Down under

I'm one of the 38%, people who had the vaccination who nonetheless got the flu. It's been many hours hibernating in bed (about 60), barely reading much less writing, barely standing up. I apologize for those who posted comments that weren't reviewed until now. This, of course, makes me appreciate that I don't usually feel like this. And it is a good reminder that there are many folks out there with chronic pain and illness who don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. In my process of gaining some strength, I started wondering who is funding Fred Phelps hate group (the "Westboro Baptist Church"). As is often the case, Wikipedia offers a succinct answer. It is self-funded. The group's 40 members chip in $200,000 per year for travel and other costs. They have also filed some suits of their own, seeking fees and damages to further their bizarre cause.

WBC's travel expenses exceed $200,000 annually. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Westboro is funded entirely by its congregation and accepts no outside donations. The church has received money from lawsuits and legal fees. For example, they sued the city of Topeka several times in the 1990s. WBC received $16,500, and is pursuing another $100,000, in legal fees for a case won in court. The WBC is considered a nonprofit organization by the federal government, and is therefore exempt from paying taxes.
The world is a crazy place, especially given that we cannot any longer have rational non-vilifying conversations with people with whom we disagree. George Carlin has said so very many things that resonate with me. One of them is that he no longer claimed a "stake in the process," and that he simply has stepped back to see life as a bizarre entertainment spectacle, and nothing more. I don't agree with this nihilistic outlook, but it nonetheless haunts me, in this day where major issues go unanticipated and unaddressed while we blast each other about trivial and tribal concerns. If only we had a way to remove all the tribal labels and figure out what needs to be done to preserve the planet for the next generation. That's my benchmark. Anyone who can't agree that this is the (or at least, a) prime directive, is a nihilist. Or equally bad, perhaps they are well-meaning people who have given up, who seen no way to apply their personal energies to change the world for the better. Yes, there will always be local victories, but the bigger context seems to me that ordinary citizens are becoming disempowered, except as consumers.

Continue ReadingDown under

EFF: Congress Disgracefully Approves the FISA Warrantless Spying Bill for Five More Years

I'm reprinting the following, with permission, from the site of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Congress Disgracefully Approves the FISA Warrantless Spying Bill for Five More Years, Rejects All Privacy Amendments

Today, after just one day of rushed debate, the Senate shamefully voted on a five-year extension to the FISA Amendments Act, an unconsitutional law that openly allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans' overseas communications.

Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the proposed amendments that would have brought a modicum of transparency and oversight to the government's activities, despite previous refusals by the Executive branch to even estimate how many Americans are surveilled by this program or reveal critical secret court rulings interpreting it.

The common-sense amendments the Senate hastily rejected were modest in scope and written with the utmost deference to national security concerns. The Senate had months to consider them, but waited until four days before the law was to expire to bring them to the floor, and then used the contrived time crunch to stifle any chances of them passing.

Sen. Ron Wyden's amendment would not have taken away any of the NSA's powers, it just would have forced intelligence agencies to send Congress a report every year detailing how their surveillance was affecting ordinary Americans. Yet Congress voted to be purposely kept in the dark about a general estimate of how many Americans have been spied on.

You can watch Sen. Ron Wyden's entire, riveting floor speech on the privacy dangers and lack of oversight in the FISA Amendments Act here.

Sen. Jeff Merkley's amendment would have encouraged (not even forced!) the Attorney General to declassify portions of secret FISA court opinions—or just release summaries of them if they were too sensitive. This is something the administration itself promised to do three years ago. We know—because the government has admitted—that at least one of those opinions concluded the government had violated the Constitution. Yet Congress also voted to keep this potentially critical interpretation of a public law a secret.

Tellingly, Sen. Rand Paul's "Fourth Amendment Protection Act," which would have affirmed Americans' emails are protected from unwarranted search and seizures (just like physical letters and phone calls), was voted down by the Senate in a landslide.

The final vote for re-authorizing five more years of the FISA Amendments Act and secretive domestic spying was 73-23. Our thanks goes out to the twenty-three brave Senators who stood up for Americans' constitutional rights yesterday. If only we had more like them.

Of course, the fight against illegal and unconsitutional warrantless wiretapping is far from over. Since neither the President, who once campaigned on a return to rule of law on surveillance of Americans, nor the Congress, which has proven to be the enabler-in-chief of the Executive's overreach, have been willing to protect the privacy of Americans in their digital papers, all eyes should now turn to the Courts.

EFF was just in federal court in San Francisco two weeks ago, challenging the NSA's untargeted dragnet warrantless surveillance program. And the Supreme Court will soon rule whether the ACLU's constitutional challenge to the "targeted" portions of the FISA Amendments Act can go forward.

But make no mistake: this vote was nothing less than abdication by Congress of its role as watchdog over Executive power, and a failure of its independent obligation to protect the Bill of Rights. The FISA Amendments Act and the ongoing warrantless spying on Americans has been, and will continue to be, a blight on our nation and our Constitution.

If you decide to view the speech of Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), be sure to listen to the portion starting at min 38, where you can see that national intelligence authorities have been completely stifling even the reasonable requests of U.S. Senators regarding the numbers of communications of innocent American that have been intercepted.

Continue ReadingEFF: Congress Disgracefully Approves the FISA Warrantless Spying Bill for Five More Years

FBI coordinated crackdown on Occupy Protests

According to Naomi Wolf, the coordinated arrests and violence against protestors were not coincidentally timed.

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

Continue ReadingFBI coordinated crackdown on Occupy Protests