The only question that needs asking: Why can't this criminal and his flock of czars be impeached NOW!!!!

wjmccrindle, it's not the "only question", of course, but consider this, the same Congress that allowed this nonentity, they, and no one else, knows anything factual about his background, to take office would have to impeach him. Can you imagine this band of disingenuous bunglers trying to disentangle themselves from their failure to vet him properly. Many of them, e.g., Reid, Pelosi, saw the opportunity to use him for their own devious purposes and chose to ignore all questions about his qualifications. They might as well have chosen the lowest ranking White House janitor, he surely would have been properly vetted, and how difficult would it have been to prop him up with teleprompters and carefully selected speechwriters? There will be no impeachment, the Congress failed miserably in allowing Obama to run and be elected; they aren't the kind of people to admit failure, they will wait him out, and they don't care if it takes another Obama term to avoid admitting their fatal error.

"the secrets-obsessed Obama administration has issued more subpoenas of reporters' phone records and other information than did the Bush administration in eight years."

Totalitarian mindset.

"...the secrets-obsessed Obama administration has issued more subpoenas of reporters' phone records and other information than did the Bush administration in eight years." And the left-wing media actually believe that totalitarianism will still respect freedom of the press and that portion of the 1st amendment, while chucking the rest of it along with the other 26. Fools and idiots.

Sorry, Dr Sowell, but I don't think it will work. If folks were smart enough to understand your arguments, they wouldn't be liberal in the first place.

Return Of The War Party?

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/2011/11/14/return-of-the-war-party-2/

Gingrich 1997: “There is No Place for Torture”

Let me be perfectly clear: If the life of my mother, father, child, friend, or basically anyone I loved could be saved by doing horrible things to some horrible person, I would do it. In fact, most normal people wouldn’t mind hurting some bad guy to save the lives of good guys.

The question of torture is not whether in some Hollywood-style, almost-never-happening life-or-death scenario, we should use it. Those who view the issue of waterboarding in this absurd light—an interrogation method everyone from Ronald Reagan to the United States military during World War II has rightly called torture—are being completely unreasonable in their general premise.

The most basic question concerning torture is whether, as a general rule, it should be endorsed. The question is whether it actually works as an interrogation tactic, which most experts say it doesn’t. The question is whether or not torture should be an acceptable rule of thumb for any civilized society.

The question is whether or not torture should be the official policy of the United States.

For most of our history, that answer has been an emphatic “no!”

Most of this year’s Republican presidential candidates care little to nothing about such questions because they know little to nothing about history, know or care little to nothing about our conventional Judeo-Christian Western morality, they know even less about the history of the conservative movement, and most seem content to try to look “tough” in front of GOP primary audiences by explicitly endorsing the use of torture, or, excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques.” This view on torture extends to these Republican candidates’ extremely anti-conservative views on civil liberties, recklessness concerning the constitutional powers of the Executive branch, and these candidates’ general dismissal of some of the most basic concepts and precepts of American law.

Newt Gingrich—who does know history and yet now refuses to call waterboarding “torture” or to strongly denounce it—nevertheless expressed the traditional conservative view on torture in 1997, after meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Gingrich’s language here is plain, simple, conservative…

And absolutely right—in the deepest American sense:

“There is no place for abuse in what must be considered the family of man. There is no place for torture and arbitrary detention. There is no place for forced confessions… the roots of American rule of law go back more than 700 years, to the signing of the Magna Carta. The foundation of American values, therefore, is not a passing priority or a temporary trend.”

Today, for most of the GOP presidential field, including Gingrich, this “foundational American value” of opposition to torture has become a mere “passing priority” and “temporary trend.”

God help us.

Do We Have a Constitution or Not?

The entire purpose of our Constitution is to restrain the federal government. Today, both Democrat and Republican leaders regularly pretend we don’t have a Constitution in areas where they prefer not to be restrained. First the Democrats, or as The American Spectator’s James Antle at http://spectator.org/blog/2011/11/14/do-we-even-have-a-written-cons explains concerning today’s ObamaCare court decision:

“Do we even have a written Constitution? That is really the fundamental question at stake in the Obamacare case. Many countries are governed by unwritten constitutions, a patchwork of court decisions, legal and political precedents, laws, and customs that shape the boundaries of government rather than any single document. Over the past eighty years, the United States has increasingly moved to that system as well. But even the post-New Deal, post-World War II consensus has always tried to appeal to our written Constitution for authority, which its champions have pretended to revere as a living document.

This case is the biggest conflicit between the unwritten constitution that gives the federal government virtually unlimited power to, as Laurence Silberman puts it, ‘forge national solutions to national problems’ and the actual Constitution on which Washington bases its legitimacy, a document that created a limited federal government of enumerated powers. Those powers, by the way, are delegated by the states and the people.”

Antle asks: “Who delegated the power to impose an individual mandate?”

And now for Republicans’ disregard for the Constitution, or as Conservative HQ’s Richard Viguerie at http://www.conservativehq.com/article/5461-ron-paul-constitution-and-foreign-policy writes of Saturday night’s foreign policy debate:

“Saturday’s CBS/National Journal Republican presidential debate on foreign policy once again showed the limits of the establishment media’s grasp of constitutional principles and how the Constitution, as the law that governs government, should instruct our foreign policy. During the entire event, the questions seemed to assume that the President is unconstrained in his or her ability to act in matters of national security — and that the role of Commander-in-Chief is tantamount to being a military dictator. Unfortunately, with the exception of Congressman Ron Paul, the Republican candidates for President generally joined this shallow analysis and skipped-over the Constitution in their answers…

Those who object to re-establishing the Constitutional role of Congress in matters of national security because it makes national security too public and too complicated might ponder what Congressman Ron Paul said during Saturday’s debate, ‘…you go to the Congress and find out if our national security is threatened… [then] you get a declaration of war and you fight it and you win it and get it over with.’

Viguerie concluded: “That sounds a whole lot less complicated, and a whole lot more in line with what the Founders had in mind for how to conduct our foreign relations, than what is going on in national security policy right now.”

http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-gets-89-seconds-to-speak-in-cbs-debate/