Imagine

Police confiscating cash and property without due process, stopping-and frisking suspiciously 'different' citizens for any damned reason.  Police SWAT teams invading private homes, terrorizing law abiding civilians, screaming obscenities for hours and waving automatic weapons; police harassing people trying to open their own doors; shooting a man over a dozen times for getting a pack of cigarettes out of his own car in his own driveway -- I could go on, and of course I have ranted endlessly and probably all too often -- and more than probably to no effect.

We're a nation of scared-shitless cowards and kept that way by endless fear mongering, endless promotion of anger by a 24 hour propaganda machine interested only in boosting ratings and profits by hiding the fact that violent crime is lower than in a hundred years and getting lower.  Most people you ask will tell you that things are getting more dangerous every day. A few of them may have a valid case for that.

One can't go for an hour without hearing some dimwitted diatribe about Obama's tyrannical government trying in Communist fashion to promote industrial safety or safe food and water and air -- and to reform our unfair and inadequate health system -- just like a fascist, but egregious infractions of Constitutional protections?  Hey, that's different, unless of course it's the second amendment so vital to that apocalyptic war against authority we dream about.

I read this morning about three Bronx kids, two girls and their brother, all siblings, who were verbally abused, handcuffed, beaten, choked, pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground by a swarm of police apparently for no better reason than for playing handball in a park while wearing Muslim hedjabs.  The girls had their scarves pulled off for the crime of not producing identification quickly enough while being black and/or Muslim, or so the police say.  Within moments dozens of police swarmed the area intimidating and tackling  bystanders and arresting one who tried to record a video of this obscenity.

"Come here, you little motherfucker, you like recording?" said one cop, mashing the 18 year old bystander's  face into the pavement;  punching  and pepper spraying him.

"Where's the phone? I'll break your arm." He screamed at the college student.

Of course the police have a cover story. Pulling one's 12 year old sister from a raging policeman who was "escorting" the children out of the park is criminal assault of course and the police were injured and had to be hospitalized -- of course and although Internal Affairs is "investigating" my bet, based on experience is that not a damned thing will happen to them. My guess is that this, like so many of the disgusting offenses that happen constantly all over the nation; like so many of the abuses of  civil rights and constitutional protection, whether it be the right to assembly, protection from searches, seizures without warrant, probable cause or any pretense of due process it will just fade away leaving only the stench of hate, racism, injustice, fear and smug hypocrisy. And all the while we will be concerned about what the leaders tell us to be concerned about; get angry on cue, ignore this fact and believe that fiction.  All the while we'll belabor the same talking points pursue the same bogeymen and we'll cringe in fear of  our neighbor's shotgun while Policemen carry machine guns, batter down our doors, blind us with gas, beat us with clubs, sodomize us with broomsticks and shoot down unarmed citizens and get way with it.

Imagine if you will, a boot stamping on a human face forever. Imagine a voice screaming "Freeze Motherfucker!"  forever.  Imagine.

 

What happens in Vegas

Needs to be heard around the world

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law

  -US Constitution, amendment III-

Of course our bill of rights is always being twisted by the perpetual state of hyperbole according to which we're always at war with drugs, poverty, crime, fear and moral decay.  Whether or not Osama Bin Laden hated us for what we're told is our 'freedom,' his attack on New York has been a gold mine for authoritarianism and the security state. Our conflict with Islamic terrorists has encouraged, as many 'paranoids' like me have warned, authorities of all types to trample all over our constitutional guarantees, whether it be searches and seizures without probable cause or, the right to confront our accusers, the right to a speedy trial, to know the charges against us and believe it or not, the right to be free from the quartering of troops in private homes.

One doesn't hear of  many court cases involving the Third Amendment although it was important enough to the American colonists and it's been a basis of the implied right to privacy that the Roe Vs. Wade decision is based upon.  Back in 1965 Justice William O. Douglas opined the amendment's implication that " an individual's home should be free from agents of the state" That followed the 1952 decision that inferred from the third amendment, the framer's intent: "to constrain executive power even during wartime." 

