In the just plain idiotic category goes S6779, a bill written by Republican New York State Senator Thomas F. O’Mara. The law would give any person, business or organization the right to force the removal from a web site of an anonymously written piece of material unless the true legal name, IP address and street address of the writer is posted along with the original written material and confirmed by the owner of the web site where the content is posted.

The law is necessary, says Senator O’Mara, to protect “a person’s right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting”. Who says people have a legal right to know what other people are saying about them? The Constitution of the United States has no such provision in it, and neither does the Constitution of the State of New York.

In fact, the Constitution of the State of New York may prohibit pieces of legislation of the sort that Thomas O’Mara has introduced. The state’s constitution declares, “The legislature shall not pass a private or local bill in any of the following cases: Changing the names of persons…” It seems to be that there’s a good argument to be made that S6779 is a law that forces people to change the names people use for themselves, and is therefore unconstitutional.

Our national Constitution has a little old thing in it that’s called the First Amendment. The First Amendment guarantees both the right to free speech and freedom of the press, both of which would be denied by the censorship facilitated by S6779.

If the New York State Assembly and Senate pass this bill, what’s next? Is there going to be a law prohibiting a spoken conversation without the prior exchange of drivers’ licenses?

Thomas O’Mara justifies his censorship legislation by saying that bullying online must be stopped. Why must online bullying behavior receive especially harsh treatment, while offline bullying gets a free pass?

This legislation seems like an attempt to stifle all speech online. It contains no provision requiring proof of bullying, or restricting the censorship to cases in which bullying is even alleged to be involved.

Besides, the legislation is poorly written, with a loophole a mile wide. It only applies to web sites that enable interactive discussion: “a web site including social networks, blogs, forums, message boards or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages”. So, even if this bill was passed, “cyberbullying” could go on as before, using web sites where there is no comment or discussion function.

Another idiotic flaw in the legislation is that it contains no restriction on the original date of publication of material. That means that, if Senator O’Mara’s legislation were signed into law, if a person published this poem…

I walk in loneliness through the greenwood
for I have none to go with me.
Since I have lost my friend by not being good
I walk in loneliness through the greenwood.
I’ll send him word and make it understood
that I will be good company.
I walk in loneliness through the greenwood
for I have none to go with me.

…on a blog with a comments section, then anyone could legally force the censorship of the poem. The poem, you see, was created by an anonymous writer over 800 years ago. It would be impossible to find the street address of the writer, and so the poem would have to be removed.

For that reason, I hereby rename S6779 as The Thomas O’Mara Medieval Poetry Censorship Act.

If writing bills like this is how Thomas O’Mara chooses to spend his time in the New York State Senate, why don’t the voters in his district just send him home to avoid further embarrassment?

They’re calling the legislation The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 Extension Act of 2012. President Barack Obama supports it, without equivocation.

The legislation, if passed, will extend the FISA Amendments Act, without any reform, until June 1, 2017. That’s five months after President Obama’s second term in office will end, if Barack Obama gains a second term at all.

The FISA Amendments Act is one of the worst laws passed at the urging of George W. Bush. The FISA Amendments Act sets up a gigantic electronic surveillance dragnet that allows the government to grab, store and search Americans’ personal telephone calls, emails, Internet activities, and other private communications, without a search warrant, and without proof that the information was gathered because of suspicion of any particular crime or conspiracy. It’s a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, which states that the private information of American citizens cannot be seized without a search warrant specifically noting the person and place that is to be searched, backed with proof of probable cause to believe that a particular crime has been committed.

When Barack Obama campaigned to become President of the United States in 2008, he voted in favor of the FISA Amendments Act, even though he had earlier made a promise never to vote for such a law. It was just the first of his broken promises.

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama promised that, although he had voted for the FISA Amendments Act, as President he would be sure to work with Congress to reform the laws, to end its violations of Americans’ constitutional rights. In spite of this promise, President Obama has never supported any law that would reform the FISA Amendments Act.

Now, Barack Obama is supporting The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 Extension Act of 2012, legislation that will keep the FISA Amendments Act in place, without any reform, until after he leaves the White House. In effect, President Obama is now saying that he has no intention to reform the FISA Amendments Act, ever. Obama is saying that, if he is given a second term in office, he will keep George W. Bush’s attack on the Constitution in place, and that he’s happy to do so.

