Blogging has been fun (not) but I suck at all of it except the writing part.
So I'm moving to Daily Kos, where smarter people will do the make-look-pretty part.
See you over here.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Monday, June 10, 2013
Rand Paul Is Not a Libertarian
"Senator" Rand Paul (R/Teahadist-KY) is a duplicitous lying bastard who specializes in talking out of both sides of his mouth. He, not McConnell, not Boehner, not Cantor, should be enemy number one of the American Progressive movement, and the Conservatives should throw him out if they value their political lives.
Let's review the case.
He claims to be a Libertarian. He decries President Barack Obama, claiming he acts like a king, invoking language from the American revolution in a cheap petty attempt to gain some traction for this completely asinine argument. Lest we forget his temper tantrum over gun control, this nut attempted to convince us all he was standing up for our civil liberties and that Obama was some sort of tyrant who had issued just piles of these executive orders. Never mind that as a matter of public record this is utter bullpucky. Never mind that Reagan issued twice as many orders as Obama. Most certainly never mind that these kingly proclamations were little more than hey underling do your job. Obama was a king! He was a tyrant! He's coming for your guns and going to repeal the Second Amendment! It has nothing to do with Rand's ties to a hyper conservative gun nut fringe right of the NRA. Rand Paul is just a good ol' Libertarian from Kentucky!
There are other examples of this turd of a politico wearing a Libertarian skin - like the drone debacle. His own party told him to sit down and shut up on that one. One particularly ornery Republican Senator continues to beat up on Rand Paul, too. Of course, these days, Paul is back to "King Obama" and the NSA with this PRISM nonsense.
Now anyone who knows me knows I think the 2008 FISAA as well as the Patriot Act and their renewals are violative of the Fourth Amendment and should be struck or repealed. On this, admittedly, I agree with Rand Paul. I would remind my readers that likewise, stopped clocks are right twice a day. On PRISM, the actual policy stand is Paul's stopped clock impersonation (as is the rest of his record if the clock was stopped circa 1940). But let's not kid ourselves, Rand Paul is still too clever by half. You do not charge up to the Supreme Court with a petition. You have to go through the lower courts first to get to the Supreme Court, as SCOTUS does not generally have original jurisdiction on much of anything. Luckily, someone has already done that. Rand Paul should not be filing another mega-suit. He should be filing an amicus brief and getting senators to sign on to it for Jewel v. NSA. He should - but he won't, because that would be reasonable and Rand Paul is a loon.
It is critically important to note that "Libertarian" Rand Paul will fight for your rights (as he defines them) as long as you're what he considers a red blooded American. If you're not, his true Tealiban colors peek out from the Libertarian makeup and he turns into an ultranationalist neoconservative. Rand Paul swears the comprehensive immigration reform bill negotiated by the Gang of Eight can't pass the House - and he may be right. The Bath Salts Caucus in the lower chamber won't vote for anything, and the Republican Caucus as a whole may be about ready to make the Hastert Rule have some teeth, at least for their Speaker. Rand Paul could do the sensible thing and line up behind the bill like Kelly Ayotte already has. That, however, has no glory for Rand Paul. No, he needs a stronger bill. He needs to be the conduit through which the bill passes - him, and only him, not the democratic process. Rand Paul will be the singular reason immigration reform happens, according to Rand Paul. What's he calling for? A stronger bill. We've heard this line before. What he will demand is that the border be hermetically sealed so not even the wind can cross, and then we can tackle the immigration piece.
I could go on. His position on gay marriage is dog whistle - let the states decide is how we kept segregation in the south. He's a die-hard pro-lifer. He's an anti-Obamacare doctor who has no plan to replace it. He thinks the way to save Social Security is to cut benefits. He thinks that a Congress that can't pass anything, at all, should review every single rule the Executive produces - which means it wouldn't have time to do anything else. He pushes and honestly believes conspiracy theories. Do not be deceived. Rand Paul is not a Libertarian. The man is just stark raving crazy. The fact that he is still talking further poisons the American political atmosphere every time he opens his mouth. Rand Paul needs to sit down and shut up.
Let's review the case.
He claims to be a Libertarian. He decries President Barack Obama, claiming he acts like a king, invoking language from the American revolution in a cheap petty attempt to gain some traction for this completely asinine argument. Lest we forget his temper tantrum over gun control, this nut attempted to convince us all he was standing up for our civil liberties and that Obama was some sort of tyrant who had issued just piles of these executive orders. Never mind that as a matter of public record this is utter bullpucky. Never mind that Reagan issued twice as many orders as Obama. Most certainly never mind that these kingly proclamations were little more than hey underling do your job. Obama was a king! He was a tyrant! He's coming for your guns and going to repeal the Second Amendment! It has nothing to do with Rand's ties to a hyper conservative gun nut fringe right of the NRA. Rand Paul is just a good ol' Libertarian from Kentucky!