As far as I know, there is no law allowing a police department to commandeer one's residence and quarter policemen there in order to  conduct surveillance to see if there was domestic violence going on next door and gather evidence thereof. If there is, I would suspect it would run afoul of the third amendment, yet so confident were the suburban Las Vegas police that they could do any damned thing they wanted, that they blew open one Henderson, Nevada resident's front door with a battering ram, screaming obscenities at the unarmed man in his living room as the police are wont to do, pointing firearms at Anthony Mitchell whom they addressed as "asshole," forcing him to grovel before them on the floor while they fired several rounds of painful but non-lethal shotgun ammunition at him and his dog at point blank range and demanding that they occupy his house. As though this weren't enough, they continued on to occupy the victim's parent's house on the same street, rummaging, ransacking and arresting and forcibly removing everyone in manacles.

Oh it gets worse, but you can read about it yourself -- violations of the third, fourth and 14th amendments and of every principle of justice common to civilized societies.  It's not unique and it may wind up in the same limbo or wind up in some dark corner of oblivion as the many cases I've read over the years where police have entered the wrong house and murdered the occupants who were trying to defend themselves against what they thought, perhaps correctly, were armed invaders.

For all the public knows in the age of cringing cowardice and lapdog obedience, an age where liberty be damned, you can be locked up indefinitely without charges, where your possessions can be searched, where you can be beaten, tortured, tazed, roughed up and have your home and possessions trashed by brutal, obscenity-screaming, uniformed thugs without any recourse -- where for all the public is likely to know or hear in the 'reality show' media, what happened in Vegas never happened at all or at best might be an uninteresting crawl beneath the Snowden Story, or the Zimmerman story or some celebrity scandal or other Fox News fabrication.

So you want to tell me an armed citizen is a ridiculous idea, that the government can't be opposed by force and won't ever need to be?  Yes, I know, talk is cheap, but when to talk back to the police results in things that would make the KGB or the Gestapo veterans long for the good old days, what's a man to do?   How does the law and how does that blindfolded lady with the scales treat the man who defends his home against armed and rabid berserkers with no regard for the law or human life?  How does a man decide whether it's worth taking up arms when the law fails and nobody cares - decide between dying with dignity and groveling on the floor of his own home while he and his family and his dog are being shot and beaten and robbed and hauled away in chains. 

I know what I would choose.  The Mitchells have chosen to take it to court and I hope they prevail, but unless these thugs are locked forever in hot and tight cages, waterboarded, tubes crammed down their throats and screamed at day and night for the rest of their lives, justice will not have been done nor will this sad, ignorant nation of sheep be worthy of talking about, much less bragging about freedom.

SOPA Opera

Should the Senate bill called PIPA or the House version called SOPA emerge as the law of the land (and probably a few other lands as well) odds are you won't like it, whether you're a downloader of music or a blogger who may have borrowed a photo you found on Google or elsewhere. Neither bill is there to address the concerns of the public, but rather the (you guessed it) big corporations hell bent on retaining every last crumb, every last cent of potential profit from every word or image or sound they can claim as their own in perpetuity.

In my opinion, it's gone far past any position I could call reasonable. I've given many a guffaw when nearly every image one could call art has to be blurred out when shown on television and although I'm sure an effort will be made to blame yet another corporate triumph on "the Liberals" and of course "that Obama" this "intellectual property" and "artist's rights" crusade is a trend that started twenty years ago or more. There's always a noble purpose, of course -- like protecting the interests of widows and orphans of dead artists and writers and such noble purpose often devolves into huge lawsuits like the squabble between France and Spain as to which one can be the executor of the Salvador Dali estate in the absence of any widows or offspring. I remember the difficulty of using an image of a work of art to sell it because whoever owned the rights to a long dead artist's work might sue you even though your efforts were actually supporting the price of the commodity. It's nearly always about money and lawyers, no matter what it's dressed up as.

