News Roundup - Jan 13th
Congress Defers to President On NSA Reform
Written by Ron Paul
Texas Straight Talk
Sunday January 12, 2014
Congress’s decline from the Founders’ vision as “first among equals” in government
to an echo chamber of the unitary executive, has been a slow but steady
process. In the process we have seen a steady stream of
unconstitutional wars and civil liberties abuses at home. Nowhere is
this decline more evident than in the stark contrast between the
Congressional response to intelligence agencies’ abuses during the
post-Watergate era and its response to the far more serious NSA abuses
uncovered in recent years.
In 1975, Senator Frank Church
(D-ID) convened an historic select committee to investigate the US
intelligence services for possible criminality in the wake of Watergate.
Thanks in part to reporting by Seymour Hersh and others, abuses by the
CIA, NSA, and FBI had come to light, including the monitoring of US
peace activists.
The Church Committee played its proper
Congressional role, checking the power of the executive branch as it had
been spiraling out of control since the 1950s and the early CIA covert
action programs. The Committee sought to protect US citizens against
abuses by their government after those abuses had come to light through
leaks of secret government documents.
The parallel to the
present NSA scandals cannot be ignored. What is completely different,
however, is that Congress is today acting as an advocate for the
executive branch’s continuing abuses, and as an opponent to the civil
liberties of US citizens. Not only has Congress – with a precious few
exceptions – accepted the NSA’s mass spying program on American
citizens, it has actually been encouraging the president to continue and
expand the program!
Where once there was a Congressional
committee to challenge and oppose the president’s abuse of power, today
the president himself has been even allowed by a complacent Congress to
hand pick his own NSA review commission!
Are we really
expected to believe that a commission appointed by the president to look
into the activities of the president’s intelligence services will come
to anything more than a few superficial changes to give the impression
of real reform?
One of the president’s commission
recommendations is that the NSA cease holding our phone records and
demand that the private phone companies retain those records instead –
for the NSA to access as it wishes. This is supposed to be reform?.....
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2014/january/12/congress-defers-to-president-on-nsa-reform-.aspx
************************************************
Peace is the Enemy of Empire
Written by Chris Rossini
Thursday January 9, 2014
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
Hardly
a day can go by without calls for the U.S. to militarily “do something”
in some foreign land. Whether it be Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Syria,
etc…it’s a never ending carousel. And let’s not forget that if there’s
ever a lull, some North Korean alarm will always pop into the news cycle
to fill the void.
MotherJones published the above map showing the locations of U.S. Special Forces all across the planet.
With U.S. Special Forces sprawled out over half of the Earth, is it any
wonder that the U.S. always seems to be involved in every flare up that
occurs? Back here at home, we’ve reached the point where a professional
sporting event cannot occur without some, and often multiple, homages
to “the troops”. Football-field sized flags are constantly unraveled
with fighter jets screaming overhead.
Misguided beliefs about
troops “protecting freedoms around the world” must always be fresh in
every American citizen’s mind. It’s the fuel that fires the Empire.
Why must the homages at sporting events, and in many other places in
American life, always be towards war? Why isn’t the national anthem sung
by a peaceful and productive member of society, like a nurse, optician,
or butcher?
Why isn’t peace extolled, yearned for, and exalted?
Well, if the goal of government is the creation of what we see in the
map above, then peace is its antithesis. It has to be one or the other.
The U.S. government has, for the last 100 years, chosen to
unconstitutionally become the policeman of the world. Peace has become
the enemy.
We can go back to the 1950’s, when General Douglas
MacArthur spoke about the mindset of war hysteria and the avoidance of
peace:
Indeed, it is a part of the general pattern of misguided
policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred
in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon
an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a
sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusory
foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political
leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war......
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2014/january/09/peace-is-the-enemy-of-empire.aspx
**************************************************
Thug
Marc H. Ellis
on January 12, 2014
Ariel Sharon
This
is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for
Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
Sharon is dead. The obituaries are coming fast and furious. Most
mainstream news outlets are presenting a “balanced” view of Sharon as a
controversial leader bound to be lionized over the next days.