Barack Obama has made his position very clear. There are no clever hints that reform might take place, if only he is given a second term. Obama is saying that if we vote for him, we’re voting for a person who wants to keep a government surveillance program, more powerful than anything that George Orwell could imagine, that targets law abiding Americans, the limits of which even Congress does not know.

So, now the time has come to make your position on this issue very clear. Will you, like Barack Obama, support the extension of Big Brother electronic surveillance powers used against the American people?

If you stand with Barack Obama on this issue, you may call yourself a Democrat, but you can never again call yourself a liberal, or a progressive. You can never describe yourself as a lover of freedom, or of constitutional rights, without being a liar.

You have an alternative: You can do your duty as a citizen of the United States of America, and speak out loudly against The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 Extension Act of 2012.

Which choice do you make?

We also can’t tell you who on the committee voted in favor of advancing the legislation toward the floor of the U.S. senate. We can’t even say whether there were any votes in opposition at all. Even the simple fact of which senators were present at the committee meeting is unavailable to us.

That’s because when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence met yesterday to discuss and hold a vote on legislation to extend the FISA Amendments Act by five years, it did so as part of a secret hearing, shutting out the American people.

This law is depriving us of our constitutional right under the Fourth Amendment to protection from warrantless searches and seizures of our personal information, but the Senate isn’t even allowing us to know what they know, and what they’re voting on, in regards to the law. There isn’t any official legislation yet on the books for us to investigate through the Library of Congress. We’re all left in the dark, lucky that a reporter at the Washington Post has an inside relationship.

That’s not how a democracy ought to work.

What’s worse is that even the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence isn’t being told how the extraordinary, unconstitutional powers of the FISA Amendments Act are being used. Senator Ron Wyden has stated that the Executive Branch has refused to tell anyone on the committee how many Americans are having their personal communications wiretapped by the government, in what conditions the surveillance is taking place, and with what justification. Even in secret, the small number of U.S. senators who are supposed to be given clearance to have information about how the FISA Amendments Act is being used are being deprived of that information by the Obama Administration.

And yet, that committee just voted in approval of legislation that, if passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law, will allow the FISA Amendments Act spying against Americans to continue for five more years without any reform. Why?

We’ve been through several rounds of this, under George W. Bush and under Barack Obama, and the American people have never gotten adequate answers to their questions. There is no public evidence that the FISA Amendments Act is being conducted constitutionally, or even that it is genuinely targeting terrorists.

The time has come for the FISA Amendments Act to expire. Years have passed in which reforms of the law could have been crafted. Yet, no reforms are even being proposed by the White House or Congress. Therefore, the only responsible vote for any member of Congress on any legislation that extends the FISA Amendments Act in any way is NO.

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America makes an absolute promise: “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.” In spite of this promise, Americans’ “persons” and “effects” are being tracked automatically in an increasing number of places in the country.

The ACLU reports that the DEA has announced plans to keep records of all the license plates of all the cars that travel along Interstate 15 in Utah, using cameras that have the ability to scan and record the license plate numbers of cars traveling at high speeds. The DEA’s justification is that drug dealers use the road quite often to transport their illegal roads, and the tracking is necessary to discourage the criminal activity.

It’s a shame that there’s an illegal drug traffic. Really, it is. However, it’s a much bigger shame that our government feels that it’s necessary to violate the constitutional rights of a huge number of completely innocent Americans just in order to follow a few criminals.

The Fourth Amendment requires a search warrant “particularly describing the place to be searched”, but the entire length of a road stretching across a large state is not a particular place. Neither does the DEA have “probable cause” to believe that illegal drugs are being transported along that road 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. The DEA is simply searching everyone along that road on a vague hunch.

According to the ACLU, it isn’t just one road, in one state, that’s under the federal government’s watch. Automatic license plate scanners are being installed along roads all across the country.

What’s more, corporations are collecting information about Americans’ whereabouts through GPS devices and even Internet-enabled technology in cars. When the federal government asks for the records generated from such devices, most corporations won’t say no, and at other times, given the powers of surveillance laws such as the Patriot Act, they may not have a choice but to turn the information over.

If you want to keep your travel private from Big Brother these days, it’s a good idea to simply walk or take a bike… and to leave all your electronic devices at home. Even then, you’ll have to watch out for the surveillance cameras set up along the streets.