There are other examples of this turd of a politico wearing a Libertarian skin - like the drone debacle. His own party told him to sit down and shut up on that one. One particularly ornery Republican Senator continues to beat up on Rand Paul, too. Of course, these days, Paul is back to "King Obama" and the NSA with this PRISM nonsense.
Now anyone who knows me knows I think the 2008 FISAA as well as the Patriot Act and their renewals are violative of the Fourth Amendment and should be struck or repealed. On this, admittedly, I agree with Rand Paul. I would remind my readers that likewise, stopped clocks are right twice a day. On PRISM, the actual policy stand is Paul's stopped clock impersonation (as is the rest of his record if the clock was stopped circa 1940). But let's not kid ourselves, Rand Paul is still too clever by half. You do not charge up to the Supreme Court with a petition. You have to go through the lower courts first to get to the Supreme Court, as SCOTUS does not generally have original jurisdiction on much of anything. Luckily, someone has already done that. Rand Paul should not be filing another mega-suit. He should be filing an amicus brief and getting senators to sign on to it for Jewel v. NSA. He should - but he won't, because that would be reasonable and Rand Paul is a loon.
It is critically important to note that "Libertarian" Rand Paul will fight for your rights (as he defines them) as long as you're what he considers a red blooded American. If you're not, his true Tealiban colors peek out from the Libertarian makeup and he turns into an ultranationalist neoconservative. Rand Paul swears the comprehensive immigration reform bill negotiated by the Gang of Eight can't pass the House - and he may be right. The Bath Salts Caucus in the lower chamber won't vote for anything, and the Republican Caucus as a whole may be about ready to make the Hastert Rule have some teeth, at least for their Speaker. Rand Paul could do the sensible thing and line up behind the bill like Kelly Ayotte already has. That, however, has no glory for Rand Paul. No, he needs a stronger bill. He needs to be the conduit through which the bill passes - him, and only him, not the democratic process. Rand Paul will be the singular reason immigration reform happens, according to Rand Paul. What's he calling for? A stronger bill. We've heard this line before. What he will demand is that the border be hermetically sealed so not even the wind can cross, and then we can tackle the immigration piece.
I could go on. His position on gay marriage is dog whistle - let the states decide is how we kept segregation in the south. He's a die-hard pro-lifer. He's an anti-Obamacare doctor who has no plan to replace it. He thinks the way to save Social Security is to cut benefits. He thinks that a Congress that can't pass anything, at all, should review every single rule the Executive produces - which means it wouldn't have time to do anything else. He pushes and honestly believes conspiracy theories. Do not be deceived. Rand Paul is not a Libertarian. The man is just stark raving crazy. The fact that he is still talking further poisons the American political atmosphere every time he opens his mouth. Rand Paul needs to sit down and shut up.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Fourth Amendment Tax Problems
I need to throw a tantrum.
We have at present a fistful of scandal that all revolve around a failure of checks and balances.
Let's start with the IRS.
The media and both sides of the aisle are crying viewpoint discrimination. Everyone seems to agree that these poor helpless (har har) Tea Party activists were unfairly targeted. This is indisputably so, and wholly irrelevant.
Let me make you an analogy. Let's say you and a friend go to a cockfight. You both place the same bet and win. The guy running the cockfight decides he thinks your friend is a Mexican, so he's going to wait two weeks to pay him. What grounds does your friend have to sue for discrimination? Is it not unfair of the guy running the fight to not pay your Mexican friend? Of course it is. But it's all ill gotten gains, and you cannot sue for that, because it is unjust for you to receive them at all.
501(c)4 statute reads "exclusively", not primarily. The IRS has no authority to make the change. This was questioned by the Kennedy administration, and the IRS' response was basically well this is how we've always done it. That is not an answer. We are starting to see these questions asked in congressional hearings now, but the obvious answer is as swift as it is efficient. Police power lies in the Executive. The IRS answer to the Treasury which is part of the Executive. The whole (c)3/(c)4 debacle could be solved with an executive order, and not even from Obama. Jack Lew could order the IRS to change the regulation to comply with the law. I have no earthly idea why this has not happened.