The Guardian plays both sides of the Sharon equation. While it highlights the
controversies that surrounded Sharon in life, the Guardian sums up
Sharon’s controversial legacy this way:
For many Israelis he will be mourned as a giant figure
that played a key role in shaping Israel both as a soldier and a
statesman. His passing severs the last link to the iconic generation
which
fought in the 1948 war that followed the declaration of the state. His
reputation as a fearless – and controversial – soldier was matched
by his uncompromising ideology as a politician.
>Among Palestinians and leftwing Israelis, he will be remembered as a
powerful and reviled champion of Israel’s colonial settlement project,
and
the political force behind the construction of the vast concrete and
steel separation barrier that snakes through the West Bank. Many will
not forgive his role in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians in
refugee camps in Beirut in the 1980s.
But those of us who aren’t beholden to these mainstream journalistic
norms, whatever they’re worth, should state what’s on our minds. As Miko Peled writes:
Ariel Sharon was an ambitious man. He was brutal, greedy, uncompromising and dishonest. He possessed an insatiable appetite for
power, glory and fortune. His tendencies as a cold-blooded, merciless
killer were evident from early on in his career….
Simply put, Sharon was a thug.
Sharon was a thug who courted and exercised power his entire career,
ultimately holding the reins of state power. For decades progressive
Zionists held fast to the fiction that Sharon was a rightwing bigot
outside Israel’s centrist political culture. They were wrong. Though
rougher and more bellicose than other Israeli leaders, Sharon’s vision
was – and is – at the center of the Israel’s state enterprise.
Sharon’s legacy isn’t about how Jews want Israel to be perceived by
others. Leadership style is only a superficial part of the story.
Sharon’s legacy is about the policies he carried out as a military and
political actor.
In
the public arena, Sharon was no different from his predecessors or
those who followed him. If anything he was ahead of his time. Though
not cutting the same outsized persona as Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu
stands squarely in Sharon’s tradition. Netanyahu, too, is a thug who
holds the reins of state power.
Sharon’s “uncompromising ideology as a politician” is Israel’s state ideology. That is the significance of Sharon’s legacy.
If Sharon is a thug, what does that make Jews in Israel and America
who are paying homage to Sharon? What does that make political leaders
around the world who offer condolences and will attend Sharon’s funeral?
President Obama released this statement on Sharon’s death:
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/01/thug.html
***************************************************
Maricopa County GOP votes overwhelmingly to censure John McCain
January 12, 2014
by Tom Tillison
Liberty Crier
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is frequently
characterized
by his critics as a “RINO” — Republican in name only — but such
criticism hit especially close to home on Saturday.
The Maricopa County Republican Party, McCain’s home
county, voted overwhelmingly to censure the 2008 Republican nominee for
president for his “betrayal” of party values, according to the local CBS affiliate.
McCain
was admonished for pushing liberal legislation, backing liberal
nominees and for “assaults on the Constitution and 2nd amendment,” the
resolution said.
Arkansas mom destroys Common Core in four powerful minutes
The vote wasn’t even close, with 1,169 voting for censure, compared to just 358 voting against it.
The censure concluded that “until he consistently champions our
Party’s Platform and values, we, the Republican leadership in Arizona
will no longer support, campaign for or endorse John McCain as our U.S.
Senator.”
Ouch.
Here is the resolution as drafted by precinct committeeman Tim Schwartz, according to CBS5 Phoenix:
http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/01/12/maricopa-county-gop-votes-overwhelmingly-to-censure-john-mccain-93657
*****************************************************
“ADHD Is A Fake Disorder” Claims Neurologist-Turned-Author
By Joe Martino
Collective Evolution/Lew Rockwell .com
January 13, 2014
According
to Neurologist Richard Saul who has written a book called “ADHD Does
Not Exist: The Truth About Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity
Disorder”, the amount of people who are suffering from Attention
Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder is zero.
Richard Saul is a neurologist who has had a long career in examining
patients who have been having trouble with short attention spans and
inability to focus. From his first hand experience, he feels that ADHD
is nothing more than a fake disorder that is really only an umbrella of
symptoms and not actually a disease. He strongly feels that it should
not be listed as a separate disorder in the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual, all detailed in his
book which is set to release in February 2014......
