Alternate title – Own it

Apparently the shine on the Obama presidency is rubbing off a bit, at least when it comes to America’s labor unions.  First, Obamacare is pushing employers to cut full-time positions to strictly part-time status, or eliminate them entirely.  People who have their hours cut in half or have their jobs erased don’t pay as much in union dues, now do they?  Second, President Obama decreed that we shall not create thousands of jobs in the mid-west, with many of them going to union labor, when he refused to authorize construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.  Those construction workers, teamsters, and manufacturers ought to be building windmills and unicorn feeding stations anyway.  And finally, his Department of Justice has filed suit to block the merger of American Airlines and US-Airways, which puts the continued competitiveness and survival of both companies in jeopardy.  Those highly unionized pilots, flight attendants, and pilots aren’t going to be paying into union coffers if their airlines go belly up.

So what we have is the most radically leftist administration in my lifetime thumbing its nose at those who put it in office.  Without the support of the labor unions, not only would Obama still be the least industrious Senator in our history, but most of the Democrat members of Congress who either swept in on his coat tails or held onto their jobs because of his victories would be out doing something more commensurate with their skills and work ethic, like sweeping up cigarette butts from the gutter.

And now that the unions have everything they asked for in two major elections, they’re complaining about the bite marks on their feeding hand.  For those of you who can see me writing this, the tears that are running down my face are from the grief I feel at their misfortune.

Oh, gee.  Oh, golly gosh darn.  How horrible that through their support of a naval gazing neophyte of a wind-up politician, they are now getting bitten right in the member(ship).  What will they do without all of those millions of dollars in dues that those who have their jobs either cut, eliminated, or never even created would have funneled into union coffers?

How absolutely sad it would be for the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, and SEIU to wake up and realize that they’ve been used in the same manner that I used to use baby wipes on Boo?

My advice to them is to look themselves in the mirror, admit that the bruises don’t come from falling down steps and walking into doors, and find a way to remove their attachment from their abuser.  They need to look deeply at their own actions and realize that their poor choices in politics led them to this circumstance, and they need to become more than the Pavlovian piggy bank and voting bloc of the Democrats.  I’m not under any illusions that they will become a truly apolitical organization that only supports politicians that have a track record of keeping their word and not hosing the American worker, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll take the time to examine whomever the Democrats pimp out in 2016 before the unions and their members step into their yokes for them.

Yesterday, Nidal Hasan, a commissioned officer in the United States Army Medical Corps, was convicted of 45 counts related to a murderous rampage at Fort Hood in Texas.  This bastard son of an inbred Algerian goat rapist murdered 13 people, 12 of them soldiers who took the same oath as he did and wore the same uniform, and wounded 32 more.  Since then, it has come to light that he had been in regular communication with jihadist religious leaders overseas and had counseled soldiers under his care that they were to blame for their own injuries and troubles, and that their comrades that were killed in combat deserved what they got.

In the aftermath of the massacre, even after Hasan freely admitted that he committed the crime as part of a global jihad against us and those like us, the Obama administration and their uniformed lapdogs in the Pentagon have refused to call the deaths and injuries from the attack combat related.  By so doing, they are denying those who were harmed and the families of those who were killed benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.  This brings shame on all of us.

It is a national disgrace that the people that that jihadist piece of crap shot and their survivors aren’t being given the combat benefits that they so richly deserve. Here’s a hint: When the guy who shoots up the SRP facility freely admits to being an Islamist terrorist, that means that the people he hurt and killed were involved in combat, no matter where they happened to be.

Since the federal government has turned its back on them, the state of Texas is stepping up.  Rather than treat our wounded veterans and their widows and orphans like trash that needs to be hidden from public view, they are extending benefits to those who survived and the survivors of the fallen the same benefits in the state Veteran’s Land Bureau.  This will help them own a home and continue the lives that Hasan tried to destroy and that Obama and his ilk are ignoring.

Good on Texas for doing what’s right, even if the President and his toadies don’t have the guts to follow their example.  When we ignore those who pay the price for our defense, we cheapen their lives and discourage their efforts.  Hopefully President Obama changes his mind and his heart, but no matter what he and his cabal of weak-willed individuals do, it is up to us to do the right thing.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am a life-long Republican who has decided that the party has left me and those like me behind in its journey toward becoming the other Democrat party.  Now, the usual gang of idiots, whose support gave us Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, is lining up to support New Jersey governor Chris Christie in his quest to become the next Republican to lose to a Democrat half-wit.

I’ve walked away from the Republican party rank and file, and put myself into the “Independent” column, but I still tend to lean toward your side of the argument on most elected officials.  That being said, let me make myself perfectly clear:

If you nominate Chris Christie or any of his ilk for the presidency in 2016, you will lose, and I will do everything in my power to help that along.

