President Lindsey Graham Would "Literally Use the Military" Against Congress

While the United States Congress currently enjoys approval ratings hovering somewhere between genital herpes and pedophilia it as after all a body mandated by the Constitution. The legislative branch is badly broken as is evident by the failure to put a check on the unitary executive (aka the king), the churning out of laws that destroy our cherished birthright civil liberties and the ongoing meddling in overseas conflicts with the main purpose of juicing arms sales. In a land of widespread institutional failure and corruption there are few worse than 'our elected representatives' when it comes to an illustration of just how far that we have fallen.

The U.S. Congress as it currently exists is the biggest gaggle of zanies, liars, cheats, perverts, con artists, charlatans, demagogues, egomaniacs, de facto lobbyists and outright traitors in the land. But as poisoned as the institution has become it is still firmly embodied within the U.S. Constitution. So whenever a prospective presidential candidate shoots off his mouth calling for sending the military after Congress it should turn a few heads.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who is Robin to John McCain’s Batman as well as one of the most strident, big government worshippers in Congress drew scorn over comments that seemed to call for a military coup. While speaking in front of the "politics and pies" forum in New Hampshire where he was promoting his long shot White House bid, the Palmetto State Princess let slip that as president he would unleash the troops against the legislature if they didn’t acquiesce to his whims.

As reported by the website Vox in a story entitled “Lindsey Graham: As president I would deploy the military against Congress”:

Republican senator and presidential maybe-hopeful Lindsey Graham stopped by the "politics and pies" forum in Concord, New Hampshire, today, where he announced that if he is elected president in 2016, his first act will be to deploy the military in Washington to force Congress to reverse cuts to the defense and intelligence budgets.

Yes, you heard that right. Here are Graham's exact words:

And here's the first thing I would do if I were president of the United States. I wouldn't let Congress leave town until we fix this. I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to. We're not leaving town until we restore these defense cuts. We are not leaving town until we restore the intel cuts.

Graham would use the military to force members of Congress to not just vote on the bill — but to pass it. Graham didn't say "until I get an up-or-down vote on restoring defense cuts." He said "until we restore these defense cuts."

In other words, Graham is proposing that his first act as president would be to use the military to force the legislative branch to pass his agenda.

Graham’s staff flew into damage control mode to spin it as a “joke” taken out of context by his political opponents but with this particular authority loving fascist one never knows. 

Graham is a media darling for his availability and the gift of providing great sound bites on any number of issues about war and the domestic police and surveillance state. He has gone so far as to babble about the possibility of a nuclear device being detonated in Charleston Harbor and has never met a foreign conflict that he would not send the sons and daughters of American mothers off to die for. He also is one of the biggest advocates of the ongoing drive to bestow near godlike powers on the federal government to monitor every phone call, email, text and purchase that Americans make with all to be archived in a massive NSA storage facility for some vague future use by a future president. He is also a full blown, balls out lunatic.

Graham’s call for sending the military after Congress was really less of a joke than another outbreak of his paranoid delusions coupled with an incurable case of diarrhea of the mouth. Thank God that this crank has about as much chance at becoming President of the United States as Kim Kardashian does.

Government Goons Steal Money From Elderly Woman at Airport

When you are living in a police state run by a corrupt and out of control government, even simple travel becomes an ordeal. One is constantly subjected to humiliation, harassment and even theft at the hands of government goons. The nation's airports have been transformed into something out of the Soviet bloc in the aftermath of 9/11 with travelers being forced to take their shoes off, surrender personal items and bow to the power of the men and women in uniform. This is not a practice that belongs in America but rather in a banana republic dictatorship which is exactly what we all live in now under the iron-fist of El Presidente Barack "Banana Republic" Obama.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the bureaucratic monster that has been given the power to harass and shake down law-abiding American citizens under the pretense of preventing "terrorism". The agency has a long and sordid history of abuse since it's inception. This includes the feeling up of children (which would have anyone else thrown into prison), stealing from travelers, pulling attractive women out of line to submit to private searches and most important conditioning Americans to submit. TSA is yet another unaccountable arm of the police state along with U.S. Customs and various and sundry other big government goon squads. The latest triumph  in the phony war on terror involves an elderly Florida woman whose offense was to travel carrying cash which put her at the mercy of our ridiculous asset forfeiture laws.

