STRAIGHTENING OUT THE YELLOW SHIRTS

Burlington Farmers Market Attempts (and fails) to Ban Political Speech in City Hall Park

NOT TO BE MISSED

Actor John Cusack examines Barack Obama and a few issues about him -  with a bit more scrutiny than we hear from the "progressive left." Read his conversation with Jonathan Turley about the Obama administration’s "War On the Constitution."

THE COPS ARE WATCHING YOUR EVERY MOVE...

Back in June, I wrote about Burlington:Surveillance City. GMD links to a disturbing story in the WaPo

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

Under the Justice Department proposal for state and local police, published for public comment July 31, law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists. They also could share results with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.

Criminal intelligence data starts with sources as basic as public records and the Internet, but also includes law enforcement databases, confidential and undercover sources, and active surveillance.

"If police officers no longer see themselves as engaged in protecting their communities from criminals and instead as domestic intelligence agents working on behalf of the CIA, they will be encouraged to collect more information," Michael German (an FBI agent for 16 years )policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said "It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government."

And, in my June post, BDP "community policing" means citizens becoming spies for them.

the local Burlington Police officer assigned to our area gave a run down of the usual summer house and car break ins ("keep your doors and windows locked") and encouraged the law abiding citizenry to report to BPD any questionable activity on our streets and in our neighborhood parks. Even if it turns out harmless, he told the Assembly, the police would find out what's up.[...] If the person is not doing anything wrong, he continued (I'm paraphrasing), a good citizen won't mind being asked a few questions by the officer.

PELOSIAN THEORY OF LEADERSHIP...

Pathetic how Nancy Pelosi leads the lemming Democrats to CAVE IN on FISA, war with Iran, and impeachment.

'HISTORY WILL NOT JUDGE THEM KINDLY'

From It still matters | Brattleboro Reformer Editorial, 17 June 2008

"This is not about vindictiveness and partisan politics. The acts committed by the Bush administration rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" that our founders said justifies the impeachment of public officials. And if the Democrats refuse to act upon the articles of impeachment, they are no better than the administration in upholding their oaths of office. They are co-conspirators, and history will not judge them kindly for putting politics above the Constitution."

DONAHUE ON 'SHUT UP AND SING'

From Real News: Phil Donahue talks about corporate media and the Iraq war:

E-voting screwup leads judge to void election results

SCHOLARS & ROGUES E-voting screwup leads judge to void election results 2 October 2007 -

As an amusing coda to my posts discussing the need for paper audit trails in electronic voting, and the industry’s opposition to same, here’s a look at what happens when you trust e-voting machines to handle a simple ballot initivative, and things go very wrong:

An Alameda County judge has voided election results for a failed 2004 Berkeley medical marijuana measure, ordering it returned to the ballot next year because county election officials failed to hand over data from voting machines, attorneys in the case said Thursday…In her ruling Tuesday, Smith said county officials had failed to retrieve backup data from electronic voting machines, logs of activity on the machines and other records as she had specifically ordered. Instead, the county ignored the request and returned the devices to their manufacturer, Diebold Election Systems, after the measure’s advocates had sued the county seeking access to the data, the judge said.

If there had been some kind of verifiable paper audit trail to use after the votes had been cast, this might not have happened. By retaining the audit records solely in electronic form on the machines, Diebold was able to eliminate the vast bulk of the vote records, necessitating a fresh start. While the bulk of culpability lies with the county election officials who undoubtedly returned the machines to Diebold to avoid revealing that the measure won, the fact remains that this data is all too easy to destroy, and we can’t trust any single source to maintain control over it. Democracy and the voting process are too important to entrust to avaricious companies, faulty technology, and corrupt officials.

Link

ATT Tries to Block Criticism from its Customers

Via UNDERNEWS ATT Tries to Block Criticism from its Customers 2 October 2007 -

SCHOLARS & ROGUES - Slashdot broke the news that AT&T's updated terms of service for its high-speed Internet packages essentially forbid you from criticizing the company on pain of cancellation. Here's the offending passage:

"AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries."
---
Needless to say, this is yet another reason why we need net neutrality as codified law. AT&T's lawyers may have written this just to enforce its rules against hate sites, spammers, and such, but they've written it so broadly that it could easily be interpreted as a "chiller" against legitimate criticism of a company. Not to mention that this is the same company that gleefully assisted the NSA in spying on Americans without warrants or oversight for years.

