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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2013 2:19 am
by admin
KARL ROVE RETURNS TO OZ, by Charles Carreon



An Untimely Exit

Well tune up the exit chorus, Karl Rove is leaving the White House, having cleansed it of every last piece of the damning evidence that once littered the place. The fixer has done his job, and now, the media is parroting, Karl Rove is going to spend more time with “his family.” Rove's cover story is that he is withdrawing from active politics. He will be spending time tending apple trees. You are thinking, like I am, this seems a very different type of Karl Rove than the one we know — who is not know for taking a back seat in anything involving his sphere of concern.

Flying Ahead of The Storm

Then there is the small matter of the subpoena from Congress over the US Attorney-gate scandal. The storm has arrived on his doorstep. He can barely be said to be leaving ahead of it, and some might say it's suspicious, his withdrawing from the President’s side just as the all-but toothless Congress masses its courage for a pitiful attempt to gum Bush to death. A cowardly charge, Karl would admit, by cowardly people, but a charge nonetheless. Rove is sure he will prevail, but the rest of us would not be too surprised to discover that Rove had just begun the last political battle of his life.

A Strategic Retreat

Rove wants all his time to strategize and plan. He will assert maximum control over his records, and will be better able to resist disclosing evidence of White House involvement in the now widely-condemned plot to purge US Attorneys from their positions in preparation for rigging the vote in various states. US Attorneys were fired who refused to pursue phoney “voter fraud” cases — a code-word for suppressing the vote among minority and lower-income voters by threatening prosecution. Republicans have used this tactic to discourage minority voting for years, being great fans of anything that keeps ordinary people from participating in the political life of the nation where they live and pay taxes.

Return to Oz

Karl has been successful in part because he tries not to lie when he might get caught. Remember he remained upright where Scooter Libby fell - he knows where to draw the line. So maybe he was being secretly candid when he announced his destination, and meant he was going to spend time with “The Family.” It’s a fine old Family he’s part of, the kind that is run by deep thinkers like him, who need time to think and strategize, especially when their strength is on the wane. So now it’s back behind the curtain with him, where he can pull the levers of power in secret. It’s another fine day in the Land of Oz.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2013 2:22 am
by admin

by Charles Carreon



Hello, Americans. Are you worried about the way our country’s being run lately? Do you get the feeling that corporate interests control everything, and the little person has no say? Are you afraid that both parties have sold out to the lobbyists? Are you sure that the noise about Britney hides something worse than a failing economy, a failed war, and a collapsing infrastructure?

If so, I think it’s time for us to discuss the Protect America Act. This Protect America Act is the largest legislative cowflop I have ever seen, and if the secret jockeying around its enactment and re-enactment are any indication, it is a central part of The Bush Amnesty Package.

The Protect America Act, enacted on August 1, 2007, was born with one of the shortest lifespans ever set on federal law – it was good for only six months, and thus was set to expire on February 1st, three days ago. This Protect America Act is so important to the president that on January 25th he said he’d use his veto to kill it if the Congress renewed it for a mere thirty days. He wants it made permanent, so America will be permanently protected. But just six days later, the Great Decider decided differently, and sat down in Las Vegas to sign a fifteen-day extension of the Act that Congress had quietly slipped through both the House and the Senate without telling any of their constituents.

Now let’s discuss what the Protect America Act is, and why I think it’s really the Bush Amnesty Bill. Most average people haven't paid too much attention to the NSA, that's the National Security Agency — the same NSA that Oliver North used as a cover for dealing cocaine and weapons on behalf of the Nicaraguan fascists we called “contras.” They don't think much about it, because it acts in secret. Sometimes, apparently even before September 11, 2001, the NSA secretly went to AT&T and Verizon and a bunch of other telecommunications companies, the “telcos,” as they're known, and got them to agree to let the NSA tap the telephones and read the email of American citizens. Some evidence has been revealed by an AT&T whistleblower, who says AT&T shared 100% of its customer information and communications with the NSA. That, in case you don't know it, violates the warrant requirement of the 4th Amendment, the one that keeps our “persons, houses, papers and effects” safe from warrantless searches.

There's a special court that the Bush NSA could have asked to issue those warrants. It's called the “FISA court,” that stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it always issues warrants for wiretaps when requested. FISA proceedings are secret, and have been used to bug the phones of mobsters and narcotrafficers very effectively for years. Not good enough for the Bush NSA. They don't want to respect any law. They just went to AT&T and Verizon and said, “Who's your Daddy?” And the telcos just gave it up for poppa. This is what we call the “domestic spying scandal.”

There's about 50 lawsuits pending against AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos for selling out their customers in this way. I, personally, have already called AT&T and asked for my money back for all the time they let the NSA invade my privacy. I told the AT&T lady that, if I'd checked into a hotel and discovered my room had two-way mirrors, I'd certainly want a refund, and sue for invasion of privacy, too. Makes sense, doesn't it?

