Our Continued Loss Of Freedom, Part 2: The CIA Hacking Of The Constitution and Our Privacy

One of the reasons why America has been such a wonderful experiment in government is because of the many freedoms that the Founders guaranteed via the Constitution and Bill of Rights. America has lifted more people out of poverty and created a legendary middle class that has never been matched anytime in history. Freedom comes in many different ways and each of those ways helps make Americans wealthier and freer to live their lives as they want.

But for the next few days we will be examining how that freedom mission and promise has been severely impaired by the American political class. We have often discussed on how our freedom of speech, freedom of religion, economic freedom, and other freedoms have been eroded over time by our politicians. And as the next few days will prove, these politicians have continued to impose their will on us until we will them to stop.

Previously, we focused on how our economic freedom is being stripped away by over taxation and over regulation of the Federal government. And when you think about it, without economic freedom, i.e. the freedom to keep the fruits of our labor, there really cannot be many other kinds of freedom. If you were allowed to keep more of your income and wages, you could:

• Send your kids to better schools.
• You could more easily start your own business.
• You could donate more to charities and needy individuals that you want to help.
• You could take more and better vacations.
• You could live in a better house or drive a better car.

Without economic freedom, freedom in other parts of your life become much more restrictive.

Today, we will talk about the freedom of being left alone and privacy and how the political class and the out of control government bureaucracy they oversee is destroying both our privacy and the Fourth Amendment:

We have previously discussed the reality that the Obama administration had stepped up its Orwellian spying effort, via the NSA, when it started to collect just about every electronic communication of every American without getting a warrant, without due process, and without probable cause. Fortunately, Eric Snowden uncovered the Obama spying network which resulted in some safeguards being put in place. 

However, the Obama administration spying effort was an unprecedented violation of the Fourth Amendment. And who knows what information the government still holds about every American and whether or not they really stopped the spying. While the government claimed they stopped the spying on innocent Americans but who knows if they did, they certainly did not announce their spying plans and operations the first time around.

But before we move on to the latest government intrusion into our lives, this time via the CIA, let’s quickly review how the Obama administration and Federal government spied on other, non-Americans. We go through this list to illustrate how the NSA, the CIA, and the Obama administration had no trepidations about spying on and violating the privacy of famous people. If they had not qualms or morals about spying on the following people, I doubt they had or would have qualms about spying on you:

• The Federal government spied on a private meeting between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon regarding a climate change meeting they were having.
• Obama was briefed that the Federal government was “monitoring” Merkel in 2010 but allowed it to continue.
• The Federal government tapped the phone of the Chief of Staff for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
• The Federal government intercepted messages of the Director of Rules of the World Trade Organization.
• The Federal government intercepted Italian diplomatic cables that involved Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
• The Federal government intercepted conversations between European Union and Japanese trade ministers.
• The Federal government targeted five top European Union officials for long term message interception including tapping their phones in several different countries.
• The Federal government targeted the Italian ambassador to NATO for long term message interception.
• The Federal government tapped a private meeting between French and Italian prime ministers regarding the Italian banking system.

Even worse than this spying and message interception is the reality that the U.S. had actually signed an agreement with the United Nations that it would not do such spying. But much like the Obama administration and the Federal government which ignored the Fourth Amendment, the administration and Federal government apparently ignored their formal agreement with the United Nations. Again, proving that the last administration and the current Federal spying operations would have no qualms about spying on American citizens.

Back to the CIA intrusion into our lives and the lives of others around the world as they enhance their ability to trample our Fourth Amendment rights. According to the latest releases by Wikileaks, the CIA has been busy creating and collecting various computer viruses, malware, and spying capabilities from around the world and from within the CIA itself. 

