Dem Holdout Signs On to Healthcare Bill, Senate Expects Passage by Christmas

Shailagh Murray and Lori Montgomery
Washington Post
December 19, 2009

Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), the final Democratic holdout on health care, announced to his colleagues Saturday morning that he would support the Senate reform bill, clearing the way for final passage by Christmas of President Obama’s top domestic policy priority.

Asked if he had secured the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) told reporters, “It seems that way.”

The Senate is expected to work its way through a series of procedural motions over the next few days, with a vote on the legislation scheduled the evening of Dec. 24th. A conference with the House to produce a final bill would likely extend into January, Senate aides said.

Congressional budget analysts said the revised package, unveiled Saturday morning by Reid, would spend $871 billion over the next decade to extend coverage to more than 30 million Americans by dramatically expanding Medicaid and offering federal subsidies to those who lack affordable coverage through employers.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/dem-holdout-signs-on-to-healthcare-bill-senate-expects-passage-by-christmas/

Final Copenhagen Text Includes Global Transaction Tax

Obama set to bypass Congress and approve massive transfer of wealth to world government

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, December 18, 2009

The final Copenhagen draft agreement which was hammered out in the early hours of Friday morning includes provisions for a global tax on financial transactions that will be paid directly to the World Bank, as President Obama prepares to bypass Congress by approving a massive transfer of wealth from America into globalist hands.

As Lord Monckton, Alex Jones and others warned, the notion that the globalists would achieve nothing at Copenhagen has likely been a ruse all along. The elite look set to ram through the lion’s share of their agenda, which would include a massive global government tax at a cost of at least $3,000 a year for American families already laboring under a devastating recession, double digit unemployment and a reduction in living standards.

Hillary Clinton arrived yesterday to rally global leaders around a resolution and Barack Obama is set to be portrayed as the savior of the world by rescuing what was pitched all along as a conference doomed to fail.

“The summit “hangs in the balance,” said Obama this morning. “We are running out of time. The time for talk is over. It is better for us to act than to talk. The question is whether we move forward together or split apart.”

The final agreement may not force countries to meet CO2 emission targets, but it will grease the skids for the biggest tax hike in human history, a fact that establishment media outlets have completely failed to emphasize.

Monckton told the Alex Jones Show last week that the initial secretive draft version of the Copenhagen agreement represented a global government power grab on an “unimaginable scale,” and mandated the creation of 700 new bureaucracies as well as a colossal raft of new taxes including 2 percent levies on both GDP and every international financial transaction.

Monckton said that the new world government outlined in the treaty would be handed powers to, “Tax the American economy to the extent of 2 percent GDP, to impose a further tax of 2 percent on every financial transaction….and to close down effectively the economies of the west, transfer your jobs to third world countries.”

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

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As the leak of the Danish text outlined, such taxes, earmarked as “climate financing,” will go straight into the coffers of the IMF and the World Bank. These funds will be used to bankroll the imposition of global governance that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon promised would be achieved at Copenhagen.

According to the latest news out of Copenhagen, the taxes that were included in the initial text are still in the final agreement which is set to be passed later today or in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the final text, “Proposes a range of innovative mechanisms for raising the money, ranging from a tax on air and sea transports fuels to a tax on financial transfers.”

This would form part of an initial commitment of $US10 billion a year from 2010 to 2012, climbing to $US50 billion annually by 2015 and $US100 billion by 2020, although these figures will inevitably increase if the UN ramps up its climate fearmongering as it has done at each successive climate conference since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

The treaty outlines, “Penalties or fines for non-compliance,” in developed countries and the creation of an international police force to “enforce its will by imposing unlimited financial penalties on any countries whose performance under this treaty they don’t like,” Monckton told the Alex Jones Show, saying that it amounted to a total global government takeover on an “unimaginable scale”.

“We’re looking at a grab for absolute power and absolute financial control worldwide by the UN and its associated bureaucracies and 700 new bureaucratic bodies,” said Monckton, adding that if the agreement was signed by Obama, the U.S. would be losing its freedom to a “sinister dictatorship” being formed under the contrived pretext of global warming.

Watch Monckton’s latest interview with the Alex Jones Show below.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/final-copenhagen-text-includes-global-transaction-tax/

Obama will bypass Congress to detain suspects indefinitely

John Byrne
Raw Story
Septmeber 24, 2009

President Barack Obama has quietly decided to bypass Congress and allow the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charges.

The move, which was controversial when the idea was first floated in The Washington Post in May, has sparked serious concern among civil liberties advocates. Such a decision allows the president to unilaterally hold “combatants” without habeas corpus — a legal term literally meaning “you shall have the body” — which forces prosecutors to charge a suspect with a crime to justify the suspect’s detention.

