I was clear from the beginning that I came to lend a Christian voice to the sift. I enjoyed videosift and had been using it for some time before I created an account. I registered an account specifically because of the number of anti-christian videos that I was noticing were hitting the top ten. I wanted to engage with the people here over the topic of Christianity because the sift was, and primarily still is, an echo chamber for the worldview of secular humanism. That's the way the sift likes it, and the sift is intolerant of any voice which challenges that viewpoint. Period, end of story.

There's nothing wrong with my coming to represent Christ, here. Have I utterly failed to do so? Yes, most definitely. However, it is up to me how I want to use this site. I have commented here almost exclusively on religious topics, either on my videos or someone elses it. Occasionally I will comment on a political video or something else, but usually only on religious topics. The point being is that, that is the way I have chosen to use this site. I don't run around and dictate to anyone else how they could or should use the sift, so why should I be singled out? I didn't cause any material harm to anyone, I wasn't off topic, I didn't flout the rules. I was on topic on the videos I commented on, and I brought a Christian viewpoint to the discussion. The sift, being inhabited primarily by atheists, agnostics and anti-theists, utterly rejects that viewpoint. It's not any different if I were to go to the comments section of any major website and say anything positive about Christianity. I would instantly get 2 to 3 comments mocking everything I said.

I stated in my post that I realized that bringing a Christian viewpoint to the sift would get me a lot of flak. I didn't always react well to that, and I acted like a jerk at times. I am sorry for that. I could have done more to build relationships here and I never put in the time. There is some truth to what you have said, that I brought the way I was treated on myself. But your rant is also a product of the simplistic and distorted lens that you view me through. I mean, you on one hand call my treatment here a persecution fantasy and on the other hand say I brought it upon myself. That's just intellectual dishonesty, pure and simply. The truth is, there was a concerted campaign to deny my participation on this site, and whatever you think the reason may be, it did happen.

As to the video, if this video was of a senior consultant from the Bush administration admitting that they systemically deceived the American people this would be #1 on the sift. You're deceiving yourself if you think that the reason this video is being suppressed is due to anything other than the ideological bent of the sift.

There is no statute of limitations in the offense of the First degree (premeditated) murder by Federal agents of Randy Weaver's wife and son in 1992. Justice has not been served yet.
I sent the following message to Idaho Governor Butch Otter via both is Facebook page and via a direct link to his state website. I'd like to challenge all of you to do the same. Just copy & paste everything below the line. His contact information is at the bottom.
---------------------------------------------------
Remembering the Real Story of Ruby Ridge Idaho - August 21 1992
From >> [url redacted]
Uncovering government corruption at Ruby Ridge
According to FBI Grand Jury Testimony, US Marshals were involved in the cover up, the media, and the story from the Weaver's perspective...

Today, you are considered an "extremist" by the ADL and SPLC if you think the actions taken here by the Federal Government were out of hand. For the first time in US history, the FBI was given permission from cabinet members of the George HW Bush administration to change their Rules of Engagement to, "can and should shoot to kill" effectively rendering the US Constitution useless. A young boy was shot in the back and killed by US Marshals, and FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi later shot and killed Vicky Weaver while she was unarmed and holding her 10 month old baby in her arms. This incident serves as an educational tool to all Americans on just how useless our coveted Constitution is to the Federal Government when you cross them. I do not endorse violence towards the Federal Government. This is simply the closest I could come to the real truth without media/Government disinformation.

You have to ask yourself, even in this age of information, why is it so hard to find the truth about Ruby Ridge?

