May
Why I'm Voting for Her | The Nation
Next time around…I’m voting for a woman. Not because I believe that the female Democratic candidate (and I think we all have a good idea who that will be) is guaranteed to be the most feminist, but because I’m just too fed up to do anything else. I’ve made a full transition from youthful idealism to jaded orneriness, and my vote will be just as angry as I am.
It would undoubtedly be a cause for celebration to elect the first female President, just as it was thrilling to vote for the first African American President. But if a voter is feeling disenchanted with Obama (and how can they not be?), it’s hard to imagine Clinton improving matters in any significant way. Historically, she’s been more inclined to discard civil liberties and wage unnecessary wars. The likelihood of Clinton implementing sweeping reform, restoring the rule of law, rolling back the war on terror, etc., is virtually nil. By all means, let’s get a woman in the White House, but let’s not do it at the expense of the entire country (or, indeed, at the expense of the inevitable foreign victims of Clinton’s hawkish inclinations).
May
DOJ: Yeah, we don’t need warrants to read your personal email
Sometimes I wonder if our federal officials have ever even heard of the Constitution. According to documents recently obtained by the ACLU, prosecutors at the Justice Department have argued that they do not need a warrant to search through any personal email or social media, public or private.
From CNET:
The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don’t need a search warrant to review Americans’ e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files, internal documents reveal.
Government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET show a split over electronic privacy rights within the Obama administration, with Justice Department prosecutors and investigators privately insisting they’re not legally required to obtain search warrants for e-mail. The IRS, on the other hand, publicly said last month that it would abandon a controversial policy that claimed it could get warrantless access to e-mail correspondence.
The U.S. attorney for Manhattan circulated internal instructions, for instance, saying a subpoena — a piece of paper signed by a prosecutor, not a judge — is sufficient to obtain nearly “all records from an ISP.” And the U.S. attorney in Houston recently obtained the “contents of stored communications” from an unnamed Internet service provider without securing a warrant signed by a judge first.
“We really can’t have this patchwork system anymore, where agencies get to decide on an ad hoc basis how privacy-protective they’re going to be,” says Nathan Wessler, an ACLU staff attorney specializing in privacy topics who obtained the documents through open government laws. “Courts and Congress need to step in.”
Like the rest of the bill of rights, the 4th amendment is as clear as a bell. Let’s review it:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In other words, the government cannot simply rummage through or obtain your personal property (digital or tangible) in any way without a warrant. It’s really quite simple. Doesn’t it seem like Eric Holder would know this?
May
Judge rips Obama’s right-wing Plan B stance
“You’re disadvantaging young people, African-Americans, the poor…that’s the policy of the Obama administration?”
Indeed it is.
May
It’s Time to End the War on Terror
“We are at war” seems to be an excuse these days for nearly any instance of government misbehavior or illegality. It is generally acknowledged and accepted that during wartime, acts that would be unthinkable during a time of peace are easily excused. It is horrifying to reflect upon the bombing of Dresden, which claimed more than 20,000 lives, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which wiped over 150,000 souls off the face of the earth. In retrospect, we might question the wisdom of these attacks (Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, maintained that dropping the bomb on Japan “was completely unnecessary”), but most Americans generally believe these events, however horrifying the cost might have been, were essential to protect and restore democracy. The same holds true for the war on terror, in which a wide variety of government abuses are frequently justified with the old edict that “we are at war.” Perhaps the best way to combat this line of thinking is to declare, officially and unequivocally, that the war on terror is over. If the idea of ending the war on terror is advanced throughout the halls of Congress and the public at large, many of the issues we contend with today, such as the closure of Guantanamo Bay, the legal and moral complications of drone strikes, and the normalization of sweeping executive power, could lose popular support.
Although I almost entirely disagreed with this Atlantic piece on what drone policy dissenters supposedly “get wrong,” there was one salient point made:
As someone who has spent over two years in combat, I suggest that the main point of moral judgment comes before one asks which means are legitimate when attacking an enemy. The main turning point concerns the question of whether we should fight at all. This is the crucial decision, because once we engage in armed conflict, we must assume that there are going to be many casualties on all sides. When we deliberate whether or not to fight, we should assume that once we step on this escalator, it will carry us to places we would rather not go.
It is often said by advocates of the war on terror that the struggle to eliminate terrorism is a unique war without borders or, oftentimes, clearly identifiable enemies. But labeling the fight against Islamic terrorism a “war” is merely a rhetorical justification for the seemingly unrestricted powers claimed by the Bush and Obama administrations to, among other things, assassinate suspects without judicial oversight or even public disclosure of the suspect’s alleged crimes, imprison innocent people in torturous facilities indefinitely, and refuse to investigate high-ranking officials who literally adopted and implemented enemy torture tactics. Lawlessness now pervades much of our government and many citizens accept this as a necessary extreme to ward off terrorist attacks, which are about as likely to claim the life of a U.S. citizen as a bolt of lightening.
