Tag Archives: Tyranny

News

Department of Justice secretly obtained Associated Press phone records over two months

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Here’s the report from the famous news service, Associated Press.

Excerpt:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.

So, the government’s been wire tapping journalists? Whatever happened to freedom of the press?

Surprise! The leftists have been exposed as the real fascists! Oh wait, that’s just like every other time. To be for big government is to be a fascist. There is no such thing as a “fascism” on the right. Conservatives believe in strong families, parental authority, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, small government, an armed populace and free markets. Right-wing conservatism is founded on liberty, private property and the rule of law itself. Big government control is solely a phenomenon of the left. We’ve been dallying with big government for 5 years under this socialist. Why are we surprised that he uses government to spy on us? It’s the left wing thing to do.

News

IRS apologizes for flagging conservative groups for audits in 2012 election year

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From the Associated Press.

Excerpt:

 The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

“That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

[…]Many conservative groups complained during the election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.

The forms, which the groups made available at the time, sought information about group members’ political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.

It’s gangster-government all over again. A continuous stream of abuses of government power.

News

Ben Shapiro takes on CNN actor Piers Morgan on gun control and the second amendment

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Ben Shapiro takes on CNN leftist Piers Morgan: (H/T Wes)

The full transcript is here.

Excerpt:

Shapiro: I think the reason that it’s about left and right here is because fundamentally, the right believes that the basis for the Second amendment–and they believe in the Second Amendment–the basis for the Second Amendment is not really about self defense, and it’s not about hunting. It’s about resistance to government tyranny. That’s what the Founders said, and that’s what the right believes in this country.

Morgan: Which tyranny are you fearing, yourself?

Shapiro: I fear the possibility of a tyranny rising in the country in the next fifty to a hundred years. Let me tell you something, Piers. The fact that my grandparents and great grandparents in Europe didn’t fear that is why they’re now ashes in Europe. So this kind of leftist revisionist history where there’s never any fear of democracy going usurpatious or tyrannical, is just that. It’s fictitious.

The fascism that arose in Germany in the 1930s sprang from a political vision called “National Socialism”. They stood against free trade, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and private ownership of arms – just like the Democrat Party of today. Socialism means big government, and big government means smaller individuals and less freedom.

Piers Morgan and the UK ban on guns

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

Here is a paper by Dr. Malcolm that summarizes one of the key points of her book.

Excerpt:

Tracing the history of gun control in the United Kingdom since the late 19th century, this article details how the government has arrogated to itself a monopoly on the right to use force. The consequence has been a tremendous increase in violent crime, and harsh punishment for crime victims who dare to fight back. The article is based on the author’s most recent book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002). Joyce Malcom is professor of history at Bentley College, in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is also author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an AngloAmerican Right (Harvard University Press, 1994).

Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: “Britain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.” The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain’s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban.

And the result of the 1997 gun ban:

The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose—by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.

[…]According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.

I think that peer-reviewed studies – from Harvard University, no less – should be useful to those of us who believe in the right of self-defense for law-abiding people. You might think that CNN actors would be vetted to make sure that they are familiar with research papers and academic books before they open their mouths, but actually they are just ignorant celebrities. They know nothing whatsoever about the things they talk about.