Category: Wrong in America

The Fourth of July 2013 Memorial?

Independence Day… Time for a memorial or a celebration?

The news tells us about the US government spying on its citizens.

Fireworks displays at military bases are suspended because of sequestration.

A citizen is hounded around the world, his passport is revoked, and foreign nations fear granting him asylum because the USA is after him. His crime? He revealed the illegal and unethical nature of US spying around the world.His trial? Never happened.

The President vacations in Africa while White House tours are suspended. A purge of US generals is occurring. The President has the highest record of charging whistleblowers with crimes in the history of the US.

Congress is determined to hold its breath until it dies rather than breathe legislative life into anything.

The Supreme Court is rife with partisanship instead of objectivity.

Two teen age boys are in jail facing charges of terrorism because they mouthed off while playing video games.

American citizens are hunted down and killed without a trial.

American citizens are no longer secure in their possessions or their homes.

National Security Letters allow any federal law enforcement to acquire anything about you they wish without showing that you are a suspect in a crime.

This is not the Fourth of July like any other. It is the first memorial to the Fourth of July.

Like you, I love my country and what I always thought it stood for. I wish it stood for those things today. Freedom, Responsibility, Choice, Constitutional Government, and the Rights of Citizens. These noble ideas have been trammeled in the pursuit of global power and by making people serve the government.

Just pathetic…

“Congressman Would Fire Feds Who Don’t Answer His Questions”

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who has introduced a bill that would fire any federal employee who refuses to answer questions or gives false testimony at a congressional hearing.

Brooks wrote the legislation after Lois Lerner, director of the tax-exempt organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service, declined to answer questions at a hearing about the agency’s targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

“I’ve been advised by my counsel to assert my constitutional right not to testify or answer questions related to the subject matter of this hearing,” Lerner said at the May hearing.

Brooks took issue with this approach.

“This is a statement which should not be made by federally appointed officials before a congressional hearing if they are faithfully carrying out the duties of their office,” he said in a statement to Government Executive. “That is why I am introducing H.R. 2458, which would terminate the employment of any federal employee who refuses to answer questions before a Congressional hearing or lies before a congressional hearing. This legislation is constitutional and necessary to enable Congress to provide proper oversight for the American people.”

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects witnesses from being forced to incriminate themselves through testimony.

This bill would terminate any employee who refuses to answer questions at a congressional hearing after being granted immunity, employees who do not answer specific and narrow questions related to their official duties — even if they are not offered immunity — or an employee who “willfully or knowingly” give false information, as determined by three-fourths of the body to whom the testimony was given.

What will he do next? Ground them for two weeks? Take away their car keys?

Sheesh. But when all you have is a hammer, pretty soon everything looks like a nail.

Soon we will have a law that prevents rain until after sundown….

There is a difference…

Although the people who run the federal government try to deceive you, there is a difference between a Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, between an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend”, between a federal oath of office and conducting yourself as the federal government wants you to do.

Does everyone/anyone remember John Brennan’s ceremony when he assumed his role as head of the CIA?

Seems to me that our government of lesser men has forgotten that its primary role is to run the federal government in accordance with the rules laid out in the Constitution of the United States. At one time, a man’s oath was considered a measure of his fidelity to  a cause. Today, the oaths of the federal cabinet heads aren’t worth the words that are uttered out of their deceitful mouths.

I used to say that the reason that large corporate officers in business are paid so much money is to afford the lawyers that their criminality will require. Now I wonder if the power that is given to cabinet heads is the same kind of power given to the heads of criminal organizations: enough power to retain control over their enterprise in exchange for loyalty to their bosses. Enough power is given to cabinet heads to preserve, protect, and defend the President against all enemies foreign and domestic.

John Brennan is a careful man. He took the oath of office on a copy of the Constitution without the Bill of Rights. There is a message here. He is either not Christian or he holds his Christian views so sacred that he won’t sully it by swearing to the criminality of his job on his Bible. That is not likely because he has taken an oath many times previously, hasn’t he? I wonder how he took his oaths in previous administrations? Perhaps he took no no oath previously but merely affirmed his allegiance to the Constitution? (If he holds any other religion as sacred, he chose not to swear on its religious book.) Which leaves me to wonder if John Brennan’s message is simply  ‘I will uphold the Constitution this far and no farther’. As I said, John Brennan is a careful man.

But now the federal government appears to want its acolytes to swear allegiance to the government itself or at least conduct itself with that end in mind. It is now treasonous according to the DOJ to out a Total Information Awareness program that Congress itself shut down in 2004. The DOJ decided that Eric Snowden should be tried for treason not because he gave secrets clandestinely to a foreign nation but because he gave information about secret programs to the public at large. It is now treasonous to out your government’s criminality.

