Monthly Archives: February 2014

Who’da thunk it?

by Paul Harvey?

Back in 1969, a group of Black Panthers decided that a fellow black panther named Alex Rackley needed to die. Rackley was suspected of disloyalty. Rackley was first tied to a chair.  Once safely immobilized, his friends tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him.

When they got tired of torturing Rackley, Black Panther member, Warren Kimbro took Rackley outside and put a bullet in his head. Rackley’s body was later found floating in a river about 25 miles north of New Haven , Connecticut .

Perhaps at this point you’re curious as to what happened to these Black Panthers?

In 1977, only eight years later, only one of the killers was still in jail.

The shooter, Warren Kimbro, managed to get a scholarship to Harvard and became good friends with none other than Al Gore. He later became an assistant dean at an Eastern Connecticut State College.

Isn’t that something!!!

As a ’60s radical you can pump a bullet into someone’s head and a few years later, in the same state, you can become an assistant college dean!

Only in America !!!

Erica Huggins was the woman who served the Panthers by boiling the water for Mr. Rackley’s torture. Some years later Ms. Huggins was elected to a California School Board.

How in the world do you think these killers got off so easily?

Maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers.

These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial.

One of these people was none other than Bill Lan Lee.  Mr. Lee, or Mr. Lan Lee, as the case may be, isn’t a college dean. He isn’t a member of a California School Board. He is now head of the United States Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, appointed by none other than Bill Clinton.

O.K., so who was the other Panther defender?  Is this other notable Panther defender now a school board member? Is this other Panther apologist now an assistant college dean?  No, neither!

The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at the time. She is now known as The “smartest woman in the world.     And now the rest of the story. She is none other than the former Democratic senator from the State of New York —- our former First Lady, and the Secretary of State, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I don’t know how true this is.  Anyone else know? Found this:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Rackley and this:  http://www.weirdrepublic.com/episode8.htm and another: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/966232/posts

In Ukraine, as all other places, it’s all about the central bank control.

 

Of course the new boss plans to “invite” the IMF to the rescue. Invite? It appears to me that he was put in place as a yes man for the “Banksters”

…….sip……Lawmakers appointed Stepan Kubiv, the ex-chairman of Lviv-based VAT Kredobank, to head the central bank after voting out Ihor Sorkin. The monetary authority this month introduced capital controls to halt the hryvnia’s slide after the currency fell to a five-year low against the dollar. Kubiv plans to invite an International Monetary Fund mission, the Unian news service reported, without giving details

Source:  .http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-23/ukraine-interim-leader-warns-of-economic-danger.html

Johnny Carson as Ronald Reagan

Thursday, February 27, 2014

I really used to like Johnny Carson, then came Jay Leno, and now Jimmy Fallon, a left winger, what else, what did you expect. Jay Leno said he did not want to leave, but he was forced to say stupid things like “I understand that a younger person should be doing this”

They had to get last right wing guy out of there.

As a remembrance, here is ……..drum roll, please: 

Subject: Johnny Carson as Ronald Reagan.
  
A great “who’s on first” type of routine. I had not seen this before. It is pretty good.
  
Check out Johnny Carson as Ronald Reagan…
 
 
 

The Secret Playbook of Social Media Censors

February 26, 2014

Source: Washington’s Blog

The “Counter Reset”

Glenn Greenwald’s piece on manipulation of the Internet by intelligence agencies gives examples – based upon documents leaked by Edward Snowden – of how governments disrupt social media websites.

Other whistleblowers have provided very specific information about how agents disrupt social media news sites.

This essay will focus one specific technique: the “Counter Reset”.

To explain the Counter Reset technique, we have to understand the concepts of “momentum” and “social proof”.

Specifically, the government spends a great deal of manpower and money to monitor which stories, memes and social movements are developing the momentum to actually pose a threat to the status quo.  For example, the Federal Reserve, PentagonDepartment of Homeland Security, and other agencies all monitor social media for stories critical of their agencies … or the government in general.   Other governments – and private corporations – do the same thing.

Why?

Because a story gaining momentum ranks high on social media sites.  So it has a high probability of bursting into popular awareness, destroying the secrecy which allows corruption, and becoming a real challenge to the powers-that-be.

“Social proof” is a related concept.  Social proof is the well-known principle stating that people will believe something ifmost other people believe it. And see this.  In other words, most people have a herd instinct, so if a story ranks highly, more people are likely to believe it and be influenced by it.