As reported by watchdog website Police State USA in a story entitled  "Government seizes elderly woman’s savings when she tries to fly with cash":

Federal agents seized thousands of dollars from a woman at an airport because she didn’t tell them how much she had.  Now the government seeks to keep the cash seizure, while having no evidence of wrongdoing or a criminal charge against the woman.

This was the situation for 78-year-old Victoria Faren of Clearwater, Florida.  According to reports, she had recently retired and sold her house and planned to move to live with her daughter in the Philippines.  The woman was then faced with the decision of how to move her money internationally.

She decided to take a dual-pronged approach.  Some of the money she sent via wire transfer, and the rest she decided to transport herself when she flew over.

On April 2, 2014, Ms. Faren tried to board Delta Air Lines Flight 275 to the Philippines.  At Detroit Metropolitan Airport, she was stopped at a federal checkpoint by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and scrutinized about what she, as an American citizen, was carrying out of the country.

The federal agents reacted when they discovered an alleged contradiction in the amount of money Ms. Faren declared verbally and in writing.  Agents then took the opportunity to rummage through every belonging she had — including the clothes on her body — to find additional cash.

It turns out that the septuagenarian had decided to stow her cash savings throughout her luggage and even hidden within her worn garments.

She believed it would be safer to keep it hidden.  Safe from thieves or government agents; whichever appeared first.  But her efforts failed.

After finding wads of cash in her wallets and carry-on bag, the agents went so far as to remove the woman’s brassiere and girdle to find the rest.  In total they seized $40,977 from the woman, which were proceeds from the recent sale of her $120,000 home.

While it is unwise to travel with large sums of cash it has never been illegal - until 9/11 and the complete surrender of the American star-spangled sheep to fear. This allowed for the out of control expansion of the federal government, including the creation of TSA and the fascist Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the militarizing of the police and the weaponizing of the state against the people.

Ms. Faren faces a nightmarish struggle in getting her money back - at least in its entirety without the government goons skimming their tribute off the top. It isn't like she can really protest either or the corrupt government will only find some other ridiculous trumped up charge to level against her. Even the mafia has a code of honor unlike the U.S. government which preys on little old ladies in airports under the ridiculous pretense that she may be involved in the funding of "terrorists".

These are the actions of a gangster state and unless people wake up and do so very, very quickly the trap will soon close on them completely.

How America Was Lost: A Chronicle of Our Decline

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”

 -George Orwell

I just picked up a copy of the new book by Paul Craig Roberts “How America Was Lost” and must say that it is an impressive chronicle of the decline of what was once at least theoretically a free country into a sucking black hole of fascism, corruption and the moral abrogation that has made it all possible. Dr. Roberts, a former assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan administration, associate Editor at the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal and a prolific columnist calls it as he sees it and it is not a pretty sight. In “How America Was Lost” a wide ranging selection of his columns spanning the years from 2008-2013, the author spares the criminal Washington establishment nothing in crusading against the moral rot of the warfare and police state that erupted out of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center to wage a bitter war of attrition against the US Constitution as well as traditional American values.

 I have long been a fan of Dr. Roberts having first read his work when as a principled conservative he dared to utter the heresy that the Bush administration and the larger Republican party were something of an abomination with much in common with traditional foreign totalitarian regimes. He as others who dared to blaspheme the gospel of the neoconservative Project For the New American Century were run out of the GOP as the ideological purity purge raged.  Those were dark days, prior to the advent of the modern internet and social networking as they exist today as the last refuge for those who dare to seek the truth and to question the agenda and actions of the criminals in high places, primarily Washington.

EXCERPTS

Will Americans wake up in time? I wish I could answer, “yes,” but I regret that Americans are an insouciant people. They are unaware. Americans are more concerned with sports events, sales, and which celebrities are sleeping together than they are with their liberty. Washington can create a police state, because there are insufficient citizens with the intelligence, education, and awareness to stop Washington.

