Wonder if this might help wake up the beer & pizza crowd?

Do you really think this is fantastic and over the top?

Watch The Video

Here is an excellent post from The Daily Kos regarding the real ramifications of domestic spying and data mining, and why this poses such a real threat to the liberties and freedoms of all Americans. A highly recommended read, especially for those who feel that “Hey, why should I worry? I’ve done nothing wrong so I don’t have anything to hide”. Think again.

Awakening this morning to the astounding news that nearly two-thirds of Americans are A-OK with being spied upon, I hastily threw together a Top Ten list of talking points as to why average citizens should worry about this. The NSA’s logging of millions and millions of phone calls has many more drawbacks, I’m sure, than I’m listing here. But off the top of my head, here are obvious and fundamental problems that all Americans should worry about with this program:

Read The Full Post Here

On a bit of a more hopeful note, its nice to see these corporations being taken to task here, too. But what the administration completes their ‘tort reform’ agenda, this won’t be possible any more either.

Now this is a great way to avoid accountability. Just declare your actions off limits to investigation because of ‘national security’ secrecy provisions. By the way, Hinchey is one of the best representatives in Congress these days in regards to media issues.

The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program.

“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.

Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.

“Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation,” wrote Jarrett.

Read The Full Article Here

An insightful and well-researched expose by Elizabeth de la Vega on the madness that is Bush administration rationale for spying powers on Americans and unaccountable executive power.

When it comes to the Bush administration, whatever the subject may be and however bad you think things are, they’re going to be at least several fallback positions worse than whatever top administration officials may be fessing up to at any given moment. This, after all, is the administration of adamant denials, followed by forceful non-confessions, followed by proud statements, followed by limited hang-outs , followed by even more grudging, only slightly less limited hang-outs.

The Bush administration, Flip….

An article, dated March 8, 2006, entitled “Gonzales: NSA Program Doesn’t Need a Law.” The article says: “The Attorney General made clear Wednesday, March 8, that the White House is not seeking congressional action to inscribe the National Security Agency’s monitoring into US law.”

Flop…

I now refer you to Exhibit B - a February 28, 2006 letter from Alberto Gonzales to Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In answer to a question about what changes to FISA are needed, Gonzales explicitly says, “The Administration believes it is unnecessary to amend FISA” to accommodate the spying program.

Read The Full Article Here

Scott McClellan is quitting.

Speaking of journalism (were we?) the FBI is trying to confiscate Jack Anderson’s papers. See details here in The New York Times story. Maybe there’s some dirt on Daddy Bush in there? You’ve got to pick up every stitch, George, and destroy everything before anyone can expose it.

Read The Full Article Here

- Ed Lacy
USTV Media

Back in December of 2005 Forbes published an AP report on the FBI and the ACLU’s claims that it is misusing its ever-expanding powers under the rubric of ‘terrorist surveillance’.

Not only is this telling because it exposes the current administration’s tactics and targets on who they are investigating, but why and how they define people and organizations as being a ‘threat’.

Its becoming abundantly clear that the Bush administration is using the security apparatus of the United States as a vehicle for political power (very Nixonian in that regard).

I would like to bring attention to the money shot line in this whole article, and the most telling and revealing aspect to it, and that is the fact that the government sees Catholic charities as being inherently dangerous to the security of the nation because they are supposedly advocating “a communist distribution of resources.”

So, if you are dedicated to living out according to the principles of Jesus, and wish to express those principles through social action such as economic charity to the needy, you become an enemy of the state?

This seems rather revealing in that much of the focus of what is deemed ‘American security’ in our history is not about protecting the nation against threats to our physical security and our Constitutional Bill of Rights, but is rather about protecting the prevailing structure of economic power and control by economic elites who translate that economic oligarchic and plutocratic dominance into political control over the nation.

So by this public statement, our political police seem to be admitting that someone who proposes changing the economic processes of the nation (which it remains to be seen that the Catholic Workers Group is even doing) is a ‘threat’ to ‘national security’, when it does not necessarily mean that at all. I’m not advocating ‘communist redistribution of wealth’ here, but simply pointing out that that is an economic policy not incongruous with a democracy, if the populace so chooses to organize the society they live in along those lines.

What it really means is that they are a threat to the current prevailing order of control by the plutocrats and corporacrats which own our political system. These political and economic elites manage society for the continued sustainment of their position of dominant authority and control over the means of wealth and distribution of not just this nation, but as much of the world as possible. (thus the continued illegal interventions in other nations around the world, most specifically latin and south America). This claim by the Justice Department about investigating potential ‘threats’ is another revelation as to the disingenuous conflating of an economic threat to the oligarchic elites with a political threat to the integrity of the nation’s continued existence as a constitutional democratic republic, and is a trick the corporatists have been pulling on the American people for a long, long time.

Right on, Sen. Feingold. This is truly sickening. The Democratic party establishment are just a grotesque parody of a genuine and much needed political opposition in this country. This latest sell-out might just be the last straw (that and the Hackett debacle).

If Democrats aren’t going to stand up to an executive who tramples on the rights of innocent Americans, what do we stand for?

It seemed like a watershed moment for the Democratic Party. At the end of 2005, Democrats, along with a small band of Republicans, stopped a bad Patriot Act reauthorization bill in its tracks. For me, it was gratifying to have so many in my party openly share — and act on — the concerns I had voiced about the Patriot Act back in 2001. But, more importantly, Democrats had decided to stand up to the White House’s scare tactics and stand for protecting the rights of law-abiding Americans. Finally, Democrats were refusing to be intimidated by suggestions that protecting our freedoms is inconsistent with fighting terrorism aggressively. This moment was long overdue.

Unfortunately, it was also short-lived. Just two months later, a number of Democrats have agreed to support a reauthorization of the Patriot Act that is basically the same as the deal we rejected in December, and doesn’t solve any of the significant problems with the law that Democrats claimed they were concerned about.

Read Sen. Feingold’s full piece in Salon

So much for the White House’s assertion that they only use the “Patriot” Act power in limited and logical ways. The whole system is set up to automatically intrude into a broad array of citizens’ activities. Incidents like the one below illustrate how routinely it intrudes with no concern about whether a citizen’s behavior poses any reasonable cause for suspicion of terrorist activity.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

Read The Providence Journal article Here

- Ed Lacy
USTV Media

Does anyone know of any journalists who’ve publicly discussed the likelihood that the GOP might use this power to spy on their political opponents during election campaigns? They have a history, after all (Watergate/plumbers/dirty tricks…)

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted along party lines yesterday to reject a Democratic proposal to investigate the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program and instead approved establishing, with White House approval, a seven-member panel to oversee the effort.

And does Pat Roberts deserve the recognition as the biggest water carrying hack in Washington, or is there someone out there that can possibly top his performance?

Read the Washington Post article on this disappointing development Here

- Ed Lacy
USTV Media

John W. Dean writes that in acting without congressional approval, Bush has underlined that his presidency is unchecked and utterly beyond the law. Now that he has turned the truly awesome powers of the NSA on Americans, what asserted powers will Bush use next? And when, if ever, will we - and Congress - discover that he is using them?

Read the FindLaw article Here from John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon.