Archive for the ‘Constitution’ Category
In California, an incumbent Congresswoman, who has voted for the indefinite detention of citizens without trial (NDAA) and the surveillance state (Patriot Act, etc.), is expecting the voters of her district to return her to office. She does not believe that Americans should enjoy their fourth amendment right to privacy or their fifth amendment right to due process. She voted for corporate bailouts but against auditing the Fed to allow the American people to know which huge financial corporations (foreign and domestic) have benefited from the secret actions of our central bank.
Given her strongly anti-civil liberties positions, you’d be forgiven for thinking she is a neo-con Republican.
In fact, she is a Democrat. Her name is Nancy Pelosi and she’s running to keep her seat in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, in Tennessee, another incumbent, who has voted with Pelosi on all of the above and votes with our Democratic President 61% of the time, is expecting his constituents to return him to the Senate.
Given his agreement with Pelosi on everything that really matters (right down to farm subsidies), you’d be forgiven for thinking that he, too, is a “progressive” Democrat. In fact, he is a Republican, and his name is Bob Corker.
Americans live in a one-party nation where the take-down of basic civil rights, the surveillance state, complete abrogation of the Constitution and crony corporatism are matters of consensus — beyond debate by our lawmakers.
The votes cast by Pelosi that should insult every principled liberal in San Francisco are the very same ones that were cast by Corker and should insult every principled conservative in Tennessee. That seeming paradox arises because America’s federal politicians now have more philosophically in common with each other than they have even with the voters of their own parties. And if you ever need a definition of oligarchy, feel free to use that one.
This is the age in which the Pelosis and Corkers of our political establishment no longer oppose each other, because they find common interest in their assault on the Bill of Rights that contains those principles held dear by decent liberals and conservatives alike.
This is the age in which a vote for a party-funded Democrat is a vote against Democracy and a vote for a party-funded Republican is a vote against the Republic.
It bears repeating: Pelosi, a Democrat, supports indefinitely detaining Americans without trial and invading their privacy without warrant or probable cause, at odds with our Bill of Rights. Corker, a member of the party that is supposed to oppose her, agrees with her. Corker, a Republican, supports secret bailouts of large corporations. Pelosi, a member of the party that is supposed to oppose him, agrees with him.
But of greater interest than the homogeneity that characterizes our American oligarchy is the heterogeneity of the electoral fight-back it is finally spawning.
In California’s Eighth, Pelosi is being challenged by a man who loves liberty and the ideals of a Constitutional Republic. His name is John Dennis. Like most of his liberal constituents, he is passionate about civil rights. He wants government out of our bedrooms and our relationships. He wants no one to be detained without trial or to suffer an invasion of privacy without cause. He wants no innocent person killed in an unauthorized war against a foreign nation that does not threaten America. Where it matters, he is more liberal (in the true sense of the word) than Pelosi.
Dennis is running as a Republican. He could as easily be running as an Independent but running Republican is the smart thing to do in the top-two-go-through electoral system that prevails in California, as it helps him to concentrate the votes of all those who would like Pelosi gone. Dennis’ persistence and integrity have won him enough financial support to finance a TV ad that exposes Pelosi’s ongoing assault against the Bill of Rights, which most of her supporters still know nothing about.
In Tennessee, Corker is also being challenged by a man who loves liberty and believes in a Constitutional Republic. His name is Dr. Shaun Crowell. Like most of his conservative constituents, he loves civil rights. He wants government out of our bedrooms and our pocket books. He wants no one ever to be detained without trial or to suffer an invasion of privacy without cause. He wants no innocent person killed in an unauthorized war in a foreign nation that does not threaten America. Where it matters, he is more conservative (in the true sense of the word) than Corker.
Since the incumbent is a fake Republican and the Democrat challenger seems to be more worried about the threat of gay couples’ committing to each other than economic collapse or the locking up of innocent Americans, Crowell is running as a libertarian-endorsed Independent. He’s already well ahead of the Democrat, and many Republicans in his district rightly identify him as a truer example of their stated principles than the incumbent who has the (R) after his name. This fact explains his extensive backing by local grass roots and tea party groups. Crowell’s integrity has gained him more funding than any other libertarian-backed candidate has attracted nationwide.
