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Good legal commentary on the NDAA.  A couple of things are overlooked though.  One is that neither the Senate, House or Executive Branch of government has the authority to suspend, change or alter in any way through a bill, regulation or other instrument of law, the Constitution.  The only Constitutional means of changing the Constitution (or Bill of Rights amendments) is that of amending the Constitution.  A ratification process process requiring super majorities of Congress (67%) and the States (75%).
IMHO, both the NDAA and the Patriot-Act AUMF are un-Constitutional.  But as the Lawfare article points out, on those few occasions where this crap has been legally challenged, the Courts have upheld Habeas Corpus and the Constitution.
The more troublesome aspect of the NDAA is twofold.  One is that Obama assumes that the AUMF has already given him legal authority to stomp on the Posse Comitatus Act, and use the federal military as his own domestic police force.  Obama has also stated that under the 2001 AUMF, he can assault, arrest and detain any citizen indefinitely, without charges, writ of Habeas Corpus, or warrant.  (See Jonathan Hurley's account of the the legal seminar where Obama representatives explained their interpretation of AUMF, the Patriot Act and NDAA).  
That's a scary interpretation of the AUMF quite out of line with Bush understanding and actual implementation, and, more importantly, how the Courts ruled on Bush's actions in support of the Constitution. Anyone know where i can sign on to a petition presenting a Bill of Particulars for Articles of Impeachment?  It's past time. NDAA FAQ: A Guide for the Perplexed by Benjamin Wittes (Benjamin Wittes & Robert Chesney)
The volume of sheer, unadulterated nonsense zipping around the internet about the NDAA boggles the mind. There was a time-only a few months ago-when the NDAA detention provisions were the obscure province of a small group of national security law nerds.

Details of how a federal Judge came to rule that the insideous NDAA law is un Constitutional. excerpt: Posted on May 18, 2012 By Chris Hedges In January, attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran asked me to be the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that challenged the harsh provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We filed the lawsuit, worked for hours on the affidavits, carried out the tedious depositions, prepared the case and went to trial because we did not want to be passive in the face of another egregious assault on basic civil liberties, because resistance is a moral imperative, and because, at the very least, we hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods smile on the damned. U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a 68-page opinion, ruled Wednesday that Section 1021 of the NDAA was unconstitutional. It was a stunning and monumental victory. With her ruling she returned us to a country where-as it was before Obama signed this act into law Dec. 31-the government cannot strip a U.S. citizen of due process or use the military to arrest him or her and then hold him or her in military prison indefinitely. She categorically rejected the government's claims that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring the case to trial because none of us had been indefinitely detained, that lack of imminent enforcement against us meant there was no need for an injunction and that the NDAA simply codified what had previously been set down in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. The ruling was a huge victory for the protection of free speech. Judge Forrest struck down language in the law that she said gave the government the ability to incarcerate people based on what they said or wrote. Maybe the ruling won't last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we and other Americans are

The Court's decision is here. http://sdnyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/12-Civ.-00331-2012.05.16-Opinion-Granting-PI.pdf

Absolutely stunning news!!!!  Tea Party Patriots and liberal progressive democrats have combined their efforts and passed the single most significant NDAA nullification Act yet.  AB351 now heads for debate and vote of the general California Assembly. "Today, the California Public Safety Committee voted unanimously in favor of Assembly Bill 351 (AB351), the California Liberty Preservation Act. Introduced by Republican Assemblymember Tim Donnelly, AB351 is a strong stand against "indefinite detention" as supposedly authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012.  It declares such federal power to be unconstitutional and also requires the entire state to refuse to enforce or assist its implementation.  A broad coalition officially supported the legislation and moved the normally partisan, and strongly democratic committee to support the republican-introduced legislation. AB351 was supported by the ACLU, Tenth Amendment Center, San Francisco 99% coalition, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Libertarian Party of California - and many others. AB351 establishes the proper constitutional role by first citing the 10th Amendment as limiting the power of the federal government as to that which has been delegated to it and nothing more. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution authorizes the United States federal government to exercise only those powers specifically delegated to it in the United States Constitution. It then declares the indefinite detention powers under NDAA to be unconstitutional: Sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) codifies indefinite military detention without charge or trial of civilians captured far from any battlefield, violating the United States Constitution and corroding our nation's commitment to the rule of law Most importantly, the bill requires the entire state apparatus, including all local governments, to refuse to implement the fede

Congressman Ron Paul explains the NDAA - National Defense Authorization Act. This military budget and expense Act has been approved by the USA Senate, and includes presidential authorization to arrest and detain Americans without charges. The Act suspends the 5th Amendment of the Bill of Rights. It suspends Habeas Corpus. Ron Paul argues that what the Patriot Act does to destroy the 4th Amendment, the NDAA does to the Bill of Rights 5th Amendment. It seems to me that no representative can take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and then vote for either the Patriot Act or NDA Act. The Bill of Rights states exactly what government can't do. And now these traitorous bastards have done it anyway. And people wonder why Ron Paul is so popular? Americans love their Constitution and will demand representatives that will uphold and defend the individual rights and freedoms that sacred document protects.