See the following links for more information:
[url redacted]

The Preliminary Hearings of Weaver and Harris -
[url redacted]

New York Times Propaganda -
[url redacted]

DOJ Whitewashing and Final Report on FBI wrongdoing -[url redacted]

Idaho vs Randy Weaver
[url redacted]

No. 98-30149. - IDAHO v. HORIUCHI - US 9th Circuit United States US 9th Cir. IDAHO v. HORIUCHI United States Court of of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. IDAHO
[url redacted]

No. 98-30149. - IDAHO v. HORIUCHI - US 9th Circuit United States US 9th Cir. IDAHO v. HORIUCHI United States Court of Appeals,Ninth Circuit.IDAHO
[url redacted]

US 9th Circuit - Court Decisions - June 2001 5, 2001 No. 99-71081. IDAHO v. HORIUCHI June 5, 2001 No. 98 30163. SILVER SAGE PARTNERS LTD
[url redacted]

US 9th Circuit - Court Decisions - June 2000 No. 96-50297. IDAHO v.
HORIUCHI June 14, 2000
No. 98-70772. VAN GERWEN v. GUARANTEE MUTUAL LIFE COMPANY ERISA
[url redacted]

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE REPORT REGARDING INTERNAL INVESTIGATION OF SHOOTINGS AT RUBY RIDGE, IDAHO DURING ARREST OF RANDY WEAVER
[url redacted]

SPLC and Spokesman Review Propaganda 20 years later
[url redacted]

I have a friend who was a Deputy United States Marshall at that time. He wasn't involved with Ruby Ridge, but he knew 2 agents who were. He told me:

"I knew two of the guys in the woods that weaver's son engaged. It was a mess from the start. If the dog would not have smelled the surveillance team nothing would have happened that day. It all ended badly. Stupid ATF case was bad from the start. Weaver would have been acquitted if he would have just gone back to court. Travesty of bad decisions all around."

The fact remains that it wasn't Randy Weaver's fault he didn't make it to the court appearance. It was all due to an intended snafu on the part of the Feds. They set him up to murder him and his family with extreme prejudice!

At the Nuremberg trials: Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him". This principle could be paraphrased as follows: "It is not an acceptable excuse to say 'I was just following my superior's orders".

In my opinion, the officers involved should be charged with first degree murder, and those who assisted the operation should be charged and tried as accessories to first degree murder. Until this happens, we will never again be "One nation under God." This travesty screams for justice!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This video and this blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes only. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 106A-117 of the U.S. Copyright Law

If we are ever going to get anyone to open the case again and get these murderers charged and tried for their crimes against Americans, we need to raise public awareness of the facts involved. The best way to do it is to get as many people as possible to share the link below or copy & paste it and post it in as many places as possible. I would also suggest you copy and paste the link and send it to every state legislator and the current governor of Idaho.

[url redacted]

To send Idaho Governor Butch Otter a link to this story, click on the link below:
[url redacted]

Governor Otter's Facebook "Page"
[url redacted]

United States is the only country which voted against investigating war crimes in Gaza by UN.
http://4bitnews.com/uk/un-human-rights-votes-investigate-war-crimes-gaza-uk-backs-israel/

US criticizes Russia over supplying arms to Ukrainian rebels, but they themselves arm Israel to its teeth by giving them $3B a year in military aid.

the Bush Administration and the Israeli government agreed to a 10-year, $30 billion military aid package for the period from FY2009 to FY2018. During his March 2013 visit to Israel, President Obama pledged that the United States would continue to provide Israel with multi-year commitments of military aid

Let me quote Cornel West:

Brother Martin Luther King, Jr., what would you say about the new Jim Crow? What would you say about the prison-industrial complex? What would you say about the invisibility of so many of our prisoners, so many of our incarcerated -- especially when 62% of them are there for soft drugs and not one executive of a Wall Street bank gone to jail? Not one!

Martin doesn't like that.

Not one wiretapper. Not one torturer under the Bush administration -- at all.

