President Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay, continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals and asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo)

Published originally in Los Angeles Times on September 30, 2011. Republished in Common Dreams by Jonathan Turley.

He may prove the most disastrous president in our history in terms of civil liberties.

Related: President Obama Richly Deserves To Be Dumped

Related: Turley: In terms of civil liberties, Obama may be “the most disastrous president in our history”

With the 2012 presidential election before us, the country is again caught up in debating national security issues, our ongoing wars and the threat of terrorism. There is one related subject, however, that is rarely mentioned: civil liberties.

Protecting individual rights and liberties — apart from the right to be tax-free — seems barely relevant to candidates or voters. One man is primarily responsible for the disappearance of civil liberties from the national debate, and he is Barack Obama. While many are reluctant to admit it, Obama has proved a disaster not just for specific civil liberties but the civil liberties cause in the United States.

Civil libertarians have long had a dysfunctional relationship with the Democratic Party, which treats them as a captive voting bloc with nowhere else to turn in elections. Not even this history, however, prepared civil libertarians for Obama. After the George W. Bush years, they were ready to fight to regain ground lost after Sept. 11. Historically, this country has tended to correct periods of heightened police powers with a pendulum swing back toward greater individual rights. Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities. Candidate Obama capitalized on this swing and portrayed himself as the champion of civil liberties.

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the “just following orders” defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama’s personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush. Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected. Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured.

It’s almost a classic case of the Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage bonds with his captor despite the obvious threat to his existence. Even though many Democrats admit in private that they are shocked by Obama’s position on civil liberties, they are incapable of opposing him. Some insist that they are simply motivated by realism: A Republican would be worse. However, realism alone cannot explain the utter absence of a push for an alternative Democratic candidate or organized opposition to Obama’s policies on civil liberties in Congress during his term. It looks more like a cult of personality. Obama’s policies have become secondary to his persona.

Ironically, had Obama been defeated in 2008, it is likely that an alliance for civil liberties might have coalesced and effectively fought the government’s burgeoning police powers. A Gallup poll released this week shows 49% of Americans, a record since the poll began asking this question in 2003, believe that “the federal government poses an immediate threat to individuals’ rights and freedoms.” Yet the Obama administration long ago made a cynical calculation that it already had such voters in the bag and tacked to the right on this issue to show Obama was not “soft” on terror. He assumed that, yet again, civil libertarians might grumble and gripe but, come election day, they would not dare stay home.

This calculation may be wrong. Obama may have flown by the fail-safe line, especially when it comes to waterboarding. For many civil libertarians, it will be virtually impossible to vote for someone who has flagrantly ignored the Convention Against Torture or its underlying Nuremberg Principles. As Obama and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. have admitted, waterboarding is clearly torture and has been long defined as such by both international and U.S. courts. It is not only a crime but a war crime. By blocking the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for torture, Obama violated international law and reinforced other countries in refusing investigation of their own alleged war crimes. The administration magnified the damage by blocking efforts of other countries like Spain from investigating our alleged war crimes. In this process, his administration shredded principles on the accountability of government officials and lawyers facilitating war crimes and further destroyed the credibility of the U.S. in objecting to civil liberties abuses abroad.

In time, the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties. Now the president has begun campaigning for a second term. He will again be selling himself more than his policies, but he is likely to find many civil libertarians who simply are not buying.

© 2011 The Los Angeles Times

Jonathan Turley is a professor of law at George Washington University.

Related Video: FBI to Expand Domestic Surveillance Power

Posted by Gypsy Chief

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There was one remark in last night’s GOP debate that we here at PFAW whole-heartedly agreed with. Asked about his view on judicial appointments, Mitt Romney said:

Let me note that the key thing I think the president is going to do, is going to be with the longest legacy. It’s going to be appointing Supreme Court and justices throughout the judicial system. As many as half the justices in the next four years are going to be appointed by the next president.

Judicial nominees will indeed be the most lasting legacy of the next president. And that’s why we can’t afford to hand over those decisions to Mitt Romney.

At last night’s debate, Romney joined his fellow candidates in praising Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative base. Under these justices, the Court has moved farther to the right than it has in decades, consistently privileging big corporations over individual Americans. When Romney declared this summer that “corporations are people, my friend,” he was summarizing, and approving of, the Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

But it’s not just that Romney wants more Alitos and Thomases on the Supreme Court. Romney sent a signal that he would move the federal courts even farther to the right than they are today when he took on Robert Bork as his campaign’s chief legal advisor. Bork’s conservativism is so extreme that a bipartisan majority of the Senate rejected him for the Supreme Court in 1987. He was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He thought it was just fine to criminalize homosexuality. He was a professed fan of censorship. And since then, he has become even more extreme in his defense of corporate power and dismissal of individual rights. But not, apparently, too extreme for Mitt Romney.