Between San Francisco and Tennessee is Colorado’s third district, where a young (30 years young) woman called Tisha Casida is also fighting for liberty in a bid to be elected to Congress. Unlike Dennis and Crowell, Casida is in a political swing state, and her race, unlike theirs, is a three-way race, in which she takes on both a Democrat challenger and a Republican incumbent as an Independent. While her opponents benefit from all of that special interest money that comes with their big party affiliations, Casida is funded by small amounts from myriad individuals. It’s a pittance next to the big party coffers, but still more than any independent candidate in her district has ever received. It runs into the tens of thousands, and her constituents-to-be should be delighted with what she has spent most of it on — gas. Casida has been tirelessly criss-crossing her rural district, speaking directly to its people. She converts most of those she speaks to because she discusses the corruption of our single-party system and, most importantly, the root causes of the problems that face her voters — rather than advocating a new state-delivered injustice as a solution to a problem caused by an old one.
Casida’s district is very rural and includes many voters who are off the grid. Those of liberal sensibility call themselves self-sustaining. Those of conservative sensibility call themselves self-reliant. But when she meets them in person, Casida can win over majorities from both groups, who notice that she is addressing issues that her opponents don’t even mention. If Casida does not win in Colorado, it won’t be because she failed to convince most of the voters: it will be simply be because most of them have never heard her speak.
Running in very different races under different political “labels,” Dennis, Crowell and Casida have diverse backgrounds, but they are united by a sense of frustration and indignation, a simple belief in common sense, justice and freedom, and their active participation in a political fight to free the American people from an oppressive political regime. If that sounds familiar, it is because it is exactly America’s founding story. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
The forces of oligarchy are the forces of homogenization and imposition. The forces of liberty, in contrast, are idealistic and pragmatic; diverse and adaptive. These are the very qualities that America “does best” — and in that fact lays our cause for hope. Dennis, Crowell and Casida are leaders in a movement that is harnessing America’s greatest strengths in the restoration of its greatest ideals. Those famously American characteristics suffice to justify our optimism that liberty shall again prevail in a renewed Constitutional Republic in which all citizens can live without fear or favor.
It is often said that it is darkest before the dawn. American politics are as dark as they have ever been, and no one knows when the sun of liberty will again peek above the horizon. The Blue Republican movement is proud to endorse John Dennis, Dr. Shaun Crowell and Tisha Casida . All the while ordinary Americans like them refuse to give up on our country and its political system, rest assured that the hour will eventually come when an oligarch gets beaten and dawn will break as the first cleansing beam of victory wakes a sleeping nation to the reality — and irrepressibility — of its promise.
Robin Koerner, who coined the term “Blue Republican” explains the Blue Republican philosophical and factual basis for supporting Ron Paul.
This lecture was recorded at Boise State University in January 2012.
American citizens are celebrating in the streets as their government snatched final victory in the War on Terror on 1 Dec. 2011 — through a maneuver that used legislative brilliance rather than bullets.
The moment of victory came when 61 senators passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal year 2012 that allows the indefinite military detention on American soil of American citizens who are merely suspected of having connections to terrorism.
To understand the genius of this legislation, some background is necessary. The Patriot Act, passed before the dust of the collapsed World Trade Center had settled, had already removed the fourth amendment rights of Americans to privacy, allowing federal authorities access to the private affairs of individuals without any court oversight. That act had also removed their rights under the first amendment to free speech, by making it illegal, for example, for one American to tell another that he has been served with a warrant under the Patriot Act — not, of course, a warrant issued by a court, but by a federal officer who can now write his own warrants without any judicial oversight.
What Senators McCain (R, Arizona) and Levin (D, Michigan), and those who voted for the legislation that they sponsored, cleverly realized, however, is that since the terrorists are attacking America for its freedoms and “way of life”, the only sure way to win the war is to eliminate all of those freedoms and way of life so that the terrorists will have no further reason to fight. (This is why the comprehensive laws that already exist in the USA that make the aiding and abetting of any terrorist organization or activity a crime, but leave untouched the inalienable rights of American citizens, simply do not suffice.)