@bcglorf

coming from the sifter who states,and i quote:
"Oh, and he thinks the Iraq "problem" was created by America in the last decade. America's role started with support for Saddam, and from there 99% of the "problem" with Iraq needs be laid at Saddams feet for the decades of brutal repression destruction of Iraqi society that he committed. All that damage had everything to do with how horrific and ugly Iraq is today."

i think maybe you should do a bit of research before you throw broad generalizations out there.
i.e: how the sift embraces something.what are we? borg?

so you choose this thread to continue your berating of people who happen to disagree with you.

so let me be clear.
all those examples in your incomplete list are proven facts.
F.A.C.T.S
there is NO concrete evidence assad's regime is responsible.
there is suspicion.
some information implicates.
but to use the 2003 bush administration jargon,there is no smoking gun that led to a mushroom cloud.

and here we are 10 years later.
6 million displaced.
over a half million dead.
a culture practically destroyed.
a population in tatters and government ineffectual.
all based on a LIE.

so those of us suggesting non-intervention or diplomacy are assholes?

look at what YOU are suggesting!
bomb bomb bomb

so let me ask YOU.
what do you think bombing syria will do?

*edit-and who the fuck is giving assad the "benefit of the doubt"? so because people are being cautious in a complicated issue all of sudden they are fans of a brutal dictator?
fucking seriously?

This is amazing. Harmon, the NSA apologist in the video above, expresses her disgust for being wiretapped under the Bush Administration in this video. Partisan politics. Around the five minute mark:

http://youtu.be/m_CUvZcv-Sw?t=4m51s

No telling. But it is worth noting that Qwest was the lone telecoms holdout under a similar program during the Bush administration. Result: all government contracts cancelled and CEO in jail for 'insider trading'. Not saying this is a direct result, but there are real consequences to not playing ball with the powerful.

@Yogi
well said my friend.

ya know.
i was talking with @VoodooV on another thread concerning this topic.
he was of the opinion that this is all about perspective and to look at the bigger picture.

now i actually agree with that, but i think the perspective is on how we approach this subject.

@Yogi and i are not coming from some alex jones 'new world order" premise but rather a historical one.
we do not trust our government because our government has proven over and over they do not deserve our trust.

and as @Yogi alluded to,the list of abuses of power by the US government is massive and extensive.

remember in 2006 when it become public that the telecoms had call system rerouters in data collection?those small rooms?
and remember how the bush administration push forward to give the telecoms retroactive immunity to avoid any civil suits?

my main point is that whenever a government gains a new power or authority they WILL use it.since 9/11 and the "war on terror" (which is just a war on ideology) our government has broadened its power and authority ten fold and it HAS USED that power.

this is not opinion.this is fact.

guess it all comes down to trust.
do you trust this government to obey the law?
i dont because they go out of their way to be creative little monkeys to circumvent the law,or redefine it to suit their purposes.

i know i am going off on a rant here,so let me end with this:
historically empires in their last stages have always become concentrated centers of power and certain criteria have always become evident.
1.the over-reach of empires always culminate with an extreme disparity between rich and poor.
2.they become incredibly militarized.
3.infrastructure and commerce begin to break down.
4.nationalism reaches fever pitch.(see:tea party)
5.those in power (the governing class) tend to become more corrupt and less idealistic and begin to pick the remnants of empire for their own enrichment.hastening the demise of empire.
6.the ruling class becomes extremely paranoid and begins to focus its attention on its own citizens.seeing enemies everywhere.
7.power seeks only to further its own power and it becomes a cycle of cannibalism.

by my statements here i am in no way disregarding or dismissing some of the great achievements that have been won by this country.but those milestones were ALWAYS because of the people and not ONE was ever implemented by a benevolent government.

so while i trust the people i,in no way,trust my government.
because they have proven they do not deserve my trust.

@VoodooV
i agree that the president is not a dictator.
hence the usage of "administration" and yes, many people tend to pin it on the presidency alone.

i appreciate your note of caution.i wish i was as optimistic.
the obama administration has expanded the executive powers the bush administration started.the difference is that the obama administration has made it legal.

which i find even more distressing.

but not surprising.
governments lie

"Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A leaked top-secret order has revealed the Obama administration is conducting a massive domestic surveillance program by collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon Business customers. Last night The Guardian newspaper published a classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing Verizon’s Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency electronic data, including all calling records on a, quote, "ongoing, daily basis." The order covers each phone number dialed by all customers along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the content of the communications. The order expressly compels Verizon to turn over records for both international and domestic records. It also forbids Verizon from disclosing the existence of the court order. It is unclear if other phone companies were ordered to hand over similar information.

