Welcome to the surveillance state
By admin
You’ve read about it in books and you’ve seen it on TV and in the movies. Well, here we are. Welcome to the surveillance state. Today it is the collection of phone records, emails, Facebook posts, text messages, chat room sessions, Google searches, credit card transactions and online documents that we know about. Tomorrow, who knows? If you can imagine it, odds are that it can probably be collected eventually. In fact, at this point you have to assume that anything that is transmitted digitally is either currently being seized, copied and stored for future reference or will be just as soon as someone on the government payroll can figure out how. It will be a historical database of your entire digital life. It is safe to say that this is well beyond the scope of anything our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment. But now our right to “be secure in (our) persons, houses, papers, and effects” is almost non-existent just because most of our “papers” are now digital. It is the foundation for a total surveillance society. Why employ an army of snitches and spies to keep tabs on your population when you can outsource the job to the population itself? Just fix it so that everything you potentially want to know goes through one “pipe” and make copies of everything that goes through. Easy peasy. The logic of those who support this hangs on the contention that the government isn’t actively “looking” at what they are collecting…yet. They will only peak if they need to. Please raise your hand if you think that Thomas Jefferson would have been fine with regularly copying every document he owned, every receipt for every purchase, every letter he ever sent or received or a transcript of every conversation he ever had and putting it into a really big box that the government could look into any time it saw fit. It’s almost comical to think back on how worked up so many politicians got about preventing those awful telemarketers from calling during dinner, and making sure that we had a “Do not call” list we could use to opt-out of further calls; and how they worked so hard to pass laws against email spam. The next time you see statist politicians pounding the table about a consumer’s need for privacy vs. corporations, feel free to politely burst out in uncontrolled laughter, because the surveillance state doesn’t have an “opt-out” list. It should not be overlooked that the driver of this massive increase in surveillance is that Obama’s pullback from an “offensive” strategy in the war on terror requires developing a “defensive” one…which means a lot more “Big Brother”. Why is it that a President and many leading politicians who are so squeamish about water-boarding a few terrorists have no problem with violating the Fourth Amendment rights of over three-hundred million American citizens? It’s the same approach that liberals take with gun control. Instead of focusing on the criminals, they just decide they’ll intrude on everyone’s rights en masse and hopefully that will take care of the problem. Part of the reason politicians are so anxious to look worked up about the IRS scandal is that it undermines the trust needed to continue to expand big government. A recent Fox News poll measuring “trust and confidence” in the federal government found sixty-three percent of Americans having either “not much” or “none at all” – which explains why the same poll found sixty-two percent opposed to the government secretly collecting their personal information. And how long will it be before we find out about IRS style political abuse of this information? How long before your entire digital life is poured through for political reason or because you have certain beliefs? How long before it just “makes sense” to some bureaucrats that this database is made available to other government agencies, or is accessed by every prosecutor for every trial in America? Like sunrise, it’s inevitable. From ancient times to today, government has proved that it can’t be trusted because its main interest is always itself and its own growth. Always. When is the last time any government ever voluntarily reduced the scope of its own power? On the contrary, it always excuses itself and rationalizes the power it has – or the need for more – for our own good. When it comes to any future hope of privacy, we are at a crossroads. If we allow this, how much of a fight will we put up against the next incremental step? And you can bet your life there will be more steps. There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “the place to kill a serpent is in the egg”, but unfortunately this egg has hatched, and the serpent is growing at the pace of technology. If we don’t do something soon the only privacy we’ll know is what we read about in history books.
