Tag: law

The unconstitutional NSA

It’s about time the violation of the 4th Amendment is addressed by the courts:

For the first time since the revelation of the National Security
Agency’s vast dragnet of all Americans’ telephone records, a federal
court has ruled that such surveillance is “significantly likely” to be unconstitutional. In a scathing 68-page opinion
peppered with exclamations of incredulity, United States District Judge
Richard Leon, of the Federal District Court of the District of
Columbia, found that the seven-year-old phone-data collection program —
which was established under the Patriot Act and has been repeatedly
reauthorized by a secret intelligence court — “almost certainly”
violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable
searches.

Reaching into the 18th century from the 21st, the judge wrote that James
Madison “would be aghast” at the degree of privacy invasion the data
sweep represents. The ruling by Judge Leon, who was nominated to the bench by President
George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, was remarkable for many reasons, but
mainly because there were real people sitting in open court challenging
the government’s lawyers over the program’s constitutionality.

The plaintiffs, led by Larry Klayman, a conservative legal activist,
sued the government after the program came to light. A similar suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union is in a federal court in New York. Judge Leon’s opinion took issue with the government’s reliance on a 1979
Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which upheld the police’s
warrantless capture of phone numbers dialed from the home of a robbery
suspect on grounds that the suspect had no reasonable expectation of
privacy in the numbers he dialed.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully expect the Roberts Supreme Court to decide that blanket surveillance is not an unreasonable search. After all, there is always an emanation or a penumbra out there somewhere to imagine and cite. But, in doing so, its actions will only underline the fact that the Constitution is now null and void.

And that will permit for the pro-Constitutional side to finally get in the game and start redefining the living, breathing version to its own liking.

Mailvox: so the slope was slippery after all

MP is a little bit excited about the new court ruling that declared polygamy bans to be unconstitutional:

Having severed marriage from any cultural traditions and values over the last fifty years, I thought it would be at least five more years before the Feds took marriage to the next step: polygamy. Marry whoever and whatever you like. Marry as many as you want. 

As of now it is not “cheating” to fuck other women when you are already married.  You are merely looking for your next wife.  The courts will have to work out some of the kinks, such as not needing the permission of your existing wife to get married again.

After all, I can contract to buy a car from one car dealer and contract to buy another car from another car dealer without asking permission of the first car dealer, right? 

And since marriage is nothing more than a voluntary contract between two people, the wife should have no say-so in preventing me from getting Wife #2 … or #3, … or even #4!

What business is it of my old wife to oppress me and prevent me from marrying the (new) one you love?  After all, she has the right to control her body and abort my child, why should I not have the right to marry who I want?

And don’t you Evil Religious Freaks start quoting the Bible or the Koran. We got rid of the old oppressive Christian monogamous “’til death do us part” junk many, many years ago.

At this rate we will have pure marriage-by-contract within 10 years: “Marriage” will be divorced from those Evil Religious Freaks and we will be able to construct our marriage contracts however we see fit!

What a Brave New World we are entering!

Do you know, I can remember when all those homogamy advocates were assuring everyone that the only reason anyone opposed altering the equation Marriage = One Man + One Woman was bigotry and that there was no possible way that changing Woman to Man could lead to changing One to One or More.

“In a game-changer for the legal fight over same-sex marriage that gives credence to opponents’ “slippery slope” arguments, a federal judge has now ruled that the legal reasoning for same-sex marriage means that laws against polygamy are likewise unconstitutional.”

American society is rapidly slip-sliding away, to the extent that it can even be said to exist at all anymore. One may not be able to legislate morality, but it is becoming eminently clear that one can legislate civilization. And barbarism, for that matter. But we may be past the point where civilization can be legislated; it may have to be imposed.

Wait, politicians lie?

I fail to see how the news that millions of Americans will lose their private insurance under Obamacare is supposed to be any surprise whatsoever:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

Barack Obama is easily the least honest president since Richard Nixon. And he has no pressure on him to be honest since he not only has the press covering for him, but relies upon the support of the two most gullible portions of the population. But, let’s face it, this isn’t going to stir any outrage among the “Obama gwan pay mah mortgage” crowd. It may spark a momentary skepticism in a few white urban liberals, but only until someone reminds them that Republicans are evil and racist, at which point they will dutifully abandon their crimethink.

Hung jury in Grisham trial

Some of the jury members obviously refused to go along with the judge’s attempt to railroad Chris Grisham’s trial:


A six-person jury was unable to reach a
verdict in the misdemeanor trial of Christopher Grisham, with the trial
ending in a hung jury Friday afternoon. Bell County officials announced they would try Grisham again, with the case slated to start on Nov. 18.

I’ve seen the video of the arrest. The fact that Grisham was arrested at all was absolutely outrageous. It was mostly because the policeman was clearly angry that Grisham was underwhelmed by the way he was throwing his badge around. It would appear that the county officials determined to keep trying him until they get the verdict they want.