.....The
topic of ADHD has been covered in-depth and it seems clear that there
is great debate around the subject for a good reason: either the
disorder isn’t actually a disorder as it is defined, or we don’t fully
understand ADHD. Considering the average ADHD pamphlet you find in a
doctor’s office states that
your
child may still have ADHD even though they are quiet and completely
focused while doing things they love, it seems that we are pushing
anything
we want under the label of ADHD without looking at core issues. Yes,
there are children who are obviously hyperactive and struggle with
attention, but usually this is obvious within the first few seconds of
seeing
the child. But when you question whether a child has ADHD or not, it is
likely they are just having trouble focusing on or giving
attention to things they don’t want to do. Same goes with adults who
can’t focus at work, maybe it is time for a job change.
We have a habit of always seeing issues in people who don’t fit in
with the system. Whether they don’t want to be in standard education,
don’t want to work their whole lives or have trouble focusing on things
they
don’t like, we tend to label this as a problem, but is it? Maybe we
just don’t look within enough to figure out what might really be going
on or why we are living the way we do. Perhaps it is time we let go of
the idea of having to “fit in” to something that doesn’t resonate rather than labelling it as a disorder.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/joe-martino/is-adhd-a-fake-disorder/
********************************************************
Cop Shoves a Gun in a Teen’s Face in a McDonald’s Drive-thru, for Taking Too Long
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” - Lord Acton
When sociopaths with guns are claiming to ‘protect and serve’ you, something has gone terribly wrong.
The audacity and attitude of the cop
in this video says a lot about the “higher than thou” mentality that the ruling class holds.
Had the person this cop pulled a gun on been armed, and justly
defended himself or herself, they would likely be facing murder charges
for killing a cop
video http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-shoves-gun-teens-face-mcdonalds-drive-thru-long/#MzBKffxFZGAV8c6y.99
"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great
moral crises maintain their neutrality" -Dante Alighieri
They who watch while our elected officials are ravaging our country
should consider that...Vin
Join The Fight - Expose Globalism and The New World Order
Congress Defers to President On NSA Reform
Written by Ron Paul
Texas Straight Talk
Sunday January 12, 2014
Congress’s decline from the Founders’ vision as “first among equals” in government
to an echo chamber of the unitary executive, has been a slow but steady
process. In the process we have seen a steady stream of
unconstitutional wars and civil liberties abuses at home. Nowhere is
this decline more evident than in the stark contrast between the
Congressional response to intelligence agencies’ abuses during the
post-Watergate era and its response to the far more serious NSA abuses
uncovered in recent years.
In 1975, Senator Frank Church
(D-ID) convened an historic select committee to investigate the US
intelligence services for possible criminality in the wake of Watergate.
Thanks in part to reporting by Seymour Hersh and others, abuses by the
CIA, NSA, and FBI had come to light, including the monitoring of US
peace activists.
The Church Committee played its proper
Congressional role, checking the power of the executive branch as it had
been spiraling out of control since the 1950s and the early CIA covert
action programs. The Committee sought to protect US citizens against
abuses by their government after those abuses had come to light through
leaks of secret government documents.
The parallel to the
present NSA scandals cannot be ignored. What is completely different,
however, is that Congress is today acting as an advocate for the
executive branch’s continuing abuses, and as an opponent to the civil
liberties of US citizens. Not only has Congress – with a precious few
exceptions – accepted the NSA’s mass spying program on American
citizens, it has actually been encouraging the president to continue and
expand the program!
Where once there was a Congressional
committee to challenge and oppose the president’s abuse of power, today
the president himself has been even allowed by a complacent Congress to
hand pick his own NSA review commission!
Are we really
expected to believe that a commission appointed by the president to look
into the activities of the president’s intelligence services will come
to anything more than a few superficial changes to give the impression
of real reform?
One of the president’s commission
recommendations is that the NSA cease holding our phone records and
demand that the private phone companies retain those records instead –
for the NSA to access as it wishes. This is supposed to be reform?.....
