A Guy in New York

Moral Preener in Chief

Two defendants in military sexual assault cases cannot be punitively discharged, if found guilty, because of “unlawful command influence” derived from comments made by President Barack Obama, a judge ruled in a Hawaii military court this week.

Navy Judge Cmdr. Marcus Fulton ruled during pretrial hearings in two sexual assault cases — U.S. vs. Johnson and U.S. vs. Fuentes — that comments made by Obama as commander in chief would unduly influence any potential sentencing, according to a court documents obtained by Stars and Stripes.

. . .
“This is bad lawyering on [Obama's] advisor’s part,” Hansen said. “It’s certainly not a problem to say that sexual assault is a bad thing and we need to weed it out … that’s innocuous. It’s when they get very pointed that it’s problematic.” [Ed. Thank goodness we have a former constitutional law professor in the White House.]

Judge: Obama sex assault comments ‘unlawful command influence’

Moral Preener in Chief, Vacationer in Chief, Golfer in Chief, Limousine Liberal in Chief, President Food Stamp, Hypocrite in Chief

One in five Americans are on food stamps. The number of Americans in the labor force fell to its lowest level since 1979 in March, when another 500,000 Americans simply gave up hope of finding a job. Median household income has declined 5.6 percent since 2009, when the so-called economic recovery began. Given these grim realities, Americans might expect President Obama to make the economy his greatest priority. Americans would be wrong. According to a new report, “Presidential Calendar: A Time-Based Analysis,” compiled by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI), Obama has spent only 3.6 percent of his total work time on economic issues, during his entire tenure in office.

Obama Vacations While Economy Tanks

Don’t get Obama wrong. He does not mean “to suggest that you just say, ‘Trust me. We’re doing the right thing. We know who the bad guys are.’” If that’s what you thought he was saying, you may have his surveillance program confused with his assassination program, under which all the deadly decisions are made within the executive branch. In this case, Obama said, members of Congress are “fully briefed,” and “federal judges are overseeing the entire program.”

But according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), a longtime ally of the president, the information shared with Congress is sketchy. “To say that there’s congressional approval suggests a level of information and oversight that’s just not there,” he told The New York Times.

We’re Only Spying on Ourselves: How Obama learned to stop worrying and love unaccountable surveillance

Every president deserves time off. Yet the unabashed luxuriousness of the Obamas’ lifestyle reflects a genuine tone-deafness with regard to the pressing concerns of millions of Americans, as well as the president’s priorities. Even as he blamed sequestration for the decision to cancel White House tours that would have cost a total of $2 million for the rest of the year, it was revealed that the known cost of Obama’s Christmas vacation in Hawaii last year was at least $4 million. That vacation was also the fourth one taken in Hawaii in four years, three of which involved separate flights First Lady Michelle Obama took to get there ahead of her husband. This year’s separate flight, necessitated by the president’s trip back to Washington to complete the fiscal cliff deal before returning to Honolulu, cost taxpayers an additional $3.24, and ran the total tab for the 2012-13 trip to more than $7 million.

The Obamas’ Unending Summer Vacation

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

You didn’t build that.

You didn’t build that

Barack Obama Named “Man of the Year” by Libertarian Party

Pres. Obama: Greatest recruiter for libertarianism, best gun salesman, Moral Preener in Chief, President Asterisk, President Big Brother, Crony Capitalist in Chief, BushObama, Obamaworld, President Drone, Golfer in Chief, Comedian in Chief, Plutocrat in Chief, Phony in Chief, Black Mascot of Wall Street, Obama Thugocracy, Statist in Chief, President Daddy, President Clunker, President Chicago Way, President Philosopher King, Constitutional Law Professor in Chief, President Food Stamp, Crony in Chief, Idiot in Chief, President Shakedown, ….

For more, see The Pretty Darn Exhaustive Obama Nickname List

Forward!

You definitely didn’t build that:

The President has a gun fight, June 11, 2011 (White House Photo by Pete Souza).

Forward!

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

Lois Lerner, “bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan”

Lois Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan. Now she also is a national security problem because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government

There’s more, much more, to the Lois Lerner story

Thank goodness we have “public servants” like Lois Lerner. The country is in the very best of hands.

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

NYC Chocolate – Mast Brothers

Arguably, these two boundary-breaking bearded brothers now make the best chocolate in America.

Innovation through Simplicity: Rick and Michael of Mast Brothers Chocolate

Mast Brothers Chocolate, 111 North 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249, 718-388-2625, open daily 12 noon – 7 pm. [Yelp | NY Mag]

Mast Brothers Chocolate: A Family Cookbook – Google Books

The Political Class Really is Special. Special.