Obama’s decision was buried on page A 23 of The New York Times’ New York edition on Thursday. It didn’t appear on that page in the national edition. (Meanwhile, the front page was graced with the story, “Richest Russian’s Newest Toy: An N.B.A. Team.”)

Rather than seek approval from Congress to hold some 50 Guantanamo detainees indefinitely, the administration has decided that it has the authority to hold the prisoners under broad-ranging legislation passed in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Former President George W. Bush frequently invoked this legislation as the justification for controversial legal actions — including the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.

“The administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” the Times‘ Peter Baker writes. “In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.”

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Constitutional scholar and Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald discussed the policy in a column in May. He warned that the ability for a president to “preventively” detain suspects could mushroom into broader, potentially abusive activity.

“It does not merely allow the U.S. Government to imprison people alleged to have committed Terrorist acts yet who are unable to be convicted in a civilian court proceeding,” Greenwald wrote. “That class is merely a subset, perhaps a small subset, of who the Government can detain. Far more significant, ‘preventive detention’ allows indefinite imprisonment not based on proven crimes or past violations of law, but of those deemed generally ‘dangerous’ by the Government for various reasons (such as, as Obama put it yesterday, they ‘expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden’ or ‘otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans’). That’s what ‘preventive’ means: imprisoning people because the Government claims they are likely to engage in violent acts in the future because they are alleged to be ‘combatants.’”

“Once known, the details of the proposal could — and likely will — make this even more extreme by extending the ‘preventive detention’ power beyond a handful of Guantanamo detainees to anyone, anywhere in the world, alleged to be a ‘combatant,’” Greenwald continues. “After all, once you accept the rationale on which this proposal is based — namely, that the U.S. Government must, in order to keep us safe, preventively detain “dangerous” people even when they can’t prove they violated any laws — there’s no coherent reason whatsoever to limit that power to people already at Guantanamo, as opposed to indefinitely imprisoning with no trials all allegedly ‘dangerous’ combatants, whether located in Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Western countries and even the U.S.”

The Obama Administration appears to have embraced “preventive detention” in part because of problems with how Guantanamo prisoners’ cases — and incarceration — were handled under President Bush. Military prosecutors have said that numerous cases could not be brought successfully in civilian courts because evidence was obtained in ways that wouldn’t be admissible on US soil. The Bush Administration originally sought to try numerous detainees in military tribunals, but the Supreme Court ruled that at least some have the rights to challenge their detention in US courts.

Baker notes that Obama’s decision to hold suspects without charges doesn’t propose as broad an executive authority claimed by President Bush.

“Obama’s advisers are not embracing the more disputed Bush contention that the president has inherent power under the Constitution to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely regardless of Congress,” Baker writes.

In a statement to Baker, the Justice Department said, “The administration would rely on authority already provided by Congress [and] is not currently seeking additional authorization.”

“The position conveyed by the Justice Department in the meeting last week broke no new ground and was entirely consistent with information previously provided by the Justice Department to the Senate Armed Services Committee,” the statement added.

Roughly 50 detainees of the more than 200 still held at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are thought to be affected by the decision.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/obama-will-bypass-congress-to-detain-suspects-indefinitely/

Obama Recommends Congress ‘Renew’ Patriot Act Domestic ‘Surveillance Methods’

Little Alex in Wonderland
September 18, 2009

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The Washington Post reports the Justice Department “recommended that Congress move swiftly with legislation that would protect the government’s ability to collect a variety of business and credit card records and to monitor terrorism suspects with roving wiretaps” set to expire 31 December 09.

Carrie Johnson and Ellen Nakashima report:

The three provisions set to expire Dec. 31 allow investigators to monitor through roving wiretaps suspects who may be trying to escape detection by switching cellphone numbers, obtain business records of national security targets, and track “lone wolves” who may be acting alone on behalf of foreign powers or terrorist groups. The government has not employed the lone wolf provision, but department officials want to ensure they can do so in the future.

Obama’s approach to electronic surveillance has been closely watched since he shifted positions during the presidential campaign last year, casting a vote to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act over the objections of liberals in his party. That law granted telecommunication companies immunity from lawsuits by Americans who argued that their privacy had been violated in an electronic data collection program….

The Justice Department inspector general issued blistering audits in 2007 and 2008, finding, for instance, that FBI agents had used demands for information known as national security letters in many cases where they were not authorized and had employed other tools called exigent letters to quickly obtain data without proper follow-up.

“As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama said he would take a close look at the law, based on his past expertise in constitutional law,” Devlin Barrett reported at the Associated Press. “Back in May, President Obama said legal institutions must be updated to deal with the threat of terrorism, but in a way that preserves the rule of law and accountability,” adding:

The lone wolf provision was created to conduct surveillance on suspects with no known link to foreign governments or terrorist groups. It has never been used, but the administration says it should still be available for future investigations.

