[Cloud9]

Pops, this is a good read over on Huffington Posts about the moral obligation not to vote for the guy who gutted the Constitution. http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11264 ... nstitution

[ColossalContrarian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'A')h, so the problem is people who vote?

Got it.

[seenmostofit]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mattduke', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'A')h, so the problem is people who vote?

Got it.

[careinke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', 'P')ops, this is a good read over on Huffington Posts about the moral obligation not to vote for the guy who gutted the Constitution. http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11264 ... nstitution

[Pops]

Thanks for the link cloud.

--
I know it's trendy among some to brag about their cynicism and worldliness and moral rectitude and how they aren't really republicans. I do believe it is my obligation to decide between "two evils".

So, just so we have our evils straight - one more time, the AUMF statute of indefinite detention was signed by Bush and established precedent affirmed by the SCOTUS 10 years before Obama signed the NDAA.

As for what Obama did do, the the Senate committee report stated:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')s requested by the Administration, the new bill would clarify that the section providing detention authority does not expand the existing authority to detain under the Authorization for Use of Military Force Force

[careinke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'T')hanks for the link cloud.

--
I know it's trendy among some to brag about their cynicism and worldliness and moral rectitude and how they aren't really republicans. I do believe it is my obligation to decide between "two evils".

So, just so we have our evils straight - one more time, the AUMF statute of indefinite detention was signed by Bush and established precedent affirmed by the SCOTUS 10 years before Obama signed the NDAA.

As for what Obama did do, the the Senate committee report stated:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')s requested by the Administration, the new bill would clarify that the section providing detention authority does not expand the existing authority to detain under the Authorization for Use of Military Force Force

[Cloud9]

Bush was a POS, but Obama signed the bill. He could have sent it back and forced a two thirds vote. He did not.

[The_Toecutter]

Obama = Bush III

The Romney campaign and/or people on behalf of the Romney campaign engaged in rampant and documented election fraud against Ron Paul(regardless of whether or not he would have been able to garner enough votes to win nationally). The courts are tied up with repeated cases and complaints, thousands of which have documentation to support them, most of which will go unaddressed and the perpetrators of these crimes unpunished.

Meanwhile, certain GOP-controlled governments in various states want to use election fraud as an excuse to require all voters to have an ID with a biometric face template(which 32 of 50 U.S. states have implemented for I.D.s and licenses, facial recognition-ready with 3D-templates and PII stored with L1 Identity Solutions owned by French conglomerate Saffron with the images shared for use in systems from contractors like Identix, which sells facial recognition goggles to the government and certain corporations, and possibly for the latest Trapwire system that has resulted in scandal), when the total amount of proven cases of ineligible people voting is so insignificant that this measure only results in wasting more money to the benefit of some well-connected corporations. It will, however, prevent many perfectly eligible Americans from being able to vote, especially the elderly and out-of-state college students.

Yet, the number of recorded cases of people voting illegally is so small and insignificant that tens of millions of dollars will be spent to catch each case of illegal voting at best, if the measure even succeeds in catching any at all.

But that's not to say that election fraud isn't rampant in the U.S. Such an assertion couldn't be further from the truth.

The election is rigged before a single ballot is ever cast by control of who can and cannot be on the ballot. Write-ins are routinely not counted, denied, or even disposed of. Third Parties are regularly kept off of ballots and out of debates within the U.S., by the enforcement of stringent qualifications designed to disenfranchise grass roots campaigns.

Voter ID laws are crafted to exclude voters, and poll challengers are hired to intimidate voters and deny their credentials. Unfavorable people, such as convicted felons, are denied their vote as well, even though they've served their time(a percentage of them are innocent as well).

Then there's the voting machines. Electronic machines with no paper trail are used. Software experts have repeatedly testified about their dangers, including some who have claimed to have themselves designed the machines to be tamper-friendly. There are tens of thousands of complaints regarding these machines flipping votes, hundreds of instances nationwide of precincts using these machines contradicting exit polls by statistically significant amounts, and even a few instances of entire counties having negative vote counts(Cuyahoga County in Ohio during the 2004 election being a most infamous example).

