How did your US House Rep Vote for National Defense Authorization Act (HR 1540)?

To be clear, Sen Levins and McCain have added in the secret provision to allow for the "indefinite imprisonment without trial or charge" of any American citizen in the Senate version of the NDAA, however it was the House that allowed for the US Armed Forces to operate in the US effectively killing posse commitus in Section 1034 of House version of the bill (HR 1540) passed in June 2011, which is in the Senate version as well. However, I think it's fair to say that posse commitus was killed long before in the Patriot Act, but is now only becoming open law.

Here's how the House voted on this bill this summer:

<http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll375.xml>

And here is the link to the bill, HR 1540, passed this summer.

<http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h1540/text>

You'll note that almost the entire House voted for this.

There is one final conclusion I've understood for quite a while now and I think it's time America woke up to, and this is the clear and undeniable fact that both parties are systematically forcing us into a manufactured police state.

S.1867 -- National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Scary stuff folks...

"The  worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S.  1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate  floor on Monday. The  bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing."

The text of the bill:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.1867:

Some articles going into the police state aspects:

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/s-1867-the-department-of-defense-authorization-act-its-more-convoluted-than-you-think/

http://www.infowars.com/congress-to-vote-next-week-on-explicitly-creating-a-police-state/

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/senators-demand-military-lock-american-citizens-battlefield-they-define-being

I would recommend that you get this information out to the widest number of contacts you have.

Star Wars’ Carrie Fisher: Ted Kennedy asked if I would have sex with Chris Dodd

Star Wars’ Carrie Fisher: Ted Kennedy asked if I would have sex with Chris Dodd: The Daily Caller

Not so long ago, in a District of Columbia not so far away, Sen. Ted Kennedy was more than a little perverted to Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher.

According to her latest book, “Shockaholic,” Fisher was on a date in 1985 with former Sen. Chris Dodd in Washington, D.C. The two were joined for dinner by the late Kennedy, who proceeded to ask some rather frank questions.

“Suddenly,” Fisher writes, “Senator Kennedy, seated directly across from me, looked at me with his alert, aristocratic eyes and asked me a most surprising question. ‘So,’ he said, clearly amused, ‘do you think you’ll be having sex with Chris at the end of your date?’”

According to Fisher, “Chris Dodd looked at me with an unusual grin hanging on his very flushed face.”

Fisher, being the trained actress she was, responded coolly: “Funnily enough, I won’t be having sex with Chris tonight. … No that probably won’t happen. … Thanks for asking, though.”

But the “Lion of the Senate” didn’t stop there.

“’Would you have sex with Chris in a hot tub?’ Senator Kennedy asked me, ‘Perhaps as a way to say good night?”

“’I'm no good in water,’ I told him.”

Senate Republicans Introduce Bill Pushing Internet Sales Taxes

Republicans Introduce Bill Pushing Internet Sales Taxes: The New American

The days of tax-free Internet shopping may soon be coming to an abrupt end, if two Republican senators have their way.
Sens. Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee are currently preparing to introduce new legislation that would allow states to force Amazon.com and other out-of-state online retailers to collect sales taxes. Their bill has the backing of several key corporate retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy, Home Depot, and other companies that are currently required to collect sales taxes. At issue is whether online retailers should have to collect sales taxes in states where they’re making sales. Currently, online shoppers are supposed to report purchases for tax purposes but usually don’t.
"It's time to close the online sales tax loophole," says Jason Brewer, a vice president at the Retail Industry Leaders Association in Arlington, Va., which represents big box stores. "Amazon and companies like it are no longer fledgling startups."
The Republican-led legislative effort has a clear precedent in legislation introduced by Senate Democrats last year. The so-called Main Street Fairness Act of 2010 was introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and called for taxes on online purchases, under the presumption that local retail outfits are placed at a comparative disadvantage to online retailers due to discrepancies in taxation. The justification for these measures is a reprise of arguments that state tax collectors have made for at least a decade: they claim that Amazon.com, Overstock.com, Blue Nile, and other online retailers that don't always collect taxes are unreasonably depriving states of revenue, and that they enjoy an unfair competitive advantage over local retailers that must collect taxes, according to CNET’s Declan McCullagh. (The latter argument ignores added shipping and handling charges added to online purchases that often exceed the amount of sales tax levied on purchases at local stores, making the online goods more expensive, albeit more convenient, for the consumer.)