“It should come as no surprise that President Barack Obama supports renewing the provisions, which were part of the Patriot Act approved six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” David Kravets writes at Wired. “As an Illinois senator in 2008, he voted to allow the warrantless monitoring of Americans’ electronic communications if they are communicating overseas with somebody the government believes is linked to terrorism. That legislative package, which President George W. Bush signed, also immunized the nation’s telecommunication companies from lawsuits charging them with being complicit with the Bush administration’s warrantless, wiretapping program. That program was also adopted in the wake of Sept. 11.”

On Tuesday, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said that the U.S. is spending $75 billion a year on “intelligence activities”, Adam Entous reports at Reuters (h/t: Jason Ditz), adding that:

It has disclosed the amount spent by the 16 intelligence agencies — $47.5 billion in 2008 alone — but those figures did not incorporate the military’s intelligence activities, officials said.

Blair, in a conference call with reporters, explained that his four-year strategy was not set up on the “traditional fault line … between military intelligence and national intelligence.”

“This whole distinction between military and non-military intelligence is no longer relevant,” Blair said.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on the U.S.A. Patriot Act [sic] next week.

Congress Considers Raising Debt Ceiling Again to Borrow from Bankers

CNN
September 18, 2009

Congress has raised the debt ceiling four times in the past two years and will probably have to do it again in the next month.

With the government borrowing record amounts of money, the nation’s current debt ceiling of $12.1 trillion will be pierced soon.

That ceiling is the cap on how much the country allows itself to have in debt. In credit card parlance, the ceiling is the U.S. credit limit. At the end of August, U.S. debt totaled $11.8 trillion. That’s roughly $349 billion shy of the statutory limit.

The ceiling is meant to serve as a brake on spending because lawmakers would have to think very seriously before they breach the limit and take a very difficult political vote to do so. In reality, lawmakers really don’t have a choice but to raise the ceiling and they know it.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/congress-considers-raising-debt-ceiling-again-to-borrow-from-bankers/

Judge Napolitano: Health-Care Reform and the Constitution

Andrew P. Napolitano
The Wall Street Journal
September 16, 2009

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Last week, I asked South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, where in the Constitution it authorizes the federal government to regulate the delivery of health care. He replied: “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do.” Then he shot back: “How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?”

Rep. Clyburn, like many of his colleagues, seems to have conveniently forgotten that the federal government has only specific enumerated powers. He also seems to have overlooked the Ninth and 10th Amendments, which limit Congress’s powers only to those granted in the Constitution.

One of those powers—the power “to regulate” interstate commerce—is the favorite hook on which Congress hangs its hat in order to justify the regulation of anything it wants to control.

Unfortunately, a notoriously tendentious New Deal-era Supreme Court decision has given Congress a green light to use the Commerce Clause to regulate noncommercial, and even purely local, private behavior. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Supreme Court held that a farmer who grew wheat just for the consumption of his own family violated federal agricultural guidelines enacted pursuant to the Commerce Clause. Though the wheat did not move across state lines—indeed, it never left his farm—the Court held that if other similarly situated farmers were permitted to do the same it, might have an aggregate effect on interstate commerce.

James Madison, who argued that to regulate meant to keep regular, would have shuddered at such circular reasoning. Madison’s understanding was the commonly held one in 1789, since the principle reason for the Constitutional Convention was to establish a central government that would prevent ruinous state-imposed tariffs that favored in-state businesses. It would do so by assuring that commerce between the states was kept “regular.”

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/judge-napolitano-health-care-reform-and-the-constitution/

Major Bills to Defeat After August Recess

Devvy Kidd
NewsWithViews
August 31, 2009

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“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept. 17, 1796

The outlaws (Congress) will be back in session, September 8, 2009. Americans have been watching and participating in ‘tea parties’ throughout the states; see this short video of one in Sacramento. Some members of Congress have vocalized what many of these crooks, cowards and outright nitwits in Congress have been thinking: There is a revolution underway. It’s about time. Those of us who have been in the lonely trenches for decades hope everyone can concentrate on the critical issues and tune out the distractions – political bickering. Time is of the essence. As I have written so many times: We are in the fight for our very survival, both as a nation and in our personal lives.