Read MoreA quick guide to Obama’s scandalrama
By admin
If you feel like you need a program to keep up with the rash of scandals coming out of Washington, you’re not alone. There’s stifling of political opposition, lying to Congress, intimidation of whistle blowers, lying to the public and a healthy dose of general incompetence. Suffice it to say that Obama has found his legacy. He has set the new presidential speed record for achieving lame-duck status, going from inauguration to irrelevance in just four months. With three major scandals all coming to a boil at the same time, Democrats will be distancing themselves in droves before the dust settles. The IRS Hokey-Pokey All of America just found out what many conservative groups have known all along – that the IRS has spent years targeting them in order to minimize how effective they can be. New information confirms that over a course of three years the IRS singled out groups for abuse if their names or descriptions included certain keywords like “tea party”, “9-12”, “patriot”, “constitution”, “voter fraud”, “government spending”, “limited government” or “Bill of Rights”. The IRS demanded that such groups turn over more information about their activities, their donors, their websites and social media accounts, even asking questions about the political beliefs of personnel. Worse, at least one liberal group has admitted that the IRS sent them confidential copies of applications and other documents from thirty-one conservative groups. Despite initial White House claims that the problem was just a bunch of low-level bureaucrats, we now know that top IRS appointees in Washington knew all about it – including IRS commissioners and chief counsels. In the end, the abuse affected almost five-hundred conservative groups, with none receiving tax-exempt status for over twenty-seven straight months – time enough to reduce their impact on the 2012 elections. Meanwhile, liberal groups with words like “progressive” in their titles zipped right through the approval process. There even seems to be evidence that such government abuse extended to other agencies. One group that was founded to fight against voter fraud found itself the target of an alphabet soup of government agencies, including a series of FBI inquiries about the group and its founders, ATF demands to see the family’s firearms, surprise audits of the founder’s gun dealership, and an OSHA audit of a family manufacturing business. There are already calls from Congress for a special prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation, and once such a process gets started it can lead pretty much anywhere. Just ask Bill Clinton. The Benghazi Shuffle Despite months of disinterest by the press, the Obama administration is facing serious questions and a probable congressional select committee over how it dealt with the September 11 th attacks on our consulate in Benghazi. There are three key elements to the scandal: First, why did our State Department ignore repeated requests for more security from our diplomatic personnel in a place that intelligence agencies had reported as being frequented by terrorists? Second, when our people were under attack, why didn’t our government begin moving Heaven and earth to help them? The White House claims there wasn’t time, as it would have taken too long to respond. But since they didn’t know “when” it would be over, why weren’t assets put in motion and kept in motion until it was? Third, in the immediate aftermath why did the administration insist that this was just a violent movie review instead of a terrorist attack? Who whitewashed the official story of any references to terrorists, and why? (OK, you probably know the answer to that one, but they’ll never admit it.) The biggest loser in this one is going to be Hillary. The odds that she will now actually have to fight for the 2016 nomination are increasing by the day. The Telephone (records) Blues This is the most recent and, for the press, the most creepy of the scandals. The Justice Department admitted this week that it grabbed two months worth of phone records for over twenty phone lines used by the Associated Press in the Capitol Building, in addition to the personal phone records of at least five reporters in the process of investigating who leaked a story about a potential terrorist attack back in 2011. Of course subpoenaing phone records is nothing new, but there are rules and procedures to follow which were ignored, plus two months worth is a rather wide net to cast. What future sources and whistle blowers are going to be confident that their anonymity will be protected now? Will they have to return to the days of trench coats and dark parking garages in order to avoid the prying eyes of Big Brother? This scandal probably has shorter legs than the others, but it has burned a lot of goodwill in what has otherwise been Obama’s steno pool. Goodwill he will probably need when it comes to how they cover the other scandals. The danger for Democrats is that Americans will note that these abuses of government power come courtesy of the same people who keep asking us to trust bigger and bigger government with more and more influence over our lives.
Read More
The Bizzaro World of Political Correctness
By admin
In case you missed it, the Associated Press recently made some changes to its official “Stylebook”, the guide journalist use to determine what words and phrases they should or should not use in their reportage. The new edict declares terms like “illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented” as verboten. Why? The AP claims that it is just “ridding the Stylebook of labels”. And that “…the English language is constantly evolving, enriched by new words, phrases and uses. Our goal is always to use the most precise and accurate words so that the meaning is clear to any reader anywhere”. Except in this case, that is, given the fact that the term “illegal alien” is the actual legal definition of the people they are trying to describe. Over the years the politically correct terminology has evolved from “illegal aliens” to “illegal immigrants” to “undocumented immigrants” to “undocumented workers”. What’s next, “uninvited guests”? Just how are we supposed to accurately describe people who have entered into our country in violation of our