, your Social Security Card is not a form of ID. Have you ever read your SSC? links? Oh hell yes, I have links. DHS and Vermont get together for a special ID. DHS and Arizona get together for a special ID. And before you ask... Yeah, you're next.

Counting your vote.

I've watched this video over and over in disbelief. Every time I see it, I get that much more pissed off. I know that it's two hours, and that I lose most of you after 15 seconds, but I would appreciate it if you set aside the time and watched this one. It just may change your life, or at least your perception. It also is relevant to the present time, what with the Iowa straw-poll being botched and all. While I can no longer embed the video due to the embed code being pulled from Google, and the quality not being good enough, the following link works and the video is of excellent quality. We'll keep putting it up until I can burn a copy of my own and upload it to my server. Click Me To Watch The Video