Back to Basics

We’ll have to wait for a Republican to get elected president for the left to once again go apoplectic and throw around accusations of fascism over things like this:

By a vote of 73 to 23, the US Senate just voted for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens until 2017.

The vote, set to affirm to eradicate the FAA Sunsets Extension Act of 2012, means we’ll be living with Bush-era spy laws for another half decade. In 2007, the Senate voted to grant blanket immunity to companies like AT&T, which conspired with the NSA to monitor American digital conversations without government oversight after 9/11. Today’s vote continues that immunity, and provides further carte blanche for the American intelligence-gathering apparatus. Phone calls, texts, and emails are all fair game—and a judge doesn’t have to give the OK, so long as it’s in the name of counterterrorism. Which is a very easy guise.

Obama is expected to sign it.

The One campaigned in 2008 under a platform of getting rid of Bush’s policies in this area (and almost every other area for that matter), but in fact warrantless wiretaps have skyrocketed under Obama.

I have taken Bill O’Reilly to task when he says stupid things – careful to point out exactly what he has said that annoys me. On the other hand, we must give O’Reilly credit when he stands up for the people and speaks truth to power.

In today’s (December 20, 2012) Talking Points Memo, O’Reilly lays out the facts – and nothing but the facts. It is well worth repeating his words here.

Hi, I’m Bill O’Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight.

Power. That is the subject of this evening Talking Points Memo.

If you are fortunate enough to acquire money in this life, you will also get power. Money in America can buy you protection, education, all kinds of entertainment options. It can also buy you good doctors who’ll keep you healthy, accountants who will make you even more money, and lawyers if anything goes wrong.

Money is power. If you don’t have much money life is much harder because you can’t protect yourself as well as a wealthy person. That is why what is happening in America right now affects every single person who lives here.

President Obama and the Democrats want to take power from the people and give it to the Federal government.

Every time you pay taxes, you make the government stronger and your own situation weaker. So a tax increase empowers the government as the expense, pardon the pun, of the taxpayer.

Of course, taxes are needed for the military, transportation, safety nets and other things that strengthen our freedoms. But what’s happening now is a bunch of other stuff.

For example, government control of the health care industry makes you weaker and the feds stronger.

Higher taxes on achievers make them weaker and the feds stronger.

Regulation of guns make citizens more dependent on police, thus the government grows stronger. The more shots, pardon the pun, the feds and the states call the less freedom we the people have.

Now, some folks want to trade freedom for security. Just go to Cuba, you’ll see that. Go to China. Government runs the show. And throughout the history, strong central governments have always been on display.

But America was supposed to be different. That’s why the Founding Fathers built in protections for us. That’s why they encouraged a free press, to keep government power in check, to expose power grabs in Washington. But now the press is working in concert with the Obama administration. No longer do we have the skeptical media when it comes to confronting power. The President’s liberal ideology is compatible with the liberal belief system of many media bosses.

And so, we are seeing a tremendous power grab in Washington that’s not being challenged by many in the media.

Talking Points submits that very few Americans understand what’s really going on. And certainly many voters had no clue in November. But just remember; every time, every time a new law is passed, even the good ones, the state grows more powerful, the individual becomes weaker. And that’s the truth.

And that’s the Memo.

Source: Bill O’Reilly; Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, December 20, 2012

Bottom line …

It doesn’t get much clearer than this. O’Reilly is speaking the absolute truth.

Back on April 23rd, 2000 Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano had a few questions for (then Deputy) Attorney General Eric Holder. Here they are thanks to The Media Research Center :

Napolitano : Tell me, Mr. Holder, why did you not get a court order authorizing you to go in and get the boy (Elian Gonzalez)?

Holder : Because we didn’t need a court order. INS can do this on its own.

Napolitano : You know that a court order would have given you the cloak of respectability to have seized the boy.

Holder : We didn’t need an order.

Napolitano : Then why did you ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for such an order if you didn’t need one?