They say this constant searching is for your own good. Are you feeling the benefits yet?

In an article by Judy Harrison on the subject, Bangor Theological Seminary administrator Steve Lewis is quoted with this reaction:

What’s alarming about those numbers is that more than 300 years after the country was founded by people seeking religious freedom, the large numbers of nonaffiliated folks out here is just the norm.

Lewis seems to have a funny definition of the term “religious freedom.” When more and more people operate outside the bounds of religious institutions, that’s not a threat to people seeking religious freedom. However “alarming” it may be to tithe-dependent institutions, non-affiliation is an expansion of people’s freedom.

North Carolina Bans Gay Marriage but You Can Marry Your First Cousin

In an outrageous attempt to regulate religious views, the state of North Carolina banned gay marriage in their constitution, a document many of the voters have never read.

The law basically bans all unions, marriages or relationships unless it is one man and one women, of the sexes. This means, common-law-marriages between a man and a woman is not recognized either.

The kicker is that you can marry your first cousin in North Carolina, so inbreeding is totally legal.

I thought this had to be a joke, you know, a Southern stereotype kind of thing. Surely a state that goes about banning harmless same-sex marriages can’t be promoting inbreeding, which actually does hurt children.

But no, it’s no joke: marriage between cousins is legal in North Carolina. The National Conference of State Legislatures has researched the issue and found that North Carolina lets cousins marry. Preventing harm to North Carolinians’ tender sensibilities is apparently more important than preventing birth defects.

This censorship of information took place at a special kind of military trial, rather than the normal kind of criminal trial that American law before September 11, 2001 would suggest that an accused terrorist should be subjected to. The kind of military trial going on now was created after the crime, with new, lax rules explicitly crafted with the specific purpose of leading to the conviction of the accused in spite of problems with evidence. The rules were changed after the fact to deprive defendants accused of involvement in this particular crime of legal rights typically given during trials in the United States.

Given the loose new rules of justice at this military trial, it was part of the plan all along in these military trials to have journalists shoved aside into a separate space, and fed an audio feed of the trial, with a military security officer given a special button to cut the audio feed when a top secret piece of government information might be revealed. So, it sounds as if there was some sort of government secret about torture at the Guantanamo prisons that the military was afraid was about to be revealed by the Air Force captain serving as lawyer for the defendants.

But, yesterday, days after the event, the military released what it says is a transcript of what was said during the period of court censorship, when journalists could not hear the audio. The military asserts that the Air Force captain didn’t talk about torture at all during the censored part of the trial. The military claims that the Air Force captain was merely discussing court procedures with the judge.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it has no relevance on the defense of the accused. Maybe it does.

We can never know whether what the military says about this trial, and its censored moments, are true. There are reasonable grounds for doubt.

We have one organization, the U.S. military, running both the prosecution and the defense, as well as controlling the courtroom environment. That same organization, the U.S. military has been accused of torturing the defendants. It was that organization, the U.S. military, that chose to censor what appears to be discussion in the court about that torture. Now, that same organization, the U.S. military, is telling us that no discussion of torture took place in the censored period of the military trial.

They military, in this circumstance, is asking the American people to trust them that what it says about the trial is true. They’re asking us to accept it on faith.

That’s insane.

Then again, the United States of America has gone a little bit insane since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The kind of justice that Americans would have considered unreasonable before the attacks now seems reasonable to many.

True reason, of course, does not change when confronted by fearful events. The standard for criminal justice in America is that conviction needs to take place only when it has stood against the test of reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt isn’t dictated by the fears of the moment, or by political expediency. It is doubt that is examined through reason.

For hundreds of years, reasoning minds in the United States agreed that a trial, long delayed, with testimony obtained through coercion and torture, in which the defense and the prosecution were part of the same team, and court records withheld from outside scrutiny, could not produce a trustworthy result. Now, we’re being expected to accept these methods as reliable and trustworthy, because of the fear that the crime of terrorism has provoked.

Many Americans have become so detached from an ordinary understanding of the reason of law that they are declaring that the accused deserve to be subjected to the military tribunals’ sloppy kangaroo court standards, because of the crimes that they have committed. They have a circular understanding of justice, in which the accused are punished for being guilty before they have been reasonably found, through trial, to be guilty.