Romney is absolutely right that appointing judges will be “the key thing” the next president will do. And it’s exactly the reason why he shouldn’t be president.

More on Robert Bork … here

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Why are these people protesting all over America? What on earth do they want? What are their demands? Part of the answer for me was revealed on Tuesday, October 25, last night, when Rachel Maddow interviewed Glenn Greenwald on his new book “With Liberty and Justice for Some“

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Security Theater for airline passengers

Perhaps you recall the major uproar over President George W. Bush’s use of massive telephone and wire tap surveillance in cooperation with major telecommunications companies after the New York and Washington 9-11 terror attacks.

Don't Worry, We Will Protect You

Ultimately the Congress adopted FISA legislation in 2006 that was supposed to curb these wiretaps by judicial review, with then U.S. Senator Barack Obama one of Bush’s leading critics.

Last Monday a three-judge federal appellate court dealt a serious blow to the Bush/Obama tactic for shielding government’s unconstitutional eavesdropping from judicial review by trying to place secret executive surveillance above and beyond the rule of law.

The unanimous court ruled that the plaintiffs’ fear that they will be subjected to expanded warrantless eavesdropping is reasonable given the sweeping powers the law vests in the Executive, that these fears substantially impede their work, and that these impediments constitute actual harm sufficient to allow them to challenge the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments.

The court’s ruling was a major victory for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in their continuing constitutional challenge to newest FISA law.

Note that I referred to the “Bush/Obama tactic” of conducting illegal surveillance.

Bi-Partisan & Unconstitutional

Nothing like “bipartisan cooperation” in Washington, eh?

Another horrendous example: last month the extension of the Bush-era PATRIOT Act jointly was assured by the most important Democratic power brokers (the Obama White House and Senators Feinstein and Leahy), plus the congressional Senate and House Republican leadership.

That’s the same sort of bipartisan coalition that has repeated for the last decade as constitutional civil liberties in the U.S. steadily have been eroded in the specious name of fighting “terrorism.”

Only 26 of the 241 House Republicans, larded with scores of new Tea Party supposed pro-US constitutionalists, voted against extension of the PATRIOT Act. Did they even read it?

[A note to the reader: Cory Gardner betrayed his 'small government' roots by voting to let snoopy FBI agents see what you read at the library.]

Repressive Laws, Here & There

On the very same day that President Obama demanded that Egypt repeal its repressive 30-year-old ”emergency law,” he joined with those House Republicans to extend America’s own emergency law, the PATRIOT Act, for three more years — with no new judicial or congressional oversight.

Another example: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admonished Egypt’s faltering Mubarak government for imposing an Internet blackout during what would be successful protests, calling it a baseless attempt to limit free speech during a time of social upheaval.

But can you believe that President Obama wants another new law that would give him the power to use an Internet kill switch? The law would allow the president to block access to the world wide web if an Egypt-style revolt or other unrest occurred in the U.S.

Obama Wants to Read Your Email

Not to be outdone, the Obama U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) also wants another new law too. This one would require Internet companies to retain data and records of user activity online. In doing so, the Obama administration is supporting measures advocated by the Bush administration that pose a grave threat to free speech and the freedom of the Internet. The sweeping legislation would cover cell phone service, Internet records, and email.

Data retention legislation would jeopardize the privacy of millions of Americans who use the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, “A legal obligation to log users’ Internet use, paired with weak federal privacy laws that allow the government to easily obtain those records, would dangerously expand the government’s ability to surveil its citizens, damage privacy, and chill freedom of expression.”

Once again, congressional Republicans are more than happy to cooperate in passing such a dangerous law; anything to go after those awful terrorists — even if it shreds the U.S. Constitution.

Laptops Galore

Although they can cite no legal basis for their high-handed actions, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security claims that its agents have the right to look though the contents of a international traveler’s electronic devices, including laptops, cameras and cell phones, and to keep the devices or copy the contents in order to continue searching them once the traveler has been allowed to enter the U.S., regardless of whether the traveler is suspected of any wrongdoing.

Documents obtained by the ACLU in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records related to the DHS policy reveal that more than 6,600 travelers, nearly half of whom are American citizens, were subjected to electronic device searches at the border between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010.