laws, forged official documents and committed perjury? But that’s the point. We’re not supposed to accurately describe them, because that would make achieving goals like amnesty and newly registered voters difficult for the folks on the left. Solution? Change the terminology. Does anyone seriously believe that it is just a coincidence that such a change comes about right as Congress is again set to debate major immigration reform legislation? It’s a well known fact that, if you control the language and terminology that is used in any given debate, you stand a much better chance of winning that debate, if for no other reason than by confusing or misinforming those who don’t already have an opinion. As a famous talk radio host is fond of saying, “words mean things”. Couple this with another recent development that showcases an overt exercise in the labeling that the left purports to hate. A recent US Army Reserve training program was found to contain materials portraying evangelical Christians and Catholics as “extremists”. And in this case, the rest of the “extremists” category was populated with the likes of the KKK, Hamas and Al Qaeda. Yes, really. After receiving numerous complaints from clergy and other concerned Americans with a modicum of common sense, that portion of the tax-dollar supported material was removed and the Army proceeded to find underlings to pass the buck to, (so much for the chain of command). And who was the source for this slanderous labeling? The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization which ironically claims to defend black Americans against racism, but seems OK with labeling fellow blacks as “extremists” if they happen to be evangelicals. One assumes that it came as somewhat of a surprise to Catholics to find themselves thrown under the same politically correct bus along with evangelicals, but it could have something to do with their high profile opposition to mandatory abortion related coverage in Obamacare, or maybe their opposition to gay marriage. Of course conservatives are accustomed to such labeling from radical liberal groups, even from some of America’s leading politicians and various elements of our bloated bureaucracy. But now the liberal culture that encourages such characterizations is beginning to infect even our nation’s military. It is just another step in the marginalization of conservative people of faith in America. To review: we can’t use terminology straight out of any legal dictionary to describe the status of millions of people while covering a major political debate, but the US government can equate over fifty percent of the population with known terrorists because some bureaucrat labels their views are “extreme”. We’re approaching the point in our country where, if you accurately describe someone’s immigration status, you’re potentially a racist, and if you also happen to be an evangelical Christian or Catholic, you’re an extremist (double point score!). It also means that there is a good chance that you are white, most likely did not vote for Obama, are not a contributor to Planned Parenthood, oppose gay marriage, and could even be from the South (gasp!). This is what things will look like when you have a media that long ago set aside everything but its pretense of objectivity, and an administration that is not only tone deaf, but openly antagonistic to the views of the majority of the country. So, there you have it. Illegals aren’t illegal, but evangelicals and Catholics are “extremists”. Up is down. Black is white. So long as it advances the objectives of our liberal betters. A Bizzaro World indeed.
Read MoreStrategic tips for the GOP in the debt limit fight
By admin
One of the most important elements in any type of conflict is to control the ground you fight on. In politics, that usually means controlling the issues that will be discussed. And for Republicans in the pending fight over the debt limit, that means taking the issue of defaulting on our debt payments off of the table and focusing on spending. In our country’s fiscal wars there have been three major moving parts: 1) taxes, 2) spending and 3) borrowing. Republicans don’t want tax increases and Democrats don’t want spending cuts, which left borrowing to finance the spending. But now increasing payments on borrowing threaten to gobble future revenue for spending and mandate future taxes; which brings us the recurring battles over the debt ceiling. Despite the tax hikes in the recent “fiscal cliff” deal, neither Obama nor any Democrats will publicly state that the rich are now “paying their fair share”. They know that with the great unwashed, the politics of envy (AKA, jealousy) is always gold. They also know that facing up to spending means facing up to reality, and facing reality means making choices, which will set some elements of the Democrats’ coalition at odds against each another. If pretty much your entire political party is built out of constituent groups bought off with tax dollars, then you better keep the punch-bowl filled or the party’s over. All of which means that this will be a fight for long-term political survival – where a lot of Republicans who supported the fiscal cliff deal (and it’s tax hike) try to get some of their anti-tax virginity back, and Democrats work to avoid cutting taxpayer subsidies to their political coalition. Obama’s main weapon is his rhetoric. He will attempt to control the terms of the debate to cower Republicans into keeping the spigot open by making Republicans look irresponsible for not wanting to borrow more money to pay back money we’ve already borrowed. He will claim that Republicans are going to put the nation into default, and the media will enthusiastically carry his water. What Republicans should do is simple: First, have the House pass legislation directing the Treasury to pay all upcoming US debt payments via the first-fruits of all revenue. The dirty little secret about this “default” business is that we collect more than enough revenue to pay our debts, it’s just that we spend so much more than we take in on everything else. Second, when Reid and Obama reject option number one, have the House pass legislation authorizing the Treasury to sell bonds (raise the debt limit) for the specific amount of money relative to three-months of new debt payments. At this