But the issue runs far deeper than the simple right to be free from having your privacy invaded, which can be personally humiliating. The point is that the government, especially, must not invade our privacy, because whenever it does, it has run off the rails, and is doing something the Founding Fathers never intended to permit, and erected the Fourth Amendment as a barrier against – the King’s ruthless methods of putting down supposed plots against “the Crown” by imprisoning people without charges, reading their letters, and interrogating their friends and family. The 4th Amendment is so precious to the American legal tradition that we let criminals, even murderers, out of jail because the evidence against them was seized without warrants. The current Supreme Court hasn’t changed that. In courts across America, every day judges let drug dealers walk without batting an eye when a narc makes a bust with evidence seized in violation of the dealer’s privacy.

Nevertheless, reading our emails and listening to our phone calls was such a priority for the Bush gang that they just blithely committed a federal felony. There is no reason to believe they’ve stopped reading our email, or that their focus is on bomb-wielding terrorists. They know their real enemies are votes, not bombs. Don’t forget what we learned in the Attorney-Gate scandal. While the NSA was illegally wiretapping Americans, Alberto Gonzales’ Department of Justice was filling the US Attorney ranks with loyalists who would help local vote-rigging by three methods: prosecuting Democratic candidates to slander them, challenging minority voters with identification requirements, and not prosecuting Republican vote-riggers. So how sure can you be that Republic dirty tricks operatives haven’t already used this information to undermine our electoral process?

The domestic spying scandal really is bad news for Bush, which is why he’s doing deals in Vegas. He and his spy-chiefs could end up answering charges for conducting illegal wiretaps, the sort of charges currently pending against Anthony Pellicano, the private investigator to the stars, who made illegal wiretaps one of his prime offerings. Of course, these prosecutions would be under Federal statute, 50 USC § 1809, the FISA section that provides for 5 years in jail if a government employee “intentionally engages in electronic surveillance ... except as authorized by statute.” While it's ”a defense to a prosecution under subsection (a) of this section that the defendant was a law enforcement or investigative officer engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction,“ that wouldn't give Bushco much comfort, would it, since this is all about warrantless surveillance. But more than likely, as is ever the case, the Bush gangsters would probably go down for obstruction of justice and perjury for trying to cover it all up. These prosecutions could sweep in Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Myers, Dick Cheney, maybe even El Busho himself. Not a matter to be dealt with lightly.

You can hear Dick Cheney thinking — and he knows something about avoiding prosecution, having dodged a bullet with that Scooter Libby case, and letting Harry Whittington take the blame for getting in the way of his birdshot in that little hunting snafu down in Texas. This is not something you can trust the federal judiciary on. Even Justice Roberts, Thomas, and Alito might not save your ass, once you were out of office. They're on the bench for life, and have short memories. No, better go to our pet Congress, and get immunity for the telcos. That'll keep us safe, because if you can't sue the telcos, you're not going to ever be able to pry through NSA secrecy to find out whose ear was actually glued to the receiver while all Americans chatted on gaily, oblivious to the fact that Big Daddy Knows All.

When this was first discovered by the press in December 2005, Congress pretended to really care. But they got buffaloed by the White House into back-door approving the program by way of the Protect America Act, which really should've been called ”Protect The Administration Act.” Sponsored by Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, this injects weasel words into the clear language of FISA, allowing warrantless surveillance against anyone, get this — “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” That means that as long as the Protect America Act is in effect, FISA is gutted, because if one party to the conversation is “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States, the entire communication can be tapped without a warrant. With servers swapping emails all over the world, and IP addresses the only clue as to their real origin, a case could be made that any email might reasonably be, on one end, coming from outside the US. And does the fact that you receive spam from Nigeria open your whole inbox to surveillance? If so, and why not, then privacy is toast! For an extra dose of irony, consider the fact that Congressmen have communications with foreign-based people every day – communications that they have authorized the Bush NSA to read willy-nilly. Well, I guess that’s what happens when Congress doesn’t have time to read the legislation, or consider its effects.

Are the Democrats naïve? It hardly matters, for if so they were criminally negligent. The Republicans broke the law as it existed, but Congress violated the Constitution when it enacted the Protect America Act. These “representatives” may as well have spilled the blood of the Founders of this nation and spit on the Constitution. They have let the wolf of tyranny in the door and watched it eat the babe of liberty. I guess that’s why they only did it for six months. That salved their jaded consciences some.