No law authorizes this power nor is there any judicial or congressional body overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing. And the citizens to whom this is done have no recourse — not even to have their property returned to them.

FBI Run Amok

In a review of nearly 2,500 pages of documents released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed what I would call alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence investigation practices. The documents suggest that FBI intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than previously assumed.

These FBI flagrant legal violations included submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoenas and accessing password protected documents without a warrant. In at least one fifth of the cases specific violations of the U.S. Constitution were cited.

Based on a review of reports by the FBI top its own Intelligence Oversight Board, from 2001 to 2008, the FBI admitted approximately 800 violations of the Constitution, laws, executive orders, or regulations governing intelligence investigations, although it is likely that significantly under-states the actual number of violations.

From 2001 to 2008, the FBI investigated, at minimum, 7000 potential intelligence violations. Based on the proportion of violations reported to the IOB and the FBI’s own statements regarding the number of violations, the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, executive order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.

One year ago, the Inspector General’s Office, the independent DoJ audit arm, issued a lengthy report (pdf) detailing that the FBI, for the years 2003-2005, had used “National Security Letters” (NSLs) to gather information on thousands of Americans in violation of the law. Under the PATRIOT Act, “NSLs” permit the FBI and other federal agencies to obtain all sorts of invasive information from telecoms, Internet and email providers, even health care providers, without any judicial warrants or any other oversight of any kind.

Last year’s IG report documented thousands of cases where the FBI abused the extraordinary power of NSLs — the FBI made false statements to obtain the information, did so where the information had nothing to do with any pending investigations, obtained far more data than even The PATRIOT Act allows.

And if you think this power is being aimed solely at suspected terrorists, think again. No wonder that some Swiss and other offshore banks refuse to discuss by telephone their accounts with Americans.

Freedom of Speech Curbs

The so-called Shield bill, now introduced in both houses of Congress in response to the WikiLeaks disclosures, would amend the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it a crime for any person knowingly and willfully to disseminate, “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States,” any classified information “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States.”

Although this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or otherwise circulate the information after it has been leaked. At the very least, the act should be expressly limited to situations in which the spread of the classified information poses a clear and imminent danger of grave harm to the nation.

A Plague on Both Houses

And by that I mean both political parties and both houses of the U.S. Congress – both of which have lost their understanding of American history and an appreciation for the genius and meaning of our Constitution and our constitutional system.

Be assured that the Sovereign Society in this time of great troubles will continue to give you not only a truthful account of the threats we face, but specific legal ways and means to protect yourself, your family and your wealth.

What bothers me most, as a conservative, as an attorney and as a student of American history, is that the great mass of U.S. citizens are oblivious of the fact that their rights and liberties are being destroyed. Most seem unaware, and those who do know a little about what’s happening, seem unconcerned.

Dark days for Americans and for our freedoms.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

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Predicting that Obama will be a one-term president is easy: Americans vote their pocketbooks.

[A note to the reader: This article would have more weight if the Republicans could find some credible candidate to run in 2012. The danger to the country is that Obama gets re-elected and then misunderstands the meaning of that.]

There is nothing remotely ideological or personal in my prediction that President Obama will lose the 2012 election. Both parties are equally out of touch with reality in my view, and both suppport the same things: a global Empire, an increasingly intrusive Savior State, a shadow banking system which is no longer under the control of State institutions (rather, the banks control the institutions), and various crony-capitalist cartels which fund political campaigns and partner with the Central State’s bloated, unaccountable fiefdoms. The only visible difference between the two parties is slight variations in the relative growth rates of the most-favored cartels and fiefdoms.

President Obama seems like a nice guy. Many people said the same thing about George W. Bush. While a likeable personality is a plus in a media-obsessed society, American elections boil down to this: Americans vote their pocketbook, and their pocketbooks will be a lot lighter by November 2012.

President Obama has several key flaws which have doomed his presidency.

1. His leadership style is one of consensus and compromise. This works OK in a caretaker setting in which there are no crises and no demands for bold changes of course. Unfortunately, this era is defined by structural crises, and a leadership based on gaining consensus and compromise is basically a rudderless one in this environment.
2. He does not understand economics or finance, nor is he secure about making decisions on financial topics. As a result he deferred to the “experts,” who just happened to be Wall Street cronies and insiders who easily swayed the President with their hobgoblin stories of financial meltdown and ruin if we didn’t “save the banking sector from losses.”
3. His grasp of history is poor. The same can be said of most presidents, but Obama failed to grasp the historic opportunity to set a new sustainable course for the nation’s banking and financial sectors, and thus for its economy. He opted instead to save and protect the corrupt and embezzlement-based banking sector from losses, and he continues to do so with “extend and pretend” policies.

