If we’re doing the Homeland Security thing, we need a leader who will do whatever it takes to protect the homeland – including lining up America’s impaled enemies on stakes outside the White House, and drinking the hot blood of terrorists with their hearts still beating in their chests. Homeland America needs Vlad the Impaler for President in 2012!

Vlad beat the Muslims hundreds of years ago, and sure, he employed some unorthodox methods, but they didn’t call him “dragon” for nothing!

Vlad the Impaler is the only true outsider in the 2012 presidential race. Prince Dracul is not from Washington D.C. He’s not from America. Heck, he’s not even from the pre-Industrial era. Since his transformation, the Transylvanian Tyrant isn’t even human.

Vlad the Impaler is the only presidential candidate who can help Americans get beyond the tired old divisions that keep the living and the dead separated. He has his own wealth, of old Roman gold coins and of centuries worth of blood, so he won’t be accountable to any special interests… other than the ones he has himself.

Maybe it’s not too late for Count Dracula to run for President using the Americans Elect system. An undead political party would be a perfect match for an undead presidential candidate, don’t you think?

I think they should have secret courts that are so secret they just don’t arrest us at all. They’d try us and sentence us and just leave us alone so that we don’t even know we’ve been convicted, and that we’re under house arrest with a degree of leniency.

Consider the data contained on a “smart” phone. The phone carries your private conversations, of course, but it also keeps data on your physical location as you move, emails and personal text messages, financial information, social network data, Internet habits, travel documents… and on and on. Depending on how “smart” you are with your smart phone, the device might contain detailed medical information, your children’s academic records, and even your cardiovascular performance from your latest workout. All of this information is easily obtainable by the police, and apparently, it is being obtained quite frequently.

You may think that your personal activities aren’t being tracked through your cell phone, because you aren’t engaged in any criminal activity. Of course, being innocent of a crime doesn’t prevent people from being suspected of a crime anyway. What’s more, the most casual association with someone who is a criminal suspect can bring you into the net of police cell phone surveillance. Records obtained by the ACLU from Chatham County, North Carolina, for instance, show that the police there are not just tracking criminal suspects using the GPS devices in their cell phones, but are also tracking by GPS every person that the criminal suspects contact with their cell phones.

It should be an obvious thing to say, but it’s being forgotten: Searching through a person’s private records without a search warrant describing the specific place to be searched is unconstitutional. Whether the records are on paper or electronic shouldn’t make a difference. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution makes the standard clear: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

With the other erosions of the right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure, such as yesterday’s Supreme Court decision declaring that people can be strip searched in prisons even on unsubstantiated suspicion of non-criminal activities, Americans have lost the ability to presume that they can keep their private lives private. These are dark days for the cause of liberty in the United States of America.

We ought to be able to carry and use cell phones with the assurance that what we do using the device will remain private, but the ideals upon which our nation was founded are no longer being heeded. Unless you’re comfortable having your every move watched by the police, carrying a smart phone around with you is just plain dumb.

Sherrod Brown: Voting for Indefinite Detention Without Due Process in 2006
When Sherrod Brown was a U.S. Representative running for Senate, he voted for H.R. 6166, a bill to scuttle habeus corpus rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution, install undemocratic executive committees without review to designate citizens and noncitizens alike as “enemy combatants, and detain non-citizens indefinitely without standards for proof. You could say that H.R. 6166 was the big lead-up to S. 1867, the bill Sherrod Brown helped pass in 2011.

The Apology and The Promise, 2007
Next came the damage control. After the campaign was over and Sherrod Brown won office to the Senate, he went on The Young Turks show to apologize for his “mistake.” He promised to fix that mistake:

Cenk Uygur: Thanks for joining us Senator. We appreciate it. I gotta start off with the question we’ve had now for over six months, I gotta ask you, why did you vote for the Military Commissions Act?

Sherrod Brown: It was a bad vote. I shouldn’t have.

Cenk Uygur: Oh, wow. Okay.

Sherrod Brown: A vote I’ll correct … when it comes.

Cenk Uygur: So, you regret that?

Sherrod Brown: I take responsibility. It was the heat of the campaign and I made a mistake.

Cenk Uygur: So, if it comes again you’re going to change the vote?

Sherrod Brown: You bet.

How well has Sherrod Brown kept his promise?

Sherrod Brown: Voting Against Fair Trials in 2009
In 2009, Sherrod Brown voted in favor of S.Amdt. 1133 to H.R. 2346, which would have forbidden the President from giving a fair trial to anyone in indefinite detention at the Guantanamo gulag. Sherrod Brown made that vote despite the revelation that many Guantanamo detainees actually were not terrorists after all.

