Gov. Christie Backs More Red Tape for Marijuana

I was going to head into the weekend without putting up another post. But then I saw this story from CNN about Gov. Chris Christie's response to his state's pending medical marijuana legislation.

I know, it's the second post this week about marijuana and CNN and still nothing about the uprising in Egypt, Bradley Manning's sentencing, or the latest revelations from Edward Snowden. But there are priorities at stake.

CNN have been reporting on Brian Wilson, a father from NJ whose 2-year-old daughter suffers from seizures due to Dravet's syndrome. This latest story is just a continuation, with the added twist of the father asking Christie "I was wondering what the holdup was; it's been like two months now."

Christie's response is the reason this story takes precedence over seemingly more important liberty news: "These are complicated issues," Christie told Wilson. "I know you think it's simple and it's not."

Actually, it's very simple. Allow me to quote from the Bill of Rights: "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...."

In this case, a 2-year-old girl's life and pursuit of happiness are both at stake. Preventing the seizures gives her and her family hope that she can grow up to be a normal girl, and it gives her the chance to actually go to school and form social relationships and get a job so she's not hooked on Medicaid. Why are these "unalienable rights" being denied to a little girl? Because the federal government and the State of New Jersey have both decided to interject themselves into the private affairs of individuals and deny them the right to a successful treatment.

Oh, and also because Chris Christie refuses to stand up for the American way. If this episode is any preview of a future Christie presidency, I fear for the nation's future.

While the law in New Jersey may be complicated, Gov. Christie has the right and the duty to protect the life and liberty of this little girl, not to mention her pursuit of happiness. As the top law enforcement officer in his state, he can issue an executive order to all other law enforcement entities in his state that expressly say they may not prosecute Brian Wilson's family for exercising their inborn human rights.

Gov. Christie, it is very simple. Don't give us the lame excuse that you first require more red tape from the NJ state legislature before this little girl's suffering can stop. Start respecting her rights NOW! It is your job to protect her, not ill-conceived federal or state laws about drug possession.

The government has never had any right to make marijuana illegal, as is made clear in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It's time to stand up for all our rights by standing up for a 2-year-old girl.

CNN and Sanjay Gupta Are Still Misleading on Medical Marijuana

Normally I hate to cover medical stories. Stories about medicine are usually corporate entities panning poorly researched products as miracle cures in the hopes that public awareness - even of products with low success rates - will somehow assist with the legitimisation process and allow the products to be sold as prescription or over-the-counter (OTC) drugs.

But in this case, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta has admitted to being the face of CNN's effort to mislead the public about marijuana's efficacy when used as a pharmaceutical. This story has implications for the freedom of religion, manipulation of the public by the press, and corporate manipulation of government. So the story earns its place here.

While I'd like to compliment Gupta on his honesty, it's too late in coming. Furthermore, his apology is shrouded in more half-truths. Media pundits have an obligation to research facts. While he claims to have "steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive," this very sentence is misleading. First of all, there is a ton of scientific literature from other nations that shows promising results in understanding marijuana's potential for helping cancer patients cope with extreme pain and regain appetite. There is also medical literature from around the world that explores the psychological mechanisms behind the various compounds in marijuana (not just THC) that can have a positive impact on a wide array of medical conditions.

But really, does Gupta or his overlords at CNN truly think that modern Americans are so stupid that we believe the medical community in the United States to be that divorced from what is being researched in other nations, say the UK, Germany, Japan, France, Israel, or Switzerland? Because out of the 15 biggest pharmaceutical corporations, half are based in the US. The other half conduct their research in the UK (GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca), Germany (Bayer), Japan (Takeda), France (Sanofi-Aventis), Israel (Teva), or Switzerland (Novartis and Hoffman-LaRoche). And that's not counting the plentiful marijuana research reports published in other nations like Australia, Holland, Brasil, Russia, India, or China. Either Sanjay Gupta is telling more lies or CNN really does ignore the world outside the United States when it puts together its newscasts.

What if CNN's anchors started out the newscast saying "we reviewed todays news stories from countries outside the United States and found them to be fairly unimpressive"? Would that fly with you? No news of bombings in Nigeria, no news of Oprah being dissed in Switzerland, no news of violence in the Holy Land... all because it's "fairly unimpressive". If you claim to run a first-rate news agency, it's a lame excuse that flies as well as a hog. Rather than regale you with all the published, peer-reviewed studies that Dr Gupta chose to ignore since they weren't published in "the United States", I'll just wrap up my point by pointing the "liar" finger at Dr Gupta's face.