Corporations do not have the right to control what you say or think any more than governments do, and the idea that we can excuse abrogations of these rights if they come from business is a slippery slope indeed.

It's all here

Homeland Security Enlists Clergy to Quell Public Unrest

KSLA-TV, SHREVEPORT, LA:

Homeland Security Enlists Clergy to Quell Public Unrest if Martial Law Ever Declared

VIDEO REPORT

COMMENT: The vid & reports are about religious selling out to authority. No thanks. I'd rather listen to the prophetic voices of Dorothy Day, ++Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., ++Desmond Tutu, or Joan Chittister.

FISA Amendment Cave-In

Yeah. So, the Vermont congressional delegation voted against it. BFD. Edgeing lays out the Bush-Cheney DemRepub complicity.

For their part, the German people quickly accepted the new order of things. Keep in mind that the average non-Jewish German was pretty much unaffected by the new laws and decrees. As long as a German citizen kept his head down, worked hard, took care of his family, sent his children to the public schools and the Hitler Youth organization, and, most important, didn’t involve himself in political dissent against the government, a visit by the Gestapo was very unlikely.

--How Hitler Became a Dictator by Jacob G. Hornberger, 28 June 2004

It's All Because (The Gays Are Getting Married)

This one's for the folks over at Vermont Renewal.



(H/T to MadPriest & episcopalooza)

Bill Moyers: Tough Talk on Impeachment

Sunday afternoon UPDATE: Follow the discussion atTalkLeft here.

You can watch Bill Moyers Journal: Tough Talk on Impeachment here.

All Saints/Pasadena Rector Calls for Investigation into Impeachment of the Vice President

It is significant that a rector of one of the largest Episcopal parishes in the US - Ed Bacon at All Saints - has called for the Justice Department to investigate impeachment of the vice president in a sermon last Sunday.

I'm pleased to see that mainstream - even liberal/progressive - churches are waking up --



No siree, he doesn't soft-soap it at all. I'm no expert on Anglican homiletics, but the build up or lead up (what ever they'd call it at GTS) to the call for impeachment is a brill exposition by a person of deep faith - calling us to "look at what is at stake," to be "stewards of the fragile dream of democracy." Click here to read it or follow along as you watch the vid. Pretty damn good stuff, IMHO.

But here's Ed Bacon -

ON THE CALL FOR IMPEACHMENT

What I am about to say has been long in coming. But I want to invite you into a conversation about it. I have been deeply troubled by the state of our nation and its flaws. I have been deeply troubled by how the behavior of the current Vice-President of the United States has expressed the erosion of democracy and has exposed the flaws in our country’s life.

Vice-president Cheney publicly embraced the violation of the Geneva Conventions when, on a talk radio program, he said he was not troubled by our forces using “waterboarding” — the simulated drowning of detainees to force them to talk. He has ordered the destruction of the visitor logs to his residence. These are presidential records the law requires him to preserve and protect. He has held secret meetings with energy executives to craft an energy policy that does not alleviate oil dependence. I believe he has been the motor leading our country through fabricated intelligence into this disastrous, illegal, immoral, and unjust war based on lies. He has expanded Executive powers at the expense of our system of checks and balances under the “unitary executive theory”. And now he is using and abusing his power to make secret what is the rightful knowledge of U. S. taxpaying citizens. He has refused to provide his office’s documents to the National Archives and Records Administration as provided by law. He then made the insane claim that the Vice-President is not “an entity within the executive branch.”
So I have come to believe that for the sake of the soul of America and its addiction to the mentality of collateral damage – both of people who get in our way and the collateral damage of the Constitution when it gets in our way – that the United States Congress should authorize and direct the Judiciary Committee to investigate whether sufficient grounds exist for the impeachment of the Vice-President.

As a teenager I learned from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr that all human beings are interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent. We really are not free until all are free for that which unjustly incarcerates another incarcerates me. Whatever oppresses someone else oppresses me. When I do violence to another through perpetuating poverty, bigotry, occupation or war or genocide, that corrupts me and my soul. It corrupts the soul of a nation.

