POLITICS - Sieg Heil ! - The Thought SS

"FCC Combing Air Tapes for Dirty Words" by REUTERS, New York Times

In its continuing crackdown on on-air profanity, the FCC has requested numerous tapes from broadcasters that might include vulgar remarks from unruly spectators, coaches and athletes at live sporting events, industry sources said.

Tapes requested by the commission include live broadcasts of football games and NASCAR races where the participants or the crowds let loose with an expletive. While commission officials refused to talk about its requests, one broadcast company executive said the commission had asked for 30 tapes of live sports and news programs.

"It looks like they want to end live broadcast TV,'' said one executive, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. ''We already know that they aren't afraid to go after news."

While live programming always has been problematic for broadcasters, it has become even more difficult under tougher commission rules approved in 2004. The new rules found that virtually any use of certain expletives will be considered profane and indecent, even if it is a slip of the tongue. In a March decision, the FCC found that the CBS news program "The Early Show'' violated its indecency rules because of a profane slip-up but did not issue a fine because the incident occurred before the new rules were instituted.

Live sports -- amateur, college and professional -- have long been a broadcast programming staple. Broadcasters have spent enormous amounts of money and energy to come up with ways to give audiences a better feel for the action. As broadcasters vie for viewers, technical advances that include such things as on-field microphones and in-car cameras have become as important as the announcers.

OK, American Public, watch what you say during that exciting football, baseball, or soccer game. The "Thought SS" are listening.

As for broadcasters, you had better stop recording of audiences at all live events. Restrict broadcasts of live events to your commentators only. After all, you don't want to be hauled off to jail because an excited fan exercised his/her right to free speech and used an unapproved word.

These people need to get a life!

POLITICS - Echos of the SS

"Gagged Library Exec Speaks Out" by Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

George Christian is the executive director of Library Connection, Inc., a nonprofit cooperative of more than two dozen public and academic libraries in Connecticut.

Last summer, his office got an odd call. It wasn’t from a co-op member.

And it wasn’t from a library patron. It was from the FBI.

One of Christian’s staff answered the phone and then brought him the news.

“We got a call from the FBI, they want to send us something called a National Security Letter, and they asked who to address it to, and I told them you,” the staffer informed Christian, he recalls.

“I thought, National Security what? What’s a National Security Letter?

Until that moment, I’d never heard those three words, National Security Letter. I never knew there was such a thing. I had no inkling whatsoever,” Christian says.

These letters are an extraordinarily powerful tool in the hands of the FBI. Basically, they amount to subpoenas the Justice Department issues by itself, without having to go to a judge for approval. When they were first authorized in the 1970s, the FBI was required to have “ ‘specific and articulable’ reasons to believe the records it gathered in secret belonged to a terrorist or spy,” Barton Gellman reported for The Washington Post on November 6, 2005. But thanks to the Patriot Act, the FBI can slap these letters not only on terrorist suspects but on anyone who is “relevant” to a national security investigation, even those “who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies,” Gellman wrote. The Patriot Act authorizes the FBI to use these National Security Letters to obtain “transactional records” from financial institutions. And the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act expanded the scope of these letters beyond financial institutions to include car dealers, travel agents, real estate agents, pawnbrokers, and others. The FBI is churning these National Security Letters out at the rate of 30,000 a year, Gellman discovered.

That specific letter (delivered by FBI Agents), according to Gellman, sought “all subscriber information, billing information, and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a nearby library.

“The first intimidating thing was the fact that this letter made really clear that I could discuss receipt of this letter with no one,” he says. “And the second thing was the good cop, bad cop routine. One FBI agent was professionally dressed, in a coat and tie, and was mild-mannered, and the other one was casually dressed and muscular and didn’t speak much at all.”

Hay, Christian , what's the matter? This is the FBI after all. Why do you feel intimidated by these agents that delivered the letter? This was not Don Vito Corleone's lawyer and a goon attempting extortion.... uh..... wait a minute.