Unlike the NSA, which at least has the illusion of getting warrants to spy on people, according to the Wikileaks information, the CIA’s cyber effort has no trepidations about screwing around with people’s lives and privacy:

• The Wikileaks release of its latest documents shows that the CIA has collected a massive, detailed catalog of secret computer hacking tools.
• These hacking tools can be used to turn computers, Internet router computers, smartphones and web-enabled televisions into remote electronic spying devices.
• The hacking tools were so good that they would enable CIA personnel or others to by bypass the encrypting software of both Apple and Android smartphones.
• This information was among the 9,000 documents that Wikileaks released, what promises to be just the first set of stolen CIA documents.
• Some of the documents show CIA personnel discussing how to hack Apple and Android smartphones in order to ascertain someone’s location and audio and text messages in addition to taking over a smartphone’s microphone and camera.
• This is interesting because the Obama administration had promised smartphone manufacturers that it would tell those manufacturers what security gaps the government uncovered and yet we now see that during that administration the CIA was actively trying to find ways to exploit those smartphones, indicating another potential Obama administration lie.
• But it is not just smartphones that are at risk since one program called “Weeping Angel” can turn a Samsung Internet connected televisions into listening devices which can send family and other conversations back to the CIA.
• Other CIA hacking programs can corrupt car control systems, which in the era of self driving cars would allow the CIA to turn a car into an assassination vehicle.

All of this is very Orwellian “1984” stuff. Given the history of the previous administration and that the NSA and CIA often operate on the edges or beyond the limits of the law and Constitution, this is very scary stuff. And adding to the scary nature of an out of control U.S. intelligence community is the reality that it is highly likely, given that Wikileaks implies it has a lot more CIA stolen documents that it could release, it appears that the CIA’s hacking library may now be out in the real and virtual world, allowing America’s enemies to raise havoc with our lives.

We have discussed the reality that we have allowed the American political class to limit our economic freedom and now it appears that we are at the mercy of intelligence agencies that have little or no incentive to obey privacy laws and morals and the Constitution. Orwell would be so proud.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2016, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: HIllary's Insulting of Most Of America and the Political Corruption and Hypocrisy Via Wikileaks

The current monthly record for the number of posts that were needed to cover one month's worth of insanity is ten. We equaled that record last month when we needed ten days to cover one month’s worth of political class insanity. There is a very good chance that the ten day record could fall this month since as we get closer and closer to the election, the volume of ineptness grows almost exponentially. 

But today and for all of the insanity posts this month, let’s start off with a welcome piece of honest political dialog. It comes from a State Department spokesperson. Mark Toner, who is about to start the daily State Department press briefing. In a joking matter, he makes the following quote: "Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy." 

He then burst out laughing at his own quote, indicating he also knew what a joke the Obama administration has been, especially Mr. Toner’s State Department, when it comes to cover ups, lack of transparency, denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, the prosecution of whistleblowers, etc. But at least it was a little refreshing to finally hear some actual honesty out of Washington as we see from the actual clip of the news conference:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/08/when-even-the-state-department-spokesperson-cant-keep-a-straight-face-about-things-anymore-video/

With that context of honesty, let’s see what other insanity has been going down:

1) As we have said a number of times this past week we have mostly stayed clear of the Clinton/Trump insanity and idiocy since trying to keep up with all of the sexcapades, pay for play instances, name calling, and lack of discussion on the issues would likely take up multiple blogs writing multiplied posts per day. But today let’s take a quick a look at some of the rich but disgusting information that has come to light via Wikileaks regarding how little Hillary Clinton and her staff think about probably the majority of Americans.

Before get to the latest condescension from Hillary, let’s review how she has already insulted and spit on tens of millions of Americans:

• She called half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables” which probably encompasses tens of millions of Americans.
• She said that Bernie Sanders supporters still live in their parents’ basements.
• She stated in an email that African Americans and Muslims are “professional never do wells,” implying that these people cannot ever rise up and better themselves.
• Her staff lumped together every different Hispanic and Latino sub segment of the population when they asserted in an email that that they needed a “taco bowl” outreach effort, certainly a racist statement.

