Tuesday, February 8, 2011
from Lew Rockwell
Here's another story that isn't getting a lot of attention. Sections of the PATRIOT Act are up for renewal this month. A renewal was introduced in the Senate at the end of January by Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to extend this unconstitutional legislation. Last week, James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) introduced a renewal to much the same effect, proving once again that statism is endemic to both parties.
A quick summary of the provisions at issue from the ACLU:
- Section 215: of the Patriot Act authorizes the government to obtain "any tangible thing" relevant to a terrorism investigation, even if there is no showing that the "thing" pertains to suspected terrorists or terrorist activities.
- Section 206: of the Patriot Act, also known as "roving John Doe wiretap" provision, permits the government to obtain intelligence surveillance orders that identify neither the person nor the facility to be tapped.
- Section 6001: of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, or the so-called "Lone Wolf" provision, permits secret intelligence surveillance of non-US persons who are not affiliated with a foreign organization.
Where is the outrage at this sweeping government power? Where are the news stories warning us that the 4th amendment, among others, no longer has any teeth? Where are the Tea Party activists who screamed so loudly for a smaller federal government, the abolition of Big Brother, and the restoration of our rights, not to mention our dignities? There are some who are fighting the good fight, even if in words only:
[...] Laura Boatright, a tea-party organizer in Ontario, Calif., says the act is "unconstitutional," adding, "We can have national security in other ways, without making all the American people relinquish their liberty."
I'm suspicious of Ms. Boatright's "other ways," but acknowledgment of the PATRIOT Act as unconstitutional is a plus in my book. The Tea Party doesn't appear to be immune to statism and the lure of big government, though:
Ryan Hecker, a Houston lawyer and tea-party organizer, says he believes the act has helped curb terrorism and "the movement should remain agnostic."
Right. Agnostic. Nothing to see here; things are fine just the way they are. How did this guy get involved with a group of people that supposedly adores the constitution and limited government? Oh, that's right. They all simply want power and control, and trotting out the idea of the big, bad terrorists will keep the people in fear and, more importantly, maintain their acquiescence. The Republicans have certainly wasted no time in peddling that fear:
"The intelligence and law enforcement communities that are responsible for preventing terrorist attacks need to know that the tools they rely on to keep the American people safe will not be weakened or allowed to expire," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas).
And with that, we should all be prepared for the Tea Party to betray its constituents and all citizens after going the way of every other politician: seduced by power, greed, and the desire for re-election to perpetuate those aims.
A House bill would extend the law without change through Dec. 8. Republican aides say such a move is the most likely outcome to give lawmakers more time to debate the issue.
No matter, though, the executive branch is prepared to carry on even without congressional approval:
Attorney General Eric Holder has said the Obama administration [...] plans to put many of the safeguards in place even without passage of the law.
Reprinted with permission from Johnnyedge.
February 8, 2011
Labels: Johnnyedge, Patriot Act, Tea Party
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Commentary: 2010 elections guarantee gridlock, anti-capitalist class war
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- “What’s distinctive about the Tea Party is its anarchist streak -- its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns,” warns Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek. But why not three cheers for the Tea Party Express?...
[Full Article]
Labels: revolution, Tea Party
Friday, July 16, 2010
Social networking giant has embarked on a move to ban Tea Party material as part of wider cybersecurity agenda for web censorship and political oppression
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, July 16, 2010
Facebook has sensationally banned the official Alex Jones Facebook page after a customer services representative admitted that all material containing images of the famous Gadsden flag was being deleted by the social networking giant.
While some fan pages remain up, the official Alex Jones Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/realalexjones has been terminated. Other Alex Jones pages run by Infowars readers have also been deleted, such as the page that was formerly at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Real-Alex-Jones/.
If Facebook has embarked on a policy of banning political expression and images it deems offensive then the company should be more open about the fact. While Facebook didn’t consider it necessary to delete a fan page dedicated to the British murderer Raoul Moat, it is now purging all material related to the Tea Party movement, states’ rights and the Gadsden flag, which is a symbol of resistance against tyranny and was originally used by the United States Marine Corps.