AMY GOODMAN: According to legal analysts, the Obama administration relied on a controversial provision in the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 215, that authorizes the government to seek secret court orders for the production of, quote, "any tangible thing relevant to a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation." The disclosure comes just weeks after news broke that the Obama administration had been spying on journalists from the Associated Press and James Rosen, a reporter from Fox News.

We’re now joined by two former employees of the National Security Agency, Thomas Drake and William Binney. In 2010, the Obama administration charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act after he was accused of leaking classified information to the press about waste and mismanagement at the agency. The charges were later dropped. William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the NSA. He resigned shortly after the September 11th attacks over his concern over the increasing surveillance of Americans. We’re also joined in studio here by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

First, for your legal opinion, Shayana, can you talk about the significance of what has just been revealed?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. So I think, you know, we have had stories, including one in USA Today in May 2006, that have said that the government is collecting basically all the phone records from a number of large telephone companies. What’s significant about yesterday’s disclosure is that it’s the first time that we’ve seen the order, to really appreciate the sort of staggeringly broad scope of what one of the judges on this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved of, and the first time that we can now confirm that this was under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which, you know, has been dubbed the libraries provision, because people were mostly worried about the idea that the government would use it to get library records. Now we know that they’re using it to get phone records. And just to see the immense scope of this warrant order, you know, when most warrants are very narrow, is really shocking as a lawyer.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, some might argue that the Obama administration at least went to the FISA court to get approval for this, unlike the Bush administration in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. Well, we don’t know if the Bush administration was, you know, getting these same orders and if this is just a continuation, a renewal order. It lasted for only—it’s supposed to last for only three months, but they may have been getting one every three months since 2006 or even earlier. You know, when Congress reapproved this authority in 2011, you know, one of the things Congress thought was, well, at least they’ll have to present these things to a judge and get some judicial review, and Congress will get some reporting of the total number of orders. But when one order covers every single phone record for a massive phone company like Verizon, the reporting that gets to Congress is going to be very hollow. And then, similarly, you know, when the judges on the FISA court are handpicked by the chief justice, and the government can go to a judge, as they did here, in North Florida, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, who’s 73 years old and is known as a draconian kind of hanging judge in his sentencing, and get some order that’s this broad, I think both the judicial review and the congressional oversight checks are very weak.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, this is just Verizon, because that’s what Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian got a hold of. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other orders for the other telephone companies, right?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Like BellSouth, like AT&T, etc.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: As there have been in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Yeah, those were—those were companies mentioned in that USA Today story in 2006. Nothing about the breadth of this order indicates that it’s tied to any particular national security investigation, as the statute says it has to be. So, some commentators yesterday said, "Well, this order came out on—you know, it’s dated 10 days after the Boston attacks." But it’s forward-looking. It goes forward for three months. Why would anyone need to get every record from Verizon Business in order to investigate the Boston bombings after they happened?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, William Binney, a decades-long veteran of the NSA, your reaction when you heard about this news?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, this was just the FBI going after data. That was their request. And they’re doing that because they—if they want to try to get it—they have to have it approved by a court in order to get it as evidence into a courtroom. But NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it’s been all the companies, not just one. And I basically looked at that and said, well, if Verizon got one, so did everybody else, which means that, you know, they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information on all U.S. citizens. That’s one of the main reasons they couldn’t tell Senator Wyden, with his request of how many U.S. citizens are in the NSA databases. There’s just—in my estimate, it was—if you collapse it down to all uniques, it’s a little over 280 million U.S. citizens are in there, each in there several hundred to several thousand times.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, let’s go to Senator Wyden. A secret court order to obtain the Verizon phone records was sought by the FBI under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was expanded by the PATRIOT Act. In 2011, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden warned about how the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

SEN. RON WYDEN: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they are going to be stunned, and they are going to be angry. And they’re going asked senators, "Did you know what this law actually permits? Why didn’t you know before you voted on it?" The fact is, anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. It’s almost as if there were two PATRIOT Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters. Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Ron Wyden. He and Senator Udall have been raising concerns because they sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee but cannot speak out openly exactly about what they know. William Binney, you left the agency after September 2001, deeply concerned—this is after you’d been there for 40 years—about the amount of surveillance of U.S. citizens. In the end, your house was raided. You were in the shower. You’re a diabetic amputee. The authorities had a gun at your head. Which agency had the gun at your head, by the way?