You may recall a little dust-up in Congress over the passage of this Benedict Arnold legislation, enough to get it enacted “temporarily,” good for only 180 days from the effective date of August 1, 2007. That meant it was due to lapse on February 1, 2008. Good enough that Cheney, and all the other Bush gang members, slept well through the holidays. And to avoid disturbing that sleep, it's all been hush-hush since then. You didn't exactly hear Rupert Murdoch breaking the news that the Protect America Act was about to expire. The Republicans certainly haven't gone to the electorate to plead their case for the extension of this rule. Sure, it's a little hard to understand the legalese, but for heavens sakes, The Protect America Act was about to expire! Terrorists around the world are licking their chops, ready to send emails stuffed with terrorist plans that no-one will even be able to read! Presumably terrorists are holding their breath, just waiting to see us drop our guard.

And yet, you didn’t hear a word. Although this law is so important that on January 25th Bush threatened to veto a thirty-day version, demanding a permanent extension, he didn’t even mention it once during his State of the Union Address four days later, on January 29th. I suspect that on the 25th, Bush was playing chicken with Reid, threatening to launch invective at the Democrats in his State of the Union address for refusing to make Protect America Act permanent. Bush apparently decided against that, because during the Address, he talked a lot about protecting America, without once referring to the Act itself.

It had been allowed to vanish from the public radar screen. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about when the Protect America Act was going to expire. The New York Times had done nothing to disturb my ignorance. February 1st was Friday. I was drinking coffee at Starbucks as usual, and there isn’t an article in The Times about this relatively important topic. But someone screwed up, because on page A12 of the New York Times, I stumbled over a statement in an article entitled “Senate Democrats' Stimulus Plan Hits Roadblock,” and it said, referring to Harry Reid, Democratic Senate Majority Whip:

Mr. Reid said late Thursday that he had reached agreement with Mr. McConnell on amendments related to the proposed permanent extension of the administration's terrorism surveillance program. Republican leaders had viewed the agreement as a condition for moving the stimulus bill to the floor.

That alarmed me. Every time Harry Reid makes a deal with the devil, I mean the White House, the people end up on the losing end. So I did what every red blooded American blogger can do, and called up Reid's office. They all said they didn't know about it, and had no response. I called Obama's office, following up a lead that he'd skipped a vote on the issue, and they admitted that he had, but also claimed he'd been present on Monday, January 28th, and voted against domestic spying. So I looked up what his vote was, and it wasn't against anything. It was FOR extending the authorization by another 30 days. All the Democratic Senators voted the same way. It seems as if the one thing the Democrats have no stomach for is fighting TODAY. Kick the can down the road until the issue is forgotten, and it can be compromised away without a fight.

Although she's the head traitor in the House, and not a Senator, I figured Nancy Pelosi would have the straight dope, but her people don't even answer the phone. I talked to staff in Clinton's office, Kennedy's office, Max Baucus' office, and many others. They all denied knowing what I was talking about. I called one of the good guys on the issue — Sen. Christopher Dodd, who keeps introducing legislation to kill the immunity deal, but his people knew nothing. Of course I couldn't learn anything from the bad guy, JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who’s pushing hard for permanent adoption of Protect America, and immunity for telcos. Stop me there — a Rockefeller from West Virginia? I thought Rockefellers were New Yorkers. Well, obviously he's not the child of any coal miner's daughter. At any rate, he's the “Democrat” who's really behind all this. Some kinda Democrats they make down in West Virginia. Would somebody go out to West Virginia and yell down a coal mine — “Hey folks — the boss is tappin' yer phone!” But Harry Reid's from Nevada, where you learn to watch your back, so he's a little more careful when he sells out. That must be why none of the Senate press offices could even tell me that the Protect America Act had been extended by fifteen days the very day before. That, and the fact that the President happened to be in Las Vegas when he signed this legislation, which is kind of strange. Doesn’t he usually sign bills in the Oval Office?

Can it be the case that, while all the Washington Senatorial press offices basked in blissful ignorance, Bush just happened to be in Nevada, Harry Reid’s home state – to sign a 15-day extension of the Protect America Act, an extension half as long as one he’d declared unacceptable just a week prior? I mean, I know Harry Reid’s constituency is all based there, but what, did some showgirls hold the president hostage and make him sign? Even weirder, since when do we extend statutes suspending the constitutional requirement of a warrant for a period of two weeks? What the hell is going on here?

I’ll tell you what’s going on. This fifteen-day extension shows the President and his cronies are dealing very seriously on this issue. They know they could go to jail, and give the whole witch-hunt-for-terrorists business a bad name. Everything could unravel around this one. Meanwhile, the Democrats are helping to keep the fire damped down over this domestic spying thing, supposedly to come out of this Congressional session with a few extra bucks for groceries and rent for regular folks. Remember, everyone’s been quoting that Clinton-era saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” So in a deal that some might call cynical, Reid is getting a few bucks for regular folks in exchange for cutting the Bush gang loose for their crimes against our constitution, our privacy, our dignity as Americans.