point, default is no longer an issue. Republicans will have taken action (twice now) to “pay our bills” as Obama says. Now whether or not there is a default would lay squarely with Reid and Obama. Third, (and in conjunction with the second item) announce that there will be no debt limit extensions for “new” spending (rather than debt payments) until Congress passes a budget. Democrats have prevented passage of a budget for over three years because a lack of one locks in the high rates of spending growth that were part of the last budget in 2009. They want the beast to keep growing on auto-pilot. The argument for Republicans to make is that it is irresponsible to agree to further debt limit increases without an actual plan for how that future borrowed money would be spent. This should be non-negotiable. Once there is a budget, it could trigger another debt extension that would allow time for negotiations over entitlements, which are the real drivers of the debt. Fourth, when negotiating on spending, propose something that almost eighty percent of Americans support (which is about thirty percent more than ever supported Obamacare) – across the board spending cuts. After putting up with years of Democrats swinging the word “fair” like a club, it’s time for Republicans to do the same. And Americans agree that “across the board” is “fair”. Fifth, take a page from Obama’s playbook and include a demand that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the debate at hand: demand a one-year moratorium on new regulations…for the good of the economy. The point of all of this is that it will leave Obama and the Democrats either putting us into default themselves, or agreeing to negotiate cuts in spending and give the GOP a boost on fiscal issues with the public. This would alter the political playing field for the foreseeable future towards real reform and ground that Democrats don’t like. By the time Obama leaves office, fifty percent of our country’s national debt from George Washington to today would have been pilled up under his administration. That’s his legacy. By focusing on the spending, Republicans can make him and the Democrats own it
Read MoreSome thoughts for our new conversation on guns
By admin
Welcome to our latest national “conversation” about guns, a conversation demanded by those who have lost all recent conversations about guns. It features an extremely loathsome group of politicians and other opponents of the Second Amendment who want to exploit the deaths of the young children in Newtown, Connecticut in order to advance a political agenda. In fact, New York Democrat congressman Jerrold Nadler even used the word exploit, suggesting they can pass new gun restrictions “if the President exploits it”. After such tragedies the cry is always to do something, anything, in order to make the story go away. Then there is a rush to pass a law – any law – and rushed laws are almost always bad. And it’s in such times that enemies of liberty always creep in hoping to use the moment to push their agenda before people calm down and look at things rationally. But since liberals insist on having this conversation, let’s take a moment to review some things that we know, and that the left will surely overlook. We know that over forty percent fewer homicides are committed with guns than those without guns. We know that violent crime is at a thirty-seven year low. We also know that this drop in violent crime coincided with a boom in gun ownership and states allowing concealed weapons permits. We know that the liberal anti-gun BradyCampaign.org ranks Connecticut as having the fifth most restrictive gun laws in America. And we know that over four-hundred and fifty school age kids were killed in Chicago in 2012, another bastion of anti-gun laws. We know that inanimate objects don’t commit murder, people do. We know that a recent study by the liberal Mother Jones magazine demonstrated that approximately two-thirds of mass killings since 1980 were committed by the “mentally unstable”. And we know that the two biggest common factors of mass killings are mental instability and gun free zones (followed closely by media hype). We know that a study of all mass shootings since 1950 involving three or more victims demonstrates that all but one has occurred in “gun free zones”, (the exception being the incident involving Congresswoman Gabby Giffords). We know that after the Batman movie shooting in Colorado evidence showed that the killer had seven theatres within a twenty mile radius of his home. Six allowed concealed weapons. One didn’t. Guess which one he targeted? We know that places like Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech were so gun-free that nobody was able to stop the killers until the cops showed up and dozens were dead, (good job liberals!). On the other hand, how many massacres or mindless shootings do you hear about happening at gun shows? And let’s not forget to add the media to this conversation, without whom no one would know the names of the killers. The media gives these creeps exactly what they crave – attention. Some even get their own specials on cable. The cliché about media coverage used to be that, “if it bleeds, it leads”; now it does so on multiple 24-7 cable channels, with celebrity style coverage of the killer and body count graphics that resemble a video game scoreboard. And throughout the sensationalized coverage, they contribute to public ignorance by using words like “automatic”, “semi-automatic”, “assault weapon” and “military style” all interchangeably. Of course the liberal goal here is new, more restrictive gun laws, but no current or proposed law would have stopped Adam Lanza or anyone else from doing what he did, unless the law was chiseled on a brick and thrown at his head. There’s now another call for longer waiting periods before you can purchase a gun. But how many examples of gun violence do you know of where the perp decided to buy a gun and then wait until the end of the waiting period to commit the crime? What about banning “high capacity” gun magazines? A red herring, since anyone with functional hands can swap out a clip on a pistol or riffle in two seconds at most. And since “automatic” weapons (the “hold the trigger and let her rip” kind) are already illegal, nothing is gained by limiting