   In a similar fashion, he has allowed the National Security State and the Global Empire to expand without any limitations.

4. He has no visible core beliefs beyond a vague sense that the Federal government and its extension, the American Empire, are forces for good. His policies can be boiled down to: support and expand the Savior State and its many fiefdoms, support and expand the Global Empire and National Security State, and allow the banking system and its Power Elites to set the agenda and control the oversight agencies and institutions.

His signature accomplishment, the “Obama-care reform” of the nation’s sickcare system, simply extends the power of existing cartels and fiefdoms and delivers an ever-larger slice of the national income to their coffers. In its basic parameters, the “reform” could easily have been supported and passed by socially liberal Republican presidents such as Richard Nixon. There is nothing remotely progressive or radical about “pooling” insurance cartels and wet-paper-bag bureaucratic tests of “the most effective treatments.”

These are simply technocratic layers added to a bloated, corrupt, venal and destructive system that already costs twice as much as those of our advanced-economy competitors.

In addition to these flaws, he has made fatal policy errors which doom the economy to implosion by November 2012

All of his administration’s policies can be distilled down to these three points:

1. The banking sector is the most important foundation of the economy. The Central State and its proxy, the Federal Reserve, pumped some $14 trillion (by some measures, $23 trillion) in cash, credit, guarantees and backstops into the banking sector and its cloaked twin, the Shadow banking System.

   Meanwhile, little to nothing was done for the cash-strapped consumer or citizenry. Why?

2. The “problem” is lack of credit and “confidence.” If the State and Fed flood the banking system with credit and “restore confidence” by goosing the stock market, then people will start borrowing and spending again, and everything will be “fixed.”

   This presumes demand is strong, and all that’s needed is credit for people to satisfy their thirst for more goods and services.

   Meanwhile, back in reality, people realized they didn’t need a third car, fourth TV, 17th “cute blouse,” 23rd pair of shoes, etc., and now that their home is worth less than their mortgage (or their remaining equity is minimal), they can’t really afford the luxury travel, boats, etc. they enjoyed when they thought their house would keep rising in value forever and tapping that rising equity was painless.

   Demand is slack because everyone who could afford more crap already owns more crap than they need or even want. The percentage of the populace who would like more stuff cannot afford more stuff. Their household incomes and wages are declining, and their expenses for essentials are rising.

   The Fed’s largesse to banks (free money in unlimited quantities) doesn’t reach them; all it does is boost assets held by the top 10%.

3. Boosting the assets of this top 10% (or 20% if you include those who have equity of some sort beyond the $2,500 in their IRA) will cause a “wealth effect” that will “trickle down” to the lower 80% as the top 20% buy more Coach handbags, enjoy fine dining at tony upscale restaurants, etc.

   Unfortunately, this may help boost Coach’s profit margins, but the vast majority of the “trickle-down” consists of low-paying retail clerks and busboys.

   In other words, the “wealth effect” is bogus, a charade deployed to defend the pillaging of the economy via financialization and Fed intervention.

4. Pushing the dollar lower in a “beggar thy neighbor” currency war is the best way to boost the U.S. economy. Apparently no one in the President’s team looked at financial history to identify the nations which grew rich and powerful by debasing their currency.

   In a perverse blowback to this misguided policy, corporate profits earned overseas were certainly goosed, but so were import prices, one of the reasons (along with the Fed’s easy-money quantitative easing) for rising costs to consumers.

If you set out to design a policy that impoverished 80% of the citizenry and channeled a larger share of the national income to the top 10%, then this is precisely the set of policies you would pursue.

Nothing important has been fixed; nothing important has even been addressed. The institutions of governance are captured and corraled by the monied Elites to the point that the government has lost control of its own institutions, which now rule as quasi-independent fiefdoms. The citizenry, bought off on the cheap by stale Bread (rapacious student loans, food stamps which offer the veneer of normalcy, extended unemployment benefits so no angry mobs form, etc.) and dazed and distracted by the Media Circus, keep quiet in their complicity, while the Power Elites revel in the freedoms offered by a caretaker Administration.