Now, because I try to hold pleadingthef1rst to a higher journalistic standard than CNN, I did some background investigation into CNN's holdings and those who hold stock in CNN. At this point, I can confirm that Time-Warner (which owns CNN) holds no pharmaceutical stock. However, I was unable to confirm whether any pharmaceutical corporations hold stock in Time-Warner, or whether Ted Turner (the mogul behind CNN) owns any significant stakes in pharmaceutical corporations. These facts are important because now that a majority of the American public has consistently backed marijuana legislation for over a decade, pharmaceutical companies are trying to figure out how to cash in.

The problem for their business side is that the American federal system has allowed a lot of smaller businesses to cash in ahead of them and accumulate a wealth of folk knowledge and research knowledge along the way. So because of anti-marijuana drug scheduling at the federal level, the only tactic left to the world's major pharmaceutical corporations for cornering the market is to turn to marketing. In other words, since they can't just play the game with its current rules, they want to deceive the public into thinking the rules are different long enough for them to manoeuvre into a dominant market position.

While this may sound like yet another outlandish conspiracy theory, it's how things are done. Just look at these few CNN stories from years past:
Dirt-Cheap Diabetes Drug
Leukemia Drug
Breast Cancer Drug

I could list many, many more similar articles from the CNN archives, but hopefully you are getting a sense for how at least this one media corporation is manipulating public thought on pharmaceutical information. They know that we, the People, will not spend our precious family time reading every major scientific article on every potenial drug. And we're not going to spend our free hours watching FDA proceedings in person. So they know we're going to rely on these secondary news sources (like CNN) to keep us misinformed. Mind you, every one of the major news corporations is doing the same thing. It's just that Sanjay Gupta's misdirection is so blatantly obvious that it provides an ideal focus for PtF's criticism.

Now, as for religious freedom, if you are of European or North Asian descent, there is a ~70% chance that your ancestors smoked marijuana regularly as part of a religious sacrament to honour and commune with your deceased ancestors. This religious tradition is still maintained today in the underground. Unfortuantely, the Supreme Court does not recognise religious practise unless it has not-for-profit religious status with the IRS. Just keep in mind that the Constitution exists to protect our rights, not to limit them. Yes, we may be breaking federal law by practising a religion that's over 3,000 years old, but we are not in violation of the greater law. In fact, it is the federal government that is in violation of that law.

Shame on CNN and Sanjay Gupta for enabling such an abuse to continue for so long, and shame on all American media for allowing so many medical patients suffering from epilepsy, insomnia, cancer, and other ills from getting the treatment that doctors today will still readily proscribe. While the public eye stands ignorant, doctors know what works. They may have their hands tied by insurance law, but they will still tell their patients how to survive chemotherapy, even if the federal government will arrest them for it.

Finally, shame on Barack Obama. We elected you thinking you would end drug persecution. We hoped that you would remove this scourge which alienates many African Americans and takes their lives and livelihoods at a young age. You've got two years to stand up and act like a progressive American, and we hope you - like Dr Gupta - won't act after doing a decade of damage.

Bomber Boycott Backfires

While I was out this past month, Rolling Stone decided to put the surviving Boston Marathon bomber on its cover, spurring torrents of outrage. It also spurred a misguided boycott, which according to the Christian Science Monitor, has backfired.

This story pops up as a free speech issue not because the government is stepping on anybody's freedoms, but because large masses of duped Americans are stepping on other Americans' freedoms. The kneejerk choice of the Boston police officer who released photos of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's capture is emblematic of the mindset that led to the failed boycott.

America needs to learn about what happened to Tsarnaev so that we can prevent it from happening again. I shudder to think that somewhere in Boston is still an officer of the law still serving as a police officer who believes so strongly in letting more Tsarnaevs happening in the US that he would be willing to step outside of the law in order to make a political statement. Such people do not have the mindset necessary for an impartial officer of the law and he should be immediately relieved of all duty, not just relegated to paperwork until this all blows over.