But my disdain for monster corporations stomping all over Congress screaming "mine, mine, mine" isn't my main concern. I'm more worried about the enforcement, which seems to allow huge fines for downloading some two and a half minutes of some Cramps tune from the early 90's or, God forbid, a little night music by Mozart, but about the next increment of surveillance and the possibility of making the Internet a very, very inhospitable place for non-corporate bloggers and providers of information like Wikipedia. While people of all political persuasions dislike the idea of Big Brother watching us, perhaps too few are watching Big Brother, Inc.

People often learn from mistakes, but it seems corporations do not. Prohibition and the war on drugs and stringent gun control and the war on pornography have hurt far more than they have helped and they haven't helped very much. Draconian penalties don't reduce crime and as a great article at Bloomberg.com today points out this morning, this War on Piracy isn't likely to stop, slow down or to have any effect.

"SOPA and PIPA are just the next steps in this larger enforcement agenda. Whatever happens to them, online enforcement will remain a very slippery slope, with attendant risks of censorship, surveillance, and the loss of due process. Because nothing in SOPA or PIPA is likely to stop piracy, there will be strong pressure to keep sliding."

Individuals will be scapegoated and ruined, lawyers will buy gaudier cars and cuff links and the free flow of information we have learned to rely on will dry up while more and more ordinary citizens will be made into criminals. The inevitable failure of this new, expensive enforcement crusade will only be used as proof that we need more of it, if history is a reliable teacher, and the true danger here is that it will, and I'm certain of it, be another stepping stone to the corporate police state. These are measures the public by in large does not support, but of course the public is distracted at the moment by the Republican freak show and revival meeting -- and of course congress listens to the representatives of industry instead of representing us.

I'm old enough to remember the movie industry's attempts to block cable TV and video recorders. I'm not old enough to remember how the advent of phonograph records and later radio broadcasting would, so they said, demolish the music industry, but I do remember the push to add a tax onto VCRs to reimburse the movie studios God given right to profit. I do remember how the music industry effectively prevented Americans from owning Digital Audio Tape machines and I remember how FedEx and others insisted in adding a tax on Fax machines to stifle competition and I remember how all these things not only failed but also how in the long run some of this technology was a huge boon to industries that were terrified of them.

Face it, the Internet is terrifying to a lot of entities, many of whom don't have anything like the public interest in mind when they propose to bend it to their will or destroy it. This thing of ours has more potential for good than the printing press and the spectacle of corporations crying about too much regulation calling for the garroting of that good in the name of a guaranteed right to a profit is as disgusting as anything prompting my gag reflex these days.

Slow Train Coming

One of the most frequently recurring themes echoing inside the bubble of Obamahate culture is that the President, although handily elected, was somehow thrust upon us by mistake and is an unelected tyrant.

It takes a special kind of person to believe that. It takes a special kind of person to attempt to profit by that belief and it takes a special kind of specialness not to be able to smell the boot polish and Cordite when reading about Wisconsin Governor Walker's plan to take over municipal governments ( duly elected) as part of his plan for prosperity through penury.

Forbes' Rick Ungar calls it Financial Martial Law and the Walker plan

"would empower the governor to insert a financial manager of his choosing into local government with the ability to cancel union contracts, push aside duly elected local government officials and school board members and take control of Wisconsin cities and towns whenever he sees fit to do so,"

I have no doubt that's just what the Tea-Shirts would like and little doubt that they will be able to reconcile that with their flimsy facade of Constitutional reverence.

"Such a law would additionally give Walker unchallenged power to end municipal services of which he disapproves, including safety net assistance to those in need."

That's not tyranny, that's not the kind of shredding of the constitution the baggery would love to attribute to the President: at least not to the Tea-drunk masses longing to break free of any remaining bonds of civilization.

It'll never happen? It's Liberal hyperbole? Think a State Government can't simply strip a municipality's elected government of all power by Gubernatorial fiat? You say this isn't possible in America? It's already happened in Michigan. Perhaps it's coming soon, to a state near you.

I'll spare you a rant about Fascism and Mussolini, the perils of "special emergency powers" and Orwell's eternal boot heel, I suspect you've read enough 20th Century history to know what I'm talking about, but I suspect too that the years I have left to me will be years of counting up the mounting victories of barbarism, and the steady descent of our empire. Perhaps it's high time that I got back to studying Chinese.