It’s unsurprising that Facebook has nailed its political colors to the mast in serving the establishment by targeting grass roots Facebook pages that display the Gadsden flag. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denounced privacy as a ‘social norm’ of the past, an apt excuse given the fact that his website is little more than a vast intelligence database used by spy agencies to dig up information on people. Even more alarmingly, IM’s from Zuckerberg’s early Facebook days reveal his total disregard for privacy. In the IM’s, Zuckerberg insults Facebook users as “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their private information.
The move to ban Tea Party-related material is just one example of the wider move to censor the Internet as part of the cybersecurity agenda.
During an appearance on CNN last month, Senator Joe Lieberman, the sponsor of a bill that would give President Obama the power to shut down parts of the Internet, admitted that cybersecurity was all about seizing the same policing power over the world wide web employed by the Communist Chinese government.
As we have documented, Chinese censorship of the Internet has nothing to do with security and is almost exclusively focused around covering up government atrocities and abuse by silencing whistle blowers and blocking the free flow of information. The system that Lieberman wants America to adopt is all about political oppression and preventing people from becoming organized and active in standing up against big government.
We are continuing to investigate Facebook’s move to ban the official Alex Jones page and we encourage everyone to contact Facebook and let them know that you will boycott their services if the page is not re-instated.
Contact Facebook at info@facebook.com or disabled@facebook.com.
Labels: Alex Jones, censorship, Facebook, Gadsden flag, Tea Party
Friday, April 30, 2010
Military personnel blow the whistle on exercise which involved troops taking protesters to concentration camps
Kurt Nimmo & Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, April 29, 2010
In a shocking development that outstrips even the infamous MIAC report, it has emerged via whistleblowers that the U.S. Military in Kentucky is training to confront Tea Party protesters and anti-government demonstrators, who in official intelligence advisories are described as bomb-making terrorists.
On April 17, the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, reported on a military exercise dubbed “Mangudai,” named after the special forces of Genghis Khan’s Mongol army who could fight for days without food or sleep. The Kentucky newspaper portrayed the exercise as an effort to train soldiers to battle the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“Designed to test the limits of officers’ physical, mental and emotional endurance, the emerging Army exercise offered a revealing window onto modern combat training in the era of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Chris Kenning wrote for the newspaper. “Over three days last week, participants had to crawl on their bellies under real machine-gun fire, shimmy commando-style over a single rope high in the air and march for more than 22 miles through forests.”...
Labels: Kurt Nimmo, martial law, Paul Joseph Watson, Tea Party
Rooftop snipers eye patriots singing 'God Bless America'
Patriotic tea partiers in Quincy, Ill. (photo: Jim Hoft of BigGovernment.com)
When hundreds of tea-party protesters – including many elderly women – gathered outside a civic center where President Obama was giving a public speech Wednesday, they were surprised to be greeted by police dispatched in full riot gear.
Obama spoke in Quincy, Ill., at the Oakley Lindsay Civic Center. The event was open to the public, and about 2,000 tickets were distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis.
About 200 protesters peacefully rallied outside the civic center, carrying signs that read "Give Us Liberty Not Debt" and yellow "Don't Tread On Me" flags, the Quincy Herald-Whig reported. Protesters waved U.S. flags and shouted "Remember in November" and "You work for us."Look at these extremist maniacs!'
After Obama's motorcade arrived, a Secret Service agent instructed protesters to move across the street. The crowd began singing "God Bless, America" and the National Anthem. Quincy Deputy Police Chief Ron Dreyer ordered police in full riot gear to march up the street and stand between the tea partiers and the civic center.
Snipers were also spotted on the rooftop of the building...
Labels: riot police, Tea Party
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Neocons hate the Tea Party almost as much as Democrats and liberals. And that is why the neocon and potential Republican presidential candidate New Gingrich called the Tea Party militant the other day.