Read the rest here.

Veterans Day 11.11.11

Robert Taft: Count Him Conservative

Robert Taft: Count Him Conservative; The New American

If Robert Taft had been a baseball player instead of a United States Senator, he might have led the league in left-handed compliments. As it was, he was often “damned with faint praise” by people who, while paying tribute to the power of his intellect, quite often suggested both the man and the mind had come of age in the wrong century. The Ohio lawmaker would hear himself praised as one possessing “the best eighteenth-century mind in America” by people who obviously considered an 18th-century mind ill-suited to mid-20th-century politics. Others, frustrated by the Senator’s stubborn insistence on examining the facts of any controversy before deciding whether to go with or against the prevailing political winds, were fond of saying, “Taft has the best mind in the Senate — until he makes it up.”

Read the rest here.

Sen. Rand Paul On Lou Dobbs Tonight - 10/12/11

Have Senate Cloture Votes Contributed to the Growth of Government?

Have Senate Cloture Votes Contributed to the Growth of Government? Huffington Post

The statement at issue:

"This month, Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Democrat colleagues voted to change the Senate rules with a simple majority vote of 51 to 48. Most people would simply shrug and think, "So? Isn't that the way democracy is supposed to work?" For the past 222 years in the U.S. Senate, the answer to that question has been no....The Senate, in particular, was designed to limit the growth of government....The cloture vote made it easier for government to grow, and, guess what, government grew...The introduction of the cloture vote has certainly proved effective at hampering the Senate's ability to limit the size and influence of the government."

Comments by Sen. Ron Johnson, a freshman Republican from Wisconsin, who was elected with strong Tea Party support, in an op-ed column in the Washington Post on October 23, "Why the Senate Needs to Return to Requiring Supermajorities."


We checked the Constitution, and...


The freshman Senator's comments follow in a sturdy tradition in that chamber, equating the long history of unlimited debate with a supposed design of those who wrote the Constitution to ensure the rights of the Senate's minority by assuring unlimited debate. By referring to a 222-year history, Sen. Johnson obviously was making a claim that that tradition traces back to the founding in 1789. It is true that for decades after the founding the Senate had no limits on debate. The Constitution, however, says nothing about Senate debates, leaving that entirely to the Senate's power to write its own rules, under Article I, Section 5, Clause 3. And, under those rules, the Senate has been limiting debate since 1917, when it adopted its first anti-filibuster rule. Such a rule shuts down debate, and thus is called a "cloture" rule. ...

Read the rest here.

Senate panel advances gay judicial nominee

Senate panel advances gay judicial nominee; Washington Blade

A Senate committee approved unanimously by voice vote on Thursday a judicial nominee who could become the fourth openly gay person to sit on the federal bench.

Michael Walter Fitzgerald, whom President Obama nominated in July, was approved the Senate Judiciary Committee en banc as part of a group of nominees.

Fitzgerald is the fourth out federal judicial nominee chosen by the White House. Upon confirmation, he would take a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and would be the first openly gay federal judge in that state.

Read the rest here.

Senator Lieberman Grades President Obama on His Foreign Policy

Senator Lieberman Grades President Obama on His Foreign Policy; Heritage Foundation

You can tell a lot about a group by who they associate with, and in this case The Heritage Foundation's chummy relationship with warmonger Joe Lieberman tells the same as both are nothing more than tools of the military defense industry.