That is why vested interests go to great lengths – using computer power and human resources – to monitor social media momentum.   If a story critical of one of these powerful entities is gaining momentum, they will go to great lengths to kill its momentum, and destroy the social proof which comes with alot of upvotes, likes or recommendations in social media.

They may choose to flood social media with comments supporting the entities, using armies of sock puppets, i.e. fake social media identities. See thisthisthisthis and this. Or moderators at the social media sites themselves can justcensor the stories.

Or they can be more sneaky … and do a Counter Reset to destroy momentum.

Giving specific examples will illustrate the technique.   Reddit moderators have continuously reset the counter over the last couple of days on the new Greenwald/Snowden story, to destroy momentum which would otherwise have guaranteed that the story was the top story.

Similarly, the owners of popular Youtube channels have repeatedly reported that Counter Resets are done on their most controversial news stories.

The attractiveness of the Counter Reset from a moderator’s perspective is that it destroys momentum, while leaving some plausible deniability.

If users point out that the story keeps getting spiked, the moderator can say that it hasn’t been censored, but instead that the moderators have allowed it to stay up (with periodic Counter Resets along the way).

Alternatively – if the moderators have continuously deleted the story each time it is posted – the moderators can say that it has been posted “numerous times”, and pretend that shows that they are letting the story gather momentum, when they are in fact deleting it again and again.  For example, when hundreds of Redditors complained yesterday that the Greenwald/Snowden story kept getting deleted, moderators chimed in on every thread proclaiming that the story had run multiple times … without admitting that it had been deleted each time.

Now that you know about the Counter Reset, watch your favorite social media sites to see how this technique is used for the hardest-hitting stories and videos which directly challenge the legitimacy of the powers-that-be.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_Secret_Playbook_of_Social_Media_Censors/33195/0/0/0/Y/M.html

The Secret Constitution and Bank Wars with Karen Hudes

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yy0NmkIQcQ#t=691

Published on Feb 25, 2014           

World Bank whistleblower Karen Hudes joins Buzzsaw to talk about the secret other Constitution, banking corruption on a global scale, and how secret orders have undermined freedom around the world. Unpayable debt, the worth of gold and the possibility of reforming a broken banking system is all discussed in this interview hosted by Sean Stone.
GUEST BIO: Karen Hudes studied law at Yale Law School and economics at the University of Amsterdam. She worked in the US Export Import Bank of the US from 1980-1985 and in the Legal Department of the World Bank from 1986-2007. She established the Non Governmental Organization Committee of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association and the Committee on Multilateralism and the Accountability of International Organizations of the American Branch of the International Law Association. In addition she has recently come under fire for whistleblowing at her more recent position at the World Bank.

Can Washington overthrow three governments at the same time?

 

February 25, 2014

Thierry Meyssan, voltairenet.org

The power of a state is measured by its ability to defend itself and to attack on one or more fronts. In this context, Washington is trying for the first time to show it can overthrow three governments simultaneously: Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. If it succeeds, no government would be henceforth able to resist it.

Washington, which failed in 2011 to bomb Libya and Syria simultaneously, is now engaged in a new demonstration of its strength: organizing regime change in three states at the same time, in different regions of the world: Syria (CentCom), Ukraine (EuCom) and Venezuela (SouthCom).

To do this, President Obama has mobilized almost the entire National Security Council team.

First, Advisor Susan Rice and Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. These two women are champions of “democratic” talk. They have for many years specialized in advocating interference in the internal affairs of other countries under the pretext of preventing genocide. But behind this generous rhetoric, they couldn’t care less about non-US lives as shown by Ms. Power during the chemical weapons crisis in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The ambassador, who was aware of the innocence of the Syrian authorities, had gone to Europe with her husband to attend a film festival dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, while her government denounced a crime against humanity, the responsibility for which was placed upon President al Assad.

Then, the three regional co-ordinators: Philip Gordon ( Middle East and North Africa ), Karen Donfried (Europe and Eurasia ) and Ricardo Zuñiga ( Latin America).

• Phil Gordon (personal friend and translator of Nicolas Sarkozy) organized the sabotage of the Geneva 2 Peace Conference as long as the Palestinian issue is not settled to the U.S. liking. During the second session of the conference, while John Kerry spoke of peace, Gordon met with the heads of Jordanian, Qatari , Saudi and Turkish intelligence services in Washington to prepare for yet another attack. The plotters have gathered an army of 13,000 men, of whom only 1,000 were given brief military training, to drive tanks and take Damascus. The problem is that the column may be destroyed by the Syrian Army before arriving in the capital. But they fail to agree on how to defend it without distributing anti-aircraft weapons that could later be used against Israel.