If President Obama had fought for fundamental structural reforms and lost, he would still have support. Yes, Congress holds the pursestrings, but let’s not forget the President appoints his own staff and advisors, and wields great power via Executive Orders. He could have submitted a 5-page Financial Reform Bill and promised to veto anything else. If the Power Elites watered it down, then he could have vetoed it and gone directly to the public. But he did none of these things.

Courtesy of correspondent George B., here is a chart of public and private debt over the past decade, from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Notice that all the Administration and Congress have done is boost Federal debt to replace the “missing” private debt (missing because incomes are declining, housing equity has crashed and the consumer overborrowed for a decade).

This is mindless Keynesian policy on auto-pilot. As I have reported before, the Federal Government is borrowing and spending some $6 trillion in a mere four years, almost doubling the nation’s debt, and all that’s been accomplished is the Power Elites’ share of the national income has risen and GDP has flatlined.

The structural dislocations and imbalances remain firmly in place; a financial sector dependent on fraud has been “saved,” and an economy sick with an addiction to rampant financialization has been given plenty of smack to keep it from going through a desperately needed withdrawal.

The Keynesians have no answer as to when the economy will “recover” without the Central State borrowing 11% of GDP every year to prop up its various cartels and fiefdoms. They have no answer because they have no understanding of the imbalances, the fraud, the financialization or of the feudal partnership of the State and crony-capitalist cartels.

Obama has lost his “progressive” base, because he’s done nothing remotely progressive. He has lost the middle because his Administration has overseen their gradual impoverishment at the hands of Financial Power Elites. He has offered them phony facsimiles of reform slicked down with the tiresome “soaring rhetoric” of a con artist so besotted with his own story that he actually believes the BS himself.

He can count on the public-union vote and a few of the State fiefdoms he’s enriched and enlarged at the expense of the common good, but as the addict (the economy) goes downhill, slowly destroyed by the ever-larger doses of smack administered by the Fed and the Central State, then the consent of the governed will be irrevocably lost–not just by President Obama, but by the entire Status Quo.

The President is now a candidate hoping to scoop up a cool $1 billion to blow on another long, greasy media blitz, but I would be surprised if he rakes in much from the commoners and serfs straining to keep the wheels of their household finances turning. He will of course collect big bucks from various crony-cartels and contractors who have benefited from his bogus “reforms” and unstinting support of the banking sector, but his true-believer supporters will be thinned down to a few Elites, die-hard Democratic hacks and the delusional by mid-2012.

His opponents may fare little better unless they are willing to tackle the dominance of crony cartels, government fiefdoms and Financial Power Elites whose fat fingers remain firmly on the throat of the fast-expiring nation.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

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Backs Big Govt. Obama Justice Dept

H.R. 514:

To extend expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 relating to access to business records, individual terrorists as agents of foreign powers, and roving wiretaps until December 8, 2011.
~~ Source: Govtrack.us

Translation

Authorizes snoopy FBI agents to see what you read at the library. Authorizes roving wiretaps inside the USA without any warrant. Authorizes survellience on people not connected to any terror investigation.

Politico Wrapup

House Republicans Tuesday night got a harsh introduction to the majority, as more than two dozen rank-and-file GOP lawmakers voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act.

And just hours before the vote on the Bush-era homeland security measure, GOP leaders yanked a trade bill from consideration as the Ways and Means Committee is “working through issues.”

There was no sign that the leadership saw the setbacks coming. The Patriot Act was moved to the floor under suspension of the rules — a provision that requires two-thirds majority (290 votes) to pass and is often used for noncontroversial legislation. After holding the vote open well past the 15-minute window, it failed 277 to 148 with five Republicans and four Democrats not voting.

Republican leaders will bring the bill back to the floor under a rule, where it will almost certainly secure the 218-vote threshold.

It was a specifically rough patch for Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was the subject of much finger-pointing after the vote, as he is charged with vote-counting. Erica Elliott, spokesman for McCarthy, noted that most House Democrats voted against the bill, “deny[ing] their own administration’s request for key weapons in the war on terror.”

Other Republicans blamed Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) for the debacle. Sensenbrenner is a senior Judiciary Committee Republican.

Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) office had no comment on the trade bill or Patriot Act failure. He did not vote, which is somewhat of a tradition for the speaker. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and McCarthy voted for the Patriot Act extension.

The Patriot Act has long been a contentious issue on Capitol Hill. It was passed shortly after Sept. 11 to give the government expanded surveillance powers, while breaking down barriers between the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies.