WILLIAM BINNEY: That was the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: You were not charged, though you were terrorized. Can you link that to what we’re seeing today?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it’s directly linked, because it has to do with all of the surveillance of the U.S. citizens that’s been going on since 9/11. I mean, that’s—they were getting—from just one company alone, that I knew of, they were getting over 300 million call records a day on U.S. citizens. So, I mean, and when you add the rest of the companies in, my estimate was that there were probably three billion phone records collected every day on U.S. citizens. So, over time, that’s a little over 12 trillion in their databases since 9/11. And that’s just phones; that doesn’t count the emails. And they’re avoiding talking about emails there, because that’s also collecting content of what people are saying. And that’s in the databases that NSA has and that the FBI taps into. It also tells you how closely they’re related. When the FBI asks for data and the court approves it, the data is sent to NSA, because they’ve got all the algorithms to do the diagnostics and community reconstructions and things like that, so that the FBI can—makes it easier for the FBI to interpret what’s in there.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’re also joined by Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted by the Obama administration after he blew the whistle on mismanagement and waste and constitutional violations at the NSA. Thomas Drake, your reaction to this latest revelation?

THOMAS DRAKE: My reaction? Where has the mainstream media been? This is routine. These are routine orders. This is nothing new. What’s new is we’re actually seeing an actual order. And people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records of—from any company that exists in the United States.

I think what people are now realizing is that this isn’t just a terrorist issue. This is simply the ability of the government in secret, on a vast scale, to collect any and all phone call records, including domestic to domestic, local, as well as location information. We might—there’s no need now to call this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Let’s just call it the surveillance court. It’s no longer about foreign intelligence. It’s simply about harvesting millions and millions and millions of phone call records and beyond. And this is only just Verizon. As large as Verizon is, with upwards of 100 million subscribers, what about all the other telecoms? What about all the other Internet service providers? It’s become institutionalized in this country, in the greatest of secrecy, for the government to classify, conceal not only the facts of the surveillance, but also the secret laws that are supporting surveillance.

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Drake, what can they do with this information, what’s called metadata? I mean, they don’t have the content of the conversation, supposedly—or maybe we just don’t see that, that’s under another request, because, remember, we are just seeing this one, for people who are listening and watching right now, this one request that is specifically to—and I also want to ask you: It’s Verizon Business Services; does that have any significance? But what does it mean to have the length of time and not the names of, but where the call originates and where it is going, the phone numbers back and forth?

THOMAS DRAKE: You get incredible amounts of information about subscribers. It’s basically the ability to forward-profile, as well as look backwards, all activities associated with those phone numbers, and not only just the phone numbers and who you called and who called you, but also the community of interests beyond that, who they were calling. I mean, we’re talking about a phenomenal set of records that is continually being added to, aggregated, year after year and year, on what have now become routine orders. Now, you add the location information, that’s a tracking mechanism, monitoring tracking of all phone calls that are being made by individuals. I mean, this is an extraordinary breach. I’ve said this for years. Our representing attorney, Jesselyn Radack from the Government Accountability Project, we’ve been saying this for years and no—from the wilderness. We’ve had—you’ve been on—you know, you’ve had us on your show in the past, but it’s like, hey, everybody kind of went to sleep, you know, while the government is harvesting all these records on a routine basis.

