Tag Archives: Charles Krauthammer

Send In The Drones: Obama Spies On America

Posted on by
2

Via Investors.com

 

Privacy: News the EPA is conducting surveillance on farmers goes against our grain. Freedom means freedom of movement and the presumption of innocence. How can we have it if every move is monitored by government?

Nebraska’s congressional delegation sent a justifiably angry letter  to Administrator Lisa Jackson last week  complaining that her Environmental Protection Agency had exceeded its legislative and constitutional authority by conducting drone surveillance flights over Nebraska and Iowa farms looking for violations of the Clean Water Act.

“They are just way on the outer limits of any authority they’ve been granted,” said Nebraska GOP Sen. Mike Johanns, an opinion the bureaucrats rejected Friday in responding to the letter. The EPA argues that the courts, including the Supreme Court, have already authorized aerial surveillance, such as taking aerial photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility.

“Farmers and ranchers in Nebraska pride themselves in the stewardship of our state’s natural resources,” says the letter signed by Republican Reps. Adrian Smith, Jeff Fortenberry and Lee Terry, as well as Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson and Johanns.

“As you might imagine, this practice has resulted in privacy concerns among our constituents and raises several questions.”

Smith, co-chairman of the Modern Agriculture Caucus and the Congressional Rural Caucus, said Tuesday the operations in many cases are near homes so “landowners deserve legitimate justification given the sensitivity of the information gathered by the flyovers.”

America is awash in surveillance cameras, from red-light cameras at intersections to cameras in and outside businesses. For the most part, we tolerate their intrusiveness if the pictures are triggered by actual lawbreakers or are in a public place for legitimate security purposes where the expectation of privacy does not exist.

But a drone flying over farmer Jones’ farmhouse seems a stretch that sets a dangerous precedent.

A federal policy promotes the use of drones by local law enforcement, and drone manufacturers are now pushing their products to the nation’s 18,000 police jurisdictions. This raises the question of whether drones will be allowed to capture information normally requiring a search warrant authorized by a judge?

Syndicated columnist and IBD contributor Charles Krauthammer calls drones instruments of war suited for war. They should not be used domestically, he says.

He notes that you can hear a police helicopter but not a drone over your house, and argues that “the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.”

This is not the crazy urban legend of black helicopters roaming about. “We’ve seen in some records that were released by the Air Force just recently, that under their rules, they are allowed to fly drones in public areas and record information on domestic situations,” says Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Association, who is looking into various government surveillance techniques.

Under current guidelines, information gathered deliberately or accidentally by military drones over the U.S. can be kept by the military up to three months before being purged.

They can also be turned over to “another Department of Defense or government agency to whose function it pertains.” Presumably that includes Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

“Our Founding Fathers had no idea that there would be remote-control drones with television monitors that can feed back live data instantaneously — but if they had, they would have made darn sure that these things were subject to the Fourth Amendment (protecting individual privacy),” Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, told Fox News.

It’s been said that those who sacrifice liberty for the sake of security will likely wind up with neither.

We agree with Mr. Krauthammer on drones surveilling American citizens: “Stop it here. Stop it now.”

For more click here.

Related articles

Overreach: Obamacare vs. the Constitution

Posted on by
5

By  , The Washington Post

Give him points for cleverness. President Obama’s birth control “accommodation” was as politically successful as it was morally meaningless. It was nothing but an accounting trick that still forces Catholic (and other religious) institutions to provide medical insurance that guarantees free birth control, tubal ligation and morning-after abortifacients — all of which violate church doctrine on the sanctity of life.

The trick is that these birth control/abortion services will supposedly be provided independently and free of charge by the religious institution’s insurance company. But this changes none of the moral calculus. Holy Cross Hospital, for example, is still required by law to engage an insurance company that is required by law to provide these doctrinally proscribed services to all Holy Cross employees.

Nonetheless, the accounting device worked politically. It took only a handful of compliant Catholic groups — Obamacare cheerleaders dying to return to the fold — to hail the alleged compromise and hand Obama a major political victory.

Before, Obama’s coalition had been split. His birth control mandate was fiercely opposed by such stalwart friends as former Virginia governor Tim Kaineand pastor Rick Warren (Obama’s choice to give the invocation at his inauguration), who declared he would rather go to jail than abide by the regulation. After the “accommodation,” it was the (mostly) Catholic opposition that fractured. The mainstream media then bought the compromise as substantive, and the issue was defused.A brilliant sleight of hand. But let’s for a moment accept the president on his own terms. Let’s accept his contention that this “accommodation” is a real shift of responsibility to the insurer. Has anyone considered the import of this new mandate? The president of the United States has just ordered private companies to give away for free a service that his own health and human services secretary has repeatedly called a major financial burden.

On what authority? Where does it say that the president can unilaterally order a private company to provide an allegedly free-standing service at no cost to certain select beneficiaries?

This is government by presidential fiat. In Venezuela, that’s done all the time. Perhaps we should call Obama’s “accommodation” Presidential Decree No. 1.

Consider the constitutional wreckage left by Obamacare:

First, the assault on the free exercise of religion. Only churches themselves are left alone. Beyond the churchyard gate, religious autonomy disappears. Every other religious institution must bow to the state because, by this administration’s regulatory definition, church schools, hospitals and charities are not “religious” and thus have no right to the free exercise of religion — no protection from being forced into doctrinal violations commanded by the state.

Second, the assault on free enterprise. To solve his own political problem, the president presumes to order a private company to enter into a contract for the provision of certain services — all of which must be without charge. And yet, this breathtaking arrogation of power is simply the logical extension of Washington’s takeover of the private system of medical care — a system Obama farcically pretends to be maintaining.

Under Obamacare, the state treats private insurers the way it does government-regulated monopolies and utilities. It determines everything of importance. Insurers, by definition, set premiums according to risk. Not anymore. The risk ratios (for age, gender, smoking, etc.) are decreed by Washington. This is nationalization in all but name. The insurer is turned into a middleman, subject to state control — and presidential whim.

Third, the assault on individual autonomy. Every citizen without insurance is ordered to buy it, again under penalty of law. This so-called individual mandate is now before the Supreme Court — because never before has the already hypertrophied Commerce Clause been used to compel a citizen to enter into a private contract with a private company by mere fact of his existence.

This constitutional trifecta — the state invading the autonomy of religious institutions, private companies and the individual citizen —  should not surprise. It is what happens when the state takes over one-sixth of the economy.

In 2010, when all this lay hazily in the future, the sheer arrogance of Obamacare energized a popular resistance powerful enough to deliver an electoral shellacking to Obama. Yet two years later, as the consequences of that overreach materialize before our eyes, the issue is fading. This constitutes a huge failing of the opposition party whose responsibility it is to make the opposition argument.

Every presidential challenger says that he will repeal Obamacare on Day One. Well, yes. But is any of them making the case for why?

Related articles