The state of American civil liberties, an image macro series

So the latest civil liberties tragedy that no one cares about is Obama and Holder's non-justification for killing American citizens abroad*. They might as well have kept their mouths shut because we didn't learn anything.

My first piece is a straightforward assessment of the situation:

If that's too demotivational, then turn those frowns upside-down and get to work:

This one's my homage to the good folks at the ACLU. Now would be a damn good time to donate or join them. They're kinda busy right now:

 This last one is a more general approach. Ron Paul could use it; I don't care.**

*The "abroad" part is weird because-- it's like, duh, executing Americans in America without trial is bad, but if you allow for extrajudicial execution abroad, then what stops you from extrajudicial execution inside the U.S.? The Constitution? Please. You've already argued that if certain conditions are met, then you can proceed with an execution, but if those same conditions are met on U.S. soil, then you're not going to execute? Why? Aren't terrorists more dangerous to us when they're in the Homeland? You see what I mean here. That "abroad" clause has already been jettisoned at this point, believe me.

**I'm fundamentally opposed to libertarianism because it completely ignores and enables oppression by non-government actors like businesses, religious institutions, money in general, and all banks other than the Fed. Not coincidently, these actors have done most of the oppressing throughout history. See this spot-on analysis of what's going on at the Cato Institute right now. It's a perfect example of the blinders that libertarians always have on.

That said, I think the Ron Paul campaign is a good thing. It's not simply because Ron Paul is trolling the Republican primaries, although that's nice. It's mostly because he gives Republicans, and all the rest of us for that matter, something different to think about. Diversity of opinion is almost always welcome in our stultifying electoral system. What's most attractive about Paul is that he's against many GWOT policies that all liberals should be against and were against during the Bush administration. I'm referring to the full panoply of Bush civil liberties abuses that Obama has adopted: see the NDAA, FISA reauthorization, targeted killing of American citizens-- oh wait, that's a new one. Bush didn't do that.

Anyway, a debate was sparked a while back among progressives when some dared to suggest that Ron Paul was a welcome presence in the Republican primaries. Some morons interpreted this to mean that those progressives supported Ron Paul. Well, one can of course acknowledge the value of Paul's presence in the race and not support Paul. I am one.

Why do we have religious freedom again?

So the Mormons baptized Anne Frank. Bastards.

I must say, as a liberal, I'm getting sick of religious freedom. Between the Catholic bishops bitching about contraception (and molesting boys), Iranian women soccer players wearing headscarves, and now the Mormons baptizing Anne Frank, I'm done being tolerant toward religion in general.

Christopher Hitchens is surely burning in Mormon Hell right now, but that dick was completely right about religion. 99% of people in any given religion don't actually believe the dogma that they're supposed to believe. They're just acting the way they think society wants them to act. 

So what I say is, let's cut the bullshit, America. You know what I'm talking about. And until the glorious day when humanity finally embraces atheism, we unbelievers can have fun with this.

A Rape Question

Question: How many extra votes would Obama get from independents, women, minorities, Northerners, and people who appreciate balls, if he charged the Republicans in the Virginia legislature with conspiracy to commit mass rape?

Bonus Question: How many more people would learn about what the Virginia legislature has done who would not have otherwise known?

Bonus Question 2: Would Obama be able to handle the hellstorm of feces that would descend on Washington from across the Potomac, as millions of angry white men don their grand- grand- grand-pappies Civil War rags, KKK robes, and suicide vests, slowly mount their arthritic, diabetic, and otherwise-addled frames atop their noble Medicare HoverRounds, conceal their personal arsenals of automatic weapons in the folds of their skin, and ride, ride, ride to Washington, to the house of the Devil himself, on a horrible wave of mutilation!?

Discuss.

Welcome to Amurica, Andrea Mitchell

So MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell was talking to serial rapist and Santorum backer Foster Friess, and the two of them, along with the rest of us innocent bystanders, traveled back to the year 1955. But we weren't there to save Doc Brown from the Libyans. No, we were there because 1955 was the only place that Foster Friess felt comfortable saying this:

"This contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's so... inexpensive. Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives... The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn't that costly."

 If you're under 40 years old, like me, you don't know what that means. I will never know what that means, in a visceral sense, but I'm pretty sure that Foster Friess is saying that if women keep pills between their knees, as emperor penguins protecting their eggs during the long Antarctic winter, then they can't walk outside. And if they don't go outside, then Foster Friess won't have to rape them, like he did with 14 women across southern Ohio in the summer of 1990.

Andrea Mitchell, for her part, felt the chill of interminable winter spent in Antarctic darkness as soon as Friess said what he said, because then she said:

"Excuse me, I'm just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Friess, frankly," she said, after a pause.

Now, if you are familiar with what usually happens on mainstream cable news, each and every day, then you will know the incredibly stifling restraint on the part of pundits like Andrea Mitchell, at the constant onslaught of right-wing extremism. The record is abundantly clear that as the conservative movement and their corporate backers have become more extreme, more absurd, more aggressive, people like Andrea Mitchell have maintained a faux-objectivity, an objectivity that has nothing to do with observing and reporting on the world as it is, but is instead utterly absorbed with criticizing both sides of a political fight equally. (And they don't even do that very well, mostly because of who they recognize as legitimate players on the liberal side.)

