Keeping Us Safe From Obama

Mona Charen / Townhall Columnist
 

It would be nice to write a column in praise of President Obama for his vigorous conduct of the war on terror -- to praise his willingness to look for "dots" to connect amid all the electronic noise of the communications web. It would be pleasantly nonpartisan to observe that some conservatives are being hypocritical -- denouncing Obama for surveillance of millions of Americans while they were content to permit President Bush to do similar things without protest, just as many liberals are doing the reverse.

Three glaring obstacles stand in the way: One is the memory of the casual smears candidate Obama directed at President Bush. The second is the rank abuse of power his administration has demonstrated, which undermines one's trust that the trove of information the government is sifting will be used only to disrupt possible terror attacks. The third is the administration's pattern of lying -- which undermines any reassurances the president proffers that "nobody is listening to your telephone calls."

Candidate Obama did more than dissent from President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. He asserted that the decision itself was dishonest -- based "not on principle but on politics." He said the war was a "cynical attempt by arm-chair warriors to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats."

What that agenda might have been (is removing terror-sponsoring aggressors an "ideology"?), candidate Obama didn't say.

Regarding the larger war on terror, Obama denounced Bush for advancing a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." His administration, he pledged, would provide law enforcement the tools to deal with terrorists "without undermining our Constitution and our freedom." He denounced "illegal wiretapping of American citizens," "tracking citizens who do nothing more that protest a misguided war" and "ignoring the law when it is inconvenient."

"That is not who we are," he scolded.

Mrs. Obama too struck this theme, railing against the supposed reign of fear that Bush imposed. "I am tired of living in a country where every decision that we've made over the last 10 years wasn't for something, but it was because people told us we had to fear something."

In his first inaugural address, Obama intoned, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

In the wake of revelations that the Obama administration has been engaged in massive data mining of telephone calls, computer use (by foreigners) and other information, the president explains, "It's important to recognize that you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience."

Why did the president only come to his realization after "his team" evaluated the intelligence? Most Americans were aware that the threats from terrorists were genuine without benefit of the "President's Daily Intelligence Brief." Terror attacks tend to make the news. But Barack Obama wasn't an average citizen before moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was a senator. He was on the Foreign Relations Committee and had access to classified information -- all the more reason to believe that he knew that the terror threat was not cynical "fear mongering" by President Bush.

Never has Obama conceded that President Bush acted in good faith -- not even after his "team" assured him that data collection was necessary for thwarting terror plots. No, when Bush engaged in data mining, he was "undermining our constitution and our freedoms." When Obama does it, he is "striking the right balance" between security and freedom.

Obama asks us to trust that he's using power judiciously. Under President Bush, liberals were never given reason to fear that government power was being used to persecute them. Enough said.

The president assures us that "no one is listening to our phone calls," and that may be true. But this administration also assured us that no sweeping data collection on American citizens was going on, that the IRS was not unfairly singling out conservatives, that the Justice Department had not attempted to prosecute journalists, and that the Benghazi attack was the response to a video.

It would be nice to trust the president, but it wouldn't be wise.

Bohner and Finestein are full of it...Snowden is a hero

Boehner, Feinstein: Snowden’s a traitor

by Ed Morrissey / HOT AiR

I guess this makes it bipartisan, no?  The Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Republican Speaker of the House don’t agree on large number of issues, but they both have the same assessment of NSA leaker Edward Snowden — that he is a traitor.  Boehner offered his take on ABC’s Good Morning America in an interview with George Stephanopoulos:

See the interview here:
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/11/boehner-feinstein-snowdens-a-traitor/

House Speaker John Boehner today called NSA leaker Edward Snowden a “traitor” who put Americans at risk by releasing classified information to the media.

“He’s a traitor,” the highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives said in an extensive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk.  It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are.  And it’s a giant violation of the law.” …

“The president outlined last week that these were important national security programs to help keep Americans safe, and give us tools to fight the terrorist threat that we face,” Boehner said. “The president also outlined that there are appropriate safeguards in place to make sure that there’s no snooping, if you will, on Americans here at home.” …

“There is heavy oversight of this program by the House Intelligence Committee on a bipartisan basis and the Senate Intelligence Committee,” Boehner said. “And that’s why I feel comfortable that we can operate this program and protect the privacy rights of our citizens.”