See Lieberman's interview here and know that we will continue on the path of this endless war no matter which wing of the one party wins the next election.

Members Of Congress Grow Wealthier Despite Recession

Members Of Congress Grow Wealthier Despite Recession; Huffington Post

Despite the economic recession and declining household wealth, the net wealth of members of Congress continues to rise, according to a Roll Call analysis of financial disclosure forms.

Members of the House and Senate have a collective net worth of $2.04 billion, up from $1.65 billion in 2008. The vast majority of the increase goes to the wealthiest members of Congress, who also account for most of Congress' net worth.

Members' net wealth may be much higher, however, since Roll Call only used the minimum valuation of assets in the range required by disclosure forms, and disclosure forms do not include non-income-producing assets, such as a personal residence.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) reported that his assets were worth at least $295 million. Much of his wealth comes from the money he earned in the car alarm business. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) wealth also increased from 2009 to 2010, from $21.7 million to $35.2 million. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Majority Leader (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) all had multimillion-dollar net worths in 2010.

Read the rest here.

Portman: Super committee secrecy needed

Portman: Super committee secrecy needed; Gannett News.com

...The day before, there was a more telling scene, as Portman, an Ohio Republican, and the committee's 11 other members met for nearly three hours behind closed doors, emerging tight-lipped about what they had discussed.

"I'd like to tell you everything, but I'm not talking about the super committee stuff," Portman said in a brief interview after that session.

The panel has held only three public hearings -- and at least eight private ones. In addition, the Republican and Democratic members of the super committee have also held separate, undisclosed partisan huddles to talk about substance and strategy.

And while there have been a few leaks to the press here and there, the 12 lawmakers on the committee seem to have taken a sort of informal vow of secrecy, refusing to disclose even the broad outlines of their daily agenda or deliberations.

"We treat it kind of like the ethics committee," said Portman, referring to the congressional panels that handle ethics complaints against members of Congress. "It's just confidential." ...

Read the rest here.

Comment: Welcome to the new Soviet, where oligarchs elect oligarchs to administer over the paroles proles and your life is decided upon behind closed doors.

PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America

PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America; Techdirt.com

As was unfortunately expected, the House version of PROTECT IP has been released (embedded below) and it's ridiculously bad. Despite promises from Rep. Goodlatte, there has been no serious effort to fix the problems of the Senate bill, and it's clear that absolutely no attention was paid to the significant concerns of the tech industry, legal professionals, investors and entrepreneurs. There are no two ways around this simple fact: this is an attempt to build the Great Firewall of America. The bill would require service providers to block access to certain websites, very much contrary to US official positions on censorship and internet freedom, and almost certainly in violation of the First Amendment.

Oh, and because PROTECT IP wasn't enough of a misleading and idiotic name, the House has upped the ante. The new bill is called: "the Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act" or the E-PARASITE Act (though, they also say you can call it the "Stopping Online Piracy Act").

The bill is big, and has a bunch of problems. First off, it massively expands the sites that will be covered by the law. The Senate version at least tried to limit the targets of the law (but not the impact of the law) on sites that were "dedicated to infringing activities" with no other significant purposes (already ridiculously broad), the new one just targets "foreign infringing sites" and "has only limited purpose or use other than" infringement. They're also including an "inducement" claim not found elsewhere in US regulations -- and which greatly expands what is meant by inducement. The bill effectively takes what the entertainment industry wanted the Supreme Court to say in Grokster (which it did not say) and puts it into US law. In other words, any foreign site declared by the Attorney General to be "inducing" infringement, with a very broad definition of inducing, can now be censored by the US. With no adversarial hearing. Hello, Great Firewall of America.

Read the rest here.

Comment: Who's their Daddy...well it's not you, it's Hollywood. Follow the money folks. If Hollywood is going to do the bidding for the government complex they expect mafia protection. This is what this potential law is all about. It's one big organized crime ring and America thinks all the while that we live in a Democracy.