An unbalanced truth.

Seems like yesterday when criticizing George Bush was close enough to treason that the police would get involved. I remember people walking out of a Jon Lovitz stand-up routine when he made some mild crack about Bush's garbled English. I remember tirades on TV when Streisand aired her opinions of the president. I remember grumbling in the movie theater lobby after a showing of "W" about how "you shouldn't criticize a president like that." There were the Dixie Chicks, and there were the Radio bloviators out there bashing liberals as though freedom of speech were some Marxist plot. The word treason, the accusation of "emboldening" and giving aid and comfort to some amorphous enemy was given enough air time to warm the climate for real.

I remember audiences for Bush's town hall meetings being vetted to make sure flattering questions were the only ones asked. I remember protesters being herded into "free speech" zones behind barbed wire and miles from anywhere the President might be. I remember people being escorted from the premises by armed policemen simply because of a bumper sticker on the car they arrived in.

Many people persist in telling us that such things are common on "both sides" yet I do not remember anyone being escorted away from the current president for carrying signs advocating killing "his ugly wife and stupid children" nor for carrying guns. It's perhaps the most false of the false equivalences that constitute political dialogue today.

Of course if you want to tell me the courts share the blame, I'll agree. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of two Colorado residents who were excluded unwillingly from a speech by President Bush in 2005 because White House aides saw them arrive in a car with a bumper sticker that proclaimed: “No More Blood For Oil.”

Do we attribute this slap in the face for the First amendment to the Bush Police State? Certainly it wasn't the only one, but Bush is gone and the highest court seems to think we won't care that they don't care enough to hear the case.

So is it now that the freedom to have a bumper sticker on your car -- that is the freedom to criticize the government, to petition the government, to print your opinions for all to read can simply be washed away by a government that can't be bothered to listen to it? Stare decisis?

I don't know about you, but no matter how conservative, libertarian or just plain ornery you are, I don't see a way to pin this one on Obama or to try to pull a fast one with the "both sides do it so its not so bad" sidestep. If you agree that this kind of presidential power is inappropriate, you'll have to agree that getting away with it because the courts don't care is worse. So can we shut up about "liberal active courts" and recognize that this one at least has come down on the side of the police state and the Liberals had nothing to do with it?

So where's the anger? where's the admission that yes, we supported this administration and its policies and WE WERE WRONG!

Drop that Chalupa, Pedro

When those cold war movies I grew up on wanted to let you know the scene was not in the land of the free, we were furnished with Angst ridden scenes where the protagonist was asked for his papers by someone in a leather trench coat on some dark street corner. Maybe his accent was showing, the cut of his clothes -- maybe it was just routine, but we were all grateful that back here, in "freedom" we could go about our business without worry and the government was on our side.

The strangest thing about Arizona's new knee jerk immigration law is that Arizona is the spiritual home of small-government libertarianism and the feeling that Government is a necessary evil; perhaps more evil than necessary. They don't want the government telling them when and where or if they can keep and bear and conceal weapons, what they can eat, smoke or drink or what they can do on their property. They don't trust public education or public radio and they sure as hell don't want to pay for them. I suspect they'd raise holy hell if the police were to stop them at random looking for contraband or illegal weapons or even a drivers license, yet they're apparently quite happy to demand that anyone "suspicious" in that state must keep proof of citizenship on their person at all times, display such proof to any cop that feels like demanding it, or face serious consequences. Of course, if you're white, you're probably all right, so never mind.

To any unbiased observer this alone would more than hint of a police state and unconstitutional government interference in private life.

Sure, if the Arizona police were perfect human beings there would be little concern, but they're far from that. Still, those self-styled Libertarians seem quite happy to give unprecedented and perhaps unconstitutional power to Law enforcement to stop people and demand papers. It's pretty hard to maintain the pose of strict constitutional limits on government when the power reserved for the judicial branch is given to a cop on the beat. The various issues surrounding protecting citizens from government powers of search and seizure were a cornerstone of our rebellion against British rule -- as I shouldn't have to remind anyone.