I’m actually on board with the idea that Snowden is a criminal, but that doesn’t mean that the NSA program is necessarily heroic, either.  Has Boehner confirmed that the NSA programs have those safeguards, or is he just taking Barack Obama’s word and those of the committee chairs for it?

Shouldn’t the leadership of Congress be able to speak from their own close oversight of such a powerful program about whether appropriate and effective safeguards are in place?  Because if Obama’s assurances on NSA are on the same level as those of IRS and State Department accountability, then we have a big problem.

Speaking of which, Boehner makes more or less the same point on credibility:

He said it was “inconceivable” that Obama could not have known about the targeting, despite the president’s claim that he did not know about the outcome of an inspector general audit until the report was released publicly.

“It would be inconceivable in my operation that my staff would know it and I wouldn’t,” Boehner said. “It just doesn’t pass the straight face test.  How could — how can your chief of staff — your general counsel know, and you not know?”

Now, let’s bring that back around to the NSA.  Do the two committees actually have effective oversight of the entire PRISM program, or are they just processing whatever the NSA and the administration tell them? Didn’t the House and Senate committees also hear from the IRS that no targeting was taking place at all, which later turned out to be a big, fat lie?

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, also called Snowden a traitor yesterday:

“I don’t look at this as being a whistle-blower,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calf.) said. “I think it’s an act of treason.” …

Democrats like Feinstein also said the source behind the leak of the NSA’s Internet and phone surveillance programs must be prosecuted.

“He took an oath — that oath is important,” she said. “He violated the oath, he violated the law. It’s an act of treason in my view.”

Treason?  Not really, but Snowden broke laws that would put him in prison for a very long time, if the US manages to catch him.  Right now, though, the rest of us would like a better idea of just how tight the leash is on the NSA, and whether the agency has returned to the days of Minaret.

Op-ed
Fourth Amendment violations and Big Brother all rolled into one
By: Diane Sori

A computer geek just might have put the key into the lock of Obama’s downfall.

Edward Snowden, the much heralded NSA (National Security Agency) leaker, was one of thousands of analysts hired by the Obama government to manage and go through huge amounts of personal data collected through monitoring our personal phone calls and internet usage.

Blowing the lid off what in reality is the Obama government’s spying on Americans through what’s known as PRISM…a covert government electronic surveillance program operated by the NSA and originally designed to identify terrorists, PRISM has now become a collaboration between the NSA, the FBI, and major tech companies that allow government access to your personal information...Obama and crew are unconstitutionally and without warrants spying on private citizens who have committed NO crime, who belong to NO terrorist groups, who are just going about their daily lives…in a direct and flagrant violation of rights afforded us under the Fourth Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizures (phone and internet snooping meets this definition), yet the Obama government is listening in on…spying on…half the country which was NOT the intention of the policies (the Patriot Act most specifically) George W. Bush put in place immediately after 9/11.

But laws passed since then have given authorities the ability to request judicial approval through a special National Security court, to basically troll for all sorts of records under the premise that the searching and accumulation of citizen’s phone and internet records could be analyzed for patterns of suspicious behavior while not involving a specific focus on any specific individual or group.

And this is where the violation of our Fourth Amendment rights come into play.

The Fourth Amendment requires that searches meet a ‘reasonableness standard’. This means that ‘reasonableness’ can be judged on the circumstances surrounding the search, and then weighing the search’s overall intrusive nature against the legitimate interests of the government.

However, the government must show that there was ‘probable cause’ for the search, meaning some form of evidence must be brought forth showing that there’s good reason to suspect an individual of a particular transgression, and only then can said search be deemed Constitutional.

A search will be constitutionally ‘unreasonable’ when the government can’t prove the search was necessary.

