Obama & Holder Declaration Even Scares Dick Polman

You know Obama overstepped his bounds when even the normally compliant Dick Polman is concerned about the administration's actions:

Bear with me while I quote from The Godfather - hey, doesn't everyone? - because this is really about how Barack Obama has been playing fast and loose with the Constitution.

Michael Corleone tells Kay that his dad, Vito, is really no different than "a senator or a president." Kay tells Michael that he's being naive, because "senators and presidents don't have men killed."

To which Michael says, "Oh. Who's being naive, Kay?"

You tell her, Michael! Because, as the U.S. attorney general made clear the other day - in a speech that got little play in the media, thanks to the Republican primaries - Obama is the first president to claim the legal authority to whack U.S. citizens, to act as judge, jury, and executioner without a shred of transparency or public accountability.

This issue flared briefly last fall after Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born, American-educated radical Muslim cleric, was lit up in Yemen by one of Obama's drones. Another American was killed in the attack, and, two weeks later, Awlaki's 16-year-old son, also an American citizen, was taken out in another attack. The Obama team refused to say why Awlaki warranted summary execution. It refused to discuss whether he was an imminent threat, or the criteria that prompted Obama to OK the hit. It appears that the Justice Department supplied a legal rationale in writing, but to this day the administration refuses to confirm or deny the existence of such a memo.

Aside from the lame Godfather reference, the underlying point that Eric Holder has now given every succeeding president the authority to assassinate American citizens at his whim is scary. This is stretching the limits of government authority to levels never imagined by any US leader and one in which Dick Cheney would have been horrified by.

When you've lost uber-liberal Dick Polman and he says so on the op/ed pages of the Inquirer, you've lost everyone.

If Ezra Klein is a Leader on the Left, We Should Have No Problems Rescinding Obamacare

Ezra Klein is a hard-core lefty first and foremost. He's supposedly the wonkish, young, intellectual liberals can believe in. He's smarter then everyone else by their collective reckoning for no other reason than he rebuts everything conservatives have to say with inane commentary and hazy "facts". Plus, he writes at a major MSM outlet and constantly appears on MSNBC so he's got to be a genius.

They talk about this clown like they talk about Obama being the smartest guy in the room when in reality he's not even the smartest guy in the Op/Ed section of the Washington Post.

Klein is the new liberal who, along with Matt Yglesias and Kos who pump out semi-intelligent screeds on a daily basis that get linked by other, lesser known liberals, which ensures whatever they write is at the top of Memeorandum. He's linked a whole lot so he must be an intellectual dynamo, right? A battalion of unemployed liberals living off the public dole break out their crayons and parrot him to the point that regardless of the veracity of any given Klein post, it become "progressive" fact within an hour.

But put these guys on TV where they actually have to present well-thought out ideas without the benefit of Google or as the awesome Iowahawk says; Wikipedia, they sound like exactly what they are: amateurish ideologues with access to the airwaves provided by a "news" organization that is watched by 10 or 20 people at any given minute.

Listen to Klein lay down some mean, intellectual thinking here:



It's hard to understand the Constitution of the United States because it was written over 100-years ago in language that's difficult to grasp by the great unwashed masses who voted Bush in twice. Got that?

The Communist Manifesto was written more than a hundred years ago by Engels and Marx but I'll be willing to bet that Klein understands that language very well.

Obama's Scary Infringement on Freedom of Speech

In a What If Bush Had Done it scenario, the Justice Department subpoenaed numerous documents of the vile Indymedia site(s):

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department's subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward "promoting social and economic justice" and "social change.")

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

Why Indymedia would have Social Security Numbers and bank account numbers is beyond me but that's not the point. The federal government asked for physical addresses of people who read a website including times and other identifying info. That is one scary step towards violating the 1st Amendment rights of a great many people. They also forced them to be quiet about it which I find incredibly chilling.

But wait, it gets much better worse:

A Justice Department official familiar with this subpoena just told me that the attorney general's office never saw it and that it had not been submitted to the department's headquarters in Washington, D.C. for review. If that's correct, it suggests that U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison and Assistant U.S. Attorney Doris Pryor did not follow department regulations requiring the "express authorization of the attorney general" for media subpoenas -- and it means that neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor Acting Attorney General Mark Filip were involved. I wouldn't be surprised to see an internal investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility; my source would not confirm or deny that.