(from Obama’s Expanding Kill List)

US Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, has called for Manning’s execution. According to US Rep. Rogers it is an act of treason to report an American war crime.In other words, to obey the law constitutes “treason to America.”

US Rep. Rogers said that America’s wars are being undermined by “a culture of disclosure” and that this “serious and growing problem” could only be stopped by the execution of Manning.

If Rep. Rogers is representative of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don’t need.

(from The Collapse of Western Morality)

Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.

Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for big government to initiate wars without a declaration of war or even Congress’ assent, and to murder with drones citizens of countries with which Washington is not at war. Republicans do not mind that federal “security” agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call, and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored.

But heaven forbid that big government should do anything for a poor person.

(from The Institutionalizaton of Tyranny)

The only shortcoming and this is by no means any sort of criticism is that the book really only covers the descent during the period of the reign of Barack Obama. This may sell the great work of Dr. Roberts short in the opinion of some in that he has not included the Bush years in which he was as honest and vigorous a critic of Obama’s war criminal predecessor as he is of the current occupant of the Oval Office. I would love to see a future volume published that includes the hundreds of fine pieces that he wrote during the period leading up to 2008. He does however have a website which has an archive of this work and I would strongly recommend checking it out. It can however be argued that the Obama regime has been far more damaging to the long-term prospects of America in that the current narcissist in chief has not only codified the crimes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their burgeoning list of accomplices in a myriad of high crimes but in many ways refined upon them.

Obama as we have learned thanks to the patriotic efforts of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden presided over the expansion of a metastasizing high-tech surveillance colossus that spies on millions of otherwise law abiding Americans and then stores the data that has been mined for some vaguely defined future use. This will surely be available for when one of Obama’s successors decides that it is time to truly up the ante and begin the pickups, inquisitions, detentions, show trials and perhaps even executions. He has also presided over the new drone warfare programs that have been used for the targeted killings of American citizens without due process.

The true measure of one’s credibility in these sad days of imperial overreach and ultimately collapse is consistency and Paul Craig Roberts has been as much so as they are when it comes to taking on the forces that have overseen the transformation of America into The Homeland.

Published by Clarity Press

http://www.claritypress.com/RobertsAnthology.html

9/11 Museum Gift Shop is a Gross Exploitation of Tragedy

Over three thousand innocent Americans were murdered and all that I got is this lousy T-shirt. While I jest with that line there is nothing even remotely funny about the gift shop at the National September 11 Memorial Museum. That the museum itself should be a national outrage and more shameful exploitation of the tragic events that took place on that horrific Tuesday morning on September 11, 2001 in that the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center is yet another point. The attacks have been used as justification for the implementation of unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining programs, turned the US into a meaner than a snake torture state, allowed for the gutting of the Constitution and given a corrupt political class and the oligarchy that it serves cover to strip mine the domestic economy for self enrichment. Then there are the wars which will never end as long as the enabling act that is the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution ( AUMF) that was rammed down the throats of a terrified America like the USAPATRIOT Act while the stench of rotting corpses still was strong in the morning Manhattan breeze exists. Yes indeed - now there is something to memorialize.

It was drilled in that it was the Day that Everything Changed and the "new normal" became the type of flag-wrapped fascism that Sinclair Lewis once warned of in his book "It Can't Happen Here". Americans were to shut up and be subservient to their corrupt government and the neoconservative world domination machine as put forth by The Project for the New American Century or PNAC and in the early days speaking out would have one smeared as a traitor or worse. The worship of 9/11 became our national religion for how else to justify the wars of aggression and the redistribution of wealth into the surveillance state Gomorrah that arose out of the ashes - death and spying were the new growth industries in the USA, USA, USA. The tenth anniversary of that day, which fell on a Sunday and with the assistance of the National Football League and state corporate media it was as former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury turned prolific writer Paul Craig Roberts put it "a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma". Now we have the September 11 Museum and it's disgusting gift shop. 