It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied. Certainly it’s the purpose of the Bush gang to deny Americans the justice that should be served on them, and delay is their method. Harry Reid is ready to give them all the delay they need. The deal he referred to having reached is contained in Senate Bill 2557, that Reid introduced on January 28th. It would extend the Protect America Act four months, until “July 1, 2009.” Hell of a lot better than 15 days. In fact, you could divide the dollars directed to poor people by the stimulus package by 120, the number of days by which Senate Bill 2557 will extend the Protect America Act, and determine just how much it cost the Republicans to buy each day of delay. But it will be worth every penny. Warrantless surveillance will remain the law of the land well into the summer, by which time the nation will be wrapped up in presidential campaign fever, and the last Bush holdouts will be deploying their parachutes. The Bush gang is betting that Congress will be less willing to confront the issue four months from now. Meanwhile, they will enjoy the power to violate our privacy in ways we don’t even understand.

The Democrats know what they’re doing, but as usual, they’ve got an outdated strategy. It was the economy, stupid, but it’s gone way beyond that. It’s about having government we can trust, from the Congress to the President to the Supreme Court. Right now, we have none of it. We have a president who lies, a Congress that runs in fear from the word “terror,” and a Supreme Court that worships government and reduces the individual to a pawn. Congress is afraid to reveal the depth of the traitorous conduct that they have let the Bush regime perpetrate. That’s why they enacted the Protect America Act in the first place – to give Bush the cover he needs to get out of office without being impeached, and to retire in safety, without being indicted.

The media disinformation campaign is going great. The gutting of the 4th Amendment has gone all but unnoticed. Good liberals like me think that the point is whether the telcos will get amnesty, overlooking the fact that the Protect America Act itself is the elephant in the room. I started out from that viewpoint when I began researching this report, and ended up deciding that the whole “amnesty for telcos” issue is a sidetrack. Sure, the telco lawsuits are the most likely avenue for an investigation that would lead to discovering who, in the Bush gang, put all this stuff in motion. But only idiots with media credentials really ask themselves, “who authorized this?” That’s like asking if Reagan authorized North to supply the Contras with weapons in defiance of a law making it strictly illegal to provide that assistance. Of course Reagan authorized it – that’s why North did it. And of course Bush authorized domestic spying – that’s why he’s willing to stretch his immunity deal out for fifteen days.

Realizing that the worms that would come out of this domestic spying garbage can, if it were opened, would be large enough to eat all of Washington DC, the two houses of Congress are as ready as two mutts in an alley to do the deed. Eventually, they’ll grant the telcos immunity from lawsuits, because that’s all the Republicans will need to keep the lid on the scandal. But are they so messed up that they might permanently adopt the Protect America Act? It’s one thing to let the Bush gang go free when they deserve to swing on the end of a rope. It’s quite another to burn the 4th Amendment right out of the Constitution for the rest of the life of our nation.

Here’s what I think – anytime somebody is bargaining in the area of fifteen days, they’re weak. And when Bush cuts his demands from vetoing a 30-day deal to signing a 15-day deal, there has got to be some invisible sweetener – an unspoken quid pro quo, something more than the mere four month extension bill that Reid is proposing. Something that, in essence, is granting Bush and his affiliated criminals amnesty for running America into the ground, ruining our economy, our national pride, our ability to stand together as Americans proud to be Americans. It all turns round this Protect America Act, I’m sure. Call Harry Reid now at 202-224-3502, and tell him you heard about the secret deals in Vegas. Tell him to ditch his amnesty plans for Bush, let the Protect America Act expire, and save our Constitution.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2013 9:41 pm
by admin


Punks are by nature contrarian, so it stands to reason that I would be bored to the bone in the middle of an election season that is supposedly a standing-room only attraction. Can't help it. The Obamajama is making history, and is reputed to be hella charismatic, but I'm just not picking up on the magic. I must have a bit of the skepticism that infects the aged, who have been bilked out of their lunch money so many times it's become second nature to expect it. The more politicians say they have the best interests of all at heart, while promising to mightily smite our foes here and abroad, the more I can see the forked tongue darting between their lips.

The things that have poisoned politics are:

The requirement that politicians be pious

The requirement that politicians never offend anyone

The ban on criticising "the military"

The veneration of past "leaders," such as FDR, Truman, Reagan, etc.

Politicians are by nature foul mouthed, hot headed, and lustful. To require that they be pious corrupts them with a vice far more dangerous to a democracy -- hypocrisy.

Politicians should be exceptionally free to offend corporations, banks, military officers, and any damn one else who gets in the way of doing the business of the people. As voters, we need aggressive politicians, on our behalf, not namby pamby bootlickers and swine suckers.

The military is not a sacred institution, even though its members spill their own blood and that of others in pursuit of their mission. Badly-planned military missions that cause the loss of human life need to be criticised and aborted. The loss of military discipline that results in torture, abuse, and murder requires the strictest censure. Che Guevara was quickest to execute those purported "revolutionaries" who used battle as an excuse for gangsterism and brutality.