And listening in on…intruding on…spying on…collecting data on…law-abiding American citizens engaged in NO activity harmful to this country or its citizens is indeed ‘unreasonable’. And just because our government has the technical ability to conduct such searches on such a large scale does NOT mean the government should conduct such searches…legally or otherwise.

So how did Obama and crew justify their spying when exposed…by using the totally ridiculous justification that since terrorists have cell phones and internet access that they use to plot and carry out acts of terrorism, and because millions of American citizens have cell phones and computers with internet access, government surveillance…NO…government spying…is necessary to weed out suspicious activity. This means that every citizen is under suspicion until they are cleared by an Obama sanctioned look-see at their records.

So now we are NO longer innocent until proven guilty but guilty until the Obama government deems us innocent.

And to make this worse the fact is that every American who uses a cell phone or logs onto the internet is being tracked to some degree on a daily basis.  And the Obama controlled NSA is building a massive cyber intelligence data center, dubbed The Dark Star, in Bluffdale, Utah (scheduled to be operational this fall) that can analyze, in real time, the actual voice content of phone calls and ‘see’ what people are doing on the internet. In fact, it’s the largest of a network of data farms which include sites in Colorado, Georgia, and Maryland.

And it’s Fourth Amendment violations and Big Brother all rolled into one.

So with Edward Snowden now fearing retaliation against him for blowing the whistle on this operation, he is out of the country and on the run…and who can blame him with Obama’s thugs after him…and with the Obama government’s very defense reaction to the lid being blown off their doing what they knew was unconstitutional to begin with, this gives much credibility to the supposition that the Obama government actually did spy on and continues to spy on 'We the People' NOT to weed out potential acts of terrorism as they claim, but to ‘tag’ those of us who oppose this miserable excuse of a president and his equally miserable administration.

And I can bet one of those ‘tags’ is most assuredly on me...and damn proud of it.

The saga of the man who tried to extort money from me and others continues...

Audio: WePluribUS.net’s Scott Rohter unplugged, uncensored and unhinged

by jnewby / Conservative Firing Line

 

If you’re not familiar with the saga of Scott Rohter, you can get up to speed here.  In a nutshell, he’s mad at me because I did not post on his site but did post on Facebook while balancing work, writing and family issues in the middle of a move.  He hit me up for money and I told him this wasn’t a good time for that but I would consider it in a couple weeks after things had settled down a bit.  He was okay at first but last Friday — out of the blue — he blasts me on Facebook, calling me a liar.

Since posting that article, I’ve heard from a lot of people who say they have suffered Rohter’s anger, and  I’ve been given a piece of audio that, I think, pretty much speaks for itself.

In this audio clip, Rohter can be heard engaging in a Mel Gibson-style meltdown that simply has to be heard to be believed.

Tom Harrison, an acquaintance of Rohter who warned me of his anger early on, explains the context of what you are about to hear.

“With me, he was upset that I DECLINED to admin his site, then got madder when things did not go as planned, even though all I promised to do was to give advice, then switch over the pointers from the old site to the new one. Problem was, Scott left almost no time to fix anything, because the old site was going dark. The wrong security certificate was installed, and a proper one would have been quite expensive. Scott couldn’t see the new site (his computer connection), even though 35 people were already on it, and he blamed me for that, as well,” he wrote.

He added:

So, suddenly I’m stupid… and banned. You should hear the message he left on my voicemail when I posted a defense of the move problems and the work being done to correct them… ON THE NEW SITE (yeah, it was up, though permission problems still existed).

See, I had NO experience with PHPFox, and that’s why I declined to admin the site. And when it didn’t come up perfectly, I got the blame even though it was a transfer and co-habitation (two sites on same server) problem.

That didn’t make me stupid, but it did mean that Scott was an ungrateful SOB.

The clip can be heard below, or here if you don’t see the audio widget, and as Harrison warned, it’s not exactly work- or family-friendly.

Examiner’s Dean Chambers has more here, including reports that show Rohter has a history of this kind of behavior.