The Tea Party movement, said Gingrich while speaking at an event in York County, Pennsylvania, is a “natural expression of frustration with Republicans and anger at Democrats,” which is “more likely to end up as the militant wing of the Republican Party” than a third party...
Labels: Newt Gingrich, Tea Party
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Former President Bill Clinton yesterday criticized conservatives who are “vilifying” government and its workers warning that such rhetoric could lead to a repetition of the horrific attack on the Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that marred his presidency.
Apart from the absurdity of likening elderly Medicare recipients pushing walkers to the likes of Timothy McVeigh and the right wing militias, Clinton’s comments totally ignore the real history of Oklahoma City.
It was not anti-government rhetoric that inspired McVeigh to do his dastardly deed. According to the killer himself, it was the action of the federal government during the Waco raid that incited him to violence. That the attack on the Federal Office Building took place on the anniversary of the Waco raid underscores the connection.
Bill Clinton was far from blameless in the Waco attack. While he sought to shift the responsibility to Attorney General Janet Reno, acting as if he were merely a by-stander, subsequent histories make it clear that he was smarting from criticism that the failure of the feds to act and their continued toleration of the siege showed him to be too weak to be a good president. He would often complain about the unfairness of this coverage to me as he recounted the events leading up to the Waco raid.
The Obama strategy of vilifying the tea party protesters and trying to link them to the violence of Oklahoma City is cynical and ridiculous. The tea party protesters are, in many cases, decorated war veterans and can, in the main, only be described as patriots. That Obama needs to paint them as violence prone extremists who are fanning flames that could lead to Oklahoma City-style bombings is offensive and vile in the extreme...
Labels: Janet Reno, Oklahoma City, Tea Party, Timothy McVeigh, Waco
Monday, April 19, 2010
Joe Klein is worried. All this constitutional talk on the part of the Tea Party movement may actually lead to significant change (not Obama faux change, but the real McCoy).
Mr. Klein, who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, does not take kindly to the commoners organizing and refusing to sit down and shut up, so over the weekend he characterized exercising the First Amendment as sedition.
“I did a little bit of research just before this show — it’s on this little napkin here,” Klein told Obama attack dog Christ Matthews. “I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements, especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right up close to being seditious.”
Mr. Klein, of course, realizes Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck will not challenge the primacy of the state — they will merely flip the rigged political game back over to the Republican side of the coin. Klein and the CFR will not be sent packing under a Republican regime. Establishment Republicans are not allergic to the CFR and its plan for world government...
Labels: CFR, Council on Foreign Relations, Glenn Beck, Joe Klein, Tea Party
Monday, April 12, 2010
With the establishment desperate to engender and exploit violence which will be used to demonize the Tea Party movement as an extremist mob, so-called anarchists are now openly declaring their intentions to pose as Tea Party members and stage violence in order to discredit populist grass roots organizations.
As we warned last week, leading anarchist groups have announced that they plan to “crash” the nationwide Tea Party protests on April 15, a promise that should not be taken lightly given the proven history of such organizations being infiltrated and steered by authorities to provocateur pointless mayhem and violence that serves as a justification for oppressing peaceful protest groups.
Now a new website called crashtheteaparty.org has appeared to act as a forum through which such activity can be planned. The website openly states its mission is to have people infiltrate and pose as Tea Party members and then carry out shameful acts in order to “dismantle and demolish” the Tea Party. The website is registered to a man named Josh Levin...
Labels: provocateur, Tea Party
Have you seen the "Crash the Tea Party" web site? It's among the most illustrative expressions ever of the thirst on the Left to suppress dissent by whatever means are necessary. It is Saul Alinsky on steroids.
Whoever is behind the site claims that it represents "a nationwide network of Democrats, Republicans and Independents who are all sick and tired of that loose affiliation of racists, homophobes and morons; who constitute the fake grassroots movement, which calls itself 'the Tea Party.'"