Am I to believe that these underlings acted on their own in the midst of a transition and while working under an interim boss? If so, why haven't they been fired and why did we not hear of this before now?

The Obama administration is turning into one of the most secretive since Nixon and acting like the shadiest since Tricky Dick as well.

Here's the EFF post on the legal issues. Thank goodness for those who are protecting us when real rights are violated by the government unlike the ACLU who makes shit up.

Now Obama Thinks He's Above Supreme Court

Chutzpah for sure from The One. He may well be smacked down by the high court, however:

The Obama Administration argued Monday that no court, including the Supreme Court, has the authority to hear a challenge by Indiana benefit plans to the role the U.S. Treasury played in the Chrysler rescue, including the use of “bailout” (TARP) funds. The Indiana debt holders, U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan wrote, simply have no right to raise that issue, thus putting it out of the reach of the courts.

...All of the legal filings expected in the Chrysler case are now before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as Circuit Justice, and thus she or the full Court could now act on the three applications to postpone the sale of most of the auto company’s assets to a new company representing a combination with Fiat, the Italian auto company.

Ginsburg or the full Court probably will act by mid-afternoon, since there is a 4 p.m. deadline set by the Second Circuit Court. After that, the plan can go forward, unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise. A federal bankruptcy judge and the Second Circuit have approved the deal. The Circuit Court is expected to issue one or more opinions Monday explaining its decision. The Supreme Court, however, does not have to wait for that in order to act.

I wish it was Alito instead of Ginsburg but she got the draw.

This is a power play of historical proportions and one that will test the checks and balances intended by the framers of the Constitution. A check on Obama here may well give investors some confidence that their investment will be somewhat protected but a decision to allow Obama to go forward would have the opposite effect.

The Supreme Court has the chance to put a stop on our march to socialism and Obama doesn't want anyone standing in his way, not even SCOTUS. Let's wait and see if Ginsburg has the guts to challenge him.

Tigerhawk has more.

Friday Morning News & Notes

Good morning. TGIF and enjoy the weekend.

Here's what's new:

--The Constitution seems more a set of guidelines and less protected rights in Obamanation. Here's example one and here's example two. Didn't the left criticize Bush incessantly for every perceived trampling of rights while they seem amazingly quite on this...

--Ahmadinejad: The ACORN of Iran. Neither care how legally or morally they get votes.

--Americans taking a look at the cap and trade scam scheme and increasingly saying "screw that".

--Even Ralph Nader thing the "Government Motors" plan is a bad one.

--Terri has thoughts on Sotomayor.

--Bush may be gone but BDS lives on and on and on...

More Democrat Crushing of Free Speech

It's only year one in Obamanation and we're already seeing bills introduced that would curtail free speech in ways never before considered:

Proposed congressional legislation would demand up to two years in prison for those whose electronic speech is meant to “coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person.”

Every single one of my posts is meant to "coerce...or cause substantial emotional distress" to liberals. That's by design. This is a great example. So is this.

The proposal by Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Los Angeles, would never pass First Amendment muster, unless the U.S. Constitution was altered without us knowing. So Sanchez, and the 14 other lawmakers who signed on to the proposal, are grandstanding to show the public they care about children and are opposed to cyberbullying.

The meaasure (sic), H.R. 1966, is labeled the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act. It’s designed to target the behavior that led to last year’s suicide of the 13-year-old Meier.

And there you go, we must pass this un-Constitutional bill because it's "for the kids". How the hell could you oppose this, do you hate kids?

There slippery slopes and slopes lined with Crisco oil. This would be the latter. I mean, it would be like a Democratic president using his authority to round up a certain ethnic group and interning them because their ancestral homeland attacked one of our Navy bases or something. That couldn't happen, right?

Who would be the arbiters of what words "intimidate," "harass" or "cause emotional distress" anyway?

I could see conservative bloggers being investigated for every single post and it will effectively shut down the newest and some may say most important form of free speech that we now have. Of course, the Democrats led by Sanchez have exactly that goal in mind.

Obama Trashes Civil Rights

The left went insane when President Bush conducted communications surveillance of terror suspects with credible evidence. I can't wait to hear how they white-wash this bit of civil rights insanity:

Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.

Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.

