Oh My….. “The White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explains that they take “great care” before killing US citizens, and not to worry because the killing of US citizens without trial or evidence is “legal”, “ethical”, and “wise”.
By: Kevin Gosztola Thursday August 2, 2012 1:25 pm
Campaign logo from the lawsuit/campaign’s website
Plaintiffs, who won a preliminary injunction in May against a provision of the Homeland Battlefield Act or the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), are pushing for a permanent injunction to this provision of the NDAA. Citing recent statements made by the United States government that it made in a filed brief to a federal court, plaintiffs now have a heightened fear that that the provision—specifically known as Section 1021, which Judge Katherine B. Forrest temporarily enjoined—could potentially be used against them for engaging in First Amendment activities.
On today’s Studio B, Judge Napolitano broke down the New York Times’ release of President Obama’s so-called “kill list.” He expressed discomfort at Obama’s newly revealed list of alleged Al Qaeda suspects, saying, “Look, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would be turning in their graves if they thought that the Constitution that they brought forth permitted the president to become a killer.”
He added, “It doesn’t, it’s wrong, it’s against our values, it’s unlawful and it’s unconstitutional. Congress should do something about it!”
On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signed expansive new guidelines for terrorism analysts, allowing the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) to mirror entire federal databases containing personal information and hold onto the information for an extended period of time—even if the person is not suspected of any involvement in terrorism. (Read the guidelines here).
Despite the “terrorism” justification, the new rules affect every single American. The agency now has free rein to, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage put it, “retrieve, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats ” and expands the amount of time the government can keep private information on innocent individuals by a factor of ten.
Cato senior fellow Randy Barnett (also, of course, a Georgetown law professor and the “intellectual godfather” of the Obamacare litigation) blogs the results of a new USA Today/Gallup poll: 72% of Americans (including 56% of Democrats and 54% of those who think “the healthcare law is a good thing”) think the individual mandate is unconstitutional. This follows a Rasmussen poll showing that a majority of Americans favor repeal and an AP poll from August that found 82% to opine that the federal government “should not have the power to require all Americans to buy health insurance.”
Imagine a future historian examining Obama’s pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a “community organizer”; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote “present”) ; and finally an unaccomplished single term in the United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as a legislator.