But many — ranging from liberals like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), to libertarians like Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) — have long expressed concerns over the sweeping breadth of the legislation. Kucinich called Tuesday’s vote a “significant defeat,” adding that it will “fuel opposition” to the measure nationwide.

Indeed, many members were concerned about Patriot Act provisions that would allow the government to access medical and business records, GOP sources said.

And a handful of the no-votes were freshmen who felt completely uninformed by their leadership. Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.), who voted for the bill, said he “didn’t know anything about (the vote) until today.”

“In a free society you have to be very careful as to taking away the civil liberties of the American people” Rokita said. “Even if the bill is well intentioned and the law is well intentioned it can be used against innocent people. So that was my concern. But I’m here looking at a reauthorization at the end of the year and I’ll look at it more closely then.”

GOP leaders seemed unable to flip swing votes as the bill stalled on the floor. McCarthy and Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) cornered Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) on the floor — the Georgia appropriator didn’t flip his vote.

Twenty-six Republicans voted against the Patriot Act extension, but only eight were freshmen — Reps. Justin Amash (Mich.), Mike Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Chris Gibson (N.Y.), Randy Hultgren (Ill.), Raul Labrador (Idaho), Bobby Schilling (Ill.), Dave Schweikert (Ariz.) and Rob Woodall (Ga.).

Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) voted against the extension, while his wife, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), voted for it.

Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Steve Israel (N.Y.) and Henry Cuellar (Texas) all voted for the bill. Committee leaders including Reps. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) also voted for the bill. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Judiciary Committee Ranking Democrat John Conyers (Mich.) voted against extending the bill.

Altogether, 122 Democrats voted no, and 67 voted yes. Republican votes to back the bill numbered 210.

“I don’t how much you can read into one vote,” Hoyer told POLITICO. “After all, we’re still very early in the session, we’ve had very little business on the floor, as you’ve noticed.”

Hoyer added, “I think they’re clearly going to have difficulty. When you have their response to the State of the Union, and Paul Ryan being their choice and then Michele Bachmann also gives one, they’re clearly differences within their conference and they’re going to have to work it out.”

Other Democrats were giddy Tuesday night at the defeat. They knocked Republicans for not putting the bill through committee – something they all but promised they’d do during the midterm campaign season. And Hoyer’s office called it “another rough day for the new majority.”

Another Democratic aide put it more simply: “Governing 101: make sure you have the votes. Governing 102: make sure you understand your own members.”

John Bresnahan, Richard E. Cohen, Meredith Shiner and Scott Wong contributed to this report.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Democracy: de-moc-ra-cy, government by the people; the common people of a community,
as distinguished from any privileged class

From DAVE LINDORFF (http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/377)
This Can’t Be Happening Blog

According to the latest poll conducted by CBS “60 Minutes” and the magazine Vanity Fair, 61 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy as the primary way to cut the budget. The same poll finds that the second most popular first choice for cutting the nation’s budget deficit, at 20 percent, is cutting the military budget. That is, 81 percent of us–four out of five–would cut the deficit by taxing the rich and/or slashing military spending.

Only four percent of those polled favored cutting Medicare, the government-run program that provides health care for the elderly and disabled, and only three percent favored cutting Social Security.

President Obama meanwhile, appointed a so-called National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (quickly dubbed the “Catfood Commission” by critics) to come up with proposals to cut the budget deficit. He named as co-chairs former Republican Senator from Wyoming Alan Simpson, a troglodyte sworn enemy of Social Security who publicly declared it to be “a milk cow with 310 million tits,” and Erskine Bowles, a retired investment banker and former chief of staff to President Clinton who says he want to cut spending, not raise taxes, which, when it comes to Social Security, means lower benefits for retirees.

The writing on the wall appears to be that the White House, and Democrats and Republicans in Congress, are looking to raise the retirement age, currently 66, to 68 or 69, to reduce or at least limit the inflation adjustment in Social Security benefits, and perhaps also to increase the payroll tax on current workers. What they want to do is balance the budget by screwing with our retirement. What they do not do is raise taxes on the rich and on investment income, two steps which, if taken, could fully fund Social Security indefinitely into the future.

Already, the president and Congress have agreed to extend tax breaks for the rich, even though the vast majority of the American public wants the rich to pay higher taxes.

A second poll, this time by CNN, reports that 63 percent of Americans oppose the US War in Afghanistan and want it ended. Only 35 percent say they support the war (now in its ninth year).