Of course, I don't think Sean Murphy actually wants to create more Tsarnaevs; but the effect of his statements and actions only perpetuate the climate of American ignorance that creates homegrown terrorists. All those people calling for a boycott of Rolling Stone over their editorial choice are also helping create more terrorists in the same ignorant manner. It's a matter of personal responsibility: either you take personal responsibility for society's ills and try to fix them, or like Murphy and the boycotters, you sweep society's ills under the rug until the burst forth again with renewed violence and more victims.

9/11 should have been a teachable moment. Millions of people around the world came together to support the United States. But when it became clear that such support was turning into military action, the support evaporated. We should have reacted to 9/11 by learning about what created Osama ibn Laden - the CIA, the ISI, the Pakistan-Afghanistan border conflict, and the larger Shia-Sunni struggle within the Islamic world - and taken steps as a nation to prevent that threat from growing. Instead, we destabilised the Middle East, entrenched the Taliban, and allowed religious fanatics to stake claim to legitimate government in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, and Egypt. Sadly, the way America responded to 9/11 created Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The way America responds to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will determine whether we create the next generation of terror. One of the things I have learned watching terrorism cases over the past 15 years, is that entrapment isn't just one of the tools used by American law enforcement to eliminate potentially terroristic personalities. It is actually the primary tool that creates domestic terrorism. From Newburgh to the Liberty City Seven, every single domestic incident of Islamic terrorism on American soil was incited by FBI investigators. The Tsarnaev situation is the first major terrorist case of this nature conducted by rogue operatives who were not incited to violence by the FBI. In both the Newburgh and Liberty City cases, the FBI gave money and fake explosives to the so-called terrorists. In the Newburgh case, as in many others, the perpetrators were coverted to Islam in jail by FBI operatives/informants, so that by the time they left incarceration they had been brainwashed into believing that "Jews" were responsible for all their suffering.

I don't know about Sean Murphy or my fellow Americans, but I find it absolutely disgusting to know that my own hard-earned tax dollars are being used to radicalise imprisoned Americans and convert them into anti-Semitic monsters.

The reason why Roling Stone's article is so crucial to our understanding and dialogue at this point in history is because the Tsarnaevs acted without FBI instigation. So did Wade Michael Page when he shot up the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, WI one year ago. In fact, so do many of our nation's ignored mass murderers. Our human reaction to these mass murders is one of disgust, but unless we are willing to take the philosophical suggestion of Jesus and Buddha and see ourselves within others, that disgust will lead to ignorance, which in turn leads to more mass murderers.

We are slowly discovering that a common thread in all these cases is social ostracisation, brought on by society at large percieving certain individuals as "socially awkward" or "mentally unstable". Rather than society dealing with the issue and fixing it, the approach of ostracisation makes the situation worse, pushing the individual toward instability when he should be headed toward adulthood. In many Muslim nations, especially in Central Asia, these individuals can join a guerilla group or terrorist group and end their suffering with a suicide bombing. In the US, they buy firearms and bulletproof vests and go on rampages.

For those who have read this far and think I'm a flaming liberal, this is the point where I stand up against gun control. Pushing for gun control does absolutely zero to end the ostracisation that is the cause of these mental disabilities and the root cause of all these murders. Sure, we must attribute personal responsibility to the murder and sentence him according to our law; but if we let it end there, we only allow future murders to happen. Therefore, pushing for gun control allows the same mentality to persist and allows future murders to happen, even if it might statistically reduce the per-capita numbers of gun violence.

Finally, we're also forgetting about suicide victims. How many more individuals decide to take their own lives instead of others? By focusing on gun control, we abandon suicide victims and their families while allowing their tormentors - who in most cases are serial abusers themselves - to walk free. Just look at the case of Phoebe Prince, and there are another 100+ recent cases of young people committing suicide under similar conditions.

So for the sake of the victims of 9/11, the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, the victims of FBI entrapment, the victims of suicide, and the victims of school shootings; I heartly applaud Rolling Stone for doing what needed to be done. It's good to see moral law preserving goodness in the face of evil people and it's good to see that confirmed economically by Rolling Stone doubling its sales for this one issue. For those of you who say I'm wrong, allow me to suggest you move to any nation whose political system suppresses the truth and values its peoples' ignorance.