These tactics have indiscriminately disenfranchised greens, libertarians, and independents, left, right, and center.

A perfect illustration that showcases all of the aforementioned items to demonstrate just how corrupted our election process has become is the 2000 election. Both parties engaged in voter fraud, both had electronic voting machines or rigged machines from favored manufacturers at their disposal, both had taken the appropriate measures to keep third parties out of the debates and off ballots, both parties engaged in gerrymandering, and even a partisan Supreme Court determined the outcome of the election where the "two-party" candidates simultaneously posed minimal differences on the vast majority of issues that mattered in the slightest to Americans as a whole, using the wedge issues of gun-control and abortion to divide the public along the lines of which of their freedoms would be eliminated first.

Don't you see the irony here?

It is further asinine that many Americans who see themselves as being on the right consider Obama a Marxist. He is anything but that. His expansion of "free trade", extension of tax cuts to the rich and well connected to the expense of all other Americans, and imperialistic foreign policy to benefit the Captains of Industry is every bit as economically right wing as King George II. He is, however, an authoritarian of sorts, as was his predecessor. So is most of our Congress, with its sub-Gadaffi approval rating.

The Democrat vs Republican debate is infantile. "Left" vs. "Right" is truly a false paradigm as the United States exists today. I use the terms to describe Communist or Socialist political ideology compared to Capitalist ideology. By that measure, a leftist congressman is an endangered species(Dennis Kucinich, himself a recent victim of Gerrymandering who is about to retire from congress as a result, a widespread tactic in the United States on behalf of both mainstream parties to assure that they have each their own allotted territories of guaranteed outcomes), and a leftist president a long gone thing of the past(The last truly leftist president was arguably Kennedy, which would have been very marginally to the left of center if that; Carter was a centrist, and all the rest unnamed after Kennedy were to the right to some degree economically. Despite all of the right-wing presidents, the only one of them post Kennedy who was even remotely fiscally conservative was Bill Clinton, and his administration still spent like drunken sailors with a budget roughly matching that bloated budget that existed at Reagan's apex during the cold war; the very few actual leftist presidents that have existed in U.S. history, such as FDR or Truman, also have poor track records with regard to a balanced budget.

Our economic system was/is far to the right of the norm for the 1st world nations; many of those prominent Democrats considered as left in the United States, such as Bill Clinton or John Kerry, are far to the right economically of Europe's right-wing conservatives who are perceived as neoliberal-fascists by their own people, who themselves are far to the right of the historical norm for 20th century leaders. Civil Libertarians(both left and right) remain largely unrepresented in congress as well(count them on one hand), relative to their proportion of the population(very easily over 20% of Americans; I've seen varying polls from different centers with different agendas that never went lower, some were more than double). America as a composite, on economic issues, is center left, and not on the narrow scale defined by the democrat/republican paradigm, but also has a significant number of stalwart fiscal conservatives on the right as well to counter that. Both the Occupy Movement's and Tea Party Movements and the initial sympathy they had both garnered the bulk of Americans before they were marginalized by infiltration, agent provocateurs, and police state tactics and the resulting negative media coverage by a press that would put Joseph Goebbels to shame is and was proof of this. As a percentage of the U.S. population, leftists(of any sort, authoritarian to libertarian) and civil libertarians(of any sort, left to right) occupy much larger percentages of the population than the representation they receive; this is even true concerning districts where leftists and/or civil libertarians are even a majority of the population in those districts. Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Sanders are some of the few civil libertarians within our "representative" government. Even centrists don't get their due representation in congress, the executive branch, or the courts. The vast majority of these institutions are composed of neoliberal/neoconservative fascists of varying sorts that have been given the resources needed to surpass any and all competition while appointing people who are willing to do them favors thanks to healthy donations by corporate "persons", these same corporate "persons" whose representation is quite healthy within these institutions and elsewhere. When they retire, said "representatives" of any branch, get well-paying cushy jobs with said corporate "persons", and are even commonly replaced by representatives of these corporate "persons" as a favor for all of the gifts.

