Five years after Obama was elected you still hear the left wail and cry over George W. Bush's "trampling" of American's rights.
Interesting isn't it? One could argue that immediately after the worst attack on American soil the surveillance of anyone, including Americans, OUTSIDE of our borders was the prudent option to fight the enemy. In fact The Patriot Act had a sunset date so that Americans could debate in the future whether it was needed anymore.
Now we have a President who says its perfectly legal to assassinate Americans on American soil with drones. Bu..bu..but, supporters sputter, it will only be an American terrorist. What can go wrong?
...Micah Zenko of Foreign Policy notes the many ways the Obama Administration has misled Congress about its targeted-killing program, and calls for a comprehensive official history so that we're no longer at the mercy of dishonest national-security officials. If you haven't heard, they've been talking as if American drone strikes are mostly killing members of al-Qaeda who pose an imminent threat to the United States. In fact, a minority of the people they've killed belong to al-Qaeda far fewer than that pose an imminent threat to America, and many victims of U.S. drone strikes are killed without the CIA knowing their identity. What grabbed me about Zenko's piece is when he puts the drone war in perspective: "For all of the historical accounts and professed concerns over the CIA's detention and extraordinary rendition program, which involved '136 known victims,' it is time for an accounting of the CIA's drone strikes, which have killed between 3,000 and 4,000 people in Pakistan and Yemen," he writes.I for one support the drone program overseas. But recall the wails and cries from the left, the endless front page news stories, the endless amount of talking heads on news programs that were SO appalled over the rendition program that actually tried to get intelligence from those associated with the enemy. Now that their man is in office, no longer trying to get intelligence instead just killing them, everything is a-ok. Of course some innocent civilians get killed but that's ok nowadays also.
Let that sink in.
If you objected to CIA detention and rendition in the Bush era, as I did, know that you'd have to double or triple its victims to equal the number of innocents estimated to have been killed in U.S. drone strikes. Compare known victims of CIA rendition to the total number of non-al-Qaeda killed in drone strikes and the difference is significantly bigger. And don't forget the noncombatants affected by the presence of drones. Just as in the Bush Administration, the full magnitude of Obama-era transgressions are sinking in slowly, and won't penetrate the consciousness of most Americans until the end of his second term, if it even happens that rapidly.
No cries...no wails. No front page news stories. No newscasters appalled.
How about the fact that we have a Democrat controlled government that is pursuing a federal database of everyone's health records.
The [Toomey-Manchin] proposal will allow a doctor to add a patient to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) without ever telling the patient he or she has been added. ...There would be no due process requirement. Not all doctors will be able to do it with the same ease, but many will. Knowing a doctor could add him to a federal database as mentally ill without his knowledge could potentially dissuade a patient from going to the doctor in the first place to get help.But wait! The left says the bill, released last night, with amendments like Feinstein's "assault weapons" ban already being attached to it, won't create any federal database.
Worse, if the doctor does so and makes a mistake, the patient would have to actively work through the system to get himself removed — guilty before being proven innocent. In some states, should a doctor flag you as having mental illness without your knowledge, you may very well see the state come collect your previously purchased guns.
Activist mental health providers will probably be overly aggressive in adding people to the list. Give it five years in liberal areas and people who believe in the physical resurrection of Christ will probably get automatic entry onto the list.
Yeah:
First, the legislation says that nothing in the legislation shall be construed to allow establishment of a federal firearms registry. In addition, it says that the Attorney General may not consolidate or centralize records of firearms acquisition and disposition maintained by licensed importers, manufacturers, and dealers, and by buyers and sellers at gun shows (and makes it a crime for him to do so). But then, the STM bill takes those protections away by using the all-powerful word “notwithstanding”—”notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Attorney General may implement this subsection with regulations.”(excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