The shame of it is, had Rohter left me alone as I requested, I may very well have contributed to his effort.  Needless to say, I won’t be supporting him financially.

I understand that he still has supporters, and I’ve been told that at least one of them has accused me of “feathering my nest” by posting on his site.  So I took a look at my Analytics for all of my pages and Examiner titles, and out of the more than four million pageviews I’ve received since I joined early this year, only 184 came from his page.  Not a very big feather, IMHO.

Related:

• How NOT to run a social media site: The story of Scott Rohter and WePluribUS.net
• Social media site bullies users, demands cash, deletes users who don’t pay
• WePluribus site owner has history of belligerence, unprofessionalism (Video)

Terrorism By Government

by Bob Livingston / Personal liberty Digest

In any dealings with the Internal Revenue Service, and contrary to American jurisprudence, you are first considered guilty unless you can prove your innocence.

The IRS will reject your returns and require you to provide documentary evidence of all your financial transactions. Failure to provide all required documentary evidence—for whatever reason—will result in fines and penalties and possible jail time. There is little that sends more chills down the spines of American “taxpayers” than a letter or call from an IRS functionary.

Last week, before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TITGA) J. Russell George said the IRS could not account for all the costs of an Anaheim IRS training conference attended by 2,400 IRS employees and estimated to have cost the agency $4.1 million. In other words, the agency was in violation of the very rules it uses to oppress Americans.

The conference is noteworthy because of a controversial video produced for the conference that spoofed “Star Trek” and cost about $50,000 to make. It was one of the first hints of the excessive IRS abuses to leak.

A TITGA report released May 31 claimed the IRS held 225 employee conferences between 2010 and 2012 at a cost of more than $49 million. But the cost could have been a lot more. During Congressional testimony, Faris Fink, commissioner of the IRS Small Business and Self-Employed Division and “Spock” in the video spoof — who approved the expenditures for the Anaheim conference – admitted the conference may have actually cost more than $5 million. And Gregory Kutz, the assistant inspector general for the audit, testified that the Anaheim conference was the only one of the 225 examined.

The video dialogue, the lavish, unchecked conference expenditures, the abuse of conservative groups requesting non-profit status and the list of abuses that Michael Minns wrote about last week all point to an agency that is unaccountable and out of control – which is typical of unchecked government bureaucracy.

The IRS is nothing more than a blunt instrument used to beat Americans into compliance with a socialist, redistributionist fascist government that passes itself off as a democracy. It gives a face of “legitimacy” to the government’s theft of our labor. But theft is theft whether the robbery is pulled off by a masked bandit or an agent of the state wearing a suit and tie.

In fact, theft by the state is much worse because if you are prepared or armed you can fend off the masked bandit, or perhaps hope the good agents of the state law enforcement apparatus may one day capture and prosecute the bandit and return your stolen goods, but there is no such defense against state. There is no hope to recover the goods stolen from you by an agency of the government that enforces laws that are so Byzantine that a question to a dozen IRS agents will render a dozen answers, many of them contradictory. And there is essentially no appeal for a negative IRS result, as one of the people targeted in the IRS Tea Party scandal learned when his appeal was to be heard by the very agent who had denied his status previously.

For 100 years the lie has promulgated that income taxes fund the government. Americans are taught from an early age to be a good taxpayer and to pay their “fair share.” This lie has gone so far that now the majority of the people buys into the notion that the government gets first dibs on our money and can withhold the amount that is our fair share. Then, our benevolent government gives us some back after we file our return and we happily take our “refund.”

I explained this lie in detail here and here.

Using words spoken by Beardsley Ruml, chairman of the New York Federal Reserve from 1941 to 1946, we can dispel the widely believed myth that income taxes are needed for government income. Income taxes have nothing to do with providing income to the government.

In a famous speech he read before the American Bar Association during the last year of World War II, titled “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete,” Ruml said, “The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government.”

The speech was originally printed in American Affairs in the January, 1946 issue. The editor of American Affairs wrote: “His [Ruml’s] thesis is that given (1) control of a central banking system and (2) an inconvertible currency, a sovereign national government is finally free of money worries and need no longer levy taxes for the purpose of providing itself with revenue. All taxation, therefore, should be regarded from the point of view of social and economic consequences.”

