Breaking News: The New York Times Denounces Obama

The New York Times editorial board today denounced the Obama administration for its massive and unprecedented  NSA-run domestic datamining operation.  Some notable highlights:

"Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers:

"Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights. Those reassurances have never been persuasive ...especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

"The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it...."

"...Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

"This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy."

Of course, that power shift and repudiation is precisely the point of such operations:

We have in the White House the most anti-individualist and anti-Constitutional president (a man intellectually weaned in his youth by anti-West totalitarianists) since Woodrow Wilson (a would-be dictator who viewed the Constitution as "outdated"), albeit without the latter's secret army of thugs serving his "progressive" whims. Yet.

GOT FASCISM? Verizon, Obama, and the National Security Agency

"Far from providing the audacity of Hope, the Obama regime has been audacious in its contempt for legality and standards of civilisation. Fascism is not too strong an epithet." --British reader commenting on the Manchester (UK) Guardian's breaking story:

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily

Why is it that foreign news outlets –including the liberal-to-leftist Manchester Guardian– are doing the job our own mainstream media here in the USA ought to be about; namely, investigating and exposing questionable activities within the Obama administration?

When will the American media finally wake up and scrutinize the White House's current resident with even 10% of the energy and determination they showed toward the previous one?

Had Bush administration-run agencies been found
(1) killing American terror suspects with drones and without juries;
(2) covering up the Benghazi fiasco;
(3) running the Fast and Furious gun running ops;
(4) misusing tax law to audit and intimidate their political opponents;
(5) snooping into the work and lives of scores of reporters and their families; and, now,
(6) misusing the Patriot Act and top secret (!) court orders to indiscriminately gather all the phone records and internet data of private American citizens,
both W. and a good chunk of his cabinet would've been residing in a Federal penitentiary to this very day.

And rightly so.

Apparently, the current regime does not grasp the concept of universal inalienable rights recognized and encoded by our Constitution.

They seem to think the Founders established situational "rights" open to watering down by a quasi-police state.

The top secret court order itself can be read in its entirety HERE.

With Voters Like This, Who Needs Nincumpoops?

It seems some outspoken politico folk don't understand the difference between nonprofit charities and nonprofit advocacy groups.
 
Take for example "progressive" defenders of the IRS' recent abuse of its power against 501(c)4 advocacy (e.g. educational, civic, or "social welfare promotion") groups critical of the Obama regime. They seem confused about the somewhat distinct ways Federal tax law is supposed to apply to each, and even how the Constitution is supposed to protect them from the Feds.

Or perhaps they just don’t care.

Consider, for example, this Facebook meme posted by "Too Informed to Vote Republican:"

Of course, by "attack...." this person really means "criticize or disagree with the views of some Muslims, etc."

Such advocacy groups, Too Informed by Half apparently believes, should be refused the same legal rights all 501(c)4 advocacy groups (MoveOn.org, the NAACP, and NARAL, for example) are entitled to under current Federal tax law, up to and including advocacy groups speaking out or educating the public in favor of balanced budgets, tax reform, and –yes-- even abolishing the IRS (not exactly an "institution" established by the Founders during the Constitutional Convention).

Moreover, contra the claims of ignorami in the Looney Left and the Low Information Lamestream Media, a 501(c)4 nonprofit is by its very nature either an advocacy or educational group (often both), not a social services organization or charity of the 501(c)3 variety (for example, a church, synagogue, free clinic, homeless shelter, or private emergency relief agency). 

By the IRS' own rules and guidelines, and as established in the United States Code and defined by Federal courts, conservative advocacy groups are just as entitled to tax exempt status as MoveOn.org and hundreds of other "progressive" advocacy groups whose equally outspoken political opinion-making against previous administrations didn't seem to negate their tax exempt status.

Therefore, no one at the IRS had any business “investigating” or auditing any such groups without clear evidence of illegal activity --such as funding candidates--  much less harassing or stonewalling them to hampering or punish the exercise of their Constitutional rights, often at the "suggestion" of liberal politicians and "progressive" watchdog groups (according to the IRS Inspector General's report last week).

More information on  501(c)3 and (c)4 nonprofits and how the IRS is required to treat them can be found at the FindLaw Free Enterprise Blog  and at The Alliance for Justice