I noticed two anecdotes about the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, both of which were meant to be complimentary but in fact speak volumes about the petty corruption of our political class and how inured to it we’ve become. The first was told by a friend of his who was at a conference of Jewish philanthropists in Israel with Lautenberg on 9/11. Lautenberg “used his pull as a former senator” to get everyone an early flight back to the U.S. so they could rejoin their families. The second, told by Vice-President Biden at Lautenberg’s funeral, related how Biden was once hustling to make an Amtrak train to Delaware, but was told by Amtrak staff, “don’t worry we’re holding the train for Sen. Lautenberg” (who was a big political supporter of Amtrak).

. . .
How much more I would have admired Lautenberg if his friends could relate that “we begged him to use his clout as a former Senator to get us back to our families, but Frank was adamant that his friends and acquaintances were no more important than anyone else trying to get back home, and that he wouldn’t abuse his status as former senator on our behalf.”

We’ve Apparently Come to Admire the Petty Corruption of the Political Class

The political class and crony capitalists are the new aristocracy.

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

Big Brother Really Is Watching Us

Here’s a question I asked myself yesterday: Would I rather have my phone records collected and readied for possible inspection by the National Security Agency, or have my genitalia scrutinized by the Transportation Security Administration?

One answer, of course, is, why choose? In today’s America you can have both. [Ed. Is this a great country or what?!?]

How TSA’s Groping Softened Us Up for NSA’s Snooping

The 4th Amendment is an ancient memory, clearly an affectation among us hicks.

How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential mass data collections by the government from other communications and online companies. These are the “details,” and few Americans consider this approach “balanced,” though many rightly consider it Orwellian.

These activities violate the Fourth Amendment, which says warrants must be specific—”particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” And what is the government doing with these records? The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?

The country is in the very best of hands. Ai yi yi yi yi!

No one objects to balancing security against liberty. No one objects to seeking warrants for targeted monitoring based on probable cause. We’ve always done this.

What is objectionable is a system in which government has unlimited and privileged access to the details of our private affairs, and citizens are simply supposed to trust that there won’t be any abuse of power. This is an absurd expectation. Americans should trust the National Security Agency as much as they do the IRS and Justice Department.

Big Brother Really Is Watching Us: Monitoring hundreds of millions of phone records is an extraordinary invasion of privacy.

When British soldiers were roaming the American countryside in the 1760s with lawful search warrants with which they had authorized themselves to enter the private homes of colonists in order to search for government-issued stamps, Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The soul-searching became a revolution in thinking about the relationship of government to individuals. That thinking led to casting off a king and writing a Constitution.

What offended the colonists when the soldiers came legally knocking was the violation of their natural right to privacy, their right to be left alone. We all have the need and right to be left alone. We all know that we function more fully as human beings when no authority figure monitors us or compels us to ask for a permission slip. This right comes from within us, not from the government.
. . .
And, of course, to prevent the recurrence of soldier-written search warrants and the government dragnets and fishing expeditions they wrought, the Constitution mandates that only judges may issue search warrants, and they may do so only on the basis of probable cause of crime, and the warrants must “particularly describ(e) the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Last week, we discovered that the government has persuaded judges to issue search warrants not on the constitutionally mandated basis, but because it would be easier for the feds to catch terrorists if they had a record of our phone calls and our emails and texts. How did that happen?
. . .
After 9/11, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This permitted federal agents to write their own search warrants, as if to mimic the British soldiers in the 1760s. It was amended to permit the feds to go to the FISA court and get a search warrant for the electronic records of any American who might communicate with a foreign person.

In 30 years, from 1979 to 2009, the legal standard for searching and seizing private communications — the bar that the Constitution requires the government to meet — was lowered by Congress from probable cause of crime to probable cause of being an agent of a foreign power to probable cause of being a foreign person to probable cause of communicating with a foreign person. Congress made all these changes, notwithstanding the oath that each member of Congress took to uphold the Constitution. It is obvious that the present standard, probable cause of communicating with a foreign person, bears no rational or lawful resemblance to the constitutionally mandated standard: probable cause of crime.

The NSA Scandal Violates the Lessons of Our History and Our Constitution

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

Special Message

“A new invention, I think.”

(Wonder if it is for rent? That would make the owner a DC rent seeker….)

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

Spending Other People’s Money is Intoxicating!

There is nothing so intoxicating as the ability to speculate with other people’s money.

Full of Hot Air

Spending Other People’s Money – it’s the statist way!

Yes We Scan

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

“I have become convinced….” President Big Brother

I have become convinced, based on what I would argue is the increasing weight of the evidence, that Mr. Obama is a man whose sense of mission, his arrogance and self-righteousness, and his belief in the malevolence of his enemies might well lead him and his administration to act in ways that would seem to him to be justified at the time but, in fact, are wholly inappropriate.

