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Are Emergency Plans Meant Only for Nuclear War the Real Justification for Spying? To understand the scope and extent of government spying on all Americans – and the reasons for such spying – you have to understand what has happened to our Constitutional form of government since 9/11. State of Emergency The United States has been in a declared state of emergency from September 2001, to the present. Specifically, on September 11, 2001, the government declared a state of emergency. That declared state of emergency was formally put in writing on 9/14/2001: A national emergency exists by reason of the...

Views of Bush more positive than negative for first time since 2005 PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans' views of former president George W. Bush have improved, with 49% now viewing him favorably and 46% unfavorably. That is the first time since 2005 that opinions of him have been more positive than negative.Bush has maintained a fairly low profile in the four years since he left office. However, he returned to the public eye this year with the April opening of his presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S....

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and...

Timeline of NSA Domestic Spying All of the evidence found in this timeline can also be found in the Summary of Evidence we submitted to the court in Jewel v. NSA. It is intended to recall all the credible accounts and information of the NSA's domestic spying program found in the media, congressional testimony, books, and court actions. For a short description of the people involved in the spying you can look at our Profiles page, which includes many of the key characters from the NSA Domestic Spying program.

The National Security Agency pushed for the government to “rethink” the Fourth Amendment when it argued in a classified memo that it needed new authorities and capabilities for the information age. The 2001 memo, later declassified and posted online by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, makes a case to the incoming George W. Bush administration that the NSA needs new authorities and technology to adapt to the Internet era. In one key paragraph, NSA wrote that its new phase meant the U.S. must reevaluate its approach toward signals intelligence, or “SIGINT,” and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable...

The outrage over President Barack Obama’s authorization of a nearly limitless federal dive into Americans’ phone records obscures a hiding-in-plain-sight truth about the 44th president many of his supporters have overlooked for years: For all his campaign-trail talk of running the “most transparent administration” in U.S history, Obama never promised to reverse the 43rd president’s policies on domestic anti-terrorism surveillance — and he’s been good on his word. Obama’s effort to strike what he’s repeatedly called “a balance” between personal liberty and homeland security has exposed what amounts to a split political personality: Candidate Obama often spoke about personal freedom...

It is certainly schadenfreudelicious to see Al Gore and assorted Democratic tools going bonkers over news of President Obama’s radically expanded phone call data collection program — which he, ahem, inherited from the Bush administration and has apparently now widened far beyond anything Bush ever enacted or proposed.But unlike Gore and company, I am not going to engage in a full, NSA-bashing freakout. Some of us have not regressed completely to a 9/10 mentality. I will instead provide you with a sober reflection on why I supported the Bush NSA’s work and why Obama’s NSA program raises far more troubling...

Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic—terrorism—and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election. It made little difference.

In recent days, there's been a flurry of activity on the Longboat Key incident. Yeoman's work was performed last fall, by Shay Sullivan, of the Longboat Observer, and a lone web blogger, Daniel Hopsicker, has also pursued the story. At Mad Cow Productions, Hopsicker asks Atta and Al-Shehhi's presence on Longboat Key just days before the President's arrival raise a number of disturbing questions. The most pressing is also the most obvious. What were terrorists doing on Longboat Key? A recent FreeRepublic chat thread addressed this question. Here we review the evidence. Let's start with the work of Shay Sullivan:...

The MadCow Morning News     earlier stories    click the teach     on sale now!101 things  you'll never learn  on NBC    Home Delivery Available  The MadCow Morning News            Read a book  you're not supposed to visit the  'Barry & the boys' website              see a clip NOW! video clips from'Mohamed Atta  & the Venice Flying Circus!'                support the return of a free press  to America... at least   for a visit the  'barry' website  White sand and unobstructed sight lines by Daniel Hopsicker...