While I'd be the first to agree that the degree of fiscal mismanagement of this nation's economy is beyond insane and have to admit that I see very little to admire in Barack Obama's presidency, the meme about Executive Order 13603 authorizing confiscation of any property and enslavement of the American public needs to be put to rest. See http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/2012.html#13603 E.O. 13603 is not much more than an updating of similar executive orders issued by prior presidents beginning with Dwight Eisenhower. In fact, in skimming it a few minutes ago, I didn't see anything drastically different from some of the prior related orders. E.g., it reflects that a bunch of agencies that were formerly either independent or under other departments are now under the newish Department of Homeland Security, whose Secretary now gets the authority formerly delegated to other department and agency heads. If blame must be cast, it belongs on the Congress that enacted the Defense Production Act of 1950, 50 U.S.C. 2061, et seq. The executive order does no more than obey that Act's instructions. For example there is a section authorizing pre-emption of manufacturing capacity of critical industries over any existing civilian contracts in the event of a national emergency, but that language is in the statute as well. But that power hasn't had much traction since Harry Truman tried to nationalize the steel industry to break a nationwide strike. The Supreme Court swatted down that effort as an abuse of a power that would be lawful in a true emergency, like another major. But even that semi-radical "survival" power is ameliorated by other provisions of the statute and the order that authorize loan guarantees for companies' construction and maintenance of critical productive capacity. Much of that has been implemented over the years as outright grants. So for example, many chemical manufacturing plants were built with Defense Production Act funds, with

From the Tenth Amendment Center:   "On Tuesday, April 9th, the California Assembly Public Safety Committee will hold a hearing and do-or-die vote on AB351.   Passage of this bill would be a serious setback to those advancing the power of "indefinite detention" in the United States. AB351 NEEDS YOUR HELP RIGHT NOW TO PASS. 1. CALL all the members of the Public Safety Committee.  Call in the evenings or on the weekend as well.  We want them to have a flood of messages in support by the time they have the hearing on Tuesday.  Be VERY respectful, but be strong. Urge each of them to vote YES on AB351. Tom Ammiano, chair (916) 319-2017 Melissa Melendez, vice-chair (916) 319-2067 Byron Jones-Sawyer, Sr. (916) 319-2059 Holly J. Mitchell (916) 319-2054 Bill Quirk (916) 319-2020 Nancy Skinner (916) 319-2015 Marie Waldron (916) 319-2075 "

Mike Whitney eloquently expresses my anger.

Not a big Peter Beinhart fan, but this article explains a large part of the Ron Paul phenom. After a life time as a big C Goldwater-Reagan Constitutional Conservative, this summer i made a full transition to big C Constitutional Libertarian. The tipping point for me was the GAO audit of the Federal Reserve, where they discovered $16.1 Trillion of taxpayer dollars missing from the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel management books. It went to a who's who of international Bankster Cartel members. None of the taxpayer funded "financial collapse of 2008" bailout dollars went to the purposes chartered by their legislation. That includees the TARP $850 Billion, the Obama Stimulous $1 Trillion, and the mega FRBC $16.1 Trillion. No bad debts were purchased and retired. No rotting mortgage securities were swept up and restructured. No shovel ready jobs either. And no one in government or banksterism having caused the financial collapse went to jail. Instead, the perps feasted on the bailout dollars. The debt remains on the books of international Banksters, collecting interest, thirsting for foreclosure. The Bankster Cartel members are flush with cash, but not lending. By law (The Federal Reserve Act of December 23rd, 1913), FRBC members must keep a significant amount of their assets on "reserve" at the Federal Reserve, at 6% interest. In exchange for managing this process and the exploding money supply, the taxpayers of the USA are obligated by law to pay the FRBC 1% per year of (assets under management" (the money supply). Take note: the FRBC takes the 1% per year payment for their services in the form of GOLD!! They will not take payment in the form of paper notes labeled legal tender "Federal Reserve Notes". They only take GOLD. My transition to Constitutional Libertarian begins with a strct reading of the Constitution (the How), the Declaration of Independence, (the Why), and belief in the Rule of Law, not man. The concept of achievi