• Karen Donfried is the former national intelligence officer for Europe. She has long led the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. Today, she manipulates the European Union to hide Washington interventionism in Ukraine. Despite the leak of a phone conversation involving Ambassador Victoria Nuland, she succeeded in convincing Europeans that the opposition in Kiev wanted to join them and was fighting for democracy. Nonetheless, more than half of the Maidan rioters are members of the Nazi party and brandish portraits of collaborator Stepan Bandera.

• Finally, Ricardo Zuñiga is the grandson of the namesake President of the National Party of Honduras who organized the coups of 1963 and 1972 in favor of General López Arellano. He directed the CIA station in Havana where he recruited and financed agents to form opposition to Fidel Castro. He mobilized the extreme Trotskyist Venezuelan left to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, accused of being a Stalinist.

The whole process is hyped under the leadership of one Dan Rhodes. This propaganda specialist has already written the official version of September 11, 2001, drafting the report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry. He managed to remove all traces of the military coup (power was removed from the hands of George W. Bush at about 10am and it was returned that evening; all the members of his cabinet and those of Congress were placed in secure bunkers “to ensure their safety”) so that we remember only the attacks.

In all three cases, the U.S. narrative is based on the same principles: accuse governments of killing their own citizens, qualify opponents as ’democratic’; impose sanctions against the “murderers” and ultimately operate coups.

Each time, the movement begins with a demonstration during which peaceful opponents are killed, and where both sides accuse each other of violence. In fact U.S. or NATO special forces placed on rooftops shoot at both the crowd and the police. This was the case in Daraa (Syria) in 2011, Kiev (Ukraine) and Caracas (Venezuela) this week. Alas for bad luck: autopsies in Venezuela show that two victims, one opponent and one pro-government, were killed by the same weapon.

Qualifying opponents as democratic activists is a simple game of rhetoric. In Syria, they are Takfirists supported by the worst dictatorship in the world, Saudi Arabia. In Ukraine, a few sincere pro-Europeans surrounded by many Nazis. In Venezuela, young Trotskyists from good families surrounded by goon squads. Everywhere the false U.S. opponent, John McCain, brings his support to true and false on site opponents.

Support for opponents rests with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This agency of the U.S. government falsely presents itself as an NGO funded by Congress. But it was created by President Ronald Reagan, in association with Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is headed by the neoconservative Carl Gershman and the daughter of General Alexander Haig (former Supreme Commander of NATO, then Secretary of State ), Barbara Haig. This is the NED (actually the State Department), which employs the “opposition” senator John McCain.

To this operating group, you must add the Albert Einstein Institute, an “NGO” funded by NATO. Created by Gene Sharp, it trained professional agitators from two bases: Serbia (Canvas) and Qatar (Academy of currency).

In all cases, Susan Rice and Samantha Power take on airs of outrage before imposing penalties, soon echoed by the European Union, while they are in fact the sponsors of the violence.

It remains to be seen whether the the coups will be successful. Which is far from being certain.

Washington is thus attempting to show the world it is still the master. To be more sure of itself, it launched the Ukrainian and Venezuelan operations during the Olympic Games in Sochi. It was certain that Russia would not move for fear of having its party upset by Islamist attacks. But Sochi ended this weekend. Now it’s Moscow’s turn to play.

Translation Roger Lagassé

The Dollar and the Deep State

 