So before we even get into the latest Wikileaks documents we know that Hillary and her staff have insulted half of Trump’s American voters, all African Americans, all Muslims and all Hispanics. That is a heck of a start. But Jay Guy, writing for the iPatriot website on October 21, 2016, had a number of other insulting remarks and attitudes from the Hillary staff:

• In February, 2016, a number of emails were exchanged between John Podesta and Frank White, Jr., members of Clinton’s campaign staff, in which they divided Americans into seven different “food groups” so that they could analyze which Americans they wanted to consider for Vice Presidential candidates. 
• The "food groups" included Latinos, women, black men, business magnates and one group that included just one member - Bernie Sanders.
• Notice that they were willing to consider black men but no black women, a distinction and omission that one could categorize as both racist and sexist.
• In December, 2015 Podesta called Bernie Sanders a “doofus” for opposing the Paris Climate Change Conference.
• In September, 2015, Philip Munger, apparently a big Democratic Party supporter and donor and big Clinton supporter, wrote an email to Podesta where he said that Clinton is “going to have to kneecap him [Sanders]. She is going to have to take him down from his morally superior perch.” Given the Clinton penchant for having associates or political enemies end up dead, one has to wonder exactly what Munger met via his kneecapping reference.

So we now know that there are whole other sub segments of the country that Hilary and her people do not like including black women and Bernie Sanders (or doofus) in addition to the “food groups” of Trump supporters, blacks, Muslims, basement dwelling Bernie supporters, and Hispanic folks. Pathetic and so condescending.

2) But HIllary and company are not done insulting whole groups of Americans, according to reporting on Wikileaks documents that were discussed on the I Have The Truth website in a recent article:

• Marketing Executive Wendy Bronfein was introduced to Clinton campaign manager John Podesta in an email as someone who “could be immensely helpful in improving HRC’s [Hillary’s] connection to millennials.”
• She provided advice on how to reach “f***ing dumb” young people, with her version not striking out the uck after the f.
• Bronfein went on to explain to Podesta that Hillary “may not be the best face” to attract younger voters and that she needs to utilize “trending figures” as part of an “infusion to pull younger voters” because “that’s the crap that young people pay attention to. It’s f**king dumb but being “cool” counts for more than it maybe should.”
• The original email as released by Wikileaks follows:

Yes, our young folks are f***ing stupid, nice respect to the future of the country.

3) Oh, but her insults are not over. At a recent Florida political rally, a member of the audience shouted out that Bill Clinton is a rapist. Now, I certainly never saw the reason or the rationale for trying to disrupt another candidate’s freedom of speech rights. Let them speak uninterrupted and speak their mind, interrupting them in such a way is juvenile and stupid.

But the sad thing is that Hillary let it get to her. And rather than having security remove this individual from the audience she went off on him and her perceived belief that he was a Trump supporter: “I am sick and tired of the negative, dark, divisive, dangerous vision and behavior of people who support Donald Trump.” So now, besides being deplorable, Trump supporters are dark and divisive. Nice way to unite the country.

She also failed to mention that Wikileaks hacks of her emails show that her staff and operatives actively planned and executing operations to intentionallyand violently disrupt Trump rallies and gatherings. She failed to mention how her allies worked with the Chicago local political class to shut down a planned Trump rally by denying him enough police support. She failed to mention or condone how her supporters and allies ran down, egged, and physically assaulted people attending Trump rallies across the country. And it is Trump supporters, assuming this guy was a Trump supporter, are “dark and divisive.” Talk about hypocrisy.

4) Last piece of insanity for today and for the month. The iPatriot website recently listed what it called the 13 most relevant Wikileaks released emails that show Hillary is guilty of treason. I think this premise is pretty much over the top but the list does show how corrupt the American political class has become, sleazy if not treasonous:

• Muslim country Qatar gave Bill Clinton $1,000,000 for his birthday. You know Qatar, a country where gay rights and women’s rights are quite limited. (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8396#efmAEOAGW)
• A Saudi Sheikh wouldn’t donate money to the Clinton Foundation unless he received a phone call from Bill Clinton. Staff responds: Bill won’t do it “unless Sheikh Mo has sent us a $6 million check” (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6775#efmACoADwAIqAJzAOXASM)
• Hilary publicly defends the ill-fated and flawed Obama nuclear weapons deal with Iran but her campaign manager, John Podesta says “yup” to the assertion that the deal “condemns the next generation to cleaning up a nuclear war in the Persian Gulf” (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/727#efmAAGAAJABQAEL)
• That same campaign manager, John Podesta, owns 75,000 shares in a Putin associated Russian energy company (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/4635#efmAFyAGUAWLAYP)
• Clinton’s speeches to high powered Wall Street executives, speeches that she refused to release, have finally showed up and we find out that she agrees that being two faced is a good idea, i.e. you can have both a “public” position and a “private” position. (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/927)
• Clinton’s leaked speech where she says her dream is a world without borders,national sovereignty be damned: (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/927#efmFjUFkd)
• Clinton talked about putting the screws to China because she wants to “ring China with missile defense” and the U.S. has the right to rename Pacific Ocean the “American Sea”: (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/927) 
• Clinton flipped her position on the TPP international trade treaty when it was decided that her support of the treaty would get her “eaten alive” by Labor: (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8452#efmAH1APRA0NA5c)

