“This is a march that will be nearly impossible to stop. This is the permanent destruction of the right to privacy. This is the exaltation of safety over liberty, and it will lead to neither. This is the undoing of limited government, right before our eyes.”
“If ‘#Resistance’ means anything, at a minimum it should entail a refusal to trust a dangerous authoritarian to wield vast power with little checks or oversight.”
“The backlash from a liberal establishment that had once praised King for his civil rights campaign came as hard and fast as his allies had feared.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2018/01/15/martin-luther-king-jr-mlk-day-2018/
“The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to extend the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program for six years with minimal changes, rejecting a push by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to impose significant privacy limits when it sweeps up Americans’ emails and other personal communications. Effectively, the vote was almost certainly the end of a debate over 21st-century surveillance and privacy rights that broke out in 2013 after the leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/us/politics/fisa-surveillance-congress-trump.html?_r=0
“The powers in question allow the government to target foreigners overseas, collecting their communications. But Americans’ communications — even those in the U.S. — can be snared if they are part of conversations that the targets are having. The bill allows ‘abouts’ collection, which is when the government scoops up communications that mention a target, even if he or she isn’t the sender or receiver.”
Read more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/6/lawmakers-vote-thursday-renew-foreign-intelligence/
“23 percent of Americans say that the government is America’s biggest problem. ‘That’s about exactly what is was before Nixon resigned,’ Jones said, referring to the Watergate era. One might be tempted to view this result as solely caused by disgust with President Donald Trump or his policies. But that’s not really the case, or not entirely. The commentators point out that the poll is similar to findings from 2014-2015 when Barack Obama was president.”
Read more: https://fee.org/articles/americans-say-americas-biggest-problem-is-government/
“President Obama first approved U.S. support for the Saudi war effort. President Trump has continued the Obama policy. The war in Yemen has now become his war and his human rights catastrophe. Yemen today is arguably the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, and America’s role in it is undeniable and indispensable.”
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-u-s-saudi-starvation-blockade/
“Surrounding himself with generals and giving the national-security establishment carte blanche to do anything it wants to protect ‘national security,’ Trump, for all practical purposes, has been absorbed by the national-security establishment, even permitting the CIA to continue keeping its long-secret, 50-year-old JFK-assassination records secret from the American people. It is safe to say that for the balance of Trump’s term in office, his actions in foreign affairs will be no different than anything that Hillary Clinton, who undoubtedly would have been a loyal servant of the national-security establishment, would have done with respect to foreign affairs. What gives? Why the dramatic shift in Trump?”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2017/11/30/pentagon-cia-nsa-charge/
“The current authorization for Section 702 expires on December 31, and it’s the first time Congress has faced this reauthorization since Edward Snowden’s earth-shattering disclosures about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance apparatus. Committees in the Senate and House have competing proposals to reauthorize the program. But with the clock running out, Congress once again appears to be poised to jam through reauthorization.”
“Washington has suspended it way into a $5.7 trillion increase in the public debt in just six years since October 2011. That is, during a period which supposedly constitutes the third longest business expansion in US history. At the end of the day, you can’t borrow your way to prosperity. That’s the oldest rule in the book of sound money and sustainable finance. And it’s about ready to be learned all over again.”
Read more: http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-black-swan-in-plain-sight-debt-out-the-wazoo/