The Internet continues to scream at full steam about the possibility of forced vaccinations regarding the manufactured crisis over the swine flu. I covered this in my last column, but let me reinforce something before I move on to the next issue. At this time there is no federal or state edict, Executive Order or anything else stating you, me or our children must be shot up with that deadly cocktail. The possible exception might be state health care workers and some federal employees. All states have exemption clauses in their laws regarding vaccines. See link one below under Flu category.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/major-bills-to-defeat-after-august-recess/

Scientific proof of treason on September 11 sent to Congress

WeAreChange LA
August 26, 2009

We put a cover letter on a package of facts and scientific analyses regarding the controlled demolition of the WTC complex on September 11, 2001. The letter is here as follows, as well as the links to the scientific papers.

http://files.meetup.com/749288/NanoTh…
http://files.meetup.com/749288/The%20…
http://files.meetup.com/749288/WTCHig…
http://files.meetup.com/749288/14%20p…

Plus: a brochure from http://www.ae911truth.org

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Dear Honorable Congress Person,

We the People, in order to restore rule of law and accountability to our Republic, respectfully insist that you, as an elected representative, squarely face the facts concerning the events of September 11, 2001 and the implications thereof.

It is our moral and civic duty to entrust to you facts and scientific analyses in the form of peer-reviewed, published scientific papers that clearly and conclusively prove thousands of our fellow human beings and citizens were murdered in controlled and criminal demolitions on September 11, 2001.

Plausible deniability of these facts and evidence is no longer possible.

If you fail to acknowledge and act immediately and decisively on this evidence, then your inaction will constitute misprision of treason in the least, outright treason at worst. The time is now to fulfill your oath to the Constitution and stand tall in the face of the corruption of our Republic. We the People stand with you.

Pursuant to U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 115

§ 2381. Treason

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

And § 2382. Misprision of Treason

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to the President or to some judge of the United States, or to the governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both.

Sincerely,
WeAreChangeLA

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/scientific-proof-of-treason-on-september-11-sent-to-congress/

Congress Worried About “Unruly” Town Hall Meetings

Alex Isenstadt
Politico
August 5, 2009

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Screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety — welcome to the new town-hall-style meeting, the once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors for members of Congress.

On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.

“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to temporarily suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”

In Bishop’s case, his decision came on the heels of a June 22 event he held in Setauket, N.Y., in which protesters dominated the meeting by shouting criticisms at the congressman for his positions on energy policy, health care and the bailout of the auto industry.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/congress-worried-about-unruly-town-hall-meetings/

You Tube Pulls Hundreds Of Ron Paul Videos

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

You Tube has expanded its zealous copyright crusade by suspending the popular C-Span Junkie user channel, and in doing so has pulled hundreds of viral Ron Paul videos, which are now completely dead.

The C-Span Junkie user channel, a non-partisan archive of short clips taken from C-Span broadcasts of events in the Congress and the Senate, has been the home of the vast majority of You Tube videos you have seen of Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others being confronted in Congress, as well as Ron Paul’s speeches on the House floor. A total of more than 6400 videos in all have been pulled, hundreds of which featured the Texan Congressman.

Whether or not C-Span itself requested that You Tube pull the channel is not known, but it is clearly in the public interest and constitutes fair use to show a clip less than 10 minutes in length of what the people who are supposedly our Representatives are saying in Congress on our behalf.

As we have highlighted before, You Tube arbitrarily suspends accounts based on flimsy copyright claims that aren’t even properly investigated.

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We had our own You Tube account suspended following a copyright complaint from a separate party who didn’t even own the copyright on the original material. In addition, the copyright claim was clearly erroneous as it was based on the fact that Alex Jones held up a printed version of an online newspaper story for a few seconds on camera. The channel was eventually reinstated after You Tube received a flood of complaints.

“I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to in a moment see 6400 videos gone,” writes the channel owner on the C Span Junkie website, “Figure 6400 hours (easily) poof GONE! I did this for the common good and now it all gone.”

The channel has now been replaced with a new account but it’s unlikely to survive long if the owner dares to post anything of substance.

Truth is no longer acceptable on You Tube as it transforms itself into a pale reflection of Hulu, a site owned and operated by NBC Universal (GE) and Fox Entertainment Group (News Corp), that is to say a joint venture by a corporation owned by a death merchant (GE manufactures attack helicopters and jet engines) and a disinformation platform owned by a notorious neocon, Rupert Murdoch.

In the Hulu-ized universe, there is no room for truth or alternative media — all channels will contain the same schlock and mindless pablum already available on cable and broadcast television.

Videos of members of Congress grilling Bernanke and his cohorts about auditing the Fed and finding out where trillions in missing TARP funds has disappeared to just aren’t part of the sanitized and lobotomized video landscape that You Tube wants to portray.

If you post videos about people eating each other’s vomit or clips of plastic bimbos with their breasts hanging out then you’ll be left alone, but God forbid should anyone try to give the country a window on what’s actually happening in Congress and what their own Representatives are talking about – in that case your thought crimes will immediately be censored and removed.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/you-tube-pulls-hundreds-of-ron-paul-videos/