Dare I speculate that the Libertarian label might, for a great many people, sometimes be only the phony ID that authoritarianism carries?

Evidently fear of aliens overrides high principle and what Arizona really wants is a government that cuts a swath through the law to root out what they want rooted out -- and the Constitution be damned. What they want is a government that lays it's fingers heavily on people they don't like and lays completely off anything that stands between them and whatever they please. Sorry cowboy; when you add in the racist element, this situational Libertarianism is too much like Fascism to make it worth trying to find a difference.

Waiting for Ann

Oh goody! The Republicans on the Supreme court have handed down another victory to the Republicans here on Earth who think we need to punish people who say "indecent" things like "shit" and yet want to "move on" when it comes to punishing people for lesser indecencies like torturing suspects to death.

Now any minute now, Ann Coulter will be calling for these "activist judges" to be poisoned, won't she? After all, if it's Communism (or Fascism on alternate Tuesdays) to let a 3% tax cut expire and Fascist censorship to restore the Fairness Doctrine, how bad must it be to allow Federal censorship over broadcast TV? Any minute now, I'm sure. Ann and Godot -- any time now.

Bigger, more intrusive government

"The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be let alone."

-Justice Louis Brandeis-

Whenever there's a lot of outrage being sold, whether it's about protecting children, preventing tax shelters or defending the faith, it's fairly safe to assume they're selling something else and it's safer to assume it's something you wouldn't have bought otherwise.

There are few things easier to bundle with invasive, intrusive or even abusive government than protecting children, hence the carefully maintained impression that children are in vastly more danger then ever before and controlling the internet in the cause of controlling people and their unwanted thoughts and words attaches to our parental fears like a remora to a shark.

A free internet

"offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,"

says U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. Well of course! So does freedom of association and freedom of speech and assembly and of course, so does freedom in general. It also offers opportunities for dissent, for exposure of secrets of invidious nature and other things authoritarian and paranoid governments fear. So in order to protect the children, Cornyn would like to make sure that with every word you write, every breath you take, every move you make, he'll be watching you. listening to your calls, reading your mail, checking your financial records, tracking your movements: all these things we bought in the name of Bush's "warrontare" and yet it's not enough.

The plan is to have everything you say on the internet and a list of every search you make and every site you visit stored for the benefit of anyone who may want to investigate you -- for two years. Two bills have been introduced so far--S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Both bills bear the same title: "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act. Both use the same words:

"A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."

And what is a provider or remote service? If you're got a home network with a wired or wireless router, you are! Better buy another hard drive and keep it backed up, you potential child molester, you.

"That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too."

says CNN.com's Declan McCullagh.

Alberto Gonzales may be gone, George Bush may be a bad memory, but the Republican Dream lives on. A country where nothing you do is private and nothing they do is public; a country where "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" is seen as an unnecessary impediment to control.

Librarians attack

It's understandable that John McCain wants to distance himself from George Bush. No one can blame him, even though he seems to be intent on carrying out Bush's agenda to a significant extent. Bush has the popularity of Leprosy at the moment and it's clear that party loyalty no longer extends to allowing comparison to the sitting president. I can however blame his campaign staff and the Denver Colorado police from denying the right of a 61 year old librarian to be on public property for a public meeting, carrying a sign proclaiming McCain=Bush.

The banshees at Fox and the snickering snots who listen to them will never let you hear the end of the Obama campaign workers who asked two women wearing Muslim head scarves not to sit where the camera could see him, but they weren't escorted out to the street by the police, weren't issued a ticket for trespassing or told they would be arrested for constitutionally protected behavior.

Of course the cable news opinion shouters who still support Bush have a chance to show that the McCain campaign has insulted them and the President and the party, but I'm willing to bet we won't hear anything but silence from them and from John McCain. Republican apologists have little to build a defense on other than the grave danger posed by nice old lady librarians with opinions, but they will probably try.

I hope I can be forgiven for suspecting that McCain will be another president who thinks the constitution is a stumbling block and try to scare us out of our desire for freedom.