One cause of this faux-objectivity is the fact that people like Andrea Mitchell have been insulated from the effects of forty years of conservative economic policy. They haven't been personally effected by stagnant wages and having to turn to the casinos on Wall St. in order to finance a meager existence. And if Mitchell doesn't know what that's like, then she doesn't know what it's like to be living like that and dealing with right-wing social engineering that limits the options of women and girls in the middle class and below.

Or, maybe she has had a glimpse of what that's like? Perhaps Mitchell's emotional, human reaction to Friess's sexist provocation suggests that she does remember living in America in the 50's and 60's, when all women and girls were treated like poor women and girls are today.

Well, you get what I'm saying here. I hope this is a learning experience for Mitchell. I hope the next time she's talking to Chris Matthews or whoever about the religious freedom of Catholic men to keep their womans in the kitchens, that she at least raises the possibility of religious freedom being a cover for sexism. And if Matthews calls her a dumb broad, then Alan Greenspan, Mitchell's husband, could try and kick Chris's fat ass. And that'd be fun...

Your Civil Liberties: It's All Relative

A recent Digby post just excerpted something awful I heard on NPR a while ago. The post provides some extra context if your interested, but here it goes:

SINGER: Already, a couple of [police departments] have gotten special licenses to operate [drones], Miami-Dade, Mesa County in Colorado. When the airspace is opened up, which is scheduled to happen in 2015, that means pretty much every local, state, federal law agency will have this kind of system. The problem is our Constitution, you know, has the concepts of privacy and probable cause. The police aren't supposed to be able to look over your fence to see what you're doing in your backyard unless they have a search warrant, unless they have probable cause. Well, now you have a technology that allows you to always peek over the fence. And so, you know, it really opens up some interesting, interesting questions we're going to have to figure out very soon.

Yes, it's funny how "interesting, interesting questions" arise every time a new gadget (a camera) allows the police to clearly violate your civil liberties. But at least you think that we have to answer those questions very soon, because until then the police can spy on people all they want, and if anyone challenges them they can say the same thing you basically said to the NPR audience: "Well that's an interesting, interesting question, concerned citizen. I'm not a lawyer though, so piss off."

FLATOW: Yeah, let's go to our next call from Isaac(ph) in Truckee, California. Hi, Isaac. ... ISAAC: Well, I've been dreaming for like 15 years of doing aerial photography with remote-controlled helicopters, and I've gotten to the point now where I can. And I heard the point about the invasion-of-privacy thing, and as far as I know, there's laws against invasion of privacy anyhow. I mean, if I was to put a camera on a long pole, stick it up in somebody's window, wouldn't that be the same thing as putting it on a helicopter? I mean, the laws are already there, right?

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Sexy Lady Gameshow Mascot, tell our caller what he's won! Sexy Lady Gameshow Mascot: Well! For his exceptional powers of common sense, Isaac wins an appointment to the United States District Court of Central California!

FLATOW: Good question. Anybody answer that? CUMMINGS: Well, I can... FLATOW: Go ahead, Missy, (unintelligible). CUMMINGS: Well, you know, because I'm challenged almost every day. I know my students are trying to fly around my window and spy on me. So it's something I actually have to lower my blinds for. And, you know, the question is - and this is why we need to raise it to this level of debate - I can put - my students could put a vehicle outside my window and have a zoom lens, and they could have it maybe 20 feet or 40 feet or 100 feet away. And so what point then do - are you intruding on someone's privacy? Do you have to be right up next to window, or can you have a really long zoom lens? ISAAC: You could have a zoom lens on a stick as well, you know, with some wires coming down to a pair of video goggles. I mean, it's all pretty much relative. If somebody wants to invade your privacy, they're going to do it one way or another, right? CUMMINGS: That's a great insight. FLATOW: So you're saying the law's there already, and it's just up to someone to test it out and see.

I've invented a focused sound gun that I've tested on stray cats, and it makes their ears bleed until they die. I'm marketing it as a dog whistle for cats called "No Kitty!" I've shipped about a thousand units already; it's really taking off... The problem is, there are these animal cruelty laws, but they don't say anything about sound causing bleeding from the ears and stuff. So do I maybe have to stop selling this, or maybe wait until a test case winds its way through the courts? What?

ANDERSON: My sense is that the interpretation of the law has been around the notion of reasonable expectation of privacy, which is that, you know, can you expect to have privacy behind a fence? And, you know, if the case is yes, then, you know, the law tends to protect that. Presumably, as more and more things are flying overhead, that expectation will decline.

Ok, that's what I was hoping. It's become so easy to accidently kill cats these days. It's like every new discipline product that comes on the market causes someone's "little fluffy kitty princess" to bleed from the ears until they die. I mean, I'm sorry your princess is so sensitive, but you know this stuff happens all the time now; you had to expect this type of thing might happen sooner or later.