Americans are not the group being represented by their "elected representatives".

This lack of real representation has left the American people especially vulnerable to the AstroTurf campaign run on behalf of Obama, which worked without fail. Suckered them in with the promise of change. The American people wanted left-wing economic policies after the '08 crash, and got something much worse, an authoritarian, just like his predecessor, except that Obama straddles the line between neo-liberal and neo-conservative, while King George II was merely the latter. Obama is hailed within the mainstream media as a "moderate" after all, a "change" from the right-wing Bush regime. Some change. Did you believe in it?

The threat of Maoism, Marxism, or Leninism in the U.S. just doesn't exist, and arguably hasn't ever, in spite of all of the COINTEL-PRO spying from the likes of J. Edgar Hoover onward to the modern day surveillance by a "private sector" more invasive and intertwined with taxpayer funding than the Stazi could have ever dreamed.

Mitt Romney has expressed views every bit as authoritarian as the actions conducted by Barack Hussein Obama. Obama, with his secret kill lists, insistence on provisions within the NDAA to allow the murder and detention of U.S. citizens, his approval of domestic spying, and insistence on perpetual war; Romney would love nothing more than to have all of this at his disposal. Obama has already set plenty of precedent for the acceptability of illegally killing innocent people with UAV strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. They're both thugs that wouldn't give a rats ass about hunting down U.S. citizens with an unarmed drone if the opportunity presented itself and posed a potential benefit to the regime. The massive collection of biometrics and datamining would conveniently facilitate such a process; the U.S. has been doing it in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen for years while U.S. and Israeli defense contractors make a killing providing the services that make all of this possible.

Plenty of historical precedent for it. It will be coming to an America near you if U.S. citizens or someone else doesn't put a stop it. I'd rather Americans citizens put a stop to it, than a foreign entity like China. Maybe neo-con inspired propaganda of Americans speaking Chinese could become a self-fulfilled prophesy by the actions of our power elite; being global citizens now, they seek to benefit immensely from it by being able to further enrich themselves, so they probably wouldn't care in the slightest about destroying America anyhow. With regard to being a global citizen to avoid taxes and further enrich themselves off of slave labor in the 3rd world, Mitt Romney does it.

Then they tax us for this tyranny. For the privilege of paying for fraud to be levied against us whether through fraudulently issued fiat currency, fraudulent elections, and fraudulent statistics used to make the totality of our living conditions appear better than they truly are. For our identities to be stolen from us for the "privilege" of having a place to live, having a job, or access to transportation by forcing compliance with ID enrollment with biometrics, social security numbers, and/or other PII, while providing no alterntive to a job for those unwealthy enough to avoid a need for it or to start their own enterprise. For our locations, whereabouts, and assets to be tracked. For our most private information to be rendered to data-brokers for the sole purpose of using them as a workaround to the 4th amendment to compile said information within unconstitutional fusion centers. For the monitoring of our phone calls and emails. For the ability to allow corporations to experiment upon and spy on our children using the public education system with no liability when harm is done, while the state can take our children away using CPS if we choose not to conform to their norms which they are shoving down our throats against our will, including forcing our children to take dangerous antipyschotic drugs lest they be seized. For them to lock us up, inspect our piss, seize our property, and permanently brand us with a scarlet letter known as a "criminal record" for smoking a harmless green flower, or anything else they don't approve of. For them to wage war against innocent people worldwide on our behalf, causing these people to want revenge, making us less secure and further justifying in the eyes of our "representatives" the need to trade yet more liberty for a an even grander illusion of security.

Then they are willing to have men with guns lock us in cages for non-compliance with any perceived slight or violation of even the most obscure law(such as illegally having a garden or collecting rainwater), and kill us if we refuse to be locked in the cages. When they do lock us in cages, they can take fingerprints, dna, iris scans, 3-D face scans, keep it, and exchange it with 3rd parties without our consent, with no reliable remedy to remove it if we are later found to be innocent of what we are accused of due to the immediate widespread dissemination of the information. This information can even be obtained and sold to someone else at a profit by databrokers, funded by these very same politicians and profiting corporate hacks who own shares in them.