That will do it for this month’s insanity. Wikileaks is showing us how hypocrisy, name calling, and corruption are the most overriding traits of our political processes today.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

June, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Exposing Our Own Spy's Cover, Our Lost Freedom Of The Press, Losing Libya, and More

It’s the beginning of another month, which means time for one of our regular features, political class insanity. The political class of America has been working overtime in the past month or so on their idiocy so we probably have a substantial number of days ahead of us to get all of the insanity in.

1) We have often made the case that we really no longer live in a free country. You cannot live in a free country when:

• The government controls most of your retirement income via Social Security.
• The government controls most of your retirement medical needs via Medicare.
• The government controls much of the pre-retirement medical needs via Obama Care.
• The government taxes you so much that in many states you do not starting working for yourself and your family until April of each year.
• The government decides that it can assassinate American citizens without legal due process.
• The government decides that it can hold citizens in custody for an unlimited amount of time without due process.
• The government spies on just about every piece of electronic communications that you use.
• The government controls most of the election processes that allows ill performing Washington politicians to manipulate those processes to stay in office despite their ineptness.

We could go on and on but you get the idea, anyone who still thinks we are living in a free country has not been paying attention.

And we now have another item to add to that list of our dwindling freedoms. The state of the free press in the U.S. is also on the endangered freedom list, according to the latest 2014 World Press Freedom Index. This index is annually compiled by Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières).

Unbelievably, in their current analysis the U.S. was ranked 46th among the 180 nations surveyed relative to freedom of the press in this country. This is a dismal drop of 13 places since last year. Finland, the Netherlands and Norway are among the most free nations for journalists. Iran, China and North Korea are among the most restrictive for reporters.

America's bad ranking was based on the conviction of WikiLeaks' informant Bradley (Chelsea) Manning and the treatment of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, along with the Obama administration's "increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks." These infractions include but are not limited to:

• In 2013, it became known that the Justice Department had secretly obtained phone logs of Associated Press reporters. The Justice Department was also caught monitoring the personal email account for FOX News reporter James Rosen in order to discover government officials speaking to the press.
• They also monitored and sought the testimony of James Risen of the New York Times to testify against a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information.
• Obama said in May 2013 that he was "troubled" at the possible overreach by the Justice Department and ordered the agency to review its guidelines on dealing with press investigations.
• The latest analysis accused the Obama White House of shielding the President from the press by not allowing the White House Press Corps sufficient access to photograph and question Obama during his official duties.

And when the Obama friendly New York Times agrees with the general conclusion of this analysis and index, you know things are getting bad from a freedom of the press perspective: "I would say it is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering," New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson told Al Jazeera America in late January. "The Obama administration has had seven criminal leak investigations. That is more than twice the number of any previous administration in our history. It's on a scale never seen before." 

2) The Obama administration violated the Constitution when it involved the U.S. and our military forces in an illegal and unnecessary military action in Libya several years ago to oust Ghadaffi. The actions put U.S. military personnel in harm’s way and ate up well over a billion dollars of taxpayer wealth.

And we did all of this for apparently no gain since earlier this week, the State Department issued a warning and advised all Americans who remained in Libya to evacuate immediately: “The Department of State warns U.S. citizens against all travel to Libya and recommends that U.S. citizens currently in Libya depart immediately. The security situation in Libya remains unpredictable and unstable. The Libyan government has not been able to adequately build its military and police forces and improve security following the 2011 revolution.”