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2014/january/12/congress-defers-to-president-on-nsa-reform-.aspx
************************************************
Peace is the Enemy of Empire
Written by Chris Rossini
Thursday January 9, 2014
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
Hardly
a day can go by without calls for the U.S. to militarily “do something”
in some foreign land. Whether it be Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Syria,
etc…it’s a never ending carousel. And let’s not forget that if there’s
ever a lull, some North Korean alarm will always pop into the news cycle
to fill the void.
MotherJones published the above map showing the locations of U.S. Special Forces all across the planet.
With U.S. Special Forces sprawled out over half of the Earth, is it any
wonder that the U.S. always seems to be involved in every flare up that
occurs? Back here at home, we’ve reached the point where a professional
sporting event cannot occur without some, and often multiple, homages
to “the troops”. Football-field sized flags are constantly unraveled
with fighter jets screaming overhead.
Misguided beliefs about
troops “protecting freedoms around the world” must always be fresh in
every American citizen’s mind. It’s the fuel that fires the Empire.
Why must the homages at sporting events, and in many other places in
American life, always be towards war? Why isn’t the national anthem sung
by a peaceful and productive member of society, like a nurse, optician,
or butcher?
Why isn’t peace extolled, yearned for, and exalted?
Well, if the goal of government is the creation of what we see in the
map above, then peace is its antithesis. It has to be one or the other.
The U.S. government has, for the last 100 years, chosen to
unconstitutionally become the policeman of the world. Peace has become
the enemy.
We can go back to the 1950’s, when General Douglas
MacArthur spoke about the mindset of war hysteria and the avoidance of
peace:
Indeed, it is a part of the general pattern of misguided
policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred
in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon
an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a
sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusory
foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political
leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war......
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2014/january/09/peace-is-the-enemy-of-empire.aspx
**************************************************
Thug
Marc H. Ellis
on January 12, 2014
Ariel Sharon
This
is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for
Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
Sharon is dead. The obituaries are coming fast and furious. Most
mainstream news outlets are presenting a “balanced” view of Sharon as a
controversial leader bound to be lionized over the next days.
The Guardian plays both sides of the Sharon equation. While it highlights the
controversies that surrounded Sharon in life, the Guardian sums up
Sharon’s controversial legacy this way:
For many Israelis he will be mourned as a giant figure
that played a key role in shaping Israel both as a soldier and a
statesman. His passing severs the last link to the iconic generation
which
fought in the 1948 war that followed the declaration of the state. His
reputation as a fearless – and controversial – soldier was matched
by his uncompromising ideology as a politician.
>Among Palestinians and leftwing Israelis, he will be remembered as a
powerful and reviled champion of Israel’s colonial settlement project,
and
the political force behind the construction of the vast concrete and
steel separation barrier that snakes through the West Bank. Many will
not forgive his role in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians in
refugee camps in Beirut in the 1980s.
But those of us who aren’t beholden to these mainstream journalistic
norms, whatever they’re worth, should state what’s on our minds. As Miko Peled writes:
Ariel Sharon was an ambitious man. He was brutal, greedy, uncompromising and dishonest. He possessed an insatiable appetite for
power, glory and fortune. His tendencies as a cold-blooded, merciless
killer were evident from early on in his career….
Simply put, Sharon was a thug.
Sharon was a thug who courted and exercised power his entire career,
ultimately holding the reins of state power. For decades progressive
Zionists held fast to the fiction that Sharon was a rightwing bigot
outside Israel’s centrist political culture. They were wrong. Though
rougher and more bellicose than other Israeli leaders, Sharon’s vision
was – and is – at the center of the Israel’s state enterprise.
Sharon’s legacy isn’t about how Jews want Israel to be perceived by
others. Leadership style is only a superficial part of the story.
Sharon’s legacy is about the policies he carried out as a military and
political actor.
In
the public arena, Sharon was no different from his predecessors or
those who followed him. If anything he was ahead of his time. Though
not cutting the same outsized persona as Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu
stands squarely in Sharon’s tradition. Netanyahu, too, is a thug who
holds the reins of state power.
Sharon’s “uncompromising ideology as a politician” is Israel’s state ideology. That is the significance of Sharon’s legacy.
