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Liberty's backlash -- why we should be grateful to Edward Snowden By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano Published August 01, 2013 FoxNews.com Last week, Justin Amash, the two-term libertarian Republican congressman from Michigan, joined with John Conyers, the 25-term liberal Democratic congressman from the same state, to offer an amendment to legislation funding the National Security Agency (NSA). If enacted, the Amash-Conyers amendment would have forced the government's domestic spies when seeking search warrants to capture Americans' phone calls, texts and emails first to identify their targets and produce evidence of their terror-related activities before a judge may issue a warrant. The support they garnered had a surprising result that stunned the Washington establishment. It almost passed. The final vote, in which the Amash-Conyers amendment was defeated by 205 to 217, was delayed for a few hours by the House Republican leadership, which opposed the measure. The Republican leadership team, in conjunction with President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, needed more time for arm-twisting so as to avoid a humiliating loss. But the House rank-and-file did succeed in sending a message to the big-government types in both parties: Nearly half of the House of Representatives has had enough of government spying and then lying about it, and understands that spying on every American simply cannot withstand minimal legal scrutiny or basic constitutional analysis. The president is deeply into this and no doubt wishes he wasn't. He now says he welcomed the debate in the House on whether his spies can have all they want from us or whether they are subject to constitutional requirements for their warrants. Surely he knows that the Supreme Court has ruled consistently since the time of the Civil War that the government is always subject to the Constitution, wherever it goes and whatever it does. As basic as that sounds, it is not a universally held belief am

Bye bye encryption :( It's incredible to think this could happen in America. Marbux and I recently signed up for lavabit accounts, hoping to use the PGP encryption. And we knew uber patriot Edward Snowden had used Lavabit. Yet, it didn't occur to us that the Feds would shut demand their information and shut them down. We are fools. We take our freedom for granted and expect the Constitution to be upheld and adhered to. It's the law of the land, and no entity, public or private, can trump the law of the land. Yet, here we are. Totally trumped. No longer free. I feel like someone so used to the passing of night into day and back again, my freedom so caught up within the rhythms of the seasons and the passing of time that I am unable to see that it's become night time and darkness everywhere. There will be no return to sunlight unless we make it so. And the Guardian has it right: Cloud Computing will grind to a halt in the USSA. excerpt: "On Thursday afternoon, Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Lavabit, an email service that prides itself on privacy and security, abruptly closed his website, posting a short message to his former users. "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," he wrote. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot." Levison might be gagged by the law, but it's not hard to guess at least part of the reason why his site is having legal troubles. In early July, journalists and human rights activists received an email from edsnowden@lavabit.com, inviting them to a press conference in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Given the NSA leaker's understandable desire for security, it is not surprising that Edward Snowden would use a service designed for keeping messages out of prying hand

"U.S. President Barack Obama's reaction to the videos of two American freelance journalists getting beheaded by Islamist militants gives me the uncomfortable feeling that the American people are getting punk'd - again. The same thing happened 13 years ago last week, when a dozen and a half Muslim fundamentalists attacked our financial and political capitals using our own planes. The hijackers got exactly the reaction that they wanted: overreaction. "

Considering that I'm over 10 times as likely to die from a police shoooting as I am from a terrorist attack, how about we begin this conversation, Mr. Comey, by you providing formal notice to everyone who's had the telephone metadata gathered or searched all dates on which such gatherings and searches were conducted so citizens can file suit for violation of their privacy rights? Note that the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held last week that the FBI exceeded statutory authority in gathering and searching that information. Because the gathering and searching was not authorized, that would bring the gathering and searching under the protections of the Privacy Act, including the FBI duty to account for the disclosures  and to pay at least the statutory minimum $1,500 in damges per incident.  Then I would like to have an itemization of all of the commercial software and hardware products that your agency and or your buddies at NSA built backdoors into.  Then your resignation for millions of violations of the Privacy Act would be deeply appreciated. Please feel free to delegate the above mentioned tasks to your successor. 