Safety has its price

I don’t see why this poor federal air marshal is being prosecuted. Given that TSA agents can strip-search women and molest them up in the name of airplane safety, shouldn’t this guy be praised for his diligence in ensuring there are no underwear bombers boarding planes?

A federal air marshal has been arrested and accused of taking cell phone photographs underneath women’s skirts as they boarded a plane at Nashville International Airport.

Nashville police say Adam J. Bartsch was on duty on Southwest Airline Flight 3132 on Thursday when a witness noticed he was taking the photos and grabbed his cell phone. Police say the witness notified a flight attendant and Bartsch was taken off the flight and charged with disorderly conduct.

Has our society descended to this, when an innocent government employee simply doing his job of protecting the public can be harassed and even charged with a crime?  Why the next thing you know, the NSA will be banned from poring closely over naked pictures being sent from teenagers’ cell phones!

Can you ban what you don’t notice?

Effectively, that is, not legally. A technological blow for freedom in the drug wars:

More and more, people are smoking marijuana out of e-cigarettes and vapor pens — right out in the open with little or no fear of getting caught, users and experts say.

“I was on the train from New York to Baltimore and I enjoyed the pen the whole way there and back with no one noticing,” said one life-long marijuana user who asked not to be identified. “I absolutely was thinking ‘This is not bad at all.'”

As Spacebunny commented, the only surprise is that it took pot smokers so long to figure it out. I don’t partake of the herb myself, but I am 100 percent pro-legalization.

So Facebook is child rape

Just when you thought “near-rape” and “regret rape” were as silly as it was going to get; now a woman desperate to escape the consequences of her actions is attempting to elevate “posting legal pictures online” to the status of rape:

When Holly Jacobs sent nude photographs of herself to a long-distance
boyfriend she loved and trusted, the 23-year-old woman never imagined
the horror that would befall her. In August 2009, less than a year after the pair mutually ended their
three-year relationship, Jacobs did a Google search of her name and
discovered the naked photos on a so-called “revenge porn” website.

“I just went completely into shock,” said Jacobs, who hired a lawyer
and eventually changed her birth name from “Holli Thometz” to Holly
Jacobs.

“This is cyber-rape,” Jacobs, now 30, told FoxNews.com. “It’s all
about the guy having control over the woman and exploiting her in a
sexual way — the same way real-life rape does that. It violates you
over and over again.”

What came next was perhaps more shocking to Jacobs. Police in Miami,
where she lived at the time, took no action. They told her that “because
you are over 18 and you consented, technically they are his property
and he can do whatever he wants with them,” she recalled.

It is sadly unsurprising that a woman would find centuries-old laws concerning private property to be shocking. Apparently we are in the process of entering the time of juris sensus, in which the way a woman feels about something, anything, is the primary legally determinative factor.

It is manifestly obvious that having naked pictures online does a woman no material harm at all. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of women, actually profit from it. Hundreds of thousands more knowingly and intentionally post pictures of themselves for nothing more than the ego gratification. This whole campaign tends to strike me more as humblebrag than horror.

Moreover, it would be absolutely insane to try to make a law against this sort of thing. As usual, the woman desperate to erase the evidence of her past behavior and her white knights of both sexes aren’t even beginning to consider the consequences.  Think about it: we already have a problem with parents occasionally falling afoul of child pornography laws due to posting cute or funny pictures of bathtime on Facebook.

Now recall that children can’t consent. So, if posting pictures taken with consent is rape, how much worse is it to post pictures taken without consent? Of underage children! In one fell swoop, one woman with poor judgment in men is attempting to turn hundreds of thousands of American mothers into child rapists.

How “gay marriage” harms you

Remember when we were all assured that homogamy was about expanding human rights, not denying them?  Yeah, so it turns out that was a lie.

A Gresham bakery that refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, prompting a state investigation, shut its doors. On Sunday, KGW stopped by Sweet Cakes by Melissa and found the bakery
completely empty. All counter tops, display cases and decorations were
gone. Hanging in the window was a sign from the Oregon Family Council that read “Religious freedom is under attack in Gresham.”

So, we now know that in addition to being bad for marriage – in Britain a woman will soon no longer legally become a “wife” while in France women can no longer become “mothers” – we know that homogamy is bad for jobs and the economy. This is precisely why free association – or as its opponents call it, discrimination – is a Constitutional right.

It is a sign of considerable societal decline that such a fundamental human right is no longer recognized in the USA.

UPDATE: This isn’t a theoretical matter.  It is a dangerous anti-civilizational abuse of human rights quite literally sweeping the Western USA:

A commercial photography business owned by opponents of same-sex
marriage violated New Mexico’s anti-discrimination law by refusing to
take pictures of a gay couple’s commitment ceremony, the state’s highest
court ruled unanimously Thursday. Elaine Huguenin, who owns Elane Photography with her
husband and is the business’s principal photographer, refused to
photograph the ceremony because it violated her religious beliefs.

The court held that “a commercial photography
business that offers its services to the public, thereby increasing its
visibility to potential clients” is bound by the New Mexico Human Rights
Act “and must serve same-sex couples on the same basis that it serves
opposite-sex couples.”