Thanks to Susan Russell and Bill Carroll for the heads-up.

Distress Signal

WWJD

Undernews - A READER NOTES that Jesus might actually have liked the sign "Bong 4 Jesus," target of the recent anti-constitutional decision by the Supreme Court. After all in Genesis it says, "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree which bears fruit yielding seed; to you it shall for food."

Background on the SCOTUS decision this week.

A Cruel and Unusual Sentence Indeed

TalkLeft - [I]t is ridiculous for the State of Georgia to make Genarlow Wilson serve a minimum of 10 years because, at age 17, he engaged in a consensual act of oral sex with a 15 year old girl. Public outrage caused the Georgia legislature to change the law, but Georgia's courts have refused to apply the change retroactively to save Wilson from an unfair sentence.

Wilson is taking another shot at persuading a court to reduce his sentence by arguing in a habeas petition that 10 years is, under the circumstances, cruel and unusual.

...

Here's the bottom line, as expressed by the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

[T]here is more at stake here than the freedom of one young man. The integrity of Georgia's criminal justice system is on trial, and the world is watching....
All told, Genarlow Wilson has served 32 months in jail. It's time to end this ride and let him go home.

Big Brother is Watching

Update @ 2:55 pm

Today, from The Independent: Not only Big Brother, but Google is watching and wants to tell you how to run your life.

Previously, this morning I'd read this....
Radio Netherlands Worldwide Press Review -

Big Brother is watching and the Dutch do not seem to care, according to NRC Handelsblad and its sister paper NRC.next. The newspapers express their surprise that in spite of the introduction of all kinds of measures to monitor people's behaviour, no one appears to be bothered.

It's not just about cameras on the streets, police are allowed to stop and search people in certain areas, the authorities are sharing personal data for cross-checking purposes and young offenders could find themselves and their families under increasing scrutiny. There are no civil liberty groups springing to the defence of the rights of citizens.

Most people appear to think: "I've got nothing to hide." They trust the authorities will put things right if mistakes are made. But according to NRC Handelsblad, they are wrong. Parliament often adopts far-reaching legislation hoping that judges will make sure its not carried out to excess. As a result tramps, junkies and Moroccan youths are often the first to feel the consequences.

The Dutch National Ombudsman explains the subdued reaction, "The Dutch are pragmatic and seldom really principled."

Big Brother is watching Americans, too. If you are one of the millions of people using social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster, be careful what you reveal about yourself.

Why Bush Hasn't Been Impeached

VermontImpeach.com - By Gary Kamiya of Salon.com - Why Bush Hasn't Been Impeached: Congress, The Media and Most of The American People Have Yet To Turn Decisively Against Bush because To Do So Would Be To Turn Against Some Part of Themselves.

Catonsville Nine

Subversive Christianity had a post up on Thursday, May 17th, commemorating the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Catonsville Nine’s famous act of civil disobedience during the Vietnam War. How appropriate to the times we live in. I post it in its entirety -

... for the fracture of good order." - Dan Berrigan

Thirty-nine years ago today, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Dan and Phil Berrigan, Marjorie and Tom Melville, Dave Darst, John Hogan, George Mische, Tom Lewis, and Mary Moylan, Roman Catholics all, entered a draft board office in Catonsville, MD, carried nearly 400 draft files out to an adjoining parking lot, and set them on fire with homemade napalm. As Dan Berrigan said, the Catonsville 9, as they came to be known, burned "paper instead of children."
This act of holy obedience/civil disobedience was, I firmly believe, one of those kairos moments in which the Eternal breaks into the temporal and human history pauses in astonishment, bestirs itself, and recommences its journey on a realigned angle. The Catonsville 9 showed the entire country, and indeed the entire world, that there were at least some North American Christians who believed that fidelity to God should trump the demands of the State. In following Jesus' way of nonviolent resistance to injustice, at great cost to themselves, these nine witnesses for peace brought the Beloved Community a bit closer to us all. Speaking personally, their prophetic action was a turning point in my life.
God grant all of us the courage and compassion to follow their example of fracturing the "good" order of our own day and our latest war.
Here are some passages from Dan Berrigan's blank-versed The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, based on the actual court transcripts.


