But the idea that “too big to fail” institutions are too fragile to handle honest reckoning with the truth is not courage. It is civic cowardice. Better, much better, that we keep the faith: that our Constitution can work, that our great republic is a government of laws and not men, and that here, the people rule.
Kentucky isn't broke any more than the federal government is: there are tens of millions if not more in public tax dollars that state government gives away to private and religious interests every year.
Stop that inexcusably and unconstitutional shit first, Governor Beshear and Speaker Stumbo, then we can talk about budget cuts and tax hikes.
John Cheves at the Herald:
Over the last six years, as the state of Kentucky shrank public education funding, it spent nearly $18 million to pay for student busing at private, mostly religious schools in two dozen counties, according to state financial records.
SNIP
The state's spending is about to grow. In March, amid lobbying by the Catholic Conference of Kentucky and other groups, the General Assembly voted to boost the private school bus subsidy to $3.5 million annually, up from $2.9 million, a 17 percent increase.
Kentucky's constitution prohibits state funds from aiding "any church, sectarian or denominational school," which prompts a few state lawmakers to question the legality of the subsidy. But they say the subsidy is politically popular in many legislative districts and unlikely to be challenged.
"Do I have a problem with private school students getting public money to get to private schools? Yes, I do," said state Rep. Kelly Flood, D-Lexington, who is chairwoman of the House budget subcommittee that oversees K-12 schools.
"These are families who have chosen not to attend public schools, which is certainly their right. But we are under no obligation as a state to pay for their choice," Flood said. "Meanwhile, the transportation needs of our public school systems are pressing and growing, and I would like for that money to be redirected to help our public schools."
No, I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and sing lalalalalalala at the top of my lungs. This is happening; it's illegal, unconstitutional, unAmerican and unconscionable, and Barack Obama is doing it.
Kevin Drum:
Conor Friedersdorf on the Obama administration's creation of a "kill list" of individuals whom the US can kill anywhere, anytime:I wish the right would do less scoffing at the ACLU. It's often unjustified. But I'll live with scoffing if it's followed by the dawning realization that the Obama Adminstration has imprudently asserted for itself an extraordinary extra-constitutional power, the potential abuse of which ought to terrify any citizen who is half paying attention.
Once that realization has sunk in, I'd encourage this followup thought: whereas the ACLU is standing against this radical expansion of federal power — an executive branch death panel, if you will — conservative instituitions like The Heritage Foundation aren't merely silent, they're hiring a senior staffer who believes that the ability to draw up a list of American citizens to be killed is inherent in the power of the presidency.
I don't write about this often enough. But it really is extraordinary. Right now this list is confined (we think) to suspected terrorists in places like Yemen and Pakistan, and I think that distracts us from what's going on. Even if, in principle, it seems wrong, killing jihadist wannabes in Karachi or Mogadishu just doesn't get our alarm bells going. Our instinctive reaction is that these are third-world hellholes where life is cheap anyway, so why not?
But it's the still the principle that matters. If you can do it in Karachi, you can do it in Paris. And if you can do it to a New Mexico-born cleric who preaches vengeance against the U.S. from a mosque every Friday, you can do it to an expat from Oregon who runs a grimy little anti-American newspaper from a basement in Berlin. We might not be doing that right now, but what's to stop us? The good will of whoever happens to be president at the moment?
For what should be obvious reasons, the U.S. government should not be allowed to execute U.S. citizens without trial regardless of whether they happen to be on U.S. soil. It's a little hard to believe that this is even a debatable notion.
Now, no one disputes that the United States is at war. But wars are waged in specific geographic areas. Currently, the U.S. is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The U.S. is not at war in Somalia. Yet that is where a missile strike killed Ruben Shumpert, a U.S. citizen from Seattle.
The U.S. is also not at war in Yemen. Yet that is where Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, is purportedly in hiding, and where the government has attempted to assassinate him as many as a dozen times using armed drones.