America was put here as a revolution in the face of the Machiavellian order and all its abuses. If you have no interest in perpetuating the Revolution of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, you have no place being in America. And lest you think this is all about Tsarnaev and I'm giving him a free pass, I'm not. Tsarnaev's actions have demonstrated he is filled with the exact same mentality of contempt for America as still-serving police officer Sean Murphy. Both are a threat to our way of life, but luckily I live in America and still have the freedom to speak up and warn my fellow citizens: Let's make change now before any more Americans are killed.

Paul vs Christie - the Showdown Begins

Everyone already knows that Rand Paul and Chris Christie are the Republican heavyweights headed for the big game in 2016. The question I'm wondering is whether they can keep it civil enough to both run on the ticket or if Christie's callous indifference to public opinion will lose out over Paul's difficulty staking out America's libertarian middle ground. There's also the bizarre AquaBuddha story lurking in the background to derail Paul, but he's already had to deal with it pretty up close.

But my main point here is to point out some ominous words coming from Christie that drew scathing criticism from Paul and now do so from me:

"This all began last week when Christie said at an Aspen Institute forum that there is a 'strain of libertarianism' within the Republican Party by those who oppose the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program and other counterterrorism techniques. The governor said Paul and others in the GOP could come to New Jersey and explain their opposition to the 'widows and orphans' who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 terror attacks."

 From the AP via CBS Denver:

“I remember what this country was like on Sept. 12.... I’m very nervous about the direction this is moving in. I think we need to be very cautious … about shifting this thing way back."

 Chris Christie is trying to pay lip service to the national security establishment in the hopes that it will win him what looks to be a very, very bloody nomination process, unless as I said earlier he has already made the veep deal with Rand Paul.

But let's focus on the main issue, which is not Rand Paul but the preservation of the essence of American society. Remember above where I referred to the staking out of America's libertarian middle ground? This is the most important of my points. We are libertarian at heart.

I remember in public school trying to get to my backpack that was hanging on a wall and asking a classmate to please step aside so I could get to it. He responded, "I'm not moving. It's a free country." While that's one extreme case, it demonstrates how much freedom is in our air. Go to Japan, go to Germany or the UK, go to most places in Latin America or Africa and you won't find the air of freedom the way you do in the United States.

While I admit there are herds of mindless Americans who have grown so used to Facebook and smart phones that they refuse to practise security on a personal level, I still know how much freedom means to our culture and way of life. The Republican nomination in 2016 will be about whether freedom can still survive. We had hoped for Barack Obama to bring us that change, but his refusal to budge from a very anti-libertarian middle ground has squandered all the Democratic advances made in the horrors of the Bush era. With the Democratic Party already promising to put more police officers in the streets and continue reckless government abuses of power until it is voted out of office, America now turns its eye again to the Republican Party to see what morally-upright characters might still stroll amongst its ruins.

If you ask your average progressive whether he would vote for a libertarian or a capitalist conservative centrist, it's pretty obvious to see what would happen should Rand Paul win the nomination. It will be a very difficult process, but it will be enabled by all the liberal areas of the US that have recently moved in the direction of month-long elections and same-day registration. Young voters are leaning libertarian in larger numbers.

Remember that Rand Paul's father Ron Paul polled at a solid 30-33% in post-debate opinion polls for much of the primary process, until only the main contenders were left. Ron Paul also almost won Iowa with all the new voters he was able to muster, coming in just a hair behind the whirlwind Santorum blitz and the perpetual Romney machine. And Ron Paul won the overwhelming majority of caucus delegates from Iowa, for all the good it did him.

It's safe to say that Rand Paul's presence in Iowa should not be discounted, which I think explain's Christie's early attack. Sadly, it predisposes me against him. Sure, much of the centrist "I don't really follow politics" crowd who voted Christie into office will continue to support him at the national level, but I really don't think the middle of America is asking for it. Post-Bush and post-Obama, we need a real reformer.

Speaking of which, just take a look at the new Pope's stance on homosexuality. After growing up in a very Catholic part of the East Coast, I see it as nothing short of a miracle.

Let's pray we can get the miracle of an independent reformer in the White House again. Vetoing almost every bill would go a long way in cleaning up the bovine excreta of the legislative branch, even if it could put us into a short period of mild chaos. It's just trading the chaos of today's bureaucracy for the chaos of a few months' of reforms.