Obama Can’t Be Trusted with Power

Thugs and fascists act that way. Forward!

Last week, when Americans learned of a massive erosion of our freedom, also marked the 64th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s “1984.”

If you haven’t read it, please do so. If you read it years ago, read it again. The movie doesn’t count.

But don’t read it on the Internet. Instead, look for one of those quaint, old-fashioned “books on paper,” so the federal security forces can’t read along with you online.

On Friday, President Barack Obama stood in San Jose, Calif., to reassure a nation overwhelmed, perhaps numbed, at how quickly we’ve given up our liberty in the name of security.

President Big Brother from Chicago has always believed in the power of his rhetorical skills. Unfortunately, his aides forgot the speech. There was no script and no teleprompter.
. . .
This all comes after other news, that the Internal Revenue Service was used to squash dissent and harass conservative and tea party groups; and that phone records of journalists from The Associated Press and Fox News were seized, even though President Big Brother insists that he’s all about the First Amendment.

The loss of freedom has hit us so quickly that Obama felt compelled to stand up and make soothing sounds.

President Big Brother says don’t worry about federal spying

I predict we will see more spying and more intrusive spying. You should not think that recent events will simply cement a previous status quo in place, rather it moves us down a very particular path and probably makes the entire problem worse. The age of creative ambiguity in surveillance is over and probably not for the better.

The loss of privacy and the collapse of creative ambiguity

At some point, you have to recognize that OBAMA is the zombie.

So long as we have a big and bloated government, the politicians are going to want some sort of oppressive bureaucracy to extract several trillion dollars of our money every year.

So if we really want to clip the wings of the IRS, we better figure out how to restore limited, constitutional government.

Which Group Is More Despicable, IRS Bureaucrats or the Politicians who Created the Tax Code?

A large state headed by an arrogant, self-righteous Moral Preener in Chief demagogue – what could possibly go wrong?
Why the NSA Prism Program Could Kill U.S. Tech Companies
Oh.

The IRS Scandal, Day 30

BushObama

Somebody needs to tell the president that it’s not that a lack of trust in government leads to “some problems,” it’s that a litany of problems involving the use and abuse of government’s coercive power have eroded any basis for trust.

‘Trust Us,’ Says the President, Even as the Government Proves It Can’t Be Trusted

The idol worship and the cult of the presidency lives on. Rubes.

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

Good Question – Why are so many on the left so reactionary?

Why is it that liberals feel no qualms about being rude? Far too many people who are perfectly polite and courteous, otherwise, think nothing of insulting you for not sharing their political opinions. They look at us with disdain, thinking we’re unenlightened conservatives and never hesitating to say so.

As the lone conservative at the tennis courts, I cringe at the Sarah Palin jokes and the jabs at Mormons. When news came on 9/11 that planes had struck the World Trade Center, my partner commented that Bush would use it as an excuse to increase military spending. Bush, of course, is dumb – as are all Republicans, and we’re epitomized by Dan Quayle, whose spelling of “potatoe” has entered historical canon. (Never mind Obama’s telling us there are 57 states, or having a meltdown without a teleprompter) And now it’s Marco Rubio, caught drinking water. “Next time he’ll forget to zip his fly,” joked one of the guys. Mitt Romney changes his mind more often than he changes his underwear. Reagan had Alzheimer’s when he made B movies, and Bonzo had to feed him his lines. And would you believe, from a guy with a pathetic serve, this comment about the Clarence Thomas, justice of the supreme court: send him back to the plantation.

Liberals have no shame. A dinner guest in our home stood up at the table, clinked his wine glass and said, “It shows how stupid the American people are, they voted for Bush twice.” He turned to me, smirking, and said, “I know you voted for him.” A biochemist who had been too busy learning liberal doctrine instead of the basic manners of being a guest.

Why are liberals so rude to the right? Too many people who lean left would rather crack nasty jokes than actually be liberal and listen to other views

Libertarians get the same level of contempt and disdain from liberals. Look at this video for a good example of how reflexively reactionary liberals can be:

The Kochs are not conservatives, they are libertarians. “Regardless of their views.”
You just can’t make this stuff up.

A physician’s expertise makes him capable of inflicting great harm, noted Plato a couple thousand years ago, and no one is better positioned to steal than a guard. So perhaps we should not be surprised that the most conspicuous foe of liberty and the Bill of Rights turns out to be a former professor of constitutional law.

Obama’s War on the Constitution: The president, who first campaigned on a claim to constitutional expertise, is now the document’s biggest threat.

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT), learn what Members of Congress pay in taxes, and prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.

Moral Preener in Chief

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Special Message

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Spending Other People’s Money is Intoxicating!

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“I have become convinced….” President Big Brother

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