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warhorse's blog: "Our nation"

created on 10/17/2008  |  http://fubar.com/our-nation/b253029
1. You can say what you want about your government and the people in your government. They aren't supposed to harass, arrest, or do anything to prevent you from doing so. This extends to the written word as well, and the government cannot tell the press how it may describe the government, whether it's flattering or not. The government doesn't get to decide what is "news" and what isn't. You also have the right to worship God in your own way as long as no one gets hurt, or even not to worship as you so choose. The government doesn't get to say "this is the only real religion(s)." Status: Ignored at will. (See "Free Speech Zones," "Media Consolidation," and "Evangelicals at the Air Force Academy." Also see "Atheists or pagans running for public office." 2. You have the right to defend yourself from assault. As long as you're the defender and not the attacker, you may protect yourself with whatever weapon is at your disposal. This right even extends to defense against unlawful attacks by the government itself, though the government would very much like you to forget about this part of it. Status: Variable. Though certain elements often defend the "Right to Bear Arms" rigorously, there seems to be a lot of controversy surrounding who is allowed to use which methods to defend themselves. Members of certain minorities in particular are excluded from exercising this right without legal repercussions. Also, the police can exercise "no knock" warrants against any citizen and, even if they do NOT identify themselves as police, if any are somehow injured or killed during these raids, the civilian WILL be charged with murder and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. 3. The government can't force you to provide room and board for soldiers against your will. They can't make you rent a room to a soldier so he can keep an eye on you. This amendment is of limited importance these days. Status: Mostly obsolete. 4. The government can't simply go through your things without first going to a judge to ask "please, we think this person is a criminal and here's why we want to look through his things, his mail, and/or tap his phone." Status: Almost completely negated by Congressional acquiescence to the authority of President Bush and his Attorney General to intercept the communications of anyone they allegedly believe MAY be in contact with someone overseas. In addition, property can be seized without any evidence of a crime if certain agencies have reason to believe that the property is somehow connected with the sale of drugs. 5. You cannot be forced to testify against yourself or provide incriminating evidence to the authorities about yourself. Nor can they attempt to try you twice for the same crime, or take your property without paying you for it. Status: Only partially in effect. If you are suspected of terrorism, you may be taken out of the country and placed jailed indefinitely, put under torture, and never receive any sort of legitimate legal representation. If they decide you could somehow "block" the rebuilding of Iraq, or Lebanon, they can block or seize your property without due process. This is in addition to the seizure orders in effect in the Status details of the 4th Amendment above. 6. You are entitled to a public trial that follows certain procedures before a jury of people like yourself to figure out if you're innocent or guilty of the crime of which you're accused. It's supposed to happen quickly, so that an innocent person isn't wrongly jailed for a long time. Status: Only partially in effect. Certain minorities were unable to stand before a "jury of their peers" and now those suspected of terrorism are subject to military tribunals and not afforded any of the Constitutional protections listed above. 7. If someone sues you, or you sue someone else, you get to present the case to a jury and let them decide. Status: Questionable. Right now forces are mustering to protect corporations from civil suits and are trying to tie the hands of juries by changing the whole process so it's almost impossible for the average citizen to challenge corporate power. 8. The government isn't allowed to set bail so high you'd never be able to get it. They are also not supposed to inflict "cruel and unusual punishment" upon any prisoner. Status: Forget about it. Bail is whatever the hell the judge decides it will be and THEY get to decide what's "cruel and unusual." 9. The Constitution's supposed to explain the powers of government--what it can and can't do. Status: The 9th Amendment has been ignored for a LONG time. Most Americans are completely unaware of what it was supposed to mean. 10. Powers not granted by the Constitution to the federal government is supposed to remain in the hands of the people, or in the separate states

the last honest reporter

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card 10.5.08 (read by Rush today Oct 22) Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America: I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know. This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration. It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans. What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay. The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating. They end up worse off than before. This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them. Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.) Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending? I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.” Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed. As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.” These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party. Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout! What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame? Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae. And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing. If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was. But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign. You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican. If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama. If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis. There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.) If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression. Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper. But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to. If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate. Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned. Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing. Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months. So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means? Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for? You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles. That’s where you are right now. It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there. If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices. Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door. You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way. This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion. If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe –and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie. If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard. You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city. CRAWFISH NOTE: This is a real journalist…he pursues and presents truth to the people…maybe one in a thousand democrat journalists do that now…they are repeaters, not reporters…who leave out so very much of a story…on purpose..and then yell how “objective” they are… liars all.

No guts

I am new to politics in some standards. But those who I had the joy of crossing paths should get a clue on my views. Right or wrong. I don’t waver much. The big game right now is this election, which I still feel in many ways is nothing more then a dog and pony show. Let’s look at the choices, McCain or Obama, what is the true main deep core difference between these two. Not a lot. If you feel differently, well that is fine. But look at the records and listen to them, and you might see what I see. Maybe not. But no matter who gets in office. Obama or McCain, they both are heading this nation in the same direction. And for those who are big news junkies like me, you been hearing a new key word thrown around. New world order. Think I lie, look at the news in Europe dealing with America. No my little friends, we stand (alone) and look at a new plan blooming in front of us, a new deadly flower which will strangle the very life of this nation we all love. Right and left, black and white. So what do we do? Well many on here. Are getting ready. Ready for what you may ask. Well that you must find out for yourself. If you know, then I need not have to explain. But soon I think those who are true die hard Americans, who love this nation, who live and breathe the words of our founding fathers. We will be called American terrorist, or vigilante. Which you must wonder would that be so bad. ” The history of vigilantism in the United States is as old as the country itself, in many ways the history of the United States began with vigilantism – American Law Encyclopedia, vol 10” No, I think when the time is ripe and the great animal which people made and didn’t place checks on, will start to oppress the very people who it was meant to protect, I think at that time. The masses will over look their color, their social class. And act like Americans once more. You say we have laws to protect the people, really? Do we? How many in congress have direct ties to illegal actions and never spent a day in jail? Who is above the law? Think…., “ no thief, burglar, incendiary assassin shall escape punishment either by the quibbles of the law, the insecurity of prison, the carelessness or corruption of the police, or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice. Vigilantism is the spirit of permanent counter- revolution, infinitely variegated by place, power, time, and circumstances. In days of peaceful social exploitation it is dormant. In days of growing social unrest it becomes more articulate and sinister. – Benjamin Stolberg, 1937” So I sit and look at the stocks across the globe, look at the lies the two front leaders say to the masses and masses of sheep in this nation. And I look to my right I see Obama followers, to my left McCain followers. I look forward and I hope to see Americans, and as such you are my brother and my sister, my friend, my love. And I give you guidance and look to you for answers. And I ask this, with you losing your freedoms to “protect you or for the best” where do YOU say no more? Where is your line? And when the cities glow red with fires, or children die from freezing do to lack of heat.. When will you say no more? When does your spine hurt from the sudden growth of bone?
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