The State Department explained that a number of threats by “various groups” have been made against Americans in the nation while reinforcing the reality that its capability to offer protection or emergency services at this time is “very limited.” Staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Libya’s capital city of Tripoli has been pared down as a result of the ongoing threats, the statement indicated.

Thus, by not having a long term strategy or knowledge of the whole Libyan situation, our participation in that internal civil war has resulted in a lawless, terrorist infested land that apparently has no sense of gratitude for us helping the Libyan citizens get rid of their long term dictator and tormentor. But this insanity should come as no surprise, this administration and the Washington political class have repeatedly shown absolutely no ability to think strategically and long term, think and act within established legal parameters, or generally get anything done right. The evacuation of Libya is just another failure on a long line of foreign policy failures of Washington over the past fifty years, regardless of who is in office in the White House or in Congress.

3) But American politicians are just as good as wasting money within our own borders as they are in wasting money in far flung disasters around the world. Researchers from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center recently completed a corporate cronyism study which found an incredible amount of taxpayer money being given out freely to corporations. A small sample of the wasteful spending includes:

• As of 2013, Walmart had received at least 260 special state benefits worth more than $1.2 billion. But for every 100 new Walmart jobs, an average of 50 existing jobs disappear as other retailers are crowded out so the incremental benefit of Walmart jobs is offset substantially by the killing off of other state jobs. 
• Apple got $370 million in state tax breaks for setting up in North Carolina. Since only 50 jobs were created within the state, North Carolina taxpayers ended up paying $7.4 million per incremental job created within the state. 
• New York granted aluminum giant Alcoa free electricity for more than 30 years (estimated value: $5.6 billion). In return, Alcoa pledged to make a $600 million investment and promised not to fire more than 165 workers. Subsequently, to pay for the deal, New York had to raise taxes multiple times on its citizens. This deal was even worse than the Apple/North Carolina deal since if we divide the 165 saved jobs into the $5.6 billion spent to save those jobs, the cost per saved job comes out to over $38 million per job.

Total insanity. Don’t these politicians know how to do simple math: spending taxpayer money at the rate of millions of dollars per job is no way to expand an economy. Stupid is too tame a word to use for these examples and others pointed out in the study.

4) The CIA has been around for about seventy years. The White House has been around for over two hundred years. Given the longevity of each, one would have thought they both would know how to keep a secret. After all, the CIA is our primary spy organization within the Federal government. They should be keeping all kinds of secrets and have processes in place to do so since a broken secret is highly likely to get somebody killed who is inside the CIA or working for the CIA and its spying and covert activities.

Well, one could think that but one would be wrong. In one of the most dangerous and idiotic goof ups of the Obama administration,

 the White House inadvertently blew the cover of the CIA’s top officer, its station chief, in Kabul. Afghanistan during President Obama’s recent surprise trip to Afghanistan. Unbelievably, the name of the spy agency’s station chief in Kabul was included on a list provided to news organizations participating in Mr. Obama’s visit with U.S. troops.

Nobody had to hack a CIA computer to get the name of the local CIA boss. Nobody had to capture and torture a CIA operative to get the information. Nobody had to plant a mole deep inside the CIA to ferret out the name of the CIA station head. No, the Obama administration just typed the name out on a piece of paper and then distributed it freely to many people.

You cannot make up this type of incompetence. If you went to Hollywood and had a movie idea that involved the President’s staff freely handing out the name of its top spy in one of the most dangerous areas of the world, they would laugh you out of the office. But that is what happened and that is why I continue to assert we are living through a period of our nation’s history where the most inept and incompetent people are in charge in Washington.

That will do it for today but plenty more insanity will be headed this way over the next week or so so brace yourself for more wasteful spending, ineffective programs, and the ongoing lunacy that is the political class.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Bradley Manning - More Proof President Obama Is Channeling President Bush

The Week magazine is a wonderful weekly publication that summarizes the week's important events by compiling information from various sources for each event in a fair, unbiased manner. This compilation approach allows the reader to get a flavor for what journalists, politicians, leaders, and others are saying about what is going on.