Yet the president, who originally promised he would end US involvement in 2011, is now saying the US will “end combat operations” in that war-torn country in 2014–a turn of phrase that doesn’t even mean the war would be ended that year (US combat operations allegedly ended in Iraq last summer, but some 50,000 American troops and many more private mercenaries are still there today and will be next year too, unless they are thrown out by the Iraqi government).

Even on the matter of cutting military spending, and with the US currently at war, a Financial Times/Harris poll found in November of last year that a third of Americans thought cutting the Pentagon budget was a good idea, and another third said it would not be a bad thing, with only just over a third saying it was a bad idea. Only 30 percent said that they were concerned that cutting military spending might pose a security risk. Instead of cutting though, the Obama administration with Congressional backing has continued to raise military spending to record levels not seen since World War II, when the US was in a state of all-out war and full national mobilization.

Last April, while Congress was considering the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill, a Pew poll found that 64 percent of Americans favored regulations placing a maximum limit on the permissible size of a bank. Only 27 percent opposed such a limit. Yet Congress passed, and the president signed into law, a bill that allows banks to grow even larger, without any constraint on size.

A Pew Charitable Trust poll released last March found that 52 percent of Americans favor setting limits on carbon emissions by vehicles and power plants, even if such limits meant higher energy prices. Only 35 percent opposed such limits on emissions. And yet Congress and President Obama have refused to offer up with any plan to limit CO2 emissions.

Finally, for decades, a majority of Americans have favored some kind of national healthcare system, whether a fully socialized plan such as that in the UK, or a so-called single-payer type plan where the government is the insurer of all citizens, as in Canada. In May 2009, as the battle over health care reform was heating up, a CNN poll found Americans favored a government health plan by 69-29%.
What polls showed Americans didn’t want was a system of private insurers with a government mandate that everyone had to buy insurance or pay a penalty. Guess what kind of “health reform” Congress and the President gave them? Hint: It wasn’t socialized medicine.

What’s wrong with this picture?

On every key issue of public concern–protecting Social Security, reforming and universalizing health care, re-regulating the banking industry, ending America’s endless wars, cutting the military budget, and taking serious steps to combat global climate change, the government in this supposed democracy has gone against the wishes of the majority of the public.

Clearly, whatever it is, this is no democracy we are living in today.

No wonder the American government is so busy figuring out new ways to spy on and monitor us citizens, to militarize police departments, to construct ever bigger prisons, to restrict access to information, and to control and intimidate the media! Instead of being of, by and for the public, it has become the public’s enemy.

Revolution: rev-uh-loo-shun, an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.
~~

Photo Credit: Fire Dog Lake

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

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Latest News

OpenBSD has conducted a security audit. They found security errors, now fixed, but no FBI planted backdoors made it into the code. More here. Meanwhile, a former FBI agent says “Experiment yes Success no”. The story has been all over the Internet including BoingBoing.net. Geeks say that the story will go away. Perhaps, but the public policy implications will not go away. Do we want an Imperial Presidency that will keep pushing for this?

Original story after the jump

Original Story

OpenBSD has long had a reputation as the most secure commercially available operating system. No wonder that a recently released report has security experts on alert.

Quoting from Privacy Inc. – CNET News:

Allegations that the FBI surreptitiously placed a back door into the OpenBSD operating system have alarmed the computer security community, prompting calls for an audit of the source code and claims that the charges must be a hoax.

The report surfaced in e-mail made public yesterday from a former government contractor, who alleged that he worked with the FBI to implement “a number of back doors” in OpenBSD, which has a reputation for high security and is used in some commercial products.

Here is the email exchange, made public by Theo de Raadt, benevolent dictator of OpenBSD

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List: openbsd-tech
Subject: Allegations regarding OpenBSD IPSEC
From: Theo de Raadt
Date: 2010-12-14 22:24:39
Message-ID: 201012142224.oBEMOdWM031222 () cvs ! openbsd ! org
[Download message RAW]

I have received a mail regarding the early development of the OpenBSD
IPSEC stack. It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company
they worked for) accepted US government money to put backdoors into
our network stack, in particular the IPSEC stack. Around 2000-2001.

Since we had the first IPSEC stack available for free, large parts of
the code are now found in many other projects/products. Over 10
years, the IPSEC code has gone through many changes and fixes, so it
is unclear what the true impact of these allegations are.

The mail came in privately from a person I have not talked to for
nearly 10 years. I refuse to become part of such a conspiracy, and
will not be talking to Gregory Perry about this. Therefore I am
making it public so that
(a) those who use the code can audit it for these problems,
(b) those that are angry at the story can take other actions,
(c) if it is not true, those who are being accused can defend themselves.