“Therefore, when Elane Photography refused to
photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony,” the court concluded, the
photographer “violated the NMHRA in the same way as if it had refused to
photograph a wedding between people of different races.”

This should make it clear that “anti-discrimination” laws are the foundation of human rights abuses.  They serve as justifiation for involuntary government-imposed servitude.

Predictable consequences

It’s absolutely hilarious to see the mainstream media and government employees complaining about private citizens putting what they have learned from the IRS and the mortgage banks into action:

“It must be a mistake,” he said, when the loan officer told him that
someone had placed liens totaling more than $25 million on his house and
on other properties he owned.

But as Sheriff Stanek soon learned, the liens, legal claims on property
to secure the payment of a debt, were just the earliest salvos in a war
of paper, waged by a couple who had lost their home to foreclosure in
2009 — a tactic that, with the spread of an anti-government ideology
known as the “sovereign citizen” movement, is being employed more
frequently as a way to retaliate against perceived injustices.

Over the next three years, the couple, Thomas and Lisa Eilertson, filed
more than $250 billion in liens, demands for compensatory damages and
other claims against more than a dozen people, including the sheriff,
county attorneys, the Hennepin County registrar of titles and other
court officials.

“It affects your credit rating, it affected my wife, it affected my
children,” Sheriff Stanek said of the liens. “We spent countless hours
trying to undo it.”

Cases involving sovereign citizens are surfacing increasingly here in
Minnesota and in other states, posing a challenge to law enforcement
officers and court officials, who often become aware of the movement — a
loose network of groups and individuals who do not recognize the
authority of federal, state or municipal government — only when they
become targets. Although the filing of liens for outrageous sums or
other seemingly frivolous claims might appear laughable, dealing with
them can be nightmarish, so much so that the F.B.I. has labeled the
strategy “paper terrorism.” A lien can be filed by anyone under the
Uniform Commercial Code.

These liens, and many of the “frivolous” claims made by various private citizens are not necessarily fraudulent in the legal sense. There can be no question that they are no more fake than the millions of liens and foreclosures filed by mortgage banks that never held title to the properties they seized and no more illegal than the private MERS system that those banks tried to substitute for the historical county land records.

That is precisely why dealing with them can be so nightmarish; because they are as legal and legally enforceable as anything that the courts produce.  This is nothing but a natural consequence of the government declaring itself and its agents above the rule of law and then being surprised when the people follow its lead.

This is how a civilization falls, one step into barbaric chaos at a time. 

Naked authoritarianism

We appear to be rapidly reaching the end of the grand pretense of liberal democracy:

While the much publicized Sunday morning detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda at Heathrow on his way back to Brazil, in a stunning move that as we subsequently learned had been telegraphed apriori to the US, could potentially be explained away as a desperate attempt at personal intimidation by a scared, and truly evil empire in its last death throes, it is what happened a month earlier at the basement of the Guardian newspaper that leaves one truly speechless at how far the “democratic” fascist regimes have fallen and  fondly reminiscing of the times when dictatorial, tyrannical regimes did not pretend to be anything but.

For the fully story, we go to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger who, in a long editorial focusing on the tribulations of Greenwald, his partner, modern journalism and free speech and press in a time of near-ubiquitous tyranny when the status quo is questioned, happened to let his readers know that a month ago, after the newspaper had published several stories based on Snowden’s material, a British official advised him: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.”

It gets better: after further talks with the British government, Rusbirdger says that two “security experts” from Government Communications Headquarters, the British NSA equivalent, visited the Guardian’s London offices and in the building’s basement, government officials watched as computers which contained material provided by Snowden were physically pulverized. One of the officials jokes: “We can call off the black helicopters.”

Reuters adds that according to a source familiar with the event said Guardian employees destroyed the computers as government security experts looked on.

What is shocking is that as Rusbridger explained to the gentlemen from Whitehall, they had no jurisdiction over the forced destruction of Guardian property as it has offices in New York, that Greenwald himself was in Brazil, and that future reporting on the NSA did not even have to take place in London. That did not stop the UK government’s punitive measures, and obviously neither did pleas, before the computers were destroyed, that the Guardian could not do its journalistic duty if it gave in to the government’s requests.

In response, he wrote, a government official told him that the newspaper had already achieved the aim of sparking a debate on government surveillance. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying.

What is most shocking is that the UK government was apparently dumb enough to think that by forcing the Guardian to destroy its own hardware it would actually destroy some of the underlying data. It is this unprecedented idiocy that is most disturbing, because when interacting in a game theoretical fashion with an opponent one assumes rationality. In this case, what one got instead, was brute force and sheer, jawdropping stupidity.

If you still do not understand that government and force can NEVER be trusted to uphold human liberty and basic human rights without being held strictly accountable to the people at all times, with no exceptions, you are part of the problem.  And protesting “what if bad people might do bad things if we don’t let the bad people in government do whatever they want whenever they want without telling us” is not a credible counterargument, it is tantamount to voluntarily placing a dunce cap on your own head and drooling.