By now, most everyone knows President George W. Bush began that fateful day, Sept 11 on Longboat Key, but the FBI is now investigating whether terrorists also began that fateful day here on the island. At about 6 a.m. Sept. 11, Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan was at the front desk of the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort as Bush prepared for his morning jog. From that vantage point, Mooneyhan overheard a strange exchange between a Colony receptionist and security guard. A van occupied by men of Mid-Eastern descent had pulled up to the Colony stating they had a ...

Democrats love this stuff. It’s humor at its best. They can slam Bush and wounded US veterans at the same time. So funny.On his HBO show this week, Bill Maher called the George W. Bush Wounded Warrior Bike Ride nauseating and compared him to Ohio kidnapper and rapist Ariel Castro. NewsBusters reported: (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Transcript via NewsBusters: BILL MAHER: George Bush, over the Memorial Day weekend, held the Wounded Warrior 100K, which was a kind of a celebration for wounded warrior who is came back from Iraq and I guess they walked or ran or something on their prosthetic limbs. And...

As a new effort at comprehensive immigration reform inches its way forward in the Senate, dissent from many conservatives is revealing their true contempt for, and fear of, the possibility that demographic groups who look different from their base will accrue power. The questions are: Is providing a pathway to citizenship (or at least permanent residency) for the 11 million people in this country illegally an act of humanity and practicality? Or is it an electoral imperative to which opposition ultimately guarantees political suicide? The answer probably is “yes” to both, although many Republicans seem to think the opposite. President...

Former President George W. Bush questioned the political motives of lawmakers behind the immigration bill making its way through the U.S. Senate during an interview with the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward this week.Bush suggested that some in Congress pushing the legislation may be more concerned with winning votes than truly resolving the nation's immigration woes.Ward described the former President’s mindset as a “desire not to criticize the GOP” but offering a “warning about the party's mad dash for immigration reform.” “I think the atmosphere, unlike when I tried it, is better, maybe for the wrong reason,” Bush told Ward. “The...

"I think the atmosphere, unlike when I tried it, is better, maybe for the wrong reason. The right reason is it's important to reform a broken system. I'm not sure a right reason is that in so doing we win votes. I mean when you do the right thing, I think you win votes, as opposed to doing something that's the right thing to win votes. Maybe there's no difference there. It seems like there is to me though." —George W. Bush on immigration reform, according to the Huffington Post.

Classy, eh? Andrew Kaczynski discovered this lovely eulogy from C-SPAN’s archives in which the man who wants to run Virginia said that his 83-year-old father couldn’t handle seeing a Republican President: Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, once blamed his father’s death on President George W. Bush’s election in 2000.In a May 2001 interview with C-SPAN, titled the “Life and Career of Terry McAuliffe,” the former Democratic National Committee chairman says one of the “reasons” his father, Jack, died was “he could not go into a new year knowing that a Republican was actually moving into the...

George W. Bush in 2001 declared war on a tactic (terrorism), and empowered Big Brother to tap phones, launch drones and indefinitely imprison people without due process. Barack Obama in 2008 declared those Bush policies an overreach, and pledged to curb drone strikes, protect media freedoms, and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Instead, he escalated drone strikes and spied on the media. Gitmo is still open for its grim business. These are facts. And yet, they are distorted by extreme and narrow-minded partisans, supporters of both Bush and Obama. Conservatives contend that Bush single-handedly prevented a major terrorist strike...

Too many people who lean left would rather crack nasty jokes than actually be liberal and listen to other views. Why is it that liberals feel no qualms about being rude? Far too many people who are perfectly polite and courteous, otherwise, think nothing of insulting you for not sharing their political opinions. They look at us with disdain, thinking we're unenlightened conservatives and never hesitating to say so. As the lone conservative at the tennis courts, I cringe at the Sarah Palin jokes and the jabs at Mormons. When news came on 9/11 that planes had struck the World...

**SNIP** "You say it happened on his watch. It happened on the appointment of the head of the IRS, who was appointed by President Bush," Pelosi said. "His length of stay extended into President Obama’s stay, but I think that that points to the fact that, why is this a politicized issue, because we all are concerned about how the IRS does what it’s supposed to do, supports the law, but does not do it in a selective way."