Past leaders are no more deserving of veneration than our current ones. Elevating these past representatives as great "leaders" leads to a cult of personality that the media can endlessly exploit in Hitleresque fashion. Screw leaders. We need REPRESENTATIVES.

Good night and please be punk.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2013 9:44 pm
by admin


Well, the Decider has decided to keep all our options on the table, and I for one have no problem with it. Waterboarding is, by all accounts, nothing more than scary, and that could be said of roller coasters. Frankly, I'd confess to just about anything to avoid being put through a second trip on one of these seriously scary "thrill rides" that people call fun. The people who design those rides are sadists, and the people who pay to ride them are masochists. I say build a roller coaster in Gitmo and when they refuse to confess, just put 'em through the loop de loop one more time. You'll have them accusing their grandmothers of being infidels before another day goes by.

On the other hand, we have hard cases. Take Ben Bernanke for example. He just can't give it to us straight. He leaks out the bad news like a used-up adult diaper. No, we aren't in a recession -- the economy just has no points of strength. There is no core inflation, everything just costs more. The Federal Reserve Bank keeps dropping the rates to "fuel the economy," but most people's credit card rates are firmly stuck to the ceiling, while banks can't find anybody credit-worthy enough to deserve a loan. Student lenders are getting out of the business because they just can't depend on the government to send them hundreds of millions in un-needed subsidies any more.

I say sterner measures are required. Put Bernanke on the board, and I don't mean the board of directors. Strap him to a board, put a towel over his face and start pouring. He will merely experience a sensation like drowning, and will be none the worse for wear. Then we'll tilt him up, let him get a gasp of air and demand some straight answers: Where did all the money go? Is it in Iraq? Did giving away pallet-loads of hundred dollar bills in Baghdad have a negative effect on the economy? Could the daily cost of the war possibly be part of our economic bad news? Is the dollar going to plummet right down to the depths of hell?

You've got to admit these are important questions, to which we need the answers. Waterboarding has to be used in those situations where, if we don't get the answers, thousands of people will die. Well, I think we should use it when millions of people are about to go broke. Some of them, after all, will inevitably go postal and shoot their colleagues, fellow-students, and teachers. All because we couldn't get a straight story from Ben, and our Treasury officials were too squeamish to resort to lawful techniques that our Commander in Chief has preserved for their use. Maybe they're holding back because Bernanke hasn't been declared a terrorist or an enemy combatant, in which case, that's one more reason to broaden the definition of terrorism. 'Cause this economy has me scared sh*tless.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2013 9:46 pm
by admin


Okay, let's see here ... I woke up on Friday to complete a huge writing project, bleary from working too late the night before and reeling from the flu, and what do I hear? The Federal Reserve Bank is making a loan to Morgan Stanley so it can make a loan to Bear Stearns, and the Fed is taking as collateral -- you guessed it -- mortgage backed securities. The reason? Because Bear was plumb outta cash. As in -- all the billions are gone.

Now that's no problem for a Decider -- you just write another check! Which is what Ben Bernanke, Bush's master of financial prestidigitation, did. Now, no one was screaming from the high heavens that this was a bailout, and in fact the Decider himself was down at The Economic Club in New York City himself that very day, telling people we didn't want to get all excited and have a bailout, and there was one going on that very moment.

Maybe you're confused -- isn't the government supposed to bail out banks? Yes, banks that paid insurance into the Federal Deposit Insurance Fund -- they pay their insurance, and their deposits are covered. But Bear Stearns is not a bank, it's an investment bank (big difference), and it doesn't pay insurance premiums, and it had no claim upon the public purse that entitled it to be bailed out. It was kind of a huge favor that Bernanke was doing. But of course the Fed isn't supposed to do favors, it's supposed to carry out monetary policy.

So why did Bernanke authorize this outpouring of generosity? So Bear Stearns owners wouldn't go broke? So Bear executives wouldn't leap from their office windows? Well, that's not what he's saying. The reason is -- because otherwise we would have a financial meltdown in this country, and Bush would probably become about as popular as Mussolini after Italy lost the second world war. Which is not why Bush hired him.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2013 9:51 pm
by admin



I ran across an Amazon discussion group thread entitled “What really happened on 9/11?”

One of the first responses was this one:

“We became a fearfull nation that has since lost many of its core liberties.” (sic)

A skeptic replied:

Please provide a list of “hard core” liberties that we've “lost”. Thanks.

I was then moved to create a list with references to the Bill of Rights, a source of some pretty “hard core liberties,” and an indicator of who has been doing the winning while the American people took care of the losing:

First Amendment Losses: Power to the Media Poodles!