To read the entire speech, go here.

In a similar vein, former Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President Darryl Francis had this to say in 1974: “Since the direct method of printing money to finance government expenditures is prohibited in the United States, the monetization of government deficits has occurred indirectly. Government debt is ultimately being financed by the creation of new money.”

Revelations of IRS abuses should be the impetus to dismantle the government shakedown agency to the last jot and tittle.

The Surveillance State

When the people lose confidence in government they lose all fear in favor of self defense. This loss of confidence in government and the elected class is happening now at breakneck speed.

Government and Congress are no longer legitimate and they have been and are passing laws right and left against the American people. Government is composed of parasitical psychopaths who have created the hyper-Orwellian surveillance state that was completely revealed in two reports by the British paper, The Guardian last week, here and here. It is exactly what I have been warning about for a number of years, since the passage of the USA Patriot Act, here and in my newsletter, The Bob Livingston Letter™ (subscription required). The USA Patriot Act is the most unpatriotic act passed since the early days of the republic, if not ever.

My repeated warnings about the growing police state and the rise of benevolent totalitarianism have often been greeted with charges of fear mongering or tin foil-hattery, first from supporters of the George W. Bush regime and now from supporters of the undocumented usurper who sits in the people’s house.

America is on life support. Unless the leviathan government is torn down to its Constitutional foundation, the country will rip itself apart. It may well be too late to prevent it.

The government, through its alphabet soup agencies and its surveillance apparatus, are terrorizing the American people. Terrorizing by government cannot survive against a well armed citizenry. That is why the elected class have pushed so hard to disarm the populace and why the Department of Homeland Security has been militarizing itself at breakneck speed.

San Francisco Airport uses public money to construct prayer space for Muslims

From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

The top comment (as of this writing) on this SFGate sums up the main problem with this: "So we have to remove any reference to god from the pledge of allegiance, federal court houses, federal buildings, and who knows where or what else? Yet we can build Muslims a place to bathe in a federal airport so they can also pray on federal airport property? What the $&@? are we doing? The same group of people who are telling us that the Koran tells some of them to kill innocent people, even their own women and children?"

Also, it appears that public money was used for this. Would public money have been used for religious accommodation for Jews or Christians? But "Yakel says the costs were nominal." Oh, that's all right, then!

"Airport’s garage now Muslim house of worship," from SFGate, June 9 (thanks to Bill):

Here’s a sign of the changing times — Muslim cabbies now have their very own place at San Francisco International Airport to wash their hands and feet before they pray. 

Under Islamic law, Muslims are required to pray five times a day — a ritual that also calls for a ceremonial cleansing.

For many cab drivers, that’s meant either lugging bottled water around or using one of the bathrooms inside the terminal to wash — a practice not always welcomed by airport passengers.

So Royal Cab driver Hasan Khan, 52, a Pakistani immigrant, collected some 300 signatures from fellow cabbies, urging the airport to give them their own cleansing station.

Airport brass obliged — and the wash equipment was installed on the ground floor of the main garage, right next to where the drivers congregate for their breaks.

“The way we look at it…this was in the interest of maintaining a good relationship with ground transportation providers,’’ says airport spokesman Doug Yakel.

As for using public resources?

Yakel says the costs were nominal, with the work done by in-house plumbers.

As for Khan, he recognizes not everyone might appreciate the religious accommodation.

But then he points out that Christians generally pray at church on Sundays — while for him and his fellow working Muslims, the ritual is woven into their daily routine.

And from the looks of things, they’re grateful.

“We are very happy,’’ said Ahmed Algazali, 49, a fellow driver from Yemen as he prepared to join Khan for a late-afternoon garage prayer.

Well, that's all that matters.

The Two Most Beautiful Women in America

Katie Kieffer / Townhall Columnist

Two women are tied for the title of Most Beautiful Woman in America. Veritable goddesses, they show no trace of vanity. Their beauty is a gift to America and they deserve our attention.