The Constitution protects all Americans' right to life, whether they're living at home or abroad. If the government thinks you should be dead, it should at least tell you why. The fact that the standard that puts Americans on the "kill list" is a secret is itself unconstitutional. As our complaint states, "U.S. citizens have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their own government. Due process requires, at a minimum, that citizens be put on notice of what may cause them to be put to death by the state."
SNIP
A few weeks ago, ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer was on Democracy Now talking about the targeted killing program. He said: "A lot of us agree that the last administration's argument for worldwide detention authority, the authority to detain people without charge or trial, was extreme and unlawful. This administration is claiming worldwide execution authority." It's death without due process, far from any battlefield, which is alarming, dangerous, and unconstitutional.
Suppose an anti-abortion group becomes frustrated by its inability to shut down the sole clinic providing abortions in your town. Decades of protests, lobbying the legislature and governor, disseminating educational materials have accomplished nothing; the abortions go on.
Several of the group's more excitable members decide that the only option left is direct action. They decide to burn down the clinic.
But they will burn it down at night, when the clinic is closed and no one is inside. Adjoining buildings will also be empty.
One person builds the incendiary device, he and three others break into the building at night and set the device, and a fifth person stands guard outside with a walkie-talkie to warn the others if guards or police appear.
The operation is successful. The building burns to the ground, no one is physically harmed, and the access to safe and legal abortions in your town is eliminated for the time being.
Most importantly, the group has sent a message to elected officials: abortions will not be tolerated in this town.
The arsonists are criminals, certainly, but are they terrorists?
What if they are environmentalists opposed to genetic engineering of trees who burn down an empty research lab?
The federal government is now using draconian post-9/11 powers to intimidate, attack and imprison for "terrorism" political dissenters who commit property crimes.
Don't get me wrong; I hold no brief for people who destroy personal property, especially if it is my personal property.
However, as a native-born American citizen and taxpayer in good standing, I really prefer that the FBI concentrate on homicide cases involving the actual murder of actual human beings rather than, you know, trespassing. Or even arson.
And I really, really don't want them exaggering political dissent into "terrorism" as an excuse to use the Constitution for toilet paper.
Salon has the frightening, depressing and infuriating details.
Earlier this month, on March 6, a federal jury in Tacoma, Wash., found Waters guilty of two counts of arson for serving as a lookout at the University of Washington fire. According to two women who testified against her in return for dramatically reduced sentences, Waters hid in a shrub near the Center for Urban Horticulture with a walkie-talkie, ready to alert the others if the campus police strolled by. Waters testified she wasn't even in Seattle that night.
Although Waters was on trial for only the University of Washington arson, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Friedman charged that she was part of a conspiracy -- a member of a "prolific cell" of the Earth Liberation Front, responsible for 17 fires set in four states over five years. Ten conspirators have pleaded guilty and been sentenced; four have fled the country; three are awaiting sentencing. Waters, the only one of the accused to have pleaded innocent and therefore the only one to have stood trial, now faces 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors celebrated the guilty verdict against Waters as a signal victory in the campaign against "eco-terror," a mission that the U.S. Department of Justice has made the centerpiece of its domestic counterterrorism program. "This cell of eco-terrorists thought they had a 'right' to sit in judgment and destroy the hard work of dedicated researchers at the UW and elsewhere," U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Sullivan declared in announcing Waters' conviction. "Today's verdict shows that no one is above the law."
Civil libertarians draw a different moral from the verdict. For them it is evidence of how the Justice Department has exaggerated the threat of eco-sabotage; they see Waters' story as a disturbing example of the misuse of federal authority and the excessive reach of the American counterterrorism program in the wake of 9/11. As Lauren Regan, director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, Ore., remarks: "There's a question of whether burning property is really the equivalent of flying a plane into a building and killing humans."
(SNIP)
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller decided "they are going to restructure the FBI as a terrorism prevention organization rather than just a crime-fighting organization," explains Ben Rosenfeld, a civil rights attorney in San Francisco. The FBI vastly expanded its domestic and international terrorism capabilities, adding whole new categories of crime to its terrorism portfolio. Acts once considered property crimes -- like the arson at the University of Washington --were now assigned not to the bureau's criminal division but to the terrorism division.