You’ve got to remember, none of this is probable cause. This is simply the ability to collect. And as I was told shortly after 9/11, "You don’t understand, Mr. Drake. We just want the data." And so, the secret surveillance regime really has a hoarding complex, and they can’t get enough of it. And so, here we’re faced with the reality that a government in secret, in abject violation of the Fourth Amendment, under the cover of enabling act legislation for the past 12 years, is routinely analyzing what is supposed to be private information. But, hey, it doesn’t matter anymore, right? Because we can get to it. We have secret agreements with the telecoms and Internet service providers and beyond. And we can do with the data anything we want.

So, you know, I sit here—I sit here as an American, as I did shortly after 9/11, and it’s all déjà vu for me. And then I was targeted—it’s important to note, I—not just for massive fraud, waste and abuse; I was specifically targeted as the source for The New York Times article that came out in December of 2005. They actually thought that I was the secret source regarding the secret surveillance program. Ultimately, I was charged under the Espionage Act. So that should tell you something. Sends an extraordinarily chilling message. It is probably the deepest, darkest secret of both administrations, greatly expanded under the Obama administration. It’s now routine practice.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Shayana, I’d like to ask you, specifically that issue of the FISA court also authorizing domestic surveillance. I mean, is there—even with the little laws that we have left, is there any chance for that to be challenged, that the FISA court is now also authorizing domestic records being surveiled?

AMY GOODMAN: FISA being Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I mean, you know, two things about that. First, the statute says that there have to be reasonable grounds to think that this information is relevant to an investigation of either foreign terrorist activity or something to do with a foreign power. So, you know, obviously, this perhaps very compliant judge approved this order, but it doesn’t seem like this is what Congress intended these orders would look like. Seems like, on the statute, that Congress intended they would be somewhat narrower than this, right?

But there’s a larger question, which is that, for years, the Supreme Court, since 1979, has said, "We don’t have the same level of protection over, you know, the calling records—the numbers that we dial and how long those calls are and when they happen—as we do over the contents of a phone call, where the government needs a warrant." So everyone assumes the government needs a warrant to get at your phone records and maybe at your emails, but it’s not true. They just basically need a subpoena under existing doctrine. And so, the government uses these kind of subpoenas to get your email records, your web surfing records, you know, cloud—documents in cloud storage, banking records, credit records. For all these things, they can get these extraordinarily broad subpoenas that don’t even need to go through a court.

AMY GOODMAN: Shayana, talk about the significance of President Obama nominating James Comey to be the head of the FBI—

SHAYANA KADIDAL: One of the—

AMY GOODMAN: —and who he was.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. One of the grand ironies is that Obama has nominated a Republican who served in the Bush administration for a long time, a guy with a reputation as being kind of personally incorruptable. I think, in part, he nominated him to be the head of the FBI, the person who would, you know, be responsible for seeking and renewing these kind of orders in the future, for the next 10 years—he named Comey, a Republican, because he wanted to, I think, distract from the phone record scandal, the fact that Holder’s Justice Department has gone after the phone records of the Associated Press and of Fox News reporter James Rosen, right?

And you asked, what can you tell from these numbers? Well, if you see the reporter called, you know, five or six of his favorite sources and then wrote a particular report that divulged some embarrassing government secret, that’s—you know, that’s just as good as hearing what the reporter was saying over the phone line. And so, we had this huge, you know, scandal over the fact that the government went after the phone records of AP, when now we know they’re going after everyone’s phone records, you know. And I think one of the grand ironies is that, you know, he named Comey because he had this reputation as being kind of a stand-up guy, who stood up to Bush in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in 2004 and famously said, "We have to cut back on what the NSA is doing." But what the NSA was doing was probably much broader than what The New York Times finally divulged in that story in December ’05.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, will Glenn Greenwald now be investigated, of The Guardian, who got the copy of this, so that they can find his leak, not to mention possibly prosecute him?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Oh, I think absolutely there will be some sort of effort to go after him punitively. The government rarely tries to prosecute people who are recognized as journalists. And so, Julian Assange maybe is someone they try to portray as not a journalist. Glenn Greenwald, I think, would be harder to do. But there are ways of going after them punitively that don’t involve prosecution, like going after their phone records so their sources dry up.