Sunday, February 23, 2014

charles hugh smith

If we consider the Fed’s policies (tapering, etc.) solely within the narrow confines of the corporatocracy or a strictly financial context, we are in effect touching the foot of the elephant and declaring the creature to be short and roundish. I have been studying the Deep State for 40 years, before it had gained the nifty name “deep state.” What others describe as the Deep State I term the National Security State which enables the American Empire, a vast structure that incorporates hard and soft power–military, diplomatic, intelligence, finance, commercial, energy, media, higher education–in a system of global domination and influence. Back in 2007 I drew a simplified chart of the Imperial structure, what I called the Elite Maintaining and Extending Global Dominance (EMEGD): At a very superficial level, some pundits have sought a Master Control in the Trilateral Commission or similar elite gatherings. Such groups are certainly one cell within the Empire, but each is no more important than other parts, just as killer T-cells are just one of dozens of cell types in the immune system. One key feature of the Deep State is that it makes decisions behind closed doors and the surface government simply ratifies or approves the decisions. A second key feature is that the Deep State decision-makers have access to an entire world of secret intelligence. Here is an example from the late 1960s, when the mere existence of the National Security Agency (NSA) was a state secret. Though the Soviet Union made every effort to hide its failures in space, it was an ill-kept secret that a number of their manned flights failed in space and the astronauts died. The NSA had tapped the main undersea cables, and may have already had other collection capabilities in place, for the U.S. intercepted a tearful phone call from Soviet Leader Brezhnev to the doomed astronauts, a call made once it had become clear there was no hope of their capsule returning to Earth. Former congressional staff member Mike Lofgren described the Deep State in his recent essay Anatomy of the Deep State:

There is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. 

The term “Deep State” was coined in Turkey and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime. 

I use the term to mean a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.

I would say that only senior military or intelligence officers have any realistic grasp of the true scope, power and complexity of the Deep State and its Empire.Those with no grasp of military matters cannot possibly understand the Deep State. If you don’t have any real sense of the scope of the National Security State, you are in effect touching the foot of the elephant and declaring the creature is perhaps two feet tall. The Deep State arose in World War II, as the mechanisms of electoral governance had failed to prepare the nation for global war. The goal of winning the war relegated the conventional electoral government to rubber-stamping Deep State decisions and policies. After the war, the need to stabilize (if not “win”) the Cold War actually extended the Deep State. Now, the global war on terror (GWOT) is the justification. One way to understand the Deep State is to trace the vectors of dependency. The Deep State needs the nation to survive, but the nation does not need the Deep State to survive (despite the groupthink within the Deep State that “we are the only thing keeping this thing together.”) The nation would survive without the Federal Reserve, but the Federal Reserve would not survive without the Deep State. The Fed is not the Deep State; it is merely a tool of the Deep State. This brings us to the U.S. dollar and the Deep State. The Deep State doesn’t really care about the signal noise of the economy–mortgage rates, minimum wages, unemployment, etc., any more that it cares about the political circus (“step right up to the Clinton sideshow, folks”) or the bickering over regulations by various camps. What the Deep State cares about are the U.S. dollar, water, energy, minerals and access to those commodities (alliances, sea lanes, etc.). As I have mentioned before, consider the trade enabled by the reserve currency (the dollar): we print/create money out of thin air and exchange this for oil, commodities, electronics, etc. If this isn’t the greatest trade on Earth–exchanging paper for real stuff– what is?While I am sympathetic to the strictly financial arguments that predict hyper-inflation and the destruction of the U.S. dollar, they are in effect touching the toe of the elephant. The financial argument is this: we can print money but we can’t print more oil, coal, ground water, etc., and so eventually the claims on real wealth (i.e. dollars) will so far exceed the real wealth that the claims on wealth will collapse. So far as this goes, it makes perfect sense. But let’s approach this from the geopolitical-strategic perspective of the Deep State: why would the Deep State allow policies that would bring about the destruction of its key global asset, the U.S. dollar? There is simply no way the Deep State is going to support policies that would fatally weaken the dollar, or passively watch a subsidiary of the Deep State (the Fed) damage the Deep State itself. The strictly financial arguments for hyper-inflation and the destruction of the U.S. dollar implicitly assume a system that operates like a line of dominoes: if the Fed prints money, that will inevitably start the dominoes falling, with the final domino being the reserve currency. Setting aside the complexity of Triffin’s Paradox and other key dynamics within the reserve currency, we can safely predict that the Deep State will do whatever is necessary to maintain the dollar’s reserve status and purchasing power. Understanding the “Exorbitant Privilege” of the U.S. Dollar (November 19, 2012)
What Will Benefit from Global Recession? The U.S. Dollar (October 9, 2012) Recall Triffin’s primary point: countries like China that run trade surpluses cannot host reserve currencies, as that requires running large structural trade deficits. In my view, the euro currency is a regional experiment in the “bancor” model,where a supra-national currency supposedly eliminates Triffin’s Paradox. It has failed, partly because supra-national currencies don’t resolve Triffin’s dilemma, they simply obfuscate it with sovereign credit imbalances that eventually moot the currency’s ability to function as intended. Many people assume the corporatocracy rules the nation, but the corporatocracy is simply another tool of the Deep State. Many pundits declare that the Powers That Be want a weaker dollar to boost exports, but this sort of strictly financial concern is only of passing interest to the Deep State. The corporatocracy (banking/financialization, etc.) has captured the machinery of regulation and governance, but these are surface effects of the electoral government that rubber-stamps policies set by the Deep State. The corporatocracy is a useful global tool of the Deep State, but its lobbying of the visible government is mostly signal noise to the Deep State. The only sectors that matter are the defense, energy, agriculture and international financial sectors that supply the Imperial Project and project power. What would best serve the Deep State is a dollar that increases in purchasing power and extends the Deep State’s power. It is widely assumed that the Fed creating a few trillion dollars has created a massive surplus of dollars that will guarantee a slide in the dollar’s purchasing power and its demise as the reserve currency. Those who believe the Fed’s expansion of its balance sheet will weaken the dollar are forgetting that from the point of view of the outside world, the Fed’s actions are not so much expanding the supply of dollars as offsetting the contraction caused by deleveraging. I would argue that the dollar will soon be scarce, and the simple but profound laws of supply and demand will push the dollar’s value not just higher but much higher. The problem going forward for exporting nations will be the scarcity of dollars. If we consider the Fed’s policies (tapering, etc.) solely within the narrow confines of the corporatocracy or a strictly financial context, we are in effect touching the foot of the elephant and declaring the creature to be short and roundish. The elephant is the Deep State and its Imperial Project. 