magazines. Then there’s the magical “Assault Weapons Ban” we hear so much about. Of course the term “assault weapons” is specious, as all weapons are “assault weapons”. Just ask anyone who has ever been stabbed with a steak knife. “But these are military style weapons”, cry liberals. Of course they may LOOK like something you see in a Rambo movie, but functionally they are no different than any deer rifle or shotgun. One pull of the trigger, one shot. Esthetics doesn’t make a weapon more dangerous. Just saying. And while we’re having this conversation, can we talk about our culture’s increasingly diminished sense of the value of life, given that we have legally killed over fifty million unborn children since 1973? In fact, more are killed on the taxpayer’s dime every day than all of the “mass shooting” victims of the past decade. Yet the same crowd that found a right to an abortion in a document that doesn’t mention abortion wants to pretend that “right to bear arms” doesn’t mean “right to bear arms”. Go figure. It’s worth pointing out that gun control laws are supposedly aimed at the very people who are already breaking them – (genius!) – but they always end up impacting the liberties of people who were legally minding their own business. And there’s always a problem of imagination, meaning that if someone wants to kill a lot of people, they’ll find or create the means to do so, (see: 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing). How about we deal with the crazy people instead? The point should be stopping the people who are likely to commit such violence (aka the mentally ill), as opposed to infringing on the liberties of several hundred million people. Since the mass killings that gave rise to this “conversation” are almost
Read More
Celebrating (less) Independence
The land of liberty ain’t what it used to be. On the one hand we have faceless bureaucrats becoming more ingrained in our everyday lives, and on the other hand we have judges overturning the will of the voters, whether expressed in referendums or via elected representatives. Hardly a cause for a celebration of independence. And just what are we supposed to be celebrating independence from anyway? Large, distant, unrepresentative government that infringes on our liberties? Take a moment today and read the list of charges made in the Declaration of Independence against the British monarchy. I won’t spoil it for you, but a person could be excused for thinking it was meant to describe some of the actions of our own federal government. In fact, the last time we celebrated a real expansion of liberty from intrusive, dictatorial government was when the Declaration was written two-hundred and thirty-seven years ago. Each passing Independence Day since has seen a government grown larger at the expense of the liberties of the people it is supposed to serve. ( Read “Common Sense”, the book that helped start the Revolution ) The primary means our Founding Fathers employed to control government and preserve liberty was separation of powers, taking political power and splitting it into executive, legislative and judicial functions. The novel idea was to set them in opposition to one another so that each one would check the powers of the other two. It would be nice if we actually lived under such a government. It’s a measure of who is really in charge of our country when you compare the size of the Congressional Record (the sum of all of the proceedings and legislation enacted by Congress) versus the Federal Register (the sum of all the regulations put in place by faceless, unelected bureaucrats). The Register wins hands down, totaling just shy of eighty-thousand pages in 2012 alone – and almost 1.5 million since it was first published in 1936. The Roman historian Tacitus once said, “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws”, but he didn’t live long enough to see a modern “progressive” tax code-enabled, social-welfare regulatory state. Today he might say, “The more oppressive the government, the more numerous the laws”. So, how did it get to this point? Slowly but surely, Congress passes broad stroke legislation with language like “as the Secretary shall determine”, allowing executive branch bureaucrats to fill in the details. That’s how two-thousand page bills like Obamacare spawn over ten-thousand pages in new regulations. The problem with the regulatory state is that it is an end-run around the separation of powers. It coalesces more power in the executive branch, (which means into the hands of bureaucrats); and more of it in Washington, DC, as opposed to the state and local governments that are closer to the people. Of course the beauty of the regulatory state for the political class is that nobody is really in charge. And when a scandal presents itself, it’s met with calls by government enablers for “better regulations”, or more people or money to better enforce them; never with why they should exist to begin with. The simple fact is the more regulators that the government has (and Obamacare adds an additional sixteen-thousand), the more power it has over the individual, and the more opportunities it has to exert bias, (as the recent IRS scandal demonstrates). If our representative branch has abdicated much of its authority, the judiciary is steadily eroding what’s left. Just this past week the Supreme Court claimed that Congress was bigoted to try to defend the definition of society’s most fundamental institution as it has been understood for several thousand years. This was on top of their condoning a lower court decision which threw out a referendum passed on the same subject by voters in California. Further, Christian Americans are now being hauled into court on “civil rights violations” for refusing to provide services for gay weddings, Christian charities are forced to close in states that won’t allow them to practice faith based adoption services, and others face millions in fines for not providing abortion-related services in company health-care plans. And this is the land of liberty? Instead of celebrating independence on July 4th, maybe we should treat the occasion more like Memorial Day, honoring what our Founding Founders achieved, and remembering what we’ve lost. I think it’s safe to say that they wouldn’t be doing too much celebrating.
Read More