Oh, I didn't know that: The American civil rights movement created paramilitary forces and overthrew the U.S. government, driving nearly all of the white people into one corner of the country, then set up their own national democratic goverrnment in the remainder, granted citizenship to any black people who wanted to emmigrate to the United Black States of America but denied all others citizenship, and enacted 51 laws that granted more rights to black citizens than their remaining few token whites, etc.  Horse feathers. Obama just shamed the American civil rights movement and he deserves to be tarred and feathered for it. 

From 2013, not long after the Boston Bombing. I never had much respect for those willing to surrender my liberties so they could feel a bit more secure. "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." Helen Keller, The Open Door (1957).

Thanks to Marbux we have this stunning summary explaining how Israel and Saudi Arabia are working together to stop Iran and the Shiite Crescent from taking over the Middle East and establishing an oil rich Shiite Caliphate. ........... "New Terrorist Gains Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies, along with Turkey, are also ramping up support in Syria for Al-Qaeda's Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Flush with jihadist reinforcements, the two terrorist organizations have seized new territory in recent weeks, including the Islamic State creating a humanitarian crisis by attacking a Palestinian refugee camp south of Damascus. All of these Saudi actions have drawn minimal criticism from mainstream U.S. media and political circles, in part, because the Saudis now have the protection of the Israel Lobby, which has kept American attention on the supposed threat from Iran, including allegedly controversial statements from Iranian leaders about their insistence that economic sanctions be lifted once the nuclear agreement is signed and/or implemented. Neocon warmongers have even been granted space in major U.S. newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, to openly advocate for the bombing of Iran despite the risk that destroying Iran's nuclear reactors could inflict both human and environmental devastation. That might serve the Saudi-Israeli interests by forcing Iran to focus exclusively on a domestic crisis but it would amount to a major war crime. [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Publishes Call to Bomb Iran."] The strategic benefit for Israel and Saudi Arabia would be that with Iran unable to assist the Iraqis and the Syrians in their desperate struggles against Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the Sunni jihadists might well be hoisting the black flag of their dystopian philosophy over Damascus, if not Baghdad. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Secret Saudi Ties to Terrorism."] Beyond the slaughter of innocents that would follow �

Wow.  Maybe the best analysis of the growing awareness of the vast differential between the patriot citizens of America and the Obammunist now in charge of our country. excerpt:  The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill. There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president-single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival-was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice-and for good reason. Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July. A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Well written comparison of Roosevelt's Great Depression and Obama's Great Recession; and how the same policies and attitudes produced the same results of prolonged economic misery.  Good charts comparing USA Obama misery to the rest of the world. excerpt: This may not be your grandfather's Great Depression, but many aspects of today's situation would remind him of the 1930s. If the recession that officially ended a year ago feels uncomfortably surreal to you yet familiar to him, it's probably because the recovery went missing. During the average recovery since World War II, gross domestic product (GDP) surpassed the pre-recession high five quarters after the recession began. It has never taken longer than seven quarters. Yet today, after 11 quarters, GDP is still below what it was in the fourth quarter of 2007. The economy is growing at only about a third of the rate of previous postwar recoveries from major recessions. FDR rode the tide of history while President Obama strives mightily against it. The progressive vision that resonated in the 1930s foundered on the hard experience of the 20th century, and it has no broad appeal in the 21st. The recovery from the Great Depression did not occur until World War II was underway, but it appears, as of today, that voters will bring the latest experiment in American collectivism to an end on Nov. 2. A real economic recovery won't be far behind.

Since the Bretton Woods Agreement was signed in the wake of World War II, the global monetary system has been based on the US dollar. This means that when the Fed decides to create trillions of dollars of inflation, other countries can't simply say, "let them dig their own grave." Instead, because their international transactions are denominated in dollars, they feel a pressure to maintain relatively stable exchange rates between their currencies and the dollar. Most countries do this informally and have their own (bad) reasons for maintaining a certain level of inflation. China, however, is more literal in its devotion to the dollar system, perhaps due to its psychology as a new arrival on the world stage. So, in recent history, the People's Bank of China has largely maintained a "peg," by which it currently offers to pay 6.8 RMB for every dollar deposited, no matter how many extra dollars the Fed prints. To put it another way, China, and to a certain extent the entire world, is on a Dollar Standard -- like the Gold Standard, but based on another fiat currency instead of a precious metal. What this also means is that China does not intentionally devalue its currency against the dollar, but only to keep pace with the dollar. As the Fed seeks to blow up the global monetary system, I take comfort in the fact that gold cannot fight a currency war because it is not a currency. Gold is money. Currencies used to be backed by money until the global fiat system was introduced under President Nixon. Fiat currency can be printed at will until the economy collapses, as has happened many times in history. Money is impossible to devalue at the whim of politicians because it is naturally scarce. Even in the ruins of Europe after the Second World War, when there was no central authority and chaos reigned, an ounce of gold was worth what it always had been. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/bernanke-is-engaging-in-the-monetary-equivalent-of-nuclear-war-2010-11?utm_sourc

Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz has an important article in the Nation arguing for "A Bank Bailout That Works." Unfortunately, it won't be read by many people because it's in The Nation and it's thousands of words long. The six points are: Solvency not liquidity ..... TARP sucks .... Forget the Bad Bank .... Drop the insurance idea ...Public private partnerships won't work either ... We have enough bad banks - Let's start a good one! That's where we come in. We went ahead and read the entire thing so you don't have to. Here are the six things you need to know from Stiglitz's piece. Feel free to pretend you read it. We won't tell.

The sickening feeling of the average investor and taxpayer being "had" by the economic crisis continues, and continues to come from disappointing quarters. My latest jolt came from a throwaway line from exiting Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in an interview with Maria Bartiromo that aired on CNBC this week. Yikes! This is a frightening look at Goldman Sachs and the foreknowledge Henry Paulson had of financial-crisis to come.

excerpt: The fact that the wealthiest already pay their fair share and more is borne out by this from the IRS: Individuals earning in the top one percent paid 40 percent of all income taxes, while those in the top 10 percent paid 71 percent of all income taxes. The fact that going after the wealthiest for even more isn't going to generate significant additional revenues - certainly not enough to make a dent in the debt - isn't mentioned by the President in his letter. And if Obama is so determined to be "fair", why doesn't he simply offer to write a check to the IRS for the part of his income that he feels he doesn't deserve? He doesn't say. The President did get one thing right: The middle class is the target of any deficit-reduction plans likely to come out of Washington in the next few days: "It's just not right to ask them to pay the whole tab - especially when they're not the ones who caused this mess in the first place." He's right: The middle class didn't create the financial crisis; the Ruling Class did. Instead, the middle class, by and large, just want to be left alone to work out their own lives. Whenever possible, they resist further government intrusions into their lives - witness the growth of the Tea Party - and are waiting to see if Washington will, for the first time in memory, not listen to the siren song of entitlement protection and class warfare being sung by the President, and instead ignore him and start some serious cutting back of Leviathan. Perhaps what the President should be saying to the American people is what he said as Senator in railing against raising the debt ceiling back in March, 2006: The fact that we are here today to debate raising America 's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. In

YES!  This works for me.  The Banksters should not profit from the corruption of our politicians.   Keep in mind that the recent GAO audit of the Federal Reserve - the first audit in a 100 yrs, making it the first audit ever, has disclosed that in 2009 and 2010, the bankster cartel gave over $16 Trill to international and wall street banks - interest free.  Don't you think they could spare us $1.6 Trill of our own money?   Many thanks to Dan Ferris ......  There's another solution to the debt ceiling problem that would instantly eliminate $1.6 trillion in government debt. In other words, it would instantly reduce the national debt to approximately $1.6 trillion below the debt ceiling. That would give the President and Congress at least a year to hash out an agreement on spending cuts and tax increases. The plan is elegantly simple and radical. The largest holder of U.S. Treasury debt is the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, the central bank of the United States. Texas Congressman Ron Paul has proposed the Federal Reserve simply cancel the $1.6 trillion in Treasury debt it holds. The Federal Reserve owns the bonds, so the Treasury is paying the Fed interest. The Fed in turn refunds the interest back to the Treasury. This is theatre of the absurd. Though the Fed is technically a privately owned bank, it's really the hand maiden of the government. It was created by a government act and is overseen by a government-appointed board of governors. For practical intents and purposes, the government owns the Fed's Treasury debt holdings. In other words, the government is borrowing from itself and manufacturing an enormous liability on which it must make interest payments - to itself! I hope you're starting to get the feeling the government is playing games and inventing a phony crisis. That's much closer to the truth. But the government's shell game of lending to itself could turn genuinely ugly.