Use Pope Francis's cleaning up of the Vatican as the example here. Sure it causes a little chaos that the prelate of the Vatican Bank is indicted for theft and fraud. But restoring the brand to its true foundations thereby restoring trust of its clients/citizens to it is far more important to the brand in the long run than questions of growth or chaos. Long-term growth on a solid foundation is far more valuable as an asset, but America is heavily in personal and national debt.

Under Obama, the economy has been gaining ground, and businesses don't want that trend to stop, even in the name of reform. Even if the Obama economy can continue another two years of even more robust growth, Americans will still vote in droves for Rand Paul the same way they voted for George W. Bush. The current holders of debt and credit in America do not want the loose credit environment to stop, even if it means strengthening the ability of their debtors to pay up. They will be happy to line Christie's process for a bloody fight, again, unless Rand Paul is already playing along to their tune.

In the end, Rand Paul has irked me on some decisions, but time will tell whether he plays to money or to the tune of Liberty.

Manning's Convictions

Just a warning to y'all:

I've been out of blog-land for over a month, but a lot of news has been building up. I'll be firing out a few more of these in rapid succession over the next 48 hours.

So let's start out this post with the hottest First Amendment story of the hour: Bradley Manning's conviction. Manning was found guilty on 20 out of 22 counts. The mainstream media are reporting the fact that he was found not guilty of aiding the enemy as though it is some miracle when in reality it was a horrendously inept charge for prosecutors to level in the first place. The only reason for including the charge I can imagine is that the military wanted to send a strong signal to other soldiers that they would be charged similarly in their cases.

Believe me, I understand the need for internal security in the military. But what I don't understand is why an 18-year-old private was given access to classified national military secrets. I also don't understand why he had access to State Department information. It seems to me that our foreign affairs should not be part of even the DIA, but then again the DIA has grown far beyond its initial mandate and resists attempts to rein in its activities legally. I digress....

Back on why a young service member ranking at private would be allowed access to any of this stuff. It is a pressing issue of national law and fundamental chaos in our military bureaucracy when young, inexperienced personnel are handling information that should not even be within reach. In our effort to innovate and share information more quickly, the United States has wired its nation with an intelligence network that can function like a bomb with billions of independent parts. Bradley Manning just went off when he wasn't supposed to.

How much easier then for a civilian subcontrator - say Edward Snowden? - to use his position to steal the entire structure of the NSA. Bottom line: No more unaccountable personnel working in intelligence, period.

We don't need contractors or subcontractors gaining access, we don't need novices gaining access, we don't need one inept government branch sharing information it shouldn't with another inept branch, and we don't need any civilians except our appointed officials to be looking at sensivitve information. When information does need to be shared, it can be; however, the twin responses "We put it all up on the internet but it's password protected" and "the Federal government invented and owns the internet" should not be the excuse behind every lapse.

The American public are obviously victims of both Bradley Manning's inexperience and the Department of Defense's atrocious handling of intelligence for our national security, but while Manning today stands convicted of 20 counts for his part in the problem, the various officials above him in his chain of command will ever bear no responsibility for the bureaucratic mess they sustain around themselves, and many of the elected officials who wrote the poor legislation that enabled these abuses are lying six feet below amongst nettles and stones. Nobody is going to jail for allowing an 18-year-old to gain access to classified documents.

Manning is the scapegoat, but the American public must suffer with him, knowing that Bradley Manning could just as easily have stolen those dirty pictures of you doing the thing you shouldn't have in the place you shouldn't have been and leaked them to the media, in which case he wouldn't have been pursued by military investigators and maybe you'd be the one losing your job and answering to 22 counts in a court of law. Sadly, it's more common than you think.

If this is the future of our society, count me among the Amish.

Wiretapping Deja Vu, Part II

Normally, I wouldn't want to waste time exploring or commenting on an issue that's already been brought up. There are so many news events in the world that deserve coverage, so why waste time doubling up?

The story of the American phone-tapping scandal bears repeating today because of yesterday's twin revelations that the leaker involved is Edward Snowden, and that he worked for another barely-accountable government contractor named Booz Allen Hamilton. That leak should and would happen has been anticipated by many of us Americans, but the fact that it comes from a contractor should be extra cause for alarm.