Now, let me be brutally honest:

I will vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton before I will vote for Chris Christie. I will vote for Nancy Pelosi before I will vote for Chris Christie. I will vote for Deval Patrick before I will vote for Chris Christie.  I will vote for just about anyone else on the face of the planet before I will vote for Chris Christie.

And I will shout from the rooftops to anyone who will listen as to why and I will take as many Republican voters with me as I can.

Chris Christie is political kryptonite to me and those like me.  He has cozied up to Barack Obama as often as he can.  He opposes gun rights at every turn, and supported anti-rights legislation in New Jersey at the same time that a groundswell of support for pro-gun legislators in Congress was at its peak.  His ilk should not be the future of the party, and if he is, you will throw away the support of that all-important “None of the above” political demographic.

Am I getting through to you?

The best case scenario for you if Governor Christie is on the Republican ticket in 2016 is that we stay home on election day.  The worst case is that we decide to vote for someone other than the person y’all decided deserved a turn at losing an election.

If you want my support and the support of those like me, you need to break your habit of putting up a milquetoast, get-along-to-get-along candidate.  You need to support people who want to roll back the abuses of the last two presidencies, both in the area of individual rights and in the overreach and intrusion of the federal government.  Anything less will reinforce your status as the also-ran, permanent loyal opposition.

Sincerely yours,

Daddy J. Bear
Louisville, KY

(Yes, I did put this in an envelope and mailed it.  No, I don’t expect they’ll respond)

General Alexander, head of the NSA, will be testifying in an open session of the house Intelligence Committee this week.  The following are some suggested questions for the good general:

Question 1 -General, exactly what percentage of your agencies requests for warrants to target American citizens are turned down by the FISA courts?

Question 2 – General, please describe to the committee the programs under which the National Security Agency gathers information about the telephonic communications and Internet activities of  American citizens.

Question 2 – General, please describe to us the procedures the NSA has put in place to make it impossible for someone to abuse this data that you’ve put into a conveniently indexed database.

Question 3 – Oh, it’s quite possible that this data could be abused by someone in your organization to target an American citizen for personal or political reasons?

Question 4 – Have you lost your damned mind?

Question 5 – General, do you understand your rights under Article 31 of the UCMJ?

Question 6 – Which one of those yokels sitting next to you is your attorney?

Oh, and “Silently We Defend“, General. Have a nice day.

Edward Snowden, the source of the recent leaks about NSA surveillance programs did a one and a half flip double gainer with a twist across the line from ‘potentially justified whistleblower’ to ‘traitorous douchebag who should be convicted by a jury of his peers and hung from the nearest yardarm” when he revealed to newspapers in Hong Kong that the NSA conducts surveillance / computer hacking against Hong Kong and the Peoples Republic of China.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, we’ve fought a shooting war against China, fought at least one war against people supported, trained, and armed by China, and have off-again, on-again been at odds with China in diplomatic, economic, and social circles over the past 65 years or so.  It should come to no-one’s surprise, least of all the Chinese communist party leadership, that our intelligence agencies are keeping tabs on them.

But he didn’t have to confirm it for them, and he certainly don’t need to give them a description of at least one effort to gather intelligence on the Chinese.

You see, every time a particular operation against a foreign power is uncovered, it not only blows the data that operation would have given, but also shows the target an example of where we have an opportunity to learn more about them.  They take that example and compare it to the rest of their military, industry, diplomats, and whatever, find similar circumstances, and figure out ways to either shut down ongoing efforts to exploit them or to prevent future intelligence efforts.

Not to mention that if our intelligence services are using human assets, also known as people, to aid in their efforts, those people have a bad habit of ending up with a 9mm cerebral hemorrhage.  In other words, betraying intelligence operations frequently leads to the murder of human beings.  So much for being a guy who just wants to be a good humanitarian.

I can agree with a lot of what Snowden did when it comes to domestic government surveillance of our citizenry.  Maybe he could have gone to the Inspector General, or maybe to a sympathetic member of Congress, but he went to the press, which some have criticized.  Even then, it has been pointed out that, unlike Bradley Manning, Snowden took steps to make sure that the names of sources weren’t in what he released.  I guess that went out the window once he started talking to his Chinese hosts.

Regardless of the good his earlier revelations may yet bring, this latest trick cannot be justified in any way.  He has endangered our ability to gather intelligence against an unfriendly country, and has possibly put the lives of people who have been helping our country at risk.  For this, I hope he is apprehended, tried, and convicted.