Incredible video archive commemorating 9/11.  These are video clips that disappeared soon after that horrific event, archived for all time by some San Francisco dogooders.  It's meant to be a timeless resource for journalist, researchers, historians and writers as well as future generations of Americans who want to visually see the truth as it went down.  Now, if only we can get the Banksters behind this attack and hang them high. Sometimes we forget how dramatically those few days changed the course of history and how rapidly the desire to react was. And as you can see from the footage, it was not just the likes of Bill O'Reilly on Fox News (who declared that America should "bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble"). The archive is a way of digging into that reaction, which is itself a way of digging into where we are today. But sometimes it's just as important to remember the sheer confusion that took hold. The most grim moments come when comparing live coverage of the attacks themselves. For example on ABC, at 9:02 a.m., you hear the mangled yelps of staff in the studio as they (and you) watch the second plane strike the World Trade Center. At the same moment on CNN, meanwhile, they didn't even spot what had happened until a minute or two later. It's a brief interlude of innocence that nobody will ever have again. Understanding 9/11 is raw and unpalatable and terrifying. But what the Internet Archive has done is create an important and lasting monument to the events of a decade ago. It might not feel like a traditional tribute to those who died, but I think it is one that - for all of its difficulties - is utterly necessary.

Harvey is CEO of American Express:  This is his rant and it's awesome!   ......... Over the years, I have paid a significant portion of my income to the various federal, state and local jurisdictions in which I have lived, and I deeply resent that President Obama has decided that I don't need all the money I've not paid in taxes over the years, or that I should leave less for my children and grandchildren and give more to him to spend as he thinks fit. I also resent that Warren Buffett and others who have created massive wealth for themselves think I'm "coddled" because they believe they should pay more in taxes. I certainly don't feel "coddled" because these various governments have not imposed a higher income tax. After all, I did earn it. Others could pay higher taxes if they choose. They could voluntarily write a check or they could advocate that their gifts to foundations should be made with after-tax dollars and not be deductible. They could also pay higher taxes if they were not allowed to set up foundations to avoid capital gains and estate taxes. What gets me most upset is two other things about this argument: the unfair way taxes are collected, and the violation of the implicit social contract between me and my government that my taxes will be spent-effectively and efficiently-on purposes that support the general needs of the country. Before you call me greedy, make sure you operate fairly on both fronts.

Occupy's busting out on a new path ... So Adbusters is asking people all around the world to march on Oct. 29. "We want to send a clear message that we the people want to slow down this global casino." And Adbusters does have one specific demand, a 1 percent tax on financial-sector transactions (perhaps stocks, bonds, foreign-currency trades and derivatives). Some form of that idea, known as the "Robin Hood" tax, has been around for a while and might actually fly. - Jerry Large/Seattle Times Dominant Social Theme: We want justice for the world and the UN will give it to us. Free-Market Analysis: Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters magazine, based in Vancouver, B.C. - the magazine that issued the call for the initial Occupy Wall Street protests - has called on people to protest the upcoming G20 while demanding a one-percent tax on financial transactions. The revenue raised would be enormous and the lingering question is where this incredible revenue stream would be directed. The answer is obvious to those who follow what we call "directed history." The intention is likely to fund the UN as part of a final push to rationalize and perfect the initial stages of true world government. As we have written before, the movement toward world government is happening very quickly now. The ramifications are enormous and people who write off these protests as spontaneous and short-lived are not grasping what is taking place, in our humble opinion. The financial sales tax has been around for a very long time but has found its most recent voice in a column by Jerry Large of the Seattle Times. He recently gained an exclusive interview with Kalle Lasn, who sounds as if he hopes that a large protest on Oct 29th will mark the beginning of a push for such a tax. What's going on is pure one-worldism, an OWS ideology that is gradually revealing itself in dribs and drabs. It is one reason that that the OWS leaders have made no specific demands. They have hoped to create a momentu