We’ve overreacted to the threat of Islamic terrorism to such an extreme and alarming degree that many of us now strain to remember the years in which one did not face the real possibility of being groped by security agents at airports or corresponding with friends without the knowledge that the conversations, like billions of others annually stored in government databases, might be monitored. And what of the terrified Muslim communities infiltrated by government spies? Or the innocent Muslim Americans subjected to physical and verbal abuse by any hotheaded fool who happens to pass them on the street? Or the Congressional hearings that regard nearly all Muslims as potential enemies? In our self-absorbed, self-righteous anger, we often forget that the primary victims of Islamic terrorist attacks are innocent Muslims. We’ve learned, as Robert F. Kennedy once said, “to hate and fear” Muslim Americans, often regarding them “not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest.” It is not difficult to see that by degrading Muslims around the world, we have also degraded ourselves and our nation.
The sooner we roll back this war, the sooner we can restore our nation to normal, and the sooner we can go on living our lives without allowing a pack of murderers to forever disrupt them. In attempting to defend our “values” and our “way of life” from terrorism, we have too often destroyed those things ourselves.
May
San Francisco's Hemp Center Is the Latest Target in Federal Marijuana Crackdown
The Hemp Center…has been in business for nearly 14 years and has been in its current location for 11. Its landlords recently received a letter from U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag. The letter warned of property seizures and prison sentences if the dispensary was not shut down, according to dispensary operator Kathleen Capetti.Similar letters, which claim the clubs are too close to parks or schools, have been responsible for the closure of eight San Francisco dispensaries since Oct. 2011 — many of them longstanding, respected operations…
[…]
The letters are what the Obama Administration’s Justice Department has done to “crack down” on California’s burgeoning but federally illegal medical cannabis industry. In Oct. 2011, the four United States Attorneys for the state announced a coordinated effort that led to the closure of “hundreds” of dispensaries across the state, according to an estimate by Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana patients’ advocacy group.
“I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It’s not a good use of our resources.” — Barack Obama, August 21, 2007, in Nashua, New Hampshire
Apr
Everything Libertarians and Liberals Get Wrong About Drones
By using drones, one can wait until the children are away from the area, allow both multiple layers of command and lawyers time to review the life feed, and take other measures necessary for minimizing collateral damage.
As true as that may be in theory, the critics reply, in practice the use of drones has been reckless and caused significant collateral damage. However, it is difficult to reach conclusive judgments, as neither critics nor proponents of drones are actually there to observe the effects of drone strikes. Instead, we often have to rely upon reports from locals, who are notoriously unreliable.
This article deserves a lengthy critique but here is one brief point that seems worth making: Any assessment of warfare that euphemistically refers to the deaths of children and other innocent civilians as “collateral damage” and then minimizes those deaths by pretending there hasn’t been a lot of them (and that we must suspend our judgment because we aren’t privy to an accurate tally of the dead) is a complete moral failure.
Apr
Andrew Cuomo tells associates he would skip 2016 presidential race if Hillary Clinton runs
“The governor has told people in recent weeks that there’s not a chance for him to run if Hillary gets in the race because she’ll easily wrap up the Democratic nomination,’’ said a Cuomo administration insider with direct knowledge of the situation.
“He knows that and he accepts that, and so he won’t even be thinking at all in those terms — unless Hillary decides not to run, which seems unlikely,’’ the source continued.
The dearth of anti-Clinton sentiment within the Democratic Party continues to astonish. Is there no Democrat plagued with nightmares of the Iraq War and the Defense of Marriage Act who is conspiring to take down the Clinton machine?
Apr
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Apr
Congressional analysis upholds states' right to legalize marijuana
Today, Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) shared a new legal analysis, prepared by the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research agency supporting the United States Congress, which finds that the federal government cannot compel states to prohibit marijuana use within their borders.
More specifically, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) writes that:
“Although the federal government may use its power of the purse to encourage states to adopt certain criminal laws, the federal government is limited in its ability to directly influence state policy by the Tenth Amendment, which prevents the federal government from directing states to enact specific legislation, or requiring state officials to enforce federal law. As such, the fact that the federal government has criminalized conduct does not mean that the state, in turn, must also criminalize or prosecute that same conduct.”
Congressman Polis responded, stating, “I’ve long believed that Colorado, Washington and other states that have decriminalized or legalized marijuana for personal or medical use have acted within the legal bounds of the law. I am pleased to see that Congress’s research agency has interpreted the law the same way. With a majority of Americans now supporting marijuana legalization, and more states acknowledging every election cycle that the War on Drugs has failed, I hope that the Department of Justice will conduct and release a legal analysis that is as thorough as that done by CRS. If they do, they are sure to reach the same conclusion: it is perfectly legal for states to regulate marijuana as they see fit.”
Apr
Apr
“An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
Apr
Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Own Furniture as by Terrorism
The number of U.S. citizens who died in terrorist attacks increased by two between 2010 and 2011; overall, a comparable number of Americans are crushed to death by their televisions or furniture each year. This is not to diminish the real—albeit shrinking—threat of terrorism, or to minimize the loss and suffering of the 13,000 killed and over 45,000 injured around the world. For Americans, however, it should emphasize that an irrational fear of terrorism is both unwarranted and a poor basis for public policy decisions.
I think we all know what this means…it’s time to invade IKEA.
Apr