AMY GOODMAN: I saw an astounding comment by Pete Williams, who used to be the Pentagon spokesperson, who’s now with NBC, this morning, talking—he had talked with Attorney General Eric Holder, who had said, when he goes after the reporters—you know, the AP reporters, the Fox reporter—they’re not so much going after them; not to worry, they’re going after the whistleblowers. They’re trying to get, through them, the people. What about that, that separation of these two?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I’ll give you an example from the AP. They had a reporter named, I believe, John Solomon. In 2000, he reported a story about the botched investigation into Robert Torricelli. The FBI didn’t like the fact that they had written this—he had written this story about how they dropped the ball on that, so they went after his phone records. And three years later, he talked to some of his sources who had not talked to him since then, and they said, "We’re not going to talk to you, because we know they’re getting your phone records."

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us. Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights. William Binney and Thomas Drake both worked for the National Security Agency for years, and both ultimately resigned. Thomas Drake was prosecuted. They were trying to get him under the Espionage Act. All of those charges were dropped. William Binney held at gunpoint by the FBI in his shower, never prosecuted. Both had expressed deep concern about the surveillance of American citizens by the U.S. government. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for our hours of interviews with them, as well." - Democracy Now!

HA! miss you ya goober.

i dont subscribe to everything this video pontificates on.i thought it was an interesting point of view from a christian perspective.

ya know what i find even MORE interesting?
that during the bush years all my liberal/progressive friends needed medication for the rage and offense they took to the :illegal wars,wiretapping,torture etc etc.

even here on the sift the politics channel was busting with video after video of the malfeasance and outright destruction of civil liberties perpetrated by the bush administration.

and rightly so i might add.

go look at the politics channel now.
notice anything?
its dead jim.
empty and devoid of any real substantive discussion concerning obama.(or anything for that matter,its a ghost town)
who..lets be honest..is on his way to surpassing bush jr on:destruction of civil liberties,assasinations,expansion of more illegal wars.

now why is that?
when bush did it everybodies panties got knotted up but when obama not only expands executive powers but starts killing amreican citizens abroad.no trial.no jury..executes them.
and not a peep.
not even a slight foot note.(i may have just made that up but i havent seen much,and thats the truth)

so here we have a former constitutional lawyer.smart and photogenic pushing through some of the most heinous legislation and my liberal friends are silent.

so lets be clear here.obama is a product.
just like the pilsbury dough boy or the MGM lion.
and he has OWNERS.
they tell him what to do and what is in THEIR best interest.

our government has been purchased and is now a owned subsidiary of the multi-nationals and the financial industry.
and obama is the face of that subsidiary.

do i think a "new world order" is the goal?
well..naw....i think it is a select few who wish to perpetuate their own dominance and the rest of the world be damned.
they are only interested in governments in order to get what they want and what they want is to commodify everything.
they want to own it and sell it as they see fit.
water,air,food,energy...the whole kaboodle.

so if they have to purchase a government to make stealing legal or pay off a commitee in order to be able to sell poison as medicine or make GMO foods secret and non-litigious.
thats what they will do.

some right wing folks call it oligarchy.
i find that to be inaccurate.

the correct term is plutocracy.

so if you think the government under obama has become some benevolent uncle who just wishes to pass out smiles and hugs.
well....i dont think you have been paying attention.

obama is smarter and his administration far more clever but this government has EXPANDED on what bush did years ago.

so where the FUCK are my liberal friends????
has our society become so polemic that we root for "our" team like slacked jawed zombies?
look at how those teams are voting!
they are practically indistinguishable from each other!
republican..democrat..pffft..same fucking cookie.

are we so enamored with the IDEA of american politics that we cant see the reality?
its broken kids.
busted and banged up and rotten to its core.

i just dont get the silence..i really dont...
because i think thats what bothers me the most.
the silence.

