The Conscience of Abe’s Turn freedom of speech, defense, and life

I just got finished watching The U.S. vs. John Lennon, an inspiring and provocative film about John Lennon’s peace advocacy, and how the government attacked him for it. This documentary follows Lennon’s life after the Beatles, until his death in 1980, includes interviews with Yoko Ono and many others, and touches on freedom of speech, drug freedom, peace and military warfare, and the politics of power.

As I watched it, several themes impressed me. But nothing impressed me more than that so little has changed since then. In a very real sense, we are replaying, repeating, reliving history. This film makes real that the abuses and perversions of justice that we see today occurred decades ago, and in essentially the same form: public beatings of peaceful protesters, restriction of speech around high-profile political events, abuse of government power for personal and political gain, censorship, political appeals to “patriotism,” fear-mongering against immigrants and “aliens,” all in order to support direct government attacks on the First, Fourth, and Fifth amendments. Have we made that little progress?

Some quotes from the film:  read more »

Nine secret, Bush-era documents that the Obama administration released this week demonstrate the hubris of a powerful government and the danger posed by it.

Some of these documents are among the dozens of memos that the ACLU has been suing the Department of Justice to release. To echo Glenn Greenwald from last year: “Yet again, the ACLU has performed the function which Congress and the media are intended to perform but do not.”

One of the legal opinions, written in October 2001 by John Yoo, a lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel, one who needs a Conscience, argued that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to military activities inside the United States. That is, the federal government thought it could get away with illegal searches and seizures and spying on innocent U.S. citizens, all without a warrant, as long as it could make it look like part of a military operation.

Yoo also advised that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war,” without saying specifically how that might play out, adding that the fight against “terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”  read more »

Fortunately, this item is to be filed under the category of incompetence, and not under malice. Unfortunately, in the end, the result is the same either way. Under a new law, which just went into effect, boxes upon boxes full of classic children’s books have been and are being thrown in the dumpster, literally, because that’s now federal law. When you elect idiots to Congress— But I repeat myself.

Since 1985, it’s been illegal to manufacture children’s books using lead paint. Before then, it was common to use lead in some pigments used to color illustrations. But now, in Congress’s immutable wisdom, the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) makes it illegal to resell old children’s books from that time period.

Why is this stupid? Because even these old books pose no observable risk to children. Walter Olson explains on the City Journal website:  read more »

In case you missed it: Another instance of truth is so much more brutal than fiction, and another example of how the so-called corruption of the fictional Abe’s Turn cannot yet begin to approach reality.

In brief, 100 police put down a peaceful protest march by Iraq war veterans at Hofstra University during the McCain/Obama debate. The veterans were marching in protest of the war and asking questions they wanted the presidential candidates to answer. A police horse trampled Nick Morgan, Iraq war veteran, on his ribs and face, breaking his orbital in three places. He was then affirmatively denied medical treatment. Much more at the links below.

Now, there’s a petition on Nick Morgan’s behalf, denouncing the treatment these veterans suffered at the hands of the Abe’s Turn cops, and demanding charges against him be dropped and a public apology be issued.  read more »

This videographer, a native of Poland during Communism, where they didn’t have “free speech” like we do, documents an anti-police-state protest and the police misbehavior that successfully quashed it. And again, The Conscience of Abe’s Turn mirrors reality. (Or is it the other way around?) Watching this video, all I could think was, That’s something the Abe’s Turn police would do. That’s something Baedes actually did! (Not exactly, but yeah, just about. Achieved the same result anyhow. It’s in episode 2.)

The documentarian sums up the following short video: “I realized that in America, you can also be wrongfully arrested and beaten, or even killed, in violation of your civil rights… This kind of incidents are signs of the death of your freedom. And when American freedom dies, what do you think will happen with the rest of the world?” Here’s the video:  read more »

Everything becomes terribly muddled, such that you can’t tell where one issue ends and the other begins. Because as soon as you think you have right and wrong figured out, you turn around to discover you’ve backed yourself into another unjust, overreaching law written by power-drunk congressmen and supported by meddling constituent factions.

Here comes a post from KipEsquire, of the libertarian blog A Stitch in Haste, about what he calls “an illegal and un-Christian stunt being planned by the theocrats at the Alliance Defense Fund.” Quoting the Washington Post:

Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules… designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.

… to which Kip retorts:  read more »