When Sherrod Brown made this vote, he broke his promise.

Sherrod Brown: Voting to Expand Indefinite Detention Powers in 2011
In 2011, On December 16 Sherrod Brown voted to give U.S. government agents the power to toss people into prison forever. Doesn’t matter whether they’re arrested on U.S. soil or not. Doesn’t matter if they’re citizens or not. No charges filed. No proof in court. No trials. No due process as described in the Constitution. All government agents have to do is say that people are terrorists, and it can throw away the key on these people, forever. As we know, people are falsely accused of being terrorists on a regular basis. Remove due process for them and you have an unleashed state. Ignore constitutional guarantees of the rights of individual people and none of us is safe.

When Sherrod Brown made this vote, he broke his promise.

Sherrod Brown: Sitting on His Hands Regarding Indefinite Detention in 2012
In 2012, Senator Mark Udall of Colorado has introduced S. 2175. This bill, also called the Due Process and Military Detention Amendments Act, requires that if a person is arrested in the United States, they must be granted a “trial and proceedings by a court established under Article III of the Constitution of the United States or by an appropriate State court. Such trial and proceedings shall have all the due process as provided for under the Constitution of the United States.”

This bill would undo some of the damage wreaked by Sherrod Brown’s vote last December, and his vote for the Military Commissions Act before that. But Senator Sherrod Brown has failed to cosponsor S. 2175.

By this inaction, Sherrod Brown is breaking his promise.

People of Ohio, Sherrod Brown has lied to you. He’s repeatedly broken this promise, on a subject that straddles the dividing line between liberty and tyranny. So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to take this lying down? Are you going to be the chumps that Sherrod Brown clearly thinks you are?

Come November, we’ll find out.

Democrats who bridled at the autocratic l’etat-c’est-moi behavior of the Petulant Prince George ought to stop referring to our dear leader as “President Obama.”  The term that better fits his behavior is King Barack the First.

This means that nobody has been using full subpoena authority to interview members of the U.S. Government and to collect complete information on the search and surveillance activities carried out by our government. This means that nobody has been coordinating programs to ensure constitutional compliance by agents of our government. This means that nobody has been issuing the legally-required twice-yearly reports to Congress and the public revealing violations of Americans’ constitutional rights. Instead, actions in violation of Americans’ constitutional rights have gone unchecked. Constitutional oversight activities have been absent under the administration of President Obama. Up until December of 2011, that was Barack Obama’s fault because he had refused to place nominations to fill the PCLOB.

Since December, the fault lies with Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that reviews and processes executive nominations so the full Senate can vote on them. But since December 2011, not a single hearing for any of the nominees has been held. Not a single hearing has been scheduled.

Tell Senator Leahy it’s time for him to stop stonewalling civil liberties. It’s time to bring up the nominations for consideration and confirmation.

Leahy’s DC Office Phone: 202-224-4242
Leahy’s VT Office Phone: 800-642-3193

Enough! Call Patrick Leahy today. Tell him to get off his duff and do the job he was elected to do.

Two House Republicans (John Duncan of Tennessee and Timothy Johnson of Illinois) have joined 35 Democrats in supporting H.R. 4192, a bill that would reverse key portions of a new law that allows presidents to detain people in a gulag forever, without charges, without trial, even if they are arrested on American soil.

H.R. 4192 (also called the Due Process and Military Detention Amendments Act) requires that if a person is arrested in the United States, they must be granted a “trial and proceedings by a court established under Article III of the Constitution of the United States or by an appropriate State court. Such trial and proceedings shall have all the due process as provided for under the Constitution of the United States.”

Constitutional rights for people arrested in the United States. Time was, we could count on that. Now, such guarantees are considered anachronistic. As of today, fewer than one in ten of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives have bothered to cosponsor H.R. 4192. Here are their names:

Supporters of H.R. 4192
Rep. Adam Smith (Democrat-WA, District 9) — principal sponsor
Rep. Robert Andrews (Democrat-NJ, District 1)
Rep. Howard Berman (Democrat-CA, District 28)
Del. Madeleine Bordallo (Democrat-GU, District 0)
Rep. Lois Capps (Democrat-CA, District 23)
Rep. Michael Capuano (Democrat-MA, District 8 )
Rep. Russ Carnahan (Democrat-MO, District 3)
Rep. Joe Courtney (Democrat-CT, District 2)
Rep. Mark Critz (Democrat-PA, District 12)
Rep. Susan Davis (Democrat-CA, District 53)
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (Democrat-TX, District 25)
Rep. John Duncan (Republican-TN, District 2)
Rep. Sam Farr (Democrat-CA, District 17)
Rep. Bob Filner (Democrat-CA, District 51)
Rep. Janice Hahn (Democrat-CA, District 36)
Rep. Alcee Hastings (Democrat-FL, District 23)
Rep. Brian Higgins (Democrat-NY, District 27)
Rep. Mazie Hirono (Democrat-HI, District 2)
Rep. Rush Holt (Democrat-NJ, District 12)
Rep. Jay Inslee (Democrat-WA, District 1)
Rep. Hank Johnson (Democrat-GA, District 4)
Rep. Timothy Johnson (Republican-IL, District 15)
Rep. Rick Larsen (Democrat-WA, District 2)
Rep. Betty McCollum (Democrat-MN, District 4)
Rep. James McDermott (Democrat-WA, District 7)
Rep. James McGovern (Democrat-MA, District 3)
Rep. Michael Michaud (Democrat-ME, District 2)
Rep. George Miller (Democrat-CA, District 7)
Rep. James Moran (Democrat-VA, District 8 )
Rep. Chellie Pingree (Democrat-ME, District 1)
Rep. David Price (Democrat-NC, District 4)
Rep. Silvestre Reyes (Democrat-TX, District 16)
Rep. Bobby Rush (Democrat-IL, District 1)
Rep. Jackie Speier (Democrat-CA, District 12)
Rep. Paul Tonko (Democrat-NY, District 21)
Rep. Henry Waxman (Democrat-CA, District 30)

If you don’t find your member of Congress on that list, find his or her phone number and make a call. Treating people according to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution isn’t a special privilege; it’s the floor beneath which no one in government should be able to sink. Help remind our leaders, who seem to have forgotten that.

The Lorax markets Mazda SUVs: a thing that everyone, everyone, everyone needs?

When officials conducted a Photo Op to show off their new drones flying over American skies, the people in charge lost control of their robot and it smashed into a SWAT team.

The New York City Police Department is secretly spying on kids who’ve done nothing but be Muslim.

The Democratic-Controlled Senate Judiciary Committee continues to sit on 5 nominations to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which has been empty since Barack Obama took office as President.

Are you cool with that?

Not anymore. Not if you judge by congressional Democrats’ action this past week in overwhelmingly passing H.R. 347, a bill that makes it a federal crime punishable by a year in jail to peacefully, non-violently protest “in the proximity” of a president, a vice president, a presidential candidate, or even a visiting world leader.

I’m not kidding: H.R. 347 really does those things. Read the text of H.R. 347, which makes it a crime to act in any way that might knock an event off-center if the event includes a secret-service-protected person like — yes — any visiting world leader. Even if that disruption takes the form of a peaceful, non-violent, non-trespassing protest nearby. So if a dictator comes to the United States, and you stand on a street corner with a hundred other people to carry signs and shout at his motorcade? That’s a federal crime now.

I say it’s a federal crime now because H.R. 347 passed. It didn’t pass by a small margin. Only three Representatives — Republican Justin Amash, Republican Paul Broun, and Democrat Keith Ellison — voted against it in the House (Roll Call 73). And nobody voted against it in the Senate — the measure passed by voice vote, and not one Senator made the necessary objection to force a roll call.

The Republican Party has long been the party of censorious authoritarianism. With this solid vote against the first amendment constitutional right to free assembly, free speech and petitioning for redress of grievance, the Democratic Party has yanked the mantle of authoritarianism firmly around its own shoulders.

This past Tuesday, when the vote for H.R. 347 quickly and quietly made its final passage from the Capitol building to the desk of the President, civil liberty had only 3 friends out of 535 members of Congress. I shudder at the thought.

But now the buck’s passed. Now it’s no longer Barack Obama’s fault that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is unstaffed. Since December, it’s been the fault of Senator Pat Leahy. Senator Leahy is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is in charge of reviewing nominations for the PCLOB members and passing them on to the full Senate for official consent. But since December 2011, when the last of the five PCLOB nominees were named, not a single hearing for any of the nominees has been held or even scheduled. It’s worse than that: two of the five nominees were actually submitted by President Obama 14 months ago, in December of 2010. Even those two have been stalled by Senator Leahy. There’s been no progress in the Judiciary Committee whatsoever, and there are no public indications that there will be.

Is this what Senator Leahy was elected by the people of Vermont to do? To stonewall the protectors of Americans’ constitutional rights?

If your answer is “heck no,” then don’t just tell me. Tell Senator Leahy.

DC Office Phone: 202-224-4242
VT Office Phone: 800-642-3193

Enough! Call Patrick Leahy today. Tell him to get off his duff and do the job he was elected to do.