/rant off

It's ironic to think that the Bush administration's policy of abducting terrorism suspects and keeping them forever without trial is actually far more humane than the Obama administration's policy of exploding suspected terrorists without trial, along with everyone else nearby. The ends do not justify the means.

>> ^shagen454:

Fuck that, dont vote and lets just let the republicans do what they want ; turn America into a fascist military state where we serve the rich as slaves and fight unjust wars that causes wide spread devastation. Lets get it over with so we can start the socialist revolution for real truth and justice in the world.


This would fuck up not only America, but the whole world, as it already did the last time it was tried (viz: Bush administration). And the US is already in full-on 3rd world mode, just look at all the dirty tactics the Rethugs are pulling to keep people from voting democrat. Not to mention the ridiculous disconnect between social spending (education, health, etc.) and military spending, even under Obama; it's like the US is trying to catch up with North Korea or something. At least if Obama gets a second term he'll have no excuse to not get things moving in the right direction.

http://videosift.com/video/Jesse-Ventura-attacks-Bush-administrations-War-on-Terror

My point is in the end, it doesn't matter what the gov't spends borrowed money on in the slightest. I get what you're saying, but the wars, corporate subsidies, etc. happened regardless if you borrow money specifically for that, or don't borrow money and raid the Social Security trust fund. Assuming said wars and corp subsidies happen regardless, which is better, borrow sooner by not raiding the Social Security trust fund which is heading for insolvency anyway and pay more interest, or borrow later by raiding the Social Security trust fund. It doesn't matter once you're headed for a path of unsustainability. Even if Social Security lasted another several decades, it was headed for insolvency. And once the federal government headed for unsustainability, does it matter which folds first - social security or the rest of essential gov't programs? No.

If you raid the trust fund as a tactical mechanism in conjunction with other policies to make the federal gov't and Social Security solvent, it's a smart move because you'll save some interest by not borrowing as much money, or paying down already existent higher interest debt. That's sorta my point - the gov't reversed course under the Bush administration and didn't do that. That's the real problem here, not raiding the Social Security trust fund. Even making some allowances for needing a deficit during the recession, and revamping for intelligence and military apparatus to fight the war on terror, it didn't stop there with keeping the Bush tax cuts, the prescription drug benefit, and opening an unnecessary war with Iraq. But we can agree to disagree.

But honestly, the question about if it was right to raid the Social Security trust fund is moot in the context of this discussion because even without borrowing against the fund, the Clinton administration still ran surpluses during his second term. Republicans, desperate to prove Democrats are fiscally irresponsible, try like heck to say he didn't, but he did.

"But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while...

Other readers have noted a USA Today story stating that, under an alternative type of accounting, the final four years of the Clinton administration taken together would have shown a deficit. This is based on an annual document called the "Financial Report of the U.S. Government," which reports what the governments books would look like if kept on an accrual basis like those of most corporations, rather than the cash basis that the government has always used. The principal difference is that under accrual accounting the government would book immediately the costs of promises made to pay future benefits to government workers and Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. But even under accrual accounting, the annual reports showed surpluses of $69.2 billion in fiscal 1998, $76.9 billion in fiscal 1999, and $46 billion for fiscal year 2000. So even if the government had been using that form of accounting the deficit would have been erased for those three years."

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/

The Clinton Administration ran a surplus, period.

>> ^bmacs27:

@heropsycho
I couldn't disagree more. First of all, interest was still being paid on that same debt. The mechanism of using the social security surplus to finance the general fund was to purchase interest bearing treasury securities with the payroll tax. Now, people like you talk about those securities as though they aren't bonds at all and that interest isn't owed on that debt. That's the problem. The working class bought into a higher tax rate under the auspices that it was a retirement savings plan. Now public perception is robbing them of their interest because of Clinton's biff. If the payroll tax contributes interest-free to costly wars, corporatist subsidies, and theocratic pandering, then fold it into the progressive income tax and we can have a real conversation about paying our fair share.
You can probably smell that I'm a progressive, and thus would be inclined to support the Clintons. I just think this was one move where Reagan's scheming scored one for his team.