In their March 25, 2011 issue, they did a compilation of comments from foreign journalists regarding the treatment of Bradley Manning. Mr. Manning is accused, and is being held prisoner, of leaking hundreds of thousands of government documents to the Wikileaks website. As most people now know, many of these documents were  breeches of national security, embarrassing revelations of how our foreign policy and apparatus works, or both, depending on your perspective.

According to The Week article, and other U.S. news sources:

• Manning has been held in solitary confinement for the past 10 months.
• His cell is six foot wide by 12 feet long where he is held 23 hours a day.
• The one hour when he is not in his cell, he is taken to an empty room where he can walk around but is not allowed to run.
• A prevention-of-injury order requires that he be strip searched every night.
• When he goes to sleep, he must wear a suicide proof smock.
• However, the military psychologist that is responsible for him has repeatedly stated that Manning should be treated as a regular prisoner and is not a danger to himself.

A State Department spokesperson, P.J. Crowley, has been fired for speaking out against this harsh treatment of Manning, an American citizen who has not been convicted of any crime but who is being treated in this manner in an American jail.

President Obama campaigned against this kind of behavior, specifically condemning the previous administration for its treatment of prisoners and declaring if elected President, he wold shut down the prison at Guantanamo within a year.  His reasoning is that the prison was a stain on America's integrity and respect for justice and was used as a recruiting tool for terrorists around the world.

However, if you examine some of the foreign press reaction to this treatment of Manning, as reported in The Week article, you would think they we are still under the Bush administration:

- Switzerland's Le Temps: "Free speech in America doesn't extend to government officials. State Department spokesperson P.J.Crowley was fired this week for speaking out against the brutal treatment of Bradley Manning...Crowley called this treatment 'riduculous and counterproductive and stupid' - and its hard not to disagree."

- Germany's Der Spiegel" "It's quite a radical turnaround for Obama. One of Obama's campaign pledges was that government whistle blowers would be 'protected from reprisal.'...It seems clear that he (Manning) has, in fact, been singled out for harsh treatment."

- England's Guardian: "The 'stench of U.S. hypocrisy" is nauseating. Manning has been convicted of no crime. Yet he has been held in isolation in a stark room that's 6 feet wide and 12 feet long. In recent weeks, the U.S. government has condemned torture by the brutal, failing regimes in the Middle East, 'yet at a prison within its own borders, it sanctions persecution, alleged psychological torture and debasement of a young soldier.'"

- Spain's El Pais: "It's not just the Americans who are ignoring this injustice. Many Europeans have been passionate defenders of the rights of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks... while the real hero (Manning) has languished in prison."

So much for breaking from the Bush stigma and behaving on a higher ground when it comes to prisoner treatment. In a sense, you could argue that this approach is even worse than the Bush approach. At least the imprisonment of people under the Bush administration, right or wrong, had some connection to the physical battleground of terrorism, where the prisoner may have actually fought against our armed forces.

In the Manning case, he never fired a gun at an American, he was never on a physical battlefield facing American armed forces, and most importantly, he is an unconvicted American citizen who is undergoing such harsh treatment that the Founding Fathers must be turning in their respective graves. This is not the kind of America they wanted and they ensured that this behavior would be banned under the protections built into the Constitution.

But as we have observed previously, this President and his administration have not been strict adherents to the guiding principles in the Constitution. It attacked a foreign sovereign nation, Libya, without proper Congressional support and discussion, it ignored a judge's order to drop the moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and the President unilaterally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, something he had no right to do. Once you have violated court orders and Constitutional protocol a few times, imprisoning an American under duress and terrible conditions becomes child's play.

This is just another example of the Obama-channeling-Bush phenomenon we have discussed previously. Consider:

• Obama campaigned to get us out of Iraq which he is doing far later than he implied and he is using the original Bush exit timetable.
• Obama campaigned to close Guantanamo Bay's terrorist prison, a prison Bush opened, but that event is unlikely to happen any time soon.
• Obama has gone on record that even if some of the prisoners at Guantanamo are found not guilty at trial, his administration reserves the right to still hold them indefinitely, so very Bush-like.
• Obama pledged to significantly reduce the number of Federal budget earmarks, but the number and value of earmarks are still at an all time high.
• Obama crucified the Bush administration while he was in the Senate for the record setting Bush budget deficits and then proceeded to blow those records out of the water with deficits that were three times larger.
• Obama signed the extension of the repressive Patriot Act, a law originally enacted under the Bush administration.
• Obama's reaction to the Gulf oil spill disaster was just as ragged and incompetent as the Bush reaction to Hurricane Katrina.
• Obama and Bush seem to have taken in inordinate amount of vacations and leisure time as the world exploded around them.
• Obama and Bush appear to have no clue on how to develop and implement a coherent strategy to repair our failing schools, win the war on drugs, fix our immigration situation, and find a way to make our country energy independent.