That's another way of saying that most Americans are racists, homophobes and morons, since there is abundant and growing evidence that the Tea Partiers are more representative of the center-right conservative majority of Americans than President Obama...
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Will-Mainstream-Media-reporters-and-editors-screen-out-Tea-Party-crashers-90572559.html#ixzz0kvkQaWA6
Labels: Tea Party
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Tea Party Sarah threw a bucket of cold water on the movement the other day. Speaking before a crowd of Republican faithfuls in Arkansas on Tuesday, Palin praised the movement the corporate media claims she owns and then said independents have to pick a party.
She declared America is firmly mired in the two party system and the Tea Party has to make a choice.
“Now the smart thing will be for independents who are such a part of this Tea Party movement to, I guess, kind of start picking a party,” Palin said. “Which party reflects how that smaller, smarter government steps to be taken? Which party will best fit you? And then because the Tea Party movement is not a party, and we have a two-party system, they’re going to have to pick a party and run one or the other: ‘R’ or ‘D’.”...
Labels: false left/right paradigm, Palin, Sarah Palin, Tea Party
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
In the face of several electoral challenges from tea party-connected candidates, Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul cautioned in a recent interview that "neocon influence" is "infiltrating" the movement he is often credited for creating...
Labels: neocon, neoconservative, Ron Paul, Tea Party
A "tea bag" reference in a recent Captain America comic book that has angered the Tea Party movement will be removed by Marvel Comics in future editions, the story's writer told FoxNews.com.
A "tea bag" reference in a recent Captain America comic book that has angered the Tea Party movement will be removed by Marvel Comics in future editions, the story's writer told FoxNews.com...
Labels: Captain America, Tea Party
Marvel Comic’s Captain America is the mightiest soldier with the super powerful secret soldier formula that makes him a super man. Sadly, this muscle bound hero that took on the whole Nazi army during WWII seems to be afraid of those American people who’ve joined the Tea Party movement. Not only is Cappy quaking in his little red booties, but he’s sure that the Tea Party folks are dangerous racists, too...
Labels: Captain America, Tea Party
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Sarah Palin is missing the nucleus of what the Tea Party activists are all about. They are not looking for another John McCain or George Bush. While I sympathize with much of Palin's platform, she misses the entire isolationist sentiment of the movement.
Tea party activists want a return to the constitution. While they require that our leaders fiercely defend our country, they also do not want to conduct any more pro-active wars that bankrupt the nation. They also value the life of our young men and women more than the profits of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. There are many right leaning independents that will no longer support the use of military force to spread democracy and build nations across the globe...
Labels: neocon, neoconservative, Palin, Sarah Palin, Tea Party
In an urgent message on the systematic betrayal of the tea party, Alex Jones warns against the turncoats and deceivers flocking from the weakened GOP and FOX News wings to harness the populist uprising that briefly found life outside of the traditional two-party system.
Sarah Palin made more than headlines this past week– attempting a takeover of the tea party movement, backing GOP hack Rick Perry over a real & viable candidate, pitching for war on Iran and assessing Obama’s weaknesses in 2012...
Labels: neocon, Palin, Sarah Palin, Tea Party
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Sarah Palin delivered a speech prior to her keynote at the Republican Tea Party fest in Nashville scheduled for this weekend. In addition to touching on government spending and the bankster bailout, Palin said the underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have been grilled before he was read his Miranda rights...
Labels: neocon, Palin, Sarah Palin, Tea Party
Saturday, February 6, 2010
...It didn’t take long for establishment Republicans to steal the idea and claim it as their own. A few weeks after Rick Santelli made his comments, Ron Paul’s media coordinator Steve Gordon
went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show and complained about what he characterized as an attempt by Republicans to hijack the idea. Gordon specifically blamed former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
It didn’t take long for Republicans to embrace the idea. RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, and Rep. Michele Bachmann from Minnesota have suggested the Tea Party should be rolled into the Republican Borg hive...
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Labels: Tea Party
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