Where's the ACLU? The new administration is squashing civil rights in ways Dick Cheney could never have dreamed. Innocent people are subjected to DNA sampling and the results are entered into a database in clear violation of the Constitution and the left says nothing.

Every American has the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, at least they did until now. With the civil rights squashing machine of the Obama regime running rampant over everything America previously stood for, who knows how long that will last.

The Battle Against the States

I wrote recently about the coming Battle over states rights versus the federal government. On issues ranging from gay marriage to abortion to decriminalization of marijuana, the battle will rage for the next several years.

Liberals and Democrats generally favor the idea of a strong central government that dictates what states can and can't do. Conservatives and Libertarians tend to favor states rights; allowing states to decide what is best for them as constituent needs and wishes are more easily noted at the local level. This was the intent of the framers of our Constitution.

Today, liberal blogger Matt Yglesias posits that states are the problem without making his points too clearly:

I was talking to a libertarian-minded fellow at the Kaufman Foundation conference I was attending on Friday, and he asked me something like why does all this big government stuff have to be done at the federal level? Couldn’t we leave it all up to the states? That way there’s be a kind of “policy competition”—states could try different things, people could leave policy regimes they didn’t like, and we could see what works:

The most obvious problem with this proposal is that in the areas where the case for government activism is the strongest, it just wouldn’t make sense to take action at the level of a small sub-unit of a large economically integrated country. Rhode Island can’t regulate air pollution since it can’t help air wafting in from neighboring states. And Kentucky can’t do macro stabilization policy—there’s too much economic leakage into the rest of the country.

Now, no one I've ever spoke to has ever advocated leaving it all up to the states with no federal government oversight. That is an extreme libertarian position (as are many positions of that ideology) and one that no self-respecting pundit would ever make. The generally accepted conservative position is that states were granted rights under the 10th Amendment (and to an extent the 14th Amendment) to act on behalf of their citizens and in the best interest of those citizens. The framers understood that a strong federal government could become a kleptocracy, a theocracy or something worse. States, they reasoned, could be held more accountable since those elected in states tend to be more representative of the community at large.

Yet Yglesias uses the position of a libertarian to make his equally inane point about air "wafting" over Rhode Island or his other point about Kentucky and economic stabilization.

Liberals fear states becoming more powerful; because they know that some of the precious laws they hold dear would be overturned quickly starting with abortion and moving on to gay marriage and welfare. Roe V. Wade was thrust on the states and gave them no recourse but to comply with a practice that many people feel is abhorrent. Given the opportunity to overturn Roe V. Wade at the state level would mean large swaths of the Midwest and South would be anti-abortion zones and organizations like Planned Parenthood would be ousted within months.

But probably the more profound problem here is that it doesn’t seem to work in practice. In the context of the normal political debate, I obviously come down on the big government side of the equation. But at the same time, I wouldn’t disagree with the observation that there are some elements of our economy that are badly over-regulated. It’s much more difficult to start or expand a business than it should be and this is one of the reasons why our economy has gotten so dominated by cookie-cutter chains that have enough scale to amass expertise and legal clout needed to navigate this thicket. There’s more occupational licensing than their needs to be. There’s too much regulation saying that buildings have to be short, or can only occupy so big a percentage of the lot, or have to have so many parking spaces. At the same time that I think the country’s overall policy dynamic is too tilted toward the automobile, the actual vehicle registration process is weirdly cumbersome, and the rules governing auto dealers are positively insane.

Does Yglesias really believe that the regulatory burden on small business and such would become less burdensome if it were passed to the federal government? We see how well the federal government did when doling out our tax dollars in TARP 1. Add to that the fact that we just passed a $1-trillion stimulus package that wasn't even read by those who voted on it. I'll ask Yglesias to try to get VA benefits or social security benefits and see if he still thinks that federal government could streamline the process better than the states.

He bemoans the fact that state and local government gets bogged down in the minutiae of zoning but they have a much clearer picture of what their residents want. To pass this on to the federal government would be madness. Suppose a suburban town is approached by Home Depot to build a new store.Imagine the federal government getting involved in the process. Towns would lose their identity and become beholden to the federal government and lobbyists. In other words, the system would be corrupted well more than it is currently.