Holder : [Silence]

Napolitano : The fact is, for the first time in history you have taken a child from his residence at gunpoint to enforce your custody position, even though you did not have an order authorizing it. When is the last time a boy, a child, was taken at the point of a gun without an order of a judge…Unprecedented in American history.”

Holder : “He was not taken at the point of a gun.”

Napolitano : “We have a photograph showing he was taken at the point of a gun.”

Holder : “They were armed agents who went in there who acted very sensitively…”

This “sensitivity” consisted of the INS macing, kicking, and gun-butt their way into Lazaro Gonzalez’s house on the morning of April 22, 2000, wrenching a bawling 6-year-old child from his family at machine-gun point and bundling him off to Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom, leaving 102 people injured, some seriously.

Thanks to the ritual MSM-Castroite collusion most people forget (or missed) the crucial legal and ethical details of this circus/tragedy — which were mostly established during the first week after Elian’s rescue at sea, after his heroic mother’s drowning. The “son-belongs-with-his-father” crowd, for instance, “missed” (with the help of the MSM-Democratic complex) that Elian’s father was initially delighted that his motherless son was in the U.S. and in the loving arms of his uncles and cousins.

The evidence — frantically buried by the MSM-Democratic complex — was overwhelming. Mauricio Vicent, a reporter for Madrid newspaper El Pais, wrote that during that first week he’d visited Elian’s home town of Cardenas and talked with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, along with other family members and friends. All confirmed that Juan Miguel had always longed for his son Elian to flee to the United States . Shortly after Elian’s rescue, his father had even applied for a U.S. visa!

Elian’s Miami uncle, Lazaro, explained it repeatedly and best: “I always said I would turn over Elian to his father, when Juan Miguel would come here and claim him. But I (along with practically everyone with experience under communism from Cambodians to Hungarians and from Lithuanians to Cubans) knew such a thing was impossible. He couldn’t do that. I knew it wasn’t Juan Miguel requesting Elian– it was Fidel .”

The legal-weasels forgot (or missed) that on Dec, 1st 1999 the INS asserted that Miami-based uncle Lazaro was indeed Elian’s legal custodian and Florida’s family court indeed the place to arbitrate further issues .

In yet another example of Federal tyranny, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has come down with both feet on a Nixa, Mo., family for selling rabbits in a business that began as a way to teach their son responsibility.

John Dollarhite, the owner of Dollarvalue Rabbitry, is facing a fine of $90,643 for selling 619 rabbits to individuals and businesses in southwest Missouri from April 3, 2008 to Dec. 21, 2009. The business, which Dollarhite considered as similar to a lemonade stand to benefit his son’s development, netted $200 profit during that time on the sale of rabbits at $10 to $12 each.

According to the blog Bungalow Bill’s Conservative Wisdom, a USDA agent visited the Dollarhite’s rabbitry in the fall of 2009 and pointed out two minor infractions — cages were a quarter-inch too small and there was a small rust spot on a feeder.

It was January 2010 before the Dollarhites again heard from the USDA. They learned an agent was asking about them at a local pet store, and then they got a call demanding a face-to-face meeting and advising they have an attorney present. During the meeting, the agent would say only that he was conducting an investigation. The Dollarhites asked the agent if the business needed to be certified, and the agent was nonresponsive.

Two months later, they called the USDA to inquire about the investigation. The USDA agent Dollarhite spoke to said: “Well, Mr. Dollarhite, I’ve got the report on my desk. And I’m just gonna tell you that, once I review it, it’s our intent to prosecute you the maximum that we can … We will make an example out of you.”

The Dollarhites didn’t hear from the agency again until they received the letter informing them of the fine last April. Their crime: They sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in a calendar year.

Dollarhite, who runs a local computer store, told the Springfield News-Leader: “I don’t have any money. It doesn’t matter if it’s $1,000 or $100 million. I don’t have it.”

Bungalow Bill writes that he believes the Dollarhites are being used as pawns by the USDA to give the agency more influence over the horse industry.

Hat Tip: Naturalnews.com