Very, very sad but not surprising. As it was pointed out many times in "Love my Country, Loathe My Government," we have two political parties int his country but really only one political class. When you compare the records and actions of the two parties side-by-side, you realize how true that observations is, two parties, one political class of people. 

This Bush-like behavior by this administration has now trampled the rights of Bradley Manning. The international outrage is just as bad as the outrage towards the Bush administration's treatment of prisoners. Just another example of political class and government behavior that resulted in the exact opposite of the desire outcome.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that "An injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere." We should be very scared when an unconvicted American is held in isolation, falsely treated as a suicide threat, and treated in a degrading manner by being strip searched everyday by his government. As the above examples show, once government takes that first step over the line of legality and principle, the second and third and future stepovers become easier and easier.






Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.


Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendmen.com

"Off With Their (Political) Heads!" Shouted The Queen Of Hearts

Any number of recent events have reinforced the notion that many in our political class really do not know what they are doing. The world has gotten so complex but their grasp of it's realities is so naive. Unfortunately, every time they screw up it usually costs us in wasted tax dollars, lost freedom, or in the Wikileaks scandal, potentially human lives. In an "Alice In Wonderland" world, we could follow the advice of the Queen of Hearts and chop off their political heads and move on, hopefully filling their position with someone more competent.

However, we do not live in Wonderland. But if we did, wouldn't it be great to chop off the political careers of the following politicians:

- According to Robert Scheer, writing in The Nation, and summarized in the December 20, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, of the $44.4 billion increase in U.S. corporate profits this past quarter, about $33.3 billion of those increased corporate profits went to Wall Street banks and investment houses. Many of these firms are the same ones that were at the center of the financial meltdown with their risky investments and some were saved with taxpayer bailout money. What's more irritating is that these same financial firms, flush with cash and profits, are not making very many loans to businesses and consumers, loans that might finally get the economy moving again.

Why are they not making any loans? According to John Cassidy, writing in The New Yorker, the banks can make more money "exploiting complex security trading, day-to-day movements in the markets and other financial schemes. They do not have to make traditional loans anymore in order to make oodles of money.

Who were the brilliant politicians who worked on the bailout process that saved many big financial firms, firms that were "to big to fail," wasted billions of taxpayers dollars, and apparently included nothing in the financial industry reform legislation to prevent the banks from getting bigger and less responsive to the market? Off with their heads!

-Continuing along in the same industry, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, has this wonderful plan to get the economy jump started. It is called quantitative easing but in layman's terms it means our central bank, the Fed, is going to create $600 billion out of thin air ("print money") and use it to buy back government bonds owned by the same financial firms discussed in the previous point. His hope is that the banks, flush with this new pile of money, will go out and start making loans, getting the economy growing again.


Hey Ben, I may not be an expert on quantitative easing but won't these banks and other financial institutions just take the money and use it the way they have been using their own profits and cash, i.e. play the market rather than grow the market? If they can make a lot of money playing with their tens of billions of dollars, imagine how much money they can make playing the market with the hundreds of billions of dollars you are going to give them, apparently with no stipulation that they loan it out. Off with his head!


- Recent results form an Associated Press/CNBC poll indicated that 59% of those surveyed prefer cutting Federal government budgets and services and about half that many (30%) preferred raising taxes. 85% of those surveyed are worried that our high national debt will be harmful to future generations.