At first its tin, and then it's not. Even Pops has said so himself.

Living in this country has become a life of constant psychological trauma to anyone who isn't too drugged up or braindead not to notice. Just like fake money, fake elections, fake leaders, and a fake government, Americans also have to make due with fake liberty and fake freedoms too. This phenomenon has become so entrenched and widespread within the United States that most of its inhabitants are incapable of noticing it without a severe shock to the viability of their entire worldview.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', 'B')ush was a POS, but Obama signed the bill. He could have sent it back and forced a two thirds vote. He did not.

[JohnRM]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', 'I')n the last civil war, the Federalist were able to wrap themselves in the flag of the Union and claim the righteous stance of abolitionists. They were able to couch their power grab in the terms of liberators. The shredding of state’s rights at Appomattox was seen by the majority as blow for liberty. The nation celebrated union and the end of slavery.

[Cloud9]

No, I don’t need to step back from that claim. For the first two years the war was about union and the Republicans were losing. Then Lincoln gave his emancipation speech, seized the moral high ground, and turned the war for union into a war for abolition. That stroke guaranteed England would sit on the side lines and guaranteed victory

[The_Toecutter]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'P')retty good rant TC, especially the bit about O being way left, I'm only a little left and he's way right of me. The one on topic line re Os "insistence on provisions within the NDAA to allow the murder and detention of U.S. citizens," has been disproven in this thread.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The_Toecutter', 'O')bama Whitehouse later demanded similar provisions in the NDAA, merely that he wasn't the first.

[Plantagenet]

Human Rights Watch said that President Obama’s decision not to veto the bill (i.e. the NDAA) “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad.” The ACLU said, “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage both his legacy and American’s reputation for upholding the rule of law.” Representative Jerrold Nadler, who voted against the bill, said that it presents a “momentous challenge to one of the founding principles of the United States—that no person may be deprived of his liberty without due process of law.”


Curiously, none of these prominent liberals blame Bush for the NDAA---they all blame Obama. Why is that?

Because no law like the NDAA has ever previously existed. CONGRESS never previously passed a law authorizing indefinite detentions under Bush----it was Bush who took it upon himself during the war against Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afganistan to issue an emergency executive order to place Al Qaida detainees in indefinite detention, just as it was Bush who ordered the construction of Gitmo to hold the detainees. Because the rationale was only an executive order, Obama or a subsequent president could easily issue a new executive order to close Gitmo (something Obama promised to do in 2008 but has since reneged on) or he could order an end to indefinite detentions entirely.

The NDAA is something new-----Now for the first time Congress has passed a law authorizing indefinite detention---including indefinite detention of American citizens--- codifying this practice into permanent US law, and president Obama says he supports it and will sign it.

The NDAA didn't exist under Bush----this law is a new development on Obama's watch.

the NDAA explained

[The_Toecutter]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The_Toecutter', 'O')bama Whitehouse later demanded similar provisions in the NDAA, merely that he wasn't the first.

[Cog]

Pops seems to forget who has been president for the past four years and give Obama a pass on nearly everything he has done since 2008.

Not unexpected really from a hyper-partisan Democrat.

[JohnRM]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', 'N')o, I don’t need to step back from that claim. For the first two years the war was about union and the Republicans were losing. Then Lincoln gave his emancipation speech, seized the moral high ground, and turned the war for union into a war for abolition. That stroke guaranteed England would sit on the side lines and guaranteed victory

[JohnRM]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Everybody', 'O')bama is a tyrant. ... Congress passed the NDAA

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The_Toecutter', 'T')hat pdf document you posted fails to disprove that. Further, witness the testimony of Carl Levin in the link

[Plantagenet]

I still don't get it.

If Obama and the dems thought that indefinite detentions during the Bush administration were bad, then why do they think that indefinite detentions under the Obama administration are now OK?