The museum charging 24 bucks for entry is shameful in its own right but the gift store takes it to a completely new level. It is gaudy, tasteless, insensitive, ghoulish and an insult of the highest order towards the victims and their families. The New York Post has written about the sheer crassness of the gift shop and when such a rag is outraged about anything in the real world you know that it is pretty damned bad. I excerpt the following from the article that is entitled “The 9/11 Museum’s Absurd Gift Shop”:

The museum at Ground Zero tells the dark story of the 9/11 terror attacks with spectacular artifacts and exhibits. It pays heart-wrenching tribute to the innocents and heroes killed that day.

It also has a gift shop.

The 9/11 museum’s cavernous boutique offers a vast array of souvenir goods. For example: FDNY, NYPD and Port Authority Police T-shirts ($22) and caps ($19.95); earrings molded from leaves and blossoms of downtown trees ($20 to $68); cop and firefighter charms by Pandora and other jewelers ($65); “United We Stand” blankets.

There are bracelets, bowls, buttons, mugs, mousepads, magnets, key chains, flags, pins, stuffed animals, toy firetrucks, cellphone cases, tote bags, books and DVDs.

You can pick up an assortment of oak leaf jewelry at the 9/11 museum gift shop.

Even FDNY vests for dogs come in all sizes.

AND

Among the museum shop’s specially designed items:

 A black and white “Darkness Hoodie” printed with an image of the Twin Towers. The pullover, like other “Darkness” items, bears the words “In Darkness We Shine Brightest.” Price: $39.

 Silk scarves printed with 1986 photos by Paula Barr, including a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline. Another depicts “lunchtime on the WTC Plaza.” They go for $95 each.

 “Survivor Tree” earrings, named after a pear tree that stood in the World Trade Center plaza and survived 9/11. Made of bronze and freshwater pearls, a pair costs $64. A leaf ornament molded from the swamp white oaks at the memorial is said to change from amber to dark brown “and sometimes pink around the time of the 9/11 anniversary.”

 Heart-shaped rocks inscribed with slogans such as “United in Hope” and “Honor.” One rock bears a quote by Virgil that is emblazoned on a massive blue-tiled wall in the museum: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” It costs $39.

The gift shop is actually not that far off the mark from something I heard on the liberal firebrand Mike Malloy Show a few years ago that I transcribed. It was an email read on air from a listener named “Grand Vizier Mark of Silicon Valley”:

 If for some reason, the proposed so-called Ground Zero mosque doesn’t get built, I suggest that the old Gap store which is where this would be built be turned into something that really celebrates or rather venerates this country’s true god which is the almighty dollar.

 My idea, turn it into a nine dollar and eleven cent store! A 9-11 store. Something that would by the way fit in nicely with all the low rent commercial establishments in the area like the head shops, the Burger King and other fast food joints, strip clubs etc, etc. Yes, think of all the 9-11 souvenirs one could get for nine dollars and eleven cents: mugs, flags, pennants, cds, dvds, photos, calendars, t-shirts, plastic World Trade Center models, piggy banks, snow globes, commemorative coins, Christmas ornaments, action figures…it is sooo American!

 And to commemorate America’s response to 9/11; Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld bobblehead dolls, model airplanes just like the ones used to carpet bomb Iraq, leaving 300,000 dead and 3 million homeless, bobbleheads of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, plastic U.S. soldiers and Afghan Taliban freedom fighters, create your own battlefield and live out your wildest fantasies...

THERE’S MY IDEA!

I’d make a killing, I would. And for just two million dollars, the amount my old church owes me I’ll let you have it.

Oh well, you know me, you learned free so give free. I’m willing to let anyone use my idea as long as they give me credit.

It was meant as a joke but the ongoing commoditization of EVERYTHING including the murder of over 3,000 Americans and the first responders who died or later suffered terribly - particularly from respiratory disease -in the aftermath that that day there is really nothing sacred.  One would think that the national religion of “9/11” would somehow be sacrosanct but who am I kidding here?

What's next - a September 11 theme park?