Unlike Victoria’s Secret Angels, these two women are ageless; their attractiveness becomes more apparent with time. They echo the strength and grace of Michelangelo’s David statue. Their gazes are determined looks of confidence; the veins in their muscular arms protrude; their stances are those of female warriors.

Lately, our country’s leaders seem to have forgotten about liberty, truth, beauty, and justice. EPA planes have been snooping on cattle ranchers; Sen. Diane Feinstein wants to take away our Second Amendment rights; Washington agencies are clandestinely collecting our cell phone numbers and tracking our calling patterns, and the IRS has targeted patriot groups while spending over $4 million in taxpayer dollars on employee conferences featuring Cupid Shuffle line dancing and a “Star Trek” parody.

Lady Justice and Lady Liberty are supremely beautiful because justice and liberty are foundational to the American experiment and to the U.S. Constitution. We must remember to regularly contemplate their stunning countenances:

Lady Justice:

Justice lives in a palace of marble. She is the gatekeeper of the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and her countenance appears three times within the Courthouse. Justice takes her name from the Greek goddess Themis and the Roman goddess Justitia. Sometimes she appears with a blindfold to represent her impartiality, but other times she appears without a blindfold because she has a clairvoyant eye for the truth. She often holds a set of scales and a sword in her arms.


Inside the Courthouse, Justice appears in a frieze sculpted into the wall by Adolph Weinman. In this depiction, she looks almost masculine because of her great strength. She fixes her eyes ahead with sovereign determination while holding both hands on her sheathed sword, ready and willing to administer justice and protect the innocent.

We desperately need Justice in America today. Practicing lawyers are saddened that Attorney General Eric Holder, the top lawyer in the country, has openly abused the justice system for the Obama administration’s agenda, unconstitutionally snooping on journalists from Fox News, the Associated Press and the New York Times.

Former prosecutor Judge Jeanine Pirro indicted Holder on her June 1 Fox News show, Justice with Judge Jeanine. She chastened Holder for his rogue leadership of the Department of Justice: “What are you gonna do, one-up the Constitution? We’ve already got a First Amendment!”

Lady Liberty:

Whereas Justice graces marble, Liberty is more comfortable on the water—bracing against harsh 50 mph winds and holding a torch in the air to light the way for freedom. She welcomes visitors to America from her perch in New York Harbor. She represents the American victory of independence from Britain, holding a tablet that reads: July IV MDCCLXXVI (July 4, 1776).

Liberty does not believe in whips and chains. Broken shackles and chains are scattered at her feet because French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, her designer, wanted us to remember how we escaped from tyranny under Great Britain. He clothed Liberty in a stola and palla, the clothing worn by the free peoples of ancient Rome and Greece. Atop her head she wears a crown featuring a halo-like “diadem,” symbolizing her transcendence and a “nimbus” (rays) symbolizing her enlightened philosophy.

Measuring 111’1” from head to toe, Liberty soars far above humans. She stands above man’s petty disagreements, special interests, bribery, corruption, and cunning. She greets anyone entering the harbor with a determined and objective welcome. Her face says: “You have come to the land of freedom, and freedom requires constant vigilance.”

Bartholdi enlisted French engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel to build a secondary skeletal framework and an iron pylon for his statue. Liberty awes us by her ability to withstand the assaults of the elements—Eiffel’s ingenuity allows her to move as if she is alive. Her 31-ton copper “skin” flexes nimbly with the wind, allowing her body to move up to three inches and her torch to sway up to six inches.

As long as we are free, we can weather any storm just as Lady Liberty does on Liberty Island in New York. Liberty allows us to roll with the punches and get through any challenge in life. When we are free, we can always find a way. If we lose our job, we can start our own business. If we want to reform society, we can speak our minds in the press.

Let us take time to reflect on the beauty of both Lady Justice and Lady Liberty. Their beauty lies in their truth, virtue, and strength. If we emulate their beauty, we will empower ourselves.