The Potemkin Village that is the foundation of Obammunomics is starting to crumble. What happened to the missing 1.2 million workers? Were they abducted by alien invaders? Or black bagged in the dark by NDAA night riders and trucked off to the gulag? Simon Black and Zero Hedge have been shouting loudly for years that the emperor has no clothes. Now, to poach a phrase from that great Obammunist, the Revered Jeremiah Wright, "the chickens are coming home to roost." The numbers can only be fudged so far. And out money shot is: "the end result is that in January, those "not in the labor force" did in fact rise by 1.2 million (whether compared to December or to 2011 - please, go ahead and check as many times as needed), and the labor force participation rate dropped to a new 30 year low of 63.7%, a number which incidentally only has to drop by 5% more for the BLS to report zero, or even a negative, unemployment rate." Incredible.

Great speech Great speech!  Wonderful connection with today's events and the history of liberty.  Worth reading!   excerpt: "If tyranny might have been predicted, history also tells us that the ideas of liberty remain steadfast and pure, and repeatedly these ideas take form and flight, and agitate the status quo. Periodically in our own history, we have seen a resurgence of the ideas of Freeborn John. We are seeing them in the Republican Party, most specifically in the person and message of Dr. Ron Paul. We've seen them in the relatively young Libertarian Party. These ideas - of self-ownership, of religious toleration, of the right of free association, and of equality under the law, and ideas that oppose government influenced, government created, and government subsidized monopolies - these are old ideas, and they are right ideas. Today, we live under a constitution that in words, embraces liberty. And yet what we have in terms of a government, a president, a Congress, and a judiciary is arrogant and unrestrained. Just this week, we witnessed a mild example of actual constitutional process. A federal judge permanently blocked the detention of Americans by the executive branch. Section 1021 of the NDAA provides for the detention of any American indefinitely without habeas corpus or trial on executive order. It clearly contradicts the Constitution. Yet, when a federal judge explained this and blocked the practice, within hours of the ruling, the Obama administration filed an extensive and panicked appeal. Judge Napolitano wrote a scathing article this week, wondering what our choices were in terms of a change of national leadership. He basically asked, "What if the principal parties' candidates for president really agree more than they disagree?" He concluded with another question: "If elections change nothing, what do we do about it?"

Well written and researched article describing what it means to live in a post-Constitutional America.  Chilling facts with a cold but obvious conclusion.

"Obama - Globalist Evader Sunday, November 11, 2012 - by Staff Report Obama answers questions about the CFR and Patriot Act ... In this 2008 campaign / townhall video, Obama says that he sees no evidence towards a continental government, yet in other videos he has stated ... "world order that I think we'd all like to see." - YouTube Dominant Social Theme: All of this conspiracy talk is paranoid and unproductive. Free-Market Analysis: Thank goodness for the Internet. Even if you are an Obama supporter, this 2008 video should shock you. In it, Obama sidesteps questions about his membership in the elitist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and professes to be profoundly troubled by then-President George W. Bush's executive orders reducing US constitutional freedoms. Today, we know that Obama did nothing to defend US civil liberties once he was put in office. Not only did he not reduce George Bush's most invasive executive orders, he added to them. Notably, Obama created a list of US citizens that his administration believes pose an imminent threat to the nation and should be assassinated via drone targeting if possible. It has been pointed out that killing citizens without due process is profoundly authoritarian and violates every aspect of constitutional rights. Dangerous or not, those who the administration believes are an "imminent threat" still are entitled to due process. For some reason, Obama and those who surround him believe they are not. What's also troubling, from our point of view, is the reverence with which the audience treats Barack Obama, thanking him for not taking "lobbyist" funds (whatever that means) and applauding enthusiastically as he evades one question after another. Listen to Obama dodge the real issue - that he is the globalists' point man in the US, the individual the power elite plans to elevate still higher. There is a reason Obama will not reveal his background; it likely shows quite clearly who he really works for ... and wh

Excellent do over of the NSA Prism world wide wiretapping and eavesdropping-spy program. "The leaked PowerPoint presentation detailing a classified program called PRISM - which appears to acquire information from the servers of nine of the biggest internet companies - got shredded for how shoddy the slides are.  Emiland De Cubber, a freelance presentation designer, has published this slideshow with the message: "Dear NSA, You can do whatever you want with my data. But not with my eyes.""