While it was a big First Amendment loss when the big cities began confining anti-administration protesters to “free speech zones” where marchers could curb their enthusiasm, our greatest First Amendment loss was when we discovered that the media, that enjoys freedom to print almost anything, was content to regurgitate the paranoid rantings of neocons who urged us to revenge ourselves on the poor people of Iraq for harms committed by persons still unknown, but certainly not Iraqi. As the media fed war fever, we found an end to our post-Enron depression, and discovered as every generation seems to, that there’s something about a man in uniform. And once again, for the ten-thousandth time, Johnny and this time Jane as well, marched off to make the world safe for democracy. Four-thousand families have lost their children forever, and many times that number of soldiers have returned to their homes and home towns having lost their rights to see with two eyes, to run with two good legs, to speak through an unscarred face, and to think with a mind free of painful thoughts of regret and terror. These are some hard core rights to lose.

Second Amendment Gains: Power to Munitions-Makers!

Sticking with the Bill of Rights as a border for our discussion, I’ll concede the Second Amendment, because gun owners are about as happy as pigs in their own waste these days, notwithstanding the bumper crop of school shootings, and nowadays every politician wants to be in favor of gun-toting. We suspect that allowing Dick Cheney to get away scot-free with a negligent, likely drunken shooting of Dick Whittington, the Texas Funeral Commissioner, tends to encourage lawless behavior of that sort. The tendency of police officers in New York to release a hail of bullets in the direction of any suspect deemed to be so dark that they are always in the process of reaching for a gun, and the increasing number of gun-related crimes by Iraq veterans all suggest that in our new, openly armed society, owning a Kalashnikov, AK-47 or Uzi may in fact be good sense.

Fourth Amendment Losses: Power to the Snoops & Spies!

Let’s check in on the Fourth Amendment, that guarantees our right to privacy. It used to guarantee some pretty hard core rights, but it took a big hit when the managers of our cell phone and Internet providers decided that committing crimes in the name of national security was a safe bet, and opened our emails to view and our phone conversations to eavesdropping by the National Security Agency. Bush’s push to grant telcoms immunity leaves no question that crimes were committed by the government and the telcoms, since there’s no need to seek immunity for something that isn't at risk of being prosecuted. The Fourth Amendment has about been nullified in many cases by the FBI’s routine abuse of National Security Letters to compile dossiers on loyal Americans, a widespread invasion of privacy without precedent or justification.

We have also lost our Fourth Amendment right not to be subjected to unlawful arrest and secret detention. Thanks to the PATRIOT Act, in all its unread and dangerous bulk, people actually are kidnapped by government black ops squads, and they’re not all Middle Easterners and people of color. A good example of how even white people can have their lives turned inside out by the terrorism-finders is the little-reported case of Brandon Mayfield, the Portland, Oregon attorney who got a settlement of $2 Million after the FBI whisked him into secret confinement and tried to finger him as a conspirator in the March 11 Madrid train bombing. (Mayfield had never been to Madrid). Mayfield's sin? He married a Muslim, and then became one. Another American Muslim, Jose Padilla, who was confined for years at Guantanamo on the grounds he planned to explode a “dirty bomb” inside the nation, was designated an enemy combatant by the president, who imprisoned him, subjected him to sensory deprivation and solitary confinement for years, then ran him through a federal court trial in Florida where he was convicted of a thought-crime of training and thinking jihadically. The Statements Padilla made while being illegally deprived of an attorney and subjected to years of deprivation and coercion were used against him at trial, while the disappearance of the government’s dirty bomb story was the untold story of the trial. I would definitely say that when our federal courts are being used to functionally ignore the rights of the “enemy combatants,” dealing with every appeal so slowly that any real judicial oversight over the lives of hundreds of people currently imprisoned for an indefinite term, we have definitely lost some “hardcore rights.”

While it is true that Japanese Americans suffered a more expansive race-based insult from our nation when they were interned in rural camps for the duration of World War Two, the current degrading of human rights is intended to subject us all to lowered standards, from sea to shining sea. We Americans are all, in a way, “Good Germans” tolerating the totalitarian warm-up of a junta that has taken over the White House and has not yet given up the dream of absolute power over its citizens. We all hope it won't happen to us, but the official policy, and one that has been used against many unfortunates, is that with the right set of lies on a sworn affidavit, any human being can be put into a forgotten place even less subject to humane oversight than Guantanamo.

Fifth Amendment Losses: Power to the Torturers!

We have lost many rights under the Fifth Amendment, such as the right to an attorney if you are charged with terrorism, and the right not to be compelled to provide testimony against yourself. We are all imperiled by laws immunizing interrogators from criminal liability for torture or whatever dumbed-down term you want to impose on it. This officially pursued and officially denied pro-torture policy might make some people wonder why Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and their pet intellectual monster, John Yoo, would want the right to torture, seek immunity for war crimes, and set out to destroy the Geneva Convention? This is a “sovereign power” that even FDR didn’t ask for, that Churchill didn’t want, that Stalin of course took and without apologies, but then, our president is not supposed to emulate a totalitarian murderer.