Then there is the spying hoopla. We discuss whether or not we have privacy. We discuss the partisan implications of the usage and timing of this program. But we have to claim utter stupidity, all of us, to not be fully aware where legal authority for this program came from. It's the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. We have seen this movie, we have heard this outrage. Most of the players are even the same on the outrage end of it. Yet what are we doing? Apparently suffering from collective amnesia. Under Bush, we both hated the practice and it was a big hairy deal because it was illegal. So rather than leave it be illegal so our government cannot do this, Bush beat Congress into passing FISAA. Now, we find out that FISAA has metastasized into the government snooping through the whole entire internet. PRISM is not a proper legal outcropping of FISAA. Whatever legal counsel read that it was got it very, very wrong (as the Bush legal counsel did with a lot of things). FISAA does not authorize dragnets. FISAA does not OK the government shunting the entire internet off into a secret room to snoop through it. FISAA creates secret courts that issue secret wiretap orders. The intent is not for the government to say "hey, Verizon, give us everything you got, oh and you can't acknowledge this ever ever." The intent is for the the government to be able to say "hey, Verizon, so there's this guy, here's his number, we want all his records, and the records of everyone he's ever called as well, and it's national security so shut up about it."
Now, there are those (Lindsey Graham, I'm looking at you) who say they don't care if the NSA has their number because NSA is "keeping us safe" (and then shriek BENGHAZI!! at the tops of their lungs). Really? Have you noticed that this same buffoons praising the NSA for keeping us safe are also howling blue bloody murder on the IRS mess? Don't snoop through my stuff - but snoop through my stuff. This, like the overwhelming majority of right wing positions is not tenable. It's not even coherent. The Government has a need and a duty to from time to time breach the privacy of private citizens. Applying for super special treatment where you don't have to disclose your income nor be taxed on it nor pay tax on your expenditures (which 99.999% of Americans have to do) is one of those times. Any group, right or left, should be scrutinized to the utmost and if they do not meet the statutory definition of a 501(c)4, then the status should be denied. If Congress has decided they prefer the regulatory definition, then they must change the statute. It appears that a block of Democrats in both chambers have actually read the law and understand that the actual real live scandal at IRS is not scrutiny, it's an illegal regulation.
Flip side of the same coin, picking up your Verizon phone or logging into Facebook is not one of those times the government has any duty or need whatsoever to rifle through your material. I have a right to privacy in my home. It is a gross violation of my Fourth Amendment rights for the Government to just up and decide it has the authority to bypass me and go to service providers and demand records of them. I the Government is obtaining warrants that allow them to search all of the world wide web, I'm sorry but the "world wide" part obviously flies in the face of the "particularly describing the place to be searched" in that pesky Constitution thing. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot pick and choose the amendments, that's not how the game is played. The rule are you follow all the rules all the time, and when you break them bad things happen to you.
But bad things aren't happening to anybody. The Teahadists are, thus far, keeping their 501(c)4 statuses. PRISM is ongoing. For whatever reason the Obama administration has not elected to simply kill these practices off. It wouldn't be without precedent. On DOMA, Obama refused to defend the law any further, calling it unconstitutional. He could refuse to use PRISM any further, too. He's the President, that's kind of his job to not do things that violate the Constitution. Same goes for the IRS mess. Dear underling, fix this, as in yesterday, sincerely, POTUS. We straight up railed against tyranny when Bush did this. Yet somehow, when Bush mallyhacked the rule book, it all became magically OK. Except it didn't. The Supreme Court punted on this one, kicking the only suit on FISAA so far down the road that it's somewhere in the next county. This will have to be addressed through legislation. Where are the Democrats we elected in 2012 to stop this crap from happening? Silent. For that matter, where are the so called "civil libertarians"? Also silent. Shame on them all for that. The solution to all of this is as obvious as it is appallingly ignored - follow the damn law.
We have at present a fistful of scandal that all revolve around a failure of checks and balances.
Let's start with the IRS.
The media and both sides of the aisle are crying viewpoint discrimination. Everyone seems to agree that these poor helpless (har har) Tea Party activists were unfairly targeted. This is indisputably so, and wholly irrelevant.
Let me make you an analogy. Let's say you and a friend go to a cockfight. You both place the same bet and win. The guy running the cockfight decides he thinks your friend is a Mexican, so he's going to wait two weeks to pay him. What grounds does your friend have to sue for discrimination? Is it not unfair of the guy running the fight to not pay your Mexican friend? Of course it is. But it's all ill gotten gains, and you cannot sue for that, because it is unjust for you to receive them at all.