Nice INFOGRAPHIC that includes the timeline.  We're still in the early days of discovering just how awful and un-constitutional the Feds worldwide dragnet really is.  But this infographic does a good job of pulling it all together.  These are far more than impeachable offenses.  This treason.  This is a coupe d'etat. "We've covered how, since 9/11, the National Security Agency has spied on electronic communications of Americans without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying. The organization has done this by hiring Israeli contractors to bug the U.S. telecommunications network and building massive complexes such as their secretive $2 billion Utah spy center. Now the American Civil Liberties Union has created this handy infographic that shows how the NSA's domestic spying program thrives with impunity today:"

Timeline for reports and whistleblower information going public about NSA world wide dragnet of information and communications.  Note that the official timeline the NSA slides depict the start of the Internet dragnet as late 2007, when the Bush Administration wrangled Microsoft as a source.  The whistleblower timeline starts in 2001 and is rolling worldwide by 2004.

Good article briefly describing th ehistory of the NSA and how it has evolved to the politicized monster it has become today. excerpt: "Last week, Barack Hussein Obama deflected new concerns about the National Security Administration's intrusive domestic data-mining operations, saying, "If people can't trust ... the executive branch ... to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here." Barack, we have some problems here. Of course, trusting the Executive Branch is not the issue. The problem is Obama's life-long record of deceit and deception, and his utter contempt for Rule of Law. Amidst recent revelations that Obama's black-bag cutouts inspired his "low-level" union cadres at the IRS to target his Patriot and Tea Party political enemies list, and scripted a cover-up of the Benghazi murders in order that it not derail his 2012 re-election campaign momentum, is it conceivable that his "low-level" union cadres at the NSA might collect intelligence data on U.S. citizens to profile those whom oppose Obama? As with the other scandals, Obama's political handlers and their Leftmedia talkingheads are obfuscating the facts regarding NSA data collection. They ignore legitimate civil liberty concerns, and focus instead on the question of whether such data is essential to our national security. Allow me to reframe a quote from James "Ragin' Cajun" Carville's political playbook about focusing on the big issue, and adapt it for the big data debate: "It's the profiling, stupid!" The question is not whether intelligence data collection is critical to our nation's ability to defend itself -- good intelligence is, and has always been a critical component of national defense and security. The overarching questions are, what is the scope of domestic NSA intelligence gathering, and what is the potential for an administration to use that information to profile and target political opponents? Here is a ver

NSA-PRISM-Echelon in a nutshell.  The list below is a short sample.  Each fact is documented, and well worth the time reading. "The following are 21 facts about NSA snooping that every American should know…" #1 According to CNET, the NSA told Congress during a recent classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls… #2 According to U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, members of Congress learned "significantly more than what is out in the media today" about NSA snooping during that classified briefing. #3 The content of all of our phone calls is being recorded and stored.  The following is a from a transcript of an exchange between Erin Burnett of CNN and former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente which took place just last month… #4 The chief technology officer at the CIA, Gus Hunt, made the following statement back in March… "We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever." #5 During a Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing in March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the intelligence community has the ability to access emails "as they come in"… #6 Back in 2007, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told Congress that the president has the "constitutional authority" to authorize domestic spying without warrants no matter when the law says. #7 The Director Of National Intelligence James Clapper recently told Congress that the NSA was not collecting any information about American citizens.  When the media confronted him about his lie, he explained that he "responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner". #8 The Washington Post is reporting that the NSA has four primary data collection systems… MAINWAY, MARINA, METADATA, PRISM #9 The NSA knows pretty much everything that you are doing on the Internet.  The following is a short excerpt from a recent Yahoo article… #10 The NSA is suppose

Looks like Florian was right after all.  Google is a front for the big Media-Federalis-Bankster-Corporatist elites. excerpt: "The hand-in-hand nature of this White House and some of the nation's biggest corporations is seen in yet another incident as Barack Obama's 2012 campaign data team is now moving from team Obama to team Google. This week, Bloomberg reported that Obama's data mining team, used to such great effect during his 2012 re-election for president, has been hired nearly wholesale to go work for Google. This may not come as such a great surprise, however, as Google's Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, helped organize and run Obama's re-election e-team. Schmidt "helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization," Bloomberg reports. Since he came onto the national political scene, Barack Obama has campaigned like a veritable David vs Goliath with evil corporations standing in for Goliath while Obama presents himself as David loading his sling shot to do battle. But the reality is not quite that cut and dried and Google has been a big recipient of Obama's largesse. The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney points out that the administration is filled with Googleites and that President Obama and Google have a long standing love affair. Remember Obama's No. 2 tech staffer at the White House was Google's former top lobbyist-who improperly worked with active Google lobbyists on pushing polic.... Obama appointed non-registered Google lobbyist and max-Obama donor Vint Cerf to a science advisory board. Then there was the time when Google chief Schmidt is reported to have told a Google staffer to make sure that the search engine did not connect his entries to his own political donations so that it was a bit harder to find out to whom he donated campaign cash."