The neocon argument that this has been “a war against a new type of enemy” is utter nonsense, a militaristic misrepresentation of the highest order. Bush needs to torture in this day and age because without torture, he would have no evidence that there is any type of terrorist threat to justify his gigantic power grab. Sure, the dramatic Collapse of the Three WTC Towers (1, 2 and 7) got people riled up for a while, but when no one besides a single lone madman ever is tried for the crime, and apparently the bin Laden family has brokered an immunity deal for Osama, then ultimately the Bush junta would like to seal its claim that “Al Qaeda” destroyed three buildings in New York in one day with some convictions. So the nation’s brave interrogators confine people like Osama’s chauffeurs and butlers, interrogating them, torturing them, and extracting false evidence. Just as in the cases of the witches who confessed to the Jesuit Inquisitors hundreds of years ago, it is all false evidence, but necessary. Just as the Holy Inquisition fed itself, confiscating properties and lives for profit, and using false confessions extracted under torment as counterfeit evidence to procure false judgments of guilt against the innocent. So yes, when that sort of thing happens, and we pay for it with endless tax dollars, I’d say we’ve lost some rights.

Fourteenth Amendment Losses: Power to The Unhuman

The Fourteenth Amendment, that guarantees all “persons” the right to receive “due process of law” before being deprived of life, liberty or property, has been snuffed out for many unfortunate people. But flesh and blood people are barely persons to government officials and elected representatives, because flesh and blood people hardly contribute at all to political campaigns, and have no tasty consulting contracts and perks to hand out. Government officials today know that caring about people marks you as a fool, while having a soft spot for corporations will open doors to power. The Fourteenth Amendment gives a powerful, virtually eternal, and financially enormous identity to un-human corporations, that are encouraged to devour our environment in exchange for a trickle of jobs, and for whom all manner of excuses are made when they corrupt our government, export our jobs, steal our money, and use offshore shells to avoid paying taxes. By making the Fourteenth Amendment useful primarily to these unhumans, we have trampled on our very identity as citizens while making obeisance to the corporate masters.

Fifteenth Amendment Losses: Power to the Vote-Riggers!

Black people and other minorities have lost the right to vote, granted to them under the Fifteenth Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act, as laws interfering with voting have been adopted under the guise of “national security” and high-tech ID schemes. We have lost the power to control our nation through the ballot box, as two presidential elections have been decided under a shadow of controversy that causes many people to claim that Jeb Bush, Katharine Harris, and the Supreme Court chose Bush to rule the first time, and the second time, it was Harry Blackwell, the Secretary of State of Ohio, who cast the deciding vote. Schemes to make the vote more secure have only resulted in wasting lots of money on paperless systems that many states are choosing not to use after having blown all the federal money on the equivalent of electronic game machines that can be hacked, flipped, and anything but reliably tracked.

That the current administration fears voters more than terrorists is clear from their domestic agenda. While many have heard that Alberto Gonzales was run out of office for lying too many times about why he fired eight United States Attorneys in a political purge, few have understood why he fired them. He fired them because he wanted to install Federal prosecutors who would help the Republicans to steal the next election in their jurisdiction. How would they do that? By prosecuting Democratic candidates to defame them in the eyes of the voters, by using phony “voting fraud” prosecutions to keep easily intimidated voters from even trying to vote, and by never prosecuting Republican operatives for actual vote rigging, campaign finance violations, and the usual dirty tricks fomented by Karl Rove and his dirty-tricksters.

The Imperial Presidency: Power to the Powerful!

Since the president was twice elected without true popular support, he knows he owes his powerful position to his powerful friends. Thus, he ignores the voters and does what he is told, which is, right now, to veto anything Dick Cheney tells him to, and simply to bar the door against any impulse to alter the course of the ship of state, currently on course to spill many, many billions of dollars of stolen taxpayer loot on all the right sort of people. The president, comfortable with being out of the country pretty much full-time, now wanders the world flinging self-congratulatory rhetoric into the faces of world leaders who know he is a failed, pathetic ignoramus whose feeble-mindedness makes intelligent people want to retch. Congress cannot even find the “off switch” that would bring our rogue president to heel. He veils his ignoring act with the claim, often voiced by his dark alter ego, Dick Cheney, that when public opinion turns against one, that is a time to stick with principle. Change the spelling of the word to “P-R-I-N-C-I-P-A-L” and I would have to agree with that characterization. Most would agree having a president answerable, or at least heedful, of the people’s voice, is a fairly hard core right. But we know that the president is answerable only to Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and his mom, none of whom have the least concern for the health of our nation.