It's bad enough to have the government snooping around everybody's private business. It's even worse knowing that the government is allowing people outside the government and outside law enforcement agencies to look at that information. Why? Because we have rules regarding the operations of our government officials. We expect all intelligence and security matters to be handled by the government because the private sector is mercilessly incompetent: incompetent at screening during the hiring process, incompetent at job performance, and horrendously incompetent at security, internal or otherwise. It's the same reason it should be illegal for private corporations to run prisons or run criminal gangs (aka "mercenary outfits") in war zones like Iraq. Remember the puppy thrown off the back of the truck? Remember the four Haliburton employees that got lynched in Fallujah? Remember the contractors taunting the Iraqi children with water bottles?

These sorts of behaviours occur because contractors are not held to the same standards of behaviour as actual federal employees and officials. Therefore, it is a major security threat to the United States to allow contractors to do security work instead of actual government employees, no matter the illusion of cost savings. Whether you are in favour of the Obama Administration reading all your mails and knowing which pair of underwear you are wearing, or if you are sane and oppose such over-reaching, we can all agree that using private contractors to conduct intelligence operations is as productive as using Swiss cheese to collect radioactive rainwater.

Let's say that Edward Snowden was an actual threat, a creep, a bad guy with a vendetta, a spy for China. Let's say that he just went underground and didn't bother to report this information to newspapers in America that are trying to save our country in their dying breath. That would mean that China would have the power to look at all the private communications and financial transactions of every single US citizen.

Let's now say that one of Snowden's fellow employees at Booz Allen Hamilton is an actual Chinese spy passing on intel to the Chinese government. It would mean that Presidents George W. Bush and Barak H. Obama are both responsible for rounding up the private details of all 300M+ American citizens and offering them on a golden platter to the Chinese, or the Russians, or any intelligent and well-funded enemy of the United States.

Any other country in the world could use our private communications to infiltrate our society without the American intelligence system even knowing. They could manipulate our political process, manipulate our economy, or throw some companies under the bus while making others profit wildly.

This is not just a flaw with using private contractors. This is the primary foible of pursuing security before freedom. By allegedly pursuing terrorists using methods that directly contradict our Constitution and the intentions of our Founders to create a truly free society, we have (perhaps) unwittingly planted socially-explosive devices in the private life of every American. This is a clear and present danger that cannot stand.

In other government snooping news, Senator Rand Paul, looking for some libertarian bonafides to bolster a potential 2016 presidential run, said on FOX News that he would try to spearhead a class action lawsuit against the federal government:

"I'm going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies, ask your customers to join me in a class action lawsuit. If we get 10 million Americans saying we don't want our phone records looked at then somebody will wake up and say things will change in Washington."

While I question Paul's motives (as I do for any politician, especially those living in their fathers' shadows), I certainly agree with his main thrust that there should be a class action lawsuit. In particular I'm thinking of the kind of lawsuit called an "impeachment". It's time to file some articles of impeachment in exchange for getting some business done to help the Democratic Party agenda. Even if Obama is not removed from office, an impeachment would send the clear signal from We the People that messing around with our Fourth Amendment rights is not okay with us. Furthermore, the impeacment proceedings should also call in George W. Bush, as well as all those who worked in either administration to undermine our American way of life.

Senator Paul, I know I'm not the only one who voted for Obama that wants Washington cleaned up. If only you'd jump on board and acknowledge just how seriously the private sector has failed us here, I'd support you 100% on your impeachment/class action suit and even vote for you in 2016. A lawsuit will only be meaningful if we can ensure that only those who are actual government employees can screw us. At least it assures me that any transgressions will be held accountable to the People.

Wiretapping Déja Vu

My what a tangled web we weave. It is disheartening but not unexpected that the American people are now again deciding to confront the Obama Administration on warrantless wiretapping, a clear  violation of every citizen's 4th Amendment rights. But why are unreasonable searches such a big deal and how does that relate to the First Amendment?

Historically, governments trying to prevent reasonable voices from instigating much-needed change will resort to unreasonable searches, unreasonable seizures, unreasonable arrests, unreasonable torture, and unreasonabe murder in order to stifle the message. Warrantless searching is Step #1 when it comes to abusing a population of people and eventually depriving them of far more important rights.

But this story also deserves a place at Pleading the First because of all the work we did in the past decade to generate public