It’s because the crimes of September 11, 2001 were so horrible that the trials of anyone accused of involvement in those crimes must meet the highest standards of justice. Instead, as this week’s mysterious courtroom censorship illustrates, the American justice system has been pursuing the lowest standards, seeking out vengeance rather than a reasonable outcome.

After the ridiculous vote in North Carolina in favor of a constitutional amendment banning equality of marriage law for heterosexual and homosexual couples, President Obama’s opposition to marriage equality became untenable. Obama’s aides saw the revulsion which the North Carolina vote caused outside of the South, and realized that the Obama re-election campaign was about to be stuck in the company of the country’s worst bigots.

So, thanks for making it clear, President Obama, that you personally think that North Carolina made the wrong decision. Welcome to the 21st century – 12 years late.

But now, Mr. President, what are you going to DO about it?

It looks like President Obama intends to do nothing. He said that his newfound acceptance of the idea that homosexual couples deserve equal rights is just personal. Even as he stated this new personal opinion, Obama declared that he still believes that states should have the right to vote to ban same sex marriage.

That places Barack Obama still on the wrong side, when it counts. It places President Obama still on the side of the bigots in North Carolina.

That’s because it’s not really the job of the President of the United States to express his personal opinions and leave it at that. It’s the job of the President of the United States to be the chief executive. It’s the President’s job to act.

And so, what Barack Obama has said today is that yes, he personally believes that it’s fine for same-sex couples to get married, but that as President he will not lift a finger to give them the right to do so. When bigots in backwards states like North Carolina decide to enact bans against marriage equality, Obama won’t do a thing to stop them.

That’s not just a betrayal of the gays and lesbians. It’s a betrayal of the Constitution and the rule of law.

The rule of law in the United States of America is founded upon the national Constitution, not the authority of the states. States cannot pass laws of any sort that contradict the rights guaranteed by the national Constitution, and the national Constitution requires equality under the law.

Barack Obama’s refusal to stand up for that principle is weakening the authority of the Constitution, and is, therefore, weakening the ability of anyone, heterosexual or homosexual to trust that their legal rights are going to be respected. Obama’s new position is akin to that of Abraham Lincoln before the Civil War. President Lincoln was happy to allow slavery to continue, just so long as there wasn’t a war fought between the states over the matter.

Lincoln’s wishy washy position against national abolition of slavery could not save the union, and it made for a weak moral position during the initial part of the Civil War. The only way that Abraham Lincoln could turn around his failed policy was to finally take executive action against slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Barack Obama is often likened to Abraham Lincoln – but right now, what we’re seeing from Obama is most like a reflection of Lincoln’s worst political instincts. Obama, like Lincoln, is letting a bunch of yahoos from the Carolinas lead the way.

Real leadership from Obama, appropriate to his position, would not allow such mean-spirited erosion of the national authority in order to defend cruel, outdated traditions of inequality. Real leadership would see that, through action of the Supreme Court or through Congress, the disloyal state of North Carolina forced to come back into line with the law of the land, and revise its state constitution to reflect the fact that, in the United States, no group may be given an unequal, inferior legal status.

If President Barack Obama does not take such action, then he has only succeeded today in communicating that he has no intention of using his power to defend the Constitution from domestic threats, as he promised to do when he took the Oath of Office two and a half years ago. If he will not honor his Oath of Office now, he should not be given the chance to dishonestly swear it again.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it, until Barack Obama stands up and takes responsibility in the job that he’s been given: Americans who truly believe in constitutional rights don’t need to vote for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. There is an alternative for us: Jill Stein, who has prominently supported equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians for many years, and who, just today, endorsed the platform of the New Progressive Alliance, which includes the following plank: “Our country was founded upon a set of principles and ideals that have their most eloquent expression in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Based on these core values, we support equal rights for all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, country of origin, or other status, including the right of same-sex couples to marry, and the right of all women to make decisions about their reproductive health.”

These confirmations matter. If the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is finally constituted after four long empty years, its members will have the power of subpoena to compel testimony and the surrender of evidence from the Obama administration. The results of its investigations will be shared with Congress and the public twice yearly. If the nominees to the PCLOB are confirmed, if they are seated, and if they do their job, the civil liberties violations of the Obama administration could finally be brought to the light of day.

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.