Of course I don’t like it when my private mail is forwarded. However
the “little ethic” of a private mail being forwarded is much smaller
than the “big ethic” of government paying companies to pay open source
developers (a member of a community-of-friends) to insert
privacy-invading holes in software.

—-

From: Gregory Perry
To: “deraadt@openbsd.org”
Subject: OpenBSD Crypto Framework
Thread-Topic: OpenBSD Crypto Framework
Thread-Index: AcuZjuF6cT4gcSmqQv+Fo3/+2m80eg==
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2010 23:55:25 +0000
Message-ID: <8D3222F9EB68474DA381831A120B1023019AC034@mbx021-e2-nj-5.exch021.domain.local>
Accept-Language: en-US
Content-Language: en-US
X-MS-Has-Attach:
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”iso-8859-1″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
MIME-Version: 1.0
Status: RO

Hello Theo,

Long time no talk. If you will recall, a while back I was the CTO at
NETSEC and arranged funding and donations for the OpenBSD Crypto
Framework. At that same time I also did some consulting for the FBI,
for their GSA Technical Support Center, which was a cryptologic
reverse engineering project aimed at backdooring and implementing key
escrow mechanisms for smart card and other hardware-based computing
technologies.

My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you
aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and
side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express
purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system
implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI. Jason
Wright and several other developers were responsible for those
backdoors, and you would be well advised to review any and all code
commits by Wright as well as the other developers he worked with
originating from NETSEC.

This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they
more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were
present and didn’t want to create any derivative products based upon
the same.

This is also why several inside FBI folks have been recently
advocating the use of OpenBSD for VPN and firewalling implementations
in virtualized environments, for example Scott Lowe is a well
respected author in virtualization circles who also happens top be on
the FBI payroll, and who has also recently published several tutorials
for the use of OpenBSD VMs in enterprise VMware vSphere deployments.

Merry Christmas…

Gregory Perry
Chief Executive Officer
GoVirtual Education

“VMware Training Products & Services”

540-645-6955 x111 (local)
866-354-7369 x111 (toll free)
540-931-9099 (mobile)
877-648-0555 (fax)

http://www.facebook.com/GregoryVPerry

http://www.facebook.com/GoVirtual

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Photo Credits: Geek Coefficient Blog

Posted by The GNUinator

As we end 2010 The American Prospect has just published The Progressive Agenda Scorecard.

Photo by: (White House/Pete Souza)

Quoting now:

This magazine declared the dawn of 2009 “Our Moment.” The election of Barack Obama and a Democratic majority offered progressives a chance to deal with decades of deferred maintenance on the American dream. Our agenda included tackling long-standing priorities, undoing Bush-era debacles, and taking up new ideas that emerged from both our movement and from Obama himself.
How much was achieved before the 2010 election — and how much is possible in the remaining two years of Obama’s term? As The New York Times notes, “Many liberal activists regularly complain that their most fundamental issues remain largely unaddressed.” Others note that Obama’s first two years were the most productive for a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson.
In the dropdown menu that follows, we take a clear-eyed look at the state of the progressive agenda.

These are the dropdown menus items:

• Regulate Big Banks
• Keep the Internet Open with Net Neutrality
• Ends Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Universal Health Insurance with a Public Option
• Reduce and Secure Nuclear Weapons
• Price Carbon and Reducing Emissions
• RAISE TAXES ON RICH — NOT WORKING FAMILIES
• Reform Immigration Laws
• Invest In Education and School Improvement
• Secure Reproductive Rights
• Repeal Policies That Discriminate Against Gay Americans
• End Torture
• Reform Lobbying, Campaign Finance, and Open-Records
• Repeal Policies That Violate Civil Liberties
• Non-Starters

Bottom line: This is an important article. Every morning we hear that Obama has allowed himself to be pushed too far left by liberal bloggers. Joe should know better. We can expect the right wing noise machine to call President Obama a socialist, etc. The real story is that Obama has a mixed record. He has continued some of the worst policies of the Bush administration. The late lamented imperial presidency lives on.

Guantanamo Bay is still open. The Obama Jutice Department appeals matters the campaign said they would end. The TSA gives us security-theater with hardly any Congressional oversight. Banks are still too big to fail. I think the administration has failed to nurture credible surrogates who would counter right wing misinformation and lies. The administration seems to have given up on the effort to combat climate change.

Posted by Gypsy Chief