We should be very afraid now.

TWA Flight 800 : Another government lie

Another Lie.

Makes you wonder if you can trust any federal agency anymore.

The NTSB took four years to craft a lie and push it out into the public. Now investigators have come forward to blow the whistle on another government cover-up.

“You can’t handle the truth”. Exactly who said the American public could not handle the truth that a possible Stinger missile shot down TWA Flight 800 in 1996?

Was this disclosure of a government cover-up equal to Snowden’s disclosure of domestic surveillance?

The difference here is the title and responsibilities of the people leaking TWA 800 information compared to Snowden.

So now who are you going to believe when a train derails or a refinery blows up or a chemical plant explosion occurs “by accident” ? Hmmm?

Cheap and Tawdry Espionage Charges

read it here.

When the US government can’t tell the difference between stealing secrets and giving them to the enemy compared to going public with unconstitutional spying programs, there is little hope for justice in America.

Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.

Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Give me a break. There was nothing heroic about what Eric Snowden did, but there was nothing treasonous about it either.

I am darn tired of the DOJ using the law to try and scare people who may have similar thoughts about divulging unconstitutional programs. It is always the case that those in power first seek to fabricate the authority to break the law and then claim that the authority protects them from the consequences of their illegal acts.

There is something ironic that the espionage arm of the government seeks to punish those who spied on them successfully.

This whole idea that ‘my NSA secrets are more precious than your personal secrets’ is moronic. Isn’t it just too parental to say “I can have secrets but while you live under my roof you cannot have any secrets”?

That approach doesn’t work with teenagers, why do they think it will work with us?

More on the Drone Wars in the US

Snip:The head of the FBI told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the bureau is using drones as part of its domestic surveillance capabilities.

Snip:Mueller then elaborated to California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein that drones, formally called unmanned aerial systems, are “generally used in a particular incident where you need the capability.”

Snip:DHS, which has a fleet of drones used to patrol the nation’s borders, has been loaning drones to local police forces to assist them in their operations since 2011.

Wouldn’t you like to know more about how drones are used domestically?
I would.

Farm Bill defeated, who wins?

In a defeat for Republican leadership, the House on Thursday rejected a sweeping farm bill, amid opposition from both sides of the aisle.

More than 60 House Republicans defected and voted against the half-trillion-dollar bill, which sets funding for farm subsidies and other assistance as well as food stamps.

The vote was 234-195 against the bill.

There was a time when America wanted to feed the world and incentives were put in play to assist. But federal programs have grown so large that it no longer makes sense to take taxes from everyone to stimulate a few to produce to excess. I live in an area of one-crop farming. The farms are highly specialized and plant either corn or beans with occasional wheat thrown in. Or they are milk farms or turkey farms. But still, they are one-product farms each year. I wonder if that existed before the 1960s.
In this farm bill, the federal food stamp program was to have been cut. I agree that this program needs to shift from the federal government to state governments but I would like to hear more about how state governments should fund this.
Here is an interesting chart. It appears that people have learned how to improve their lives by taking food stamps and using their paychecks for other things. Wise choice, I think. But to double the number of people on food stamps in a decade reflects a sorry economy.
Eligibility for food stamps is a bit complicated which is why the government has people to help you. Look Here at the rules.
In any event, what does it say about the richest country in the world if ~50M people are on government food stamp assistance?
It says that the US is producing more ‘have-nots’ than ‘haves’. (I wonder if someone was incented to do that?)
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The Right to be Anonymous: an unenumerated right

Imagine a world in which you no longer control your identity. You go out in public and your picture is taken; facial recognition programs identify you and then relay your whereabouts to your permanent dossier some place in Utah’s new super secret facility for tracking citizens. Your GPS coordinates are encoded to show where you were at the time.

You walk into the local grocery store, your picture is snapped and you are identified. Your purchases and buying patterns are recorded. Did you buy condoms, EPT, or sanitary napkins? How about diet shakes and apple pie? Do you really want this stored and ultimately used to hound you over and over again with discounts for the same or similar products? For effing ever?

You accidentally drive through a stop sign and your picture is shagged and forwarded to your insurance company as well as law enforcement. You are sent a ticket with a return envelope in order to pay a fine. No harm was done to anyone by your actions but the state or the city realized that they had a great source of revenue from those illegal things you do when no one is looking. What kind of world is it when your private mistakes and private actions become a revenue source for your county, state, or country?