I was thinking about the situation with the NSA and a thought occurred to me:*  What if we take the buzzword ‘terrorism’ out of the equation and look at another scourge:  smuggling.

Right now, our country has a huge problem with smuggling of drugs, people, and money.  This problem includes smuggling both across and within our borders.  The horrors of what illegal drugs are doing to our society, especially in poor, urban areas, as well as the atrocities of human trafficking and forced labor of illegal immigrants are on our front pages and news broadcasts regularly, so the government decides to do more about it.

In an effort to find ways to choke out this smuggling, the government decides that it needs to know the following information:

1. Who is crossing our border on a regular basis?**
2. Who owns large capacity vehicles?
3. Who is moving and using large amounts of money, either electronically or cash?

In order to answer question #1, the government starts using license plate and face recognition technology to figure out who is going across the border on a regular basis.  We can make the argument that knowing who comes and goes through our international borders is a good thing, and is indeed one of the duties of the federal government.  However, recognizing that getting across the border is only the first step for these smuggling networks, the federal government takes it further.  They put up equipment where interstate highways cross state borders and record the license plates of every vehicle that goes by in either direction.  This doesn’t directly infringe on our rights to cross state borders, because they’re not stopping us and they’re only recording the identity of the vehicle, not the passengers.

Later on, they realize that a lot of people fly or take trains in this country, so they start recording the names of everyone who checks in at a train station or an airport.  Again, they’re not infringing on your freedom of movement; they just want to be able to backtrack who goes where and with whom in case someone gets investigated.

On question 2, the government starts out with inquiries to state vehicle registration agencies on such things as large vans, pick-ups, and semi-trucks and trailers.  After a while, it occurs to someone that most illicit drugs are quite small and light, as is cash, and that you can carry more than the driver in the average passenger vehicle.  Realizing that they might be missing a vast amount of smuggling via automobile, they enlarge this information gathering to include not only registrations, but also purchases and rentals of all vehicles, from motorcycles to minivans to semi’s.  Again, they’re not stopping anyone from buying and driving whatever they want; they’re just gathering data.

For question #3, they start with the current regime of banks reporting any transaction over $10,000.  It occurs to someone in the government that criminals know about this reporting, and are making multiple smaller transactions to avoid it, or are not using banks at all.  In an effort to broaden the amount of financial data they have for smuggling investigations, they require banks to report on all financial transactions, no matter the size.  Since a vast majority of businesses use computers to track transactions, the government sends letters with the force of law to the vendors of accounting software which require them to put in a reporting function, which tells the government about what products are being purchased, where, by whom, and whether or not they are being done using cash or some manner of electronic payment.  This extends not only to brick and mortar businesses, but also on-line businesses such as Amazon and Apple.

So now, in order to clamp down on smuggling, the government has begun tracking which vehicles are crossing state lines, who owns or uses which vehicles, and who is making purchases and how they are paying for them.  They take all this information and toss it into huge databases.  When they find that someone is suspected of being a smuggler, they mine that data to track his or her activities, and put in ‘strict’ controls to make sure no-one ever uses the data for nefarious reasons.

One wrinkle on this:  Let’s say that neither Customs, nor the Secret Service, nor even the FBI is doing this.  In order to leverage the capabilities of the NSA and save some money, the government gives the job to them.  The NSA gathers the data, keeps it, and retrieves it at the request of law enforcement.  So now we have an agency, which was set up and fenced off to gather intelligence about our foreign adversaries, being used to gather data and provide intelligence about our citizens.

Sound ridiculous?  I don’t think so.  Yes, there are millions of automobiles in this country, and a lot of them cross state lines every day.  And there are billions of financial transactions every day, from purchasing a soda at the stop-n-stap, to buying stock, to purchasing a home.  It would take a huge amount of storage and computing power to track all of that.  But you know, they could if they wanted to.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my little stroll down the path of conspiracy theories, or maybe you can call this speculative fiction.  But to be honest, it’s only a few degrees away from what recent revelations have indicated when it comes to the activities of our government and our security organs.  There are a massive number of telephone calls every day, and that number is probably dwarfed by the number of Internet transactions such as search, email, and just plain old web surfing going on.

We need to get a handle on this, and repaint the very bright and wide lines we do not wish our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to cross, no matter the motivation.  Yes, we need to monitor for heinous crimes such as terrorism and human trafficking, but the damage that overreaching domestic intelligence programs will, not may, cause to our society is worse than just about anything a terrorist can pull off.

Is the illusion of safety worth not only the erosion, but rather the full-scale spindling, folding, and mutilation of our freedoms?

*I know, mark your calendars.

**Let’s assume that people, goods, and cash only come across at official ports of entry for the sake of this discussion.