For that reason, on December 1, an amendment to the aforementioned National Defense Authorization Act that would seek to preserve the very last freedom of Americans — to receive due process, including the right to a trial by Grand Jury, as required in the Constitution, before being detained by the state — was defeated, ensuring that no American freedom, and therefore no reason for the terrorists to hate America — any longer exists. Now, and thankfully for those who wish to defend the American values of peace and freedom, Americans can be detained by the military without trial or limitation.
The achievement of the U.S. Congress is all the greater in the light of the United States’ own Department of Defense study, headed by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, that collected and analyzed huge amounts of data on suicide terrorism — which is 12 times more dangerous than other forms of terrorism when measured by the number of people killed per act. In this U.S. government study, speakers of the local languages of the families of suicide bombers were sent to speak with family members of the terrorists to gain as much information as possible about the context and the people involved, and the database thus obtained on suicide terrorism is, as far as we know, the most comprehensive in the world.
The most astonishing conclusion of this work, however, was much more general: 95 percent of all suicide terrorist attacks — going back to the 1980s — are against countries that the terrorist deems to be occupying (in the sense of a military presence) physical territory that that the terrorist regards as a homeland. The reason this is astonishing is that this 95 percent figure includes all those radical Islamic groups who have attacked Israel and the USA, but it explains why the U.S., for example, has only experienced such attacks (such as 9/11 itself), from citizens of countries in which it has a military presence: that’s why, says the DOD study, we were hit by Saudis on 9-11, but not Iranians, Sudanese or representatives of other countries with a large radical Islamist contingent.
Thankfully, though, McCain and Levin — and the majority of the U.S. Congress — know better than to listen to their own military, whose studies are clearly distorted by their desire to understand their enemy so as to minimize the loss of life of soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines. Indeed, aware of the danger that understanding the true nature of the threat to the USA puts the country on the slippery slope to confining its actions to those that would actually counter this threat, and the possibility, therefore, of defeating it, removing the need for this new martial law, the National Defense Authorization Act has been carefully written with absolutely no mechanism of restoring the rights that have been removed when the terrorists put down their arms, as they are bound to do when they realize that their reason to fight has been, as many Americans can now be, “disappeared”.
This “locking in” of the elimination of the Bill of Rights will certainly help Americans sleep better in the knowledge that the war on terror, now won, will not begin again should the USA slip back, in a moment of weakness, to the freedoms that caused the foreign haters to take up arms against the United States in the first place.
There are, however, a few reports of fringe elements in the USA, most of whom seem naively enthralled by outmoded political ideologies such as Constitutionalism, and the “just war doctrine” (an outdated idea, rooted in the Judaic and Christian traditions, that wars are just if they increase the safety of the combatants, have a defined goal and are winnable), who are not joining the victory parades.
In interviews and social media, they have been repeating what appear superficially to be anachronistic pleas, but may in fact be something much more sinister — expressions of terrorist sympathies. Most of them seem to be a version of the idea that if America gives up its Bill of Rights for safety, that not only will the terrorists have won, but that America, itself, handed them the victory.
Indeed, one wrote, “If the government is going to protect my life, it must first leave my life full of the liberties that make it worth protecting.” Although such extremist sentiments could obviously become dangerous were they to take hold more widely, there is little danger of that, as the federal authorities already have their eyes on the dangerous elements who are most likely to share them — including people who manufacture coins out of precious metal, own weather-proofed ammunition, may be missing a finger or two, or — perhaps the most dangerous of all — those who typically have seven days of food in their home.
We should be glad that we no longer have to wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a terrorist food hoarder’s giant mushroom: the National Defense Authorization Act now permits the feds to lock her up forever on suspicion alone, without all the difficulties that attend a trial.
God Bless America.
I was very excited to read this from the “We The People Foundation”, concerning the Occupy Wall Street Movement… especially in light of my article on the subject that was published yesterday on Huff Po and elsewhere,
This is worth reading in its entirety.
Thank you to the author for what you did.
True liberals and any true conservatives should surely be equally angered by this.
Exercise for the reader. Name five other groups of people who were just following orders in the last century. (You may include the one mentioned in the article)