Thus, average Americans understand what our problem is, high national debt is really a government spending problem, not a government revenue problem, and the current trend of deficit spending will be detrimental to future generations of Americans. How does our political class respond? They cannot come to a consensus on the President's Debt Reduction Commission, with only 11 of the 18 members approving the final recommendations of the Commission, three short of the 14 votes that were needed to get put before Congress. Off with their heads, especially the Commission's Democrats who voted against the plan, stating that there were not enough tax increases and there were too many spending cuts in the recommendations. Apparently they did not get the poll results.


- Let's talk about the Wikileaks fiasco. An ordinary U.S. Army private logs onto his government computer and with about $5.00 worth of hardware, a blank CD disc and a portable USB drive, downloads hundreds of thousands of documents that expose many valuable secrets of the U.S. military around the world. These documents identified local contacts in countries such as Afghanistan who were working closely with the U.S. military in fighting the Taliban. The documents placed them and our fighting troops in additional danger.


Apparently no computer security firewalls were breached. No complex, online security measures were hacked and undermined. Just a USB drive and a CD disc. How simple can it get? And to my knowledge no one has been fired for such lax security. Yes, the private has been arrested and is in custody, but someone, whether it is the Secretary of Defense or someone underneath him on the organization chart needs to fall on their sword for this one. We spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars a year for the defense Department and is it this simple to expose the entire U.S. military data systems to this soldier's downloads? Off with someone's head.


- Wikileaks, Part II. Let's move over to the State Department where the damage might be even more devastating. Previous State Department documents release by Wikileaks showed how the State Department worked and contained personal references and appraisals by U.S. diplomats of leaders from around the world, often in non-flattering terms. These disclosures have damaged our relationships with world leaders in ways that we have no idea how yet. Why would anyone in a foreign government tell our diplomats anything valuable or personal in the future since the State Department has proven via Wikileaks that we cannot keep a secret from the world?


But it gets worse and the potential damage far more lethal. In a December 6, 2010 Associate Press article, we find that Wikileaks has posted a secret U.S. cable on its website that lists entities worldwide that our government considers critical to our national security. The article quotes U.S. officials fearing that the publication of the cable gives a hit list to terrorists. The cable, "Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative List," included such things as border crossings, hydroelectric dams, undersea communications lines, food suppliers, shipping lanes, manufacturers of components used in U.S. weapons systems, and vaccine sources.


Here's the sad part. Hillary Clinton deemed the list so important that if these sites were "destroyed, disrupted, or exploited, would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the United States." In other words. the Secretary of State knew how important and dangerous this list was and still Wikileaks was able to get their hands on it. What do these people use for computer security if they cannot even protect this most valuable piece of intelligence? Unbelievable.


And apparently Wikileaks is not done. The website apparently held back some disclosures as "insurance." This information was stored and downloaded by multiple people in an encrypted file that can be opened only if the Wikileads head guy, Julian Assange, gives out the password. He claims he kept the really good stuff in that file as insurance for himself. Who knows what other damaging information the State Department has let leak out and now an entire Federal government department is at the mercy of a single man.


As with the defense information leaks, someone, be it Hillary or someone high up at the State department needs to be fired. This breach of security is historic and could be fatal for a lot of people. In real life, outside of politics, people lose their job every day for incompetence. Same thing should apply to government work, especially a screw up this large. If Gates and/or Hillary got fired by Obama for this mess you can bet it would get the attention of a lot of other government bigwigs. I would bet these highly paid folks would  immediately would be taking a long hard look at beefing up their own data security procedures, a hard look that hopefully would be to the benefit of all Americans. Off with their heads!


Maybe the Queen of Hearts had it right, off with their heads. As an alternative to this rather drastic approach, Step 34 from "Love My Country, Loathe My government," would be a good start. Step 34 would remove any member of Congress sitting on a Congressional committee or subcommittee if the government functions those committees were overseeing fail at executing their responsibilities. Alternative methods of determining failure are outlined in the book under Step 34.


Thus, this step would remove those Congressional members from any committee responsible for Defense Department and State Department data security. These leaks will cost us in so many ways including additional tax dollars to repair the damage, lost credibility with world leaders, and potentially lost human lives due the the military and other intelligence that is now in the hands of our enemies. Not only should high ranking  members of these two Departments pay for the leaks but Congressional members also should absorb some kind of negative hit, short of, of course, "off with their heads."


Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.


Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/