You have a right to be Anonymous in a public place. You have a right to control your audience with an expectation of Anonymity and Privacy when there is no discernible audience. Do you adjust your underwear in elevators? Do you sing along in fully sour notes during baseball games? You have a right to be Anonymous if you so choose provided you are not harming others.

When incarcerated, you have no physical freedom or personal freedom, everything about you is known by the guards and the surveillance system and can be recalled on demand if needed. When you are a free man or free woman or free transexual or free whatever, you have a right to be Anonymous in public.

When the State watches over you, more than God, and records it, there will be Hell to pay..over and over again…

The 4th, 5th, 9th, and 10th Amendment include elements of the right to be Anonymous. If our forefathers were crafting a Constitution today, they would add the Right to Anonymity in the Bill of Rights.

The Alleged Leak of NSA Black Programs

C’mon. Really. Who did not know that every piece of electronic communication worldwide was being sifted within and without the USA? Everybody knew that. This 29-year-old ex-CIA man just put flesh on the bones of the programs that everybody already knew about.

C’mon. Really. Who did not know that Clapper was lying before Congress when he said that no Americans were being surveilled on purpose? Everybody knew that Clapper was lying BUT some people thought that was okay as long as “we” were protected from “them”.

C’mon. Really. Who did not know that John Poindexter’s TIA program changed its name but not its aims when Congress tried to shut it down? Even Wikipedia knows what is happening.

The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA).

This would be achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant.[1] This information would then be analyzed to look for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and “threats”.[2] Additionally, the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras, and other methods.[2]

Following public criticism that the development and deployment of this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded, and merely run under different names.[3][4][5][6]

So what is the news crisis all about?

Well, it is about THE DARN CONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE DARN THING. But you would not know that from watching the federal government’s Mouthpiece News Services.They all seem to have forgotten that the Constitution still matters. Like megaphones with no brains, they each broadcast the story of the day rather than on the importance of the story or its context.

But we Reasonable Citizens are laughing our heads off over two things:

1. The President of the United States says the government is not listening to you and thus confirming what we already knew anyway. They never listen to us. The Federal government serves itself and its donors and not you and me.

2. The NSA is hopping mad that somebody invaded their privacy and let others know their secrets. How appropriate is that? The expression is poetic justice, my friends.

The Emperor has no clothes now. The US is building the world’s largest spy system based on electronic communication but that is not what scares some of us, is it?

What scares us is the 29-year-old dropout who can access your data and mine whenever he wants without a court order or approval from anyone. He just sits at at terminal and pops into your life or mine as he sees fit.

Who could resist the temptation to access the permanent data base of anyone we know if we had the opportunity? For how long? a week? a month? a decade?

If you build it they will come. The ghosts of players who want to play the game even after they are gone. The Field of Personal Data Dreams for John Poindexter and others.

The Selling of Wisconsin Land?

Something interesting here from The CapTimes. Seems like Tom Larson does not care who owns Wisconsin land… (Note there is more to the story at the link below about selling state property for no bidding “Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma, wrote for an upcoming opinion piece that “no conservation-minded Democrat or Republican should support a no-bid sale of state stewardship land.”)

On Wednesday, I (Jessica Vanegerin) spoke with Thomas Larson, vice president of legal and public affairs with the Wisconsin Realtors Association, who had suggested changing the law.

When asked if the Wisconsin Realtors Association planned to try and get the proposal before the Legislature as a stand-alone bill, Larson said he planned to first gather more information.

Specifically, he wants to obtain clarity from the state Attorney General’s office on whether the state law was already void because of a federal law based on the General Agreement on Trade in Services, or GATS.

That treaty, which took effect in 1995 and was signed by some 150 member countries of the World Trade Organization, says foreign corporations and foreign investors need to be treated the same as their domestic counterparts.

“We want that answer first … so people don’t think we are trying to change state law,” Larson said. “That was the basis for saying Wisconsin’s (current) law doesn’t seem to have any teeth or any impact if this treaty overrides.”

Current state law prevents an individual from another country from owning land in Wisconsin unless they live in the state. Larson argues this conflicts with the GATS treaty.

Walker’s proposal would have changed that to allow “nonresident alien individuals” to own land in the state.

A separate provision in state law prevents a foreign corporation from owning more than 640 acres of land. Walker’s proposal would have changed this by removing the acreage cap and allowing foreign corporations and foreign individuals to own unlimited amounts of land for any purpose.

The one exception is farming. Under current state law, foreign corporations cannot farm on land they own. Walker’s proposal would not have changed that.