If Sharon is a thug, what does that make Jews in Israel and America
who are paying homage to Sharon? What does that make political leaders
around the world who offer condolences and will attend Sharon’s funeral?
President Obama released this statement on Sharon’s death:
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/01/thug.html
***************************************************
Maricopa County GOP votes overwhelmingly to censure John McCain
January 12, 2014
by Tom Tillison
Liberty Crier
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is frequently
characterized
by his critics as a “RINO” — Republican in name only — but such
criticism hit especially close to home on Saturday.
The Maricopa County Republican Party, McCain’s home
county, voted overwhelmingly to censure the 2008 Republican nominee for
president for his “betrayal” of party values, according to the local CBS affiliate.
McCain
was admonished for pushing liberal legislation, backing liberal
nominees and for “assaults on the Constitution and 2nd amendment,” the
resolution said.
Arkansas mom destroys Common Core in four powerful minutes
The vote wasn’t even close, with 1,169 voting for censure, compared to just 358 voting against it.
The censure concluded that “until he consistently champions our
Party’s Platform and values, we, the Republican leadership in Arizona
will no longer support, campaign for or endorse John McCain as our U.S.
Senator.”
Ouch.
Here is the resolution as drafted by precinct committeeman Tim Schwartz, according to CBS5 Phoenix:
http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/01/12/maricopa-county-gop-votes-overwhelmingly-to-censure-john-mccain-93657
*****************************************************
“ADHD Is A Fake Disorder” Claims Neurologist-Turned-Author
By Joe Martino
Collective Evolution/Lew Rockwell .com
January 13, 2014
According
to Neurologist Richard Saul who has written a book called “ADHD Does
Not Exist: The Truth About Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity
Disorder”, the amount of people who are suffering from Attention
Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder is zero.
Richard Saul is a neurologist who has had a long career in examining
patients who have been having trouble with short attention spans and
inability to focus. From his first hand experience, he feels that ADHD
is nothing more than a fake disorder that is really only an umbrella of
symptoms and not actually a disease. He strongly feels that it should
not be listed as a separate disorder in the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual, all detailed in his
book which is set to release in February 2014......
.....The
topic of ADHD has been covered in-depth and it seems clear that there
is great debate around the subject for a good reason: either the
disorder isn’t actually a disorder as it is defined, or we don’t fully
understand ADHD. Considering the average ADHD pamphlet you find in a
doctor’s office states that
your
child may still have ADHD even though they are quiet and completely
focused while doing things they love, it seems that we are pushing
anything
we want under the label of ADHD without looking at core issues. Yes,
there are children who are obviously hyperactive and struggle with
attention, but usually this is obvious within the first few seconds of
seeing
the child. But when you question whether a child has ADHD or not, it is
likely they are just having trouble focusing on or giving
attention to things they don’t want to do. Same goes with adults who
can’t focus at work, maybe it is time for a job change.
We have a habit of always seeing issues in people who don’t fit in
with the system. Whether they don’t want to be in standard education,
don’t want to work their whole lives or have trouble focusing on things
they
don’t like, we tend to label this as a problem, but is it? Maybe we
just don’t look within enough to figure out what might really be going
on or why we are living the way we do. Perhaps it is time we let go of
the idea of having to “fit in” to something that doesn’t resonate rather than labelling it as a disorder.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/joe-martino/is-adhd-a-fake-disorder/
********************************************************
Cop Shoves a Gun in a Teen’s Face in a McDonald’s Drive-thru, for Taking Too Long
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” - Lord Acton
When sociopaths with guns are claiming to ‘protect and serve’ you, something has gone terribly wrong.
The audacity and attitude of the cop
in this video says a lot about the “higher than thou” mentality that the ruling class holds.
Had the person this cop pulled a gun on been armed, and justly
defended himself or herself, they would likely be facing murder charges
for killing a cop
video http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-shoves-gun-teens-face-mcdonalds-drive-thru-long/#MzBKffxFZGAV8c6y.99
"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great
moral crises maintain their neutrality" -Dante Alighieri
They who watch while our elected officials are ravaging our country
should consider that...Vin
Join The Fight - Expose Globalism and The New World Order
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