This is another example of, under the guise of National Security, actions by federal law enforcement are fast approaching what the Nazi SS did in Germany. All that the SS did was always coached as national security, for the good of the German people. At least until the German people realized that each and everyone of them was in danger of being watched and/or "taking away" by the SS.

Now, today, the question for Americans is, just when are we going to wakeup and stop this? Or are we so afraid the we willingly give up our Constitutional and human rights?

POLITICS - The Bush SS - Is It Now?

"U.S. strangling its democracy" by Marie Cocco, Daily Camera
(In full with no comment)

WASHINGTON — It has little to do with Sept. 11, 2001.

To understand the furor over leaks about a CIA-run network of secret prisons or, perhaps, the president's authorization of warrantless snooping on Americans' communications, the date to remember isn't 9/11. It is March 23, 2001.

On that day — just weeks after George W. Bush was inaugurated — White House counsel Alberto Gonzales instructed the archivist of the United States to delay release of thousands of President Ronald Reagan's papers, which were about to be made public under a Watergate-era law governing the release of unclassified presidential documents.

The Gonzales letter to John W. Carlin, then chief custodian of the nation's historical records, was written six months before the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon would provide an all-purpose justification for choking off public access to information. The letters would be followed, soon enough, with an executive order that vastly expanded the power of a sitting president — Bush — to keep secret not only his own papers, but those of presidents who preceded him. Bush claims this authority even if a former president wants them made public. The order is being challenged in court by scholars and journalists.

Now a longtime CIA officer, fired from her job, stands accused of leaking information about the existence of the secret overseas prisons for alleged terrorists — though her lawyer says she isn't responsible for the leak and did not have access to the information that resulted in Pulitzer Prize-winning stories by The Washington Post. Meanwhile, government gumshoes are on the trail of whoever revealed to The New York Times the clandestine wiretapping of Americans that was authorized by the president, evading the courts and Congress.

We have seen before a vindictive president who pursued his political opponents and his antagonists in the media for exposing his wrongdoing and embarrassments. But this president is, in his way, less constrained than even Richard Nixon.

He has allowed intelligence, military and other agencies to scrub files at the National Archives, reclassifying thousands of previously public documents that date as far back as World War II and the Korean conflict. Some were considered so benign that the State Department already had published them in official histories. Archives officials announced Wednesday that about a quarter of the documents had been reclassified in a way that was "clearly inappropriate."

FBI agents seek to rummage through the files of the late Jack Anderson, the muckraking columnist whose most significant exposes were written in the 1960s and 1970s. "I explained the stuff we have is really dusty — old, ancient history," says Mark Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor who is writing a book about Anderson and who has access to his files. No matter. The history cops visited Feldstein's home, flashed their badges and said they wanted to retrieve classified documents.

In California, the Bush administration fights in federal court to keep University of California political science professor Larry Berman from seeing 40-year-old documents from Lyndon Johnson's presidency. The CIA says the presidential daily intelligence briefs (PDBs) cannot now — or ever — be revealed. Nor, the agency says, can any presidential brief of any White House ever be made public.

"This government's argument today is that these are the crown jewels," Berman said in an interview. The author of several books on Johnson and the Vietnam War, Berman requested briefs from 1965 and 1968. Other presidential intelligence briefs from the Johnson White House were made public in the early 1990s and are posted on the Internet. We have not, since then, been attacked by the Vietnamese. Nor have we suffered from release of two briefs that were published by the 9/11 investigative commission.

This administration is not the first to select for public airing secrets that are a political help, such as its claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, while seeking retribution against those who reveal secrets that hurt. The politics of revenge can be reversed in an election. The rewriting of history cannot.

Just a week ago, the U.S. government celebrated victory after a long effort to get Germany to open a trove of Holocaust files. The accuracy of history, itself, was at stake. History is the lens through which we see more clearly events that partisan passion and cultural myopia cloud in the present. If it is true that democracy dies in the dark, the surest way to kill it is to continue marching down this path of suppression.