Phil Berrigan:
We have been accused of arrogance
But what of the fantastic arrogance of our leaders
What of their crimes against the people, the poor and powerless
Still no court will try them; no jail will receive them
They live in righteousness. They will die in honor
For them we have one message, for those
in whose manicured hands the power of the land lies
We say to them
Lead us. Lead us in justice
and there will be no need to break the law...
To our bishops and superiors we say
Learn something about the gospel
and something about illegitimate power
When you do, you will liquidate your investments
take a house in the slums or even
join us in jail.

David Darst:
We felt it was fitting that this agent [napalm]
which had burned human flesh
in the war in Vietnam and in many other places
should now be poured on the records
which gave war and violence
their cruel legitimacy...
The government has chosen
to see our cry
as anarchy and arrogance
Perhaps real anarchy lies
in the acts of those
who loose this plague of war
upon a proud people

George Mische (after being chided by the prosecutor for "not sticking" to the issues):
I am trying to speak
as a human being to the jury
who I hope are human beings
and can understand us
Will the jury dare to deal
with the spirit of the law
and the issues we are talking about
If not, we can expect
no peace, no solutions
only disorder and riots
in our country and in the world

John Hogan:
I just want
to let people live
That is all

Tom Lewis (upon being asked by an attorney if he indeed engaged in the Catonsville action):
Yes
It was the response of a man
a man standing for humanity, a man
a Christian, a human being
seeing what was happening not only
in Vietnam but beyond Vietnam...
I wasn't concerned with the law
I wasn't even thinking about the law
I was thinking of what those records meant
I wasn't concerned with the law
I was concerned with the lives
of innocent people
I went in there with the intent of stopping
what the files justify
The young men
whose files we destroyed
have not yet been drafted, may not be drafted
may not be sent to Vietnam for cannon fodder
My intent in going there
was to save lives. A person
may break the law to save lives

Marjorie Melville:
We were trying to find out
our role as Christians
Was it to see people's needs
and get involved
or were we to say
Well, this is too difficult
It is too hard to know what to do
Do we stand back
or do we go in
on the side of the people and say
What can I do to help?
...I did not want to bring
hurt upon myself
but there comes a moment
when you decide
that some things should not be
Then you have to act
to try to stop those things

Tom Melville:
I hear our President confuse greatness with strength
riches with goodness, fear with respect
hopelessness and passivity with peace
The cliches of our leaders
pay tribute to property and indifference to suffering

Mary Moylan:
This is what it means to be a Christian
that you act on what you say you believe
This is what
Christ meant when He lived
We have not only to talk
but if we see something wrong
we have to be willing
to do something about it
This is my belief

Dan Berrigan:
The great sinfulness
of modern war is
that it renders concrete things abstract...
Redeem the times!
The times are inexpressibly evil
Christians pay conscious indeed religious tribute
to Caesar and Mars
by the approval of overkill tactics, by brinkmanship
by nuclear liturgies, by racism, by support of genocide
They embrace their society with all their heart
and abandon the cross
They pay lip service to Christ
and military service to the powers of death
And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good
solaced by the courage and hope of many
The truth rules. Christ is not forsaken
In a time of death some men and women
the resisters, those who work hardily for social change
those who preach and embrace the truth
such men and women overcome death
their lives are bathed in the light of the resurrection
the truth has set them free
In the jaws of death
they proclaim their love of the brethren
We think of such men and women
in the world, in our nation, in the churches
and the stone in our breast is dissolved
we take heart once more

More Impeachment News

On Wednesday Detroit became the largest city whose City Council passed an impeachment resolution, with Pro-Tem Monica Conyers presiding (she is the wife of Judiciary Commitee Chair, John Conyers) - New Momentum for Putting Impeachment on the Table

From last Saturday's meeting with Peter Welch in White River -



Some people are calling the testimony of James Comey, regarding the Dept. of Justice's pressuring former US Attorney General Ashcroft to approve illegal surveillance is being called 'the smoking gun' necessary for impeachment.