 

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.ca/2014/02/the-dollar-and-deep-state.html

MEN BEHIND BARACK OBAMA,

 

 

2014-02-23

The men behind Barack Obama part 1 

at02:00 Posted by

Vatic Note:  We brought this up way back in 2008 during the primary for the dems.   We noticed that the GOP had sabotagued their own candidate for President and it was noted that Ron Paul would have beat Obama had he won the nomination.  McCain was selected for the express purpose of losing the general election, but would have won against Hitlary.
So Obama had to be the nominee.  All these candidates on both sides were Rothschild/Rockefeller minions, bought and paid for.   Not so Ron Paul and that is why they had to do what the did to him and I saw it first hand at the state convention.   The GOP violated every campaign law on the books, both state and federal during that convention.  I spoke about it earlier after I attended.
 
Before the primary was even over,  the Bildebergs called both dem candidates to their meeting in Va. to meet with them in secret which is treason.  When it was over, Obama was the nominee and Hitlary was going to be secretary of state where she had more control than she would have had as President.  That must have really ticked her off.
That was when I knew that our presidents were for sure selected by the Zionist nazi’s running industries, wars, and fiat currencies extracting all the wealth out of our nation.  Palestine simply proved it and gave us an inside view of what it would be like to live under such nazi type administrations, especially our children who would have been subjected to their Satanic ritual abuses.   Its why I fought so hard against these zionist bankers. 
 
Lets remember, JFK Jr was murdered because he had declared his intent to run against Hillary for the senate seat where she needed that position to launch her run for President for her handlers, the Israeli’s who are khazar pagan satanists.  She had to run in New  York where she could win the election using  the zionists votes which were plentiful, but JFK announced and there was no doubt he would have won against her, since dems love the Kennedy’s way more than they do the zionists, so he had to go.
 
The men behind Barack Obama part 1 
Click here for the video interview:
Uploaded on Oct 29, 2008
            
Especially in politics it is of the  utmost importance to try to look behind the facade: who makes up the  team of the presidential candidate? The future president of the United  States of America is for a large part dependent on and being fed by his  team of advisors and future cabinet members. 
 
Webster Tarpley wrote a  book on the men and women behind presidential hopeful Barack Obama. He  argues that there is more to Obama than his charismatic appearance and  that some of his advisors pose a danger to the US and the world in case  Obama might be elected to become the next US president. 
 
Whether Tarpleys  view is correct for now is a matter of opinion and remains to be seen,  but for the public debate it is relevant to take note of his facts and  arguments. Therefor DeepJournal interviewed Webster Tarpley on the topic  of his recently published book Obama, The Postmodern Coup, The Making of  a Manchurian Candidate.
 