501(c)4 statute reads "exclusively", not primarily. The IRS has no authority to make the change. This was questioned by the Kennedy administration, and the IRS' response was basically well this is how we've always done it. That is not an answer. We are starting to see these questions asked in congressional hearings now, but the obvious answer is as swift as it is efficient. Police power lies in the Executive. The IRS answer to the Treasury which is part of the Executive. The whole (c)3/(c)4 debacle could be solved with an executive order, and not even from Obama. Jack Lew could order the IRS to change the regulation to comply with the law. I have no earthly idea why this has not happened.
Then there is the spying hoopla. We discuss whether or not we have privacy. We discuss the partisan implications of the usage and timing of this program. But we have to claim utter stupidity, all of us, to not be fully aware where legal authority for this program came from. It's the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. We have seen this movie, we have heard this outrage. Most of the players are even the same on the outrage end of it. Yet what are we doing? Apparently suffering from collective amnesia. Under Bush, we both hated the practice and it was a big hairy deal because it was illegal. So rather than leave it be illegal so our government cannot do this, Bush beat Congress into passing FISAA. Now, we find out that FISAA has metastasized into the government snooping through the whole entire internet. PRISM is not a proper legal outcropping of FISAA. Whatever legal counsel read that it was got it very, very wrong (as the Bush legal counsel did with a lot of things). FISAA does not authorize dragnets. FISAA does not OK the government shunting the entire internet off into a secret room to snoop through it. FISAA creates secret courts that issue secret wiretap orders. The intent is not for the government to say "hey, Verizon, give us everything you got, oh and you can't acknowledge this ever ever." The intent is for the the government to be able to say "hey, Verizon, so there's this guy, here's his number, we want all his records, and the records of everyone he's ever called as well, and it's national security so shut up about it."
Now, there are those (Lindsey Graham, I'm looking at you) who say they don't care if the NSA has their number because NSA is "keeping us safe" (and then shriek BENGHAZI!! at the tops of their lungs). Really? Have you noticed that this same buffoons praising the NSA for keeping us safe are also howling blue bloody murder on the IRS mess? Don't snoop through my stuff - but snoop through my stuff. This, like the overwhelming majority of right wing positions is not tenable. It's not even coherent. The Government has a need and a duty to from time to time breach the privacy of private citizens. Applying for super special treatment where you don't have to disclose your income nor be taxed on it nor pay tax on your expenditures (which 99.999% of Americans have to do) is one of those times. Any group, right or left, should be scrutinized to the utmost and if they do not meet the statutory definition of a 501(c)4, then the status should be denied. If Congress has decided they prefer the regulatory definition, then they must change the statute. It appears that a block of Democrats in both chambers have actually read the law and understand that the actual real live scandal at IRS is not scrutiny, it's an illegal regulation.
Flip side of the same coin, picking up your Verizon phone or logging into Facebook is not one of those times the government has any duty or need whatsoever to rifle through your material. I have a right to privacy in my home. It is a gross violation of my Fourth Amendment rights for the Government to just up and decide it has the authority to bypass me and go to service providers and demand records of them. I the Government is obtaining warrants that allow them to search all of the world wide web, I'm sorry but the "world wide" part obviously flies in the face of the "particularly describing the place to be searched" in that pesky Constitution thing. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot pick and choose the amendments, that's not how the game is played. The rule are you follow all the rules all the time, and when you break them bad things happen to you.
But bad things aren't happening to anybody. The Teahadists are, thus far, keeping their 501(c)4 statuses. PRISM is ongoing. For whatever reason the Obama administration has not elected to simply kill these practices off. It wouldn't be without precedent. On DOMA, Obama refused to defend the law any further, calling it unconstitutional. He could refuse to use PRISM any further, too. He's the President, that's kind of his job to not do things that violate the Constitution. Same goes for the IRS mess. Dear underling, fix this, as in yesterday, sincerely, POTUS. We straight up railed against tyranny when Bush did this. Yet somehow, when Bush mallyhacked the rule book, it all became magically OK. Except it didn't. The Supreme Court punted on this one, kicking the only suit on FISAA so far down the road that it's somewhere in the next county. This will have to be addressed through legislation. Where are the Democrats we elected in 2012 to stop this crap from happening? Silent. For that matter, where are the so called "civil libertarians"? Also silent. Shame on them all for that. The solution to all of this is as obvious as it is appallingly ignored - follow the damn law.
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