Rather than the small scale of the units leading to better policy via competition, what seems to me to happen is that the lack of public attention paid to policymaking at the state, county, and municipal level leads to much more pure interest-group capture than you see on the federal level. Not that interest groups don’t have a lot of clout in federal politics. But the relatively competitive nature of elections and the relatively bright spotlight shown on national politics puts a check on these things. At the state level, bad policy really runs amok. So I wind up being skeptical that you could really improve much of anything even in those areas when I think the libertarian perspective is broadly correct by devolving more authority downward.

Of course the interest groups play a huge part in local deliberations of policy. That's the point; they are issues that affect the everyday lives of normal Americans. On issues of local concern, those interest groups don't include only businesses and local leaders but the citizens as well. I suppose that Yglesias hasn't been to too many town hall meetings where public policy is argued in real time among citizens and their elected officials. The US Congress and Senate never have to answer to their constituents except when they are running again. In between, their interaction generally is limited to a staffer reading an e-mail and not even telling the elected official what his constituents want or think. We saw this play shamefully with Sen. Specter voting for the stimulus when the majority or Pennsylvania residents opposed it.

States and municipalities should have more rights, not less. Yglesias and his ideological brethren would much rather have all power focused on DC where, regardless of who holds power--is slanted heavily to the left. Entitlements are the mother's milk of the Capitol and to take the power from the local yokels and put it into the hands of the DC elite is a dream they've been chasing for decades. The fact that it would actually reduce freedom and choice in our nation seems to be lost on our federal officials and it seems to be lost on Yglesias as well.

Enough of the Lincoln Emulations

It's getting so very old. Obama continues with his self-proclaimed comparison to Honest Abe:

Barack Obama set out on the path to the White House by announcing his candidacy on the steps of the statehouse in Springfield, Ill., the first of many allusions to Abraham Lincoln during his campaign and transition to the presidency.

On Saturday, he again connected with Lincoln’s legacy, this time stopping by the Lincoln Memorial with his wife and two daughters, to the surprise of tourists and the small pool of reporters who have been trailing him.

Mr. Obama has been largely hunkered down with his family in the Hay-Adams hotel or in his transition office, but twice on Saturday ventured out into cold, damp Washington. Earlier in the day, he had stopped by Ben’s Chili Bowl for a half-smoke with Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty, before taping an interview with George Stephanopoulos. He then returned to the hotel.

We get it already, Obama fancies himself a modern day Lincoln...it's annoying for crying out loud. Will Obama also follow in the steps of Lincoln where he suspended habeas corpus? Will he suspend other rights?

Don't get me wrong, Lincoln was an excellent president but to pretend that Obama is even in the same class as Lincoln prior to even taking office is pretentious to the extreme. Lincoln was in office when the nation was being torn apart at the seams, Obama will take office during a recession and two wars--one of which has already been won by his predecessor. Tough times? Yes, Remotely anything approaching what Lincoln was tasked with? hardly.

Judicial Watch: Hillary Ineligible to be SecState

They have the goods:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is constitutionally ineligible to serve as Secretary of State in the Obama administration.

According to the Ineligibility Clause of the United States Constitution, no member of Congress can be appointed to an office that has benefited from a salary increase during the time that Senator or Representative served in Congress. A January 2008 Executive Order signed by President Bush during Hillary Clinton's current Senate term increased the salary for Secretary of State, thereby rendering Senator Clinton ineligible for the position.

Specifically, Article I, section 6 of the U.S. Constitution provides "No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time." The provision is seen by most as designed by our Founding Fathers to protect against corruption.

I doubt that the GOP will fight this unless Gov. Patterson names Slick Willy to replace her. You figure they'd gladly have the Shill out of the Senate and have a chance to win it in four years versus putting up a fight for something that will most-likely be seen as petty. As anyone who has kids knows, you choose your battles and his is one that will gain them nothing.

Yes, the Constitution is the guiding light that leads our nation but there's precedent and her husband was involved:

Former President Richard Nixon circumvented this constitutional provision after appointing former Ohio Senator William Saxbe to the position of Attorney General. The Nixon administration managed to force legislation through Congress to reduce the salary for the position of Attorney General to the level that existed prior to Senator Saxbe's appointment. This scheme, known thereafter as "The Saxbe Fix," was also used to allow Senator Lloyd Bentsen to assume the position of Treasury Secretary under President Clinton.