The article is reproduced in accordance with  Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

 

PART 2

Vatic Note:  this is a continuation of part 1 and he is spot on.  I am impressed, this man “knows” what is going on.  We have been saying that Obama is not the problem, rather he is simply a puppet with his foreign occupying handlers standing behind the curtain.  This is confirmed by Tarpley.
He even points out that Obama knows so little that he doesn’t even know where Pakistan is on the map.  I believe him.  What we need to be saying from now on is “The rothschild bankers and their treasonous collaborators need to be kicked out of this country pronto”.   Then we can recovered from their perverse insane attack upon this planet and humanity through their black and darkness drawing satanism.
The men behind Barack Obama part 2, click here for the next video interview:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-KJCMWcoms

Uploaded on Oct 29, 2008           
(A Continuation of Part I)
Especially in politics it is of the  utmost importance to try to look behind the facade: who makes up the  team of the presidential candidate?
The future president of the United  States of America is for a large part dependent on and being fed by his  team of advisors and future cabinet members. 
 
Webster Tarpley wrote a  book on the men and women behind presidential hopeful Barack Obama. He  argues that there is more to Obama than his charismatic appearance and  that some of his advisors pose a danger to the US and the world in case  Obama might be elected to become the next US president. 
 
Whether Tarpleys  view is correct for now is a matter of opinion and remains to be seen,  but for the public debate it is relevant to take note of his facts and  arguments. Therefore DeepJournal interviewed Webster Tarpley on the topic  of his recently published book Obama, The Postmodern Coup,The Making of  a Manchurian Candidate.

The article is reproduced in accordance with  Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

Americans rising up against government: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds     5:36 p.m. EST February 23, 2014

Three examples of pushback against the ruling class.

America’s ruling class has been experiencing more pushback than usual lately. It just might be a harbinger of things to come.

First, in response to widespread protests last week, the Department of Homeland Security canceled plans to build a nationwide license plate database. Many local police departments already use license-plate readers that track every car as it passes traffic signals or pole-mounted cameras. Specially equipped police cars even track cars parked on the street or even in driveways.

The DHS put out a bid request for a system that would have gcone national, letting the federal government track millions of people’s comings and goings just as it tracks data about every phone call we make. But the proposal was suddenly withdrawn last week, with the unconvincing explanation that it was all a mistake. I’m inclined to agree with TechDirt’s Tim Cushing, who wrote: “The most plausible explanation is that someone up top at the DHS or ICE suddenly realized that publicly calling for bids on a nationwide surveillance system while nationwide surveillance systems are being hotly debated was … a horrible idea.”

On Friday, after more public outrage, the Federal Communications Commission withdrew a plan to “monitor” news coverage at not only broadcast stations, but also at print publications that the FCC has no authority to regulate. The “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” or CIN (pronounced “sin”) involved the FCC sending people to question reporters and editors about why they chose to run particular stories. Many folks in and out of the media found it Orwellian.

How this program appeared was, like the DHS program, a bit of a mystery: FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said: “This has never been put to an FCC vote; it was just announced.”  But the blowback was sufficient to stop it for now.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut a massive new gun-registration scheme is also facing civil disobedience. As J.D. Tuccille reports: “Three years ago, the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as ‘assault weapons,’ and 2 million plus high-capacity magazines. … But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for ‘assault weapon’ registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines.”

This is more  “Irish Democracy,” passive resistance to government overreach. The Hartford (Conn.) Courant is demanding that the state use background-check records to prosecute those who haven’t registered, but the state doesn’t have the resources and it’s doubtful juries would convict ordinary, law-abiding people for failure to file some paperwork.

Though people have taken to the streets from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Venezuela to Thailand,  many have wondered whether Americans would ever resist the increasing encroachments on their freedom. I think they’ve begun.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the opinion front page or follow us on twitter @USATopinion or Facebook.

NSA spy case heats up!

LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER

NSA spy case heats up!

Exclusive: Larry Klayman hopes motion will precipitate progress toward trial

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/nsa-spy-case-heats-up/#yxHARvvTBejM0fve.99

 

On Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2014, the individual Government Defendants, Barack H. Obama, Eric H. Holder, Keith B. Alexander, Roger Vinson, the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Security Agency (NSA), in our initial lawsuit over the NSA spying on the American people – the one that produced a great victory last December when Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that President Obama and the NSA had egregiously violated the Fourth Amendment and the U.S. Constitution – presented me and the other plaintiffs with the gift that may keep on giving. In response to a court order issued about 10 days earlier, wherein Judge Leon testily told the Obama Justice Department lawyers to get the show on the road and finally file an answer to the complaint as they were in default for not having responded timely, President Obama’s lawyers stonewalled the judge in the answer they later filed on the day reserved for love, not obstruction of justice.