(SNIP)
In the wake of 9/11, federal prosecutors had some new legal tools at their disposal. Historically, the crime of terrorism has required civilian deaths. In fact, the tate Department defined terrorism as "premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatants." But the USA Patriot Act created a new category of domestic terrorism, which is defined as an offense "calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government" or "to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." Under this broad definition, eco-saboteurs become terrorists if their crime seeks to change government policy or action.
Several Republican members of Congress didn't want to stop there. In a letter sent to eight mainstream environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Colorado Rep. Scott McInnis and six other congressmen demanded that respectable environmental organizations "publicly disavow the actions of eco-terrorist organizations." In
2006, Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which imposes severe punishments on anyone who "intentionally damages or causes the loss of any real or personal property used by an animal enterprise."
(SNIP)
If Waters encounters the full force of the government's anti-terror zeal, it will be when she is sentenced on May 30. Prosecutors have not yet decided whether to seek a "terrorism enhancement" -- a sentencing rule that was written into the federal sentencing guidelines in 1995, after the bombings in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Center, and would allow the judge to add up to 20 years to her prison term if her crime can be construed as a terrorist act.
Prosecutors sought the enhancement for six of the 10 Operation Backfire arsonists, who have been sentenced already, a significant departure from legal convention. (Meyerhoff, despite his cooperation, received a 13-year sentence.) "Never before has the terrorism enhancement been applied where there were no deaths," says Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.
(SNIP)
Nonviolent protesters have already felt the heat. Documents obtained in 2005 by the ACLU reveal that the FBI has been surveying animal rights and environmental groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Greenpeace, sending undercover agents to activist conferences and cultivating inside informants. Some of the documents suggest that the bureau was also attempting to link those groups with the ELF and ALF. The National Lawyers Guild reports that it receives calls regularly from environmental and animal-rights activists all over the country who had been contacted by the FBI after attending political events. "It has a chilling effect on free speech," says Guild director Boghosian, "and that's where the real damage to the Constitution is happening."
Heave a sigh of relief this morning at the news that Congressional Democrats had come up with a "fix" for the despicably and blatantly unconstitutional FISA law? Don't cancel your ACLU membership yet.
Once again, the dems' "compromise" gives Smirky's dictatorship all the power it wants to spy on American citizens, declare them "enemies" without evidence, snatch them off the streets and deport them to Guantanamo, torture them into madness and refuse to answer any questions about any of it.
bmaz from Watching Those We Chose has the nauseating details.
When it was first announced that the House Leadership was pulling their new FISA legislation under pressure from progressives to retool it, I commented that the "Dem Leadersheep will come up with a couple of token meaningless concessions and prepare a parliamentary and whip count strategy to make sure the progressives don't cause any more problems". Sometimes, it is painful being right.
From the WaPo article:"Some conservatives want no judicial oversight, and some liberals oppose any notion of a blanket order," said James X. Dempsey, Center for Democracy and Technology policy director. "So the challenge of the Democratic leadership is to strike a balance, one that gives the National Security Agency the flexibility to select its targets overseas but that keeps the court involved to protect the private communications of innocent Americans."What total crock of dung. "The challenge of the Democratic leadership" is to enact a law THAT COMPLIES WITH THE CONSTITUTION; not to "strike a balance" between unconstitutional governmental intrusion and totally off the the charts unconstitutional governmental intrusion. This is absolute baloney.
I will just add this: Once upon a time, deliberate destruction of the Constitution by elected officials had a name.
Treason.
Read the whole thing.
Cross-posted at Bluegrass Roots
Commenter melior at TPMMuckraker comes up with the perfect one-word description of this maladministration's attempt to explain why it is not subject to the Constitution.
"It's more than improvisatory, it's outright Calvinball."
Posts
All Comments