Our representatives, their ethics mined out by ceaseless lobbying efforts and floods of corporate money, fearful of the verbal scourges of right wing pundits, devoted themselves for years almost exclusively to displays of patriotism, gave a foolish “Commander in Chief” the power to launch a pre-emptive war based on concocted evidence to justify attacking an oil rich nation that had not engaged us in any hostilities. Then they sat silent while the Decider abrogated the Geneva Conventions with pro-torture policies supported by spurious legal justifications, and accelerated the delivery of torture subjects to foreign nations for “interrogation.” They voted billions upon billions of dollars to continue the war even after the 2004 elections should have given them a mandate to end it.

Governmental Secrecy: Power to Those Who Need to Know!

The saddest part of the destruction of our hard core rights is that we don’t even have the full tally of our losses. The truth is said to be the first casualty in war, and it certainly was with the war on terror. Secrecy protects corruption, and corruption has been the plan at every stage since the Bush opportunists began exploiting the nation’s trauma and the world’s sympathy in the way of 9/11. We have become utterly used to the classification of documents for reasons having no justification in national security, and do not expect administration officials to respond honestly to questions or produce documents to Congress. Government contracting, hidden under veils of wartime secrecy, conceal nothing but oceans of graft. In Iraq, Billions of dollars have simply gone missing, literally, carted away with forklifts in the Baghdad airport, where the US plan for controlling the Iraqis has all been implemented through bribery and threats.

The New Financial Order: Power to the Super-Rich!

In talking about Iraq, lots of people these days talk about “blood and treasure.” Cut the Bogart language and let’s be real. We have no treasure. We have lost control of our Treasury, with rampant looting by government contractors being the signature crime of opportunity of a two-term administration that has bathed in corruption. Now, as the Federal Reserve Bank takes over control of our economy, deciding in one big stroke after the next just how high we're going to charge up the credit cards, all financially minded people are watching in awe as our financial edifice is stripped, as the dollar plunges in value, and the price of oil flees in the opposite direction, as interest rates spiral toward zero for the rich and up and out of sight for the poor, whose payday loans make any payday in this economy a faraway day indeed. So if you’re a pragmatic person, and you consider it a “hardcore right” to be able to eat dinner in your own kitchen, and not under a bridge, or in a car in the parking lot of a WalMart, then yeah, we lost a lot of those, too.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Tue Oct 08, 2013 11:34 pm
by admin



I finally got something I've been waiting for a long time — an email from somebody trying to get John Yoo fired from his post as a professor at Boalt Hall, the highly prestigious Berkeley School of Law, operated with California State Funds. That's him in the picture above, the baby face declaiming that being put in the stocks is not torture. By his definition, it certainly wouldn't be, as long as they took you out of them before you died. But let's give credit where credit is due. According to John Yoo, even if something is torture, it's still okay! Check out this chilling little extract from his recently-revealed spine-chilling Torture Memo:

“Self-defense is a common-law defense to federal criminal offenses, and nothing in the text, structure or history of [the Federal Torture Statute] precludes its application to a charge of torture ... If hurting him is the only means to prevent the death or injury of others put at risk by his actions, such torture should be permissible ...”

Click here to read all of The Torture Memos at the Altruistic World Online Library

Well, thanks to Steve Fox of Democracy In Action for getting this needed ball rolling. It didn't take long to hammer out a quick hate note, and here's a copy of it.

As a proud graduate of UCLA Law School, and a supporting alumni of my old UC school, I have been shocked at the fact that the faculty of Boalt School of Law is sheltering a war criminal, John Yoo. Even if Mr. Yoo were not the architect of a doctrine that sought to legalize the violation of human rights and immunize war criminals from prosecution, he would still be a terrible legal scholar. His writing, if emulated by young lawyers, will likely get them in hot water with judges wherever they go. Mr. Yoo ignores contrary precedent, trades in fallacious reasoning, and clips together holdings in a way that no judge would tolerate. He was only able to sell this stuff as work product because his bosses were looking for an intellect so lacking in self-respect that it would stoop to any level to provide support for a legal position that is insupportable.

I could go on, but why? No doubt you have many other emails like this one to read before you sign Mr. Yoo's pink slip. Best get on with it.

Charles Carreon
UCLA Law, Class of 1986
Member California Bar
Alumnus, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius Litigation Section (LA)
Former Jackson County, Oregon Deputy District Attorney
Currently, CEO Online Media Law, PLLC

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:09 am
by admin



Dear Dean Edley:





Rule 3-200. Prohibited Objectives of Employment









The Dean's excuse-making is copied below:

The Torture Memos and Academic Freedom

Christopher Edley, Jr.


UC Berkeley Law School













April 10, 2008

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:13 am
by admin








Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:42 am
by admin


Loyal Bushies, This Is Not For You




First We Define The Candidates Strategically


Second, We Back A Candidate Who Will Reverse Bush-Policies





Third, We Have A Plan To Win With Either Nominee