In this answer, the Obama Justice Department told the judge that President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, NSA Director Keith Alexander and other collaborators in the NSA’s illegal spying scandal are above the law and did not need to respond, claiming falsely that they were never served with the complaint. Remarkable as it may sound, the Obama Justice Department and its clients obviously feel that they are a privileged class – free to lie to a court or Congress whenever it suits their interests.

But when it comes to the NSA and its enablers, this is nothing new. The agency and the so-called intelligence community as a whole have racked up quite a record of deceit and outright lying to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Congress, where James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, got caught perjuring himself, claiming that the NSA does not spy on American citizens if they have no connection to terrorism. Of course, given Congress’ impotence if not outright lack of courage, Clapper was not held accountable for these lies. But in front of Judge Leon, a valiant courageous man and judge, they may have met someone who will finally have them account for their lies and criminality.

As set forth in a motion I filed last Thursday, titled “Motion for Entry of Default (Judgment) and To Strike Defendants’ Answer to Third Amended Complaint”:

“The Obama Justice Department is playing its usual game, which has been to try to delay, obstruct and throw a monkey wrench into every aspect of this case, which the Court has observed is a matter of ‘pinnacle’ national importance.

“It thus stands to reason given the Court’s preliminary injunction order of December 16, 2013, which finds a clear cut violation of the Fourth Amendment concerning the unconstitutional collection of telephonic metadata, that not only a default judgment be entered, but that the Court enter judgment on liability against all of the individual Government Defendants pursuant to FRCP Rule 55(a) and 55(b), particularly given the flouting of this Court’s process. The issue of damages alleged against the individual Government Defendants can be tried later before the jury, after the parties have the opportunity to take discovery on damages.”

The reason President Obama and the other individual Government Defendants are liable individually for their illegal unconstitutional acts stems from the landmark Supreme Court case of Bivens v. Six Unknown Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), which also involved the Fourth Amendment. As also pointed out to the Court in my motion:

“Indeed, the individual Government Defendants … are liable for their tortious, unconstitutional acts under Bivens. The Supreme Court held in that case that a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s command against unreasonable searches and seizures by a federal agent acting under color of federal authority – precisely what is occurring now by Government Defendants – gives rise to a federal cause of action for damages as a consequence of the agent’s unconstitutional conduct. Specifically, the Court ruled  ‘… petitioner is entitled to recover money damages for any injuries he has suffered as a result of the agents’ violation of the Amendment.’”

Help Larry Klayman with his class-action suit against Obama’s use of the NSA to violate Americans’ rights

As a result of the Supreme Court Bivens’ precedent, the real possibility exists, whether or not Judge Leon enters a default judgment at this time on liability, that when our case is tried Obama and the other individual Government Defendants will be socked by a jury for huge monetary damages, in addition to the injunction that we have already obtained to stop the outrageous spying by the NSA.

In addition to our request that Judge Leon enter judgment for liability now against Obama and the other individual Government Defendants, my motion also seeks to strike, as lawyers say, their answer of the non-individual Government Defendants, which are the NSA and the Justice Department, which signs off on the illegal spy programs through the certifications of Attorney General Eric Holder. The reason for this aspect of our motion is because the Obama Justice Department only answered that part of our complaint that suited them and withheld information, on the bogus claims of national security. So what I asked Judge Leon to do was to require the Obama Justice Department to submit two answers, one that is for the public to see and one that would be submitted to the court in camera, that is for only the judge to see at this stage since he has a security clearance. As the judge is an honest man, I trust that he would “do the right thing” with this so-called national security information. My goal is to move our case into the discovery phase and then to trial as soon as possible.

For it is important that all matters involving the illegal NSA spy programs be litigated to a successful conclusion as soon as possible, as this most egregious violation of the citizenry’s rights in American history must be stopped immediately. And, indeed this is our mission, and this is why we have asked the Supreme Court to affirm Judge Leon’s Dec. 16, 2013, preliminary injunction order at this time.

Each day our constitutional rights continue to be violated is one day too many. It is time to wage a legal revolution, and the case before Judge Leon is just one of the tools that must be used to end the tyranny of President Obama, his NSA henchmen and others in both political parties who have sold We the People out to the devil of government corruption and subjugation.

Media wishing to interview Larry Klayman, please contact media@wnd.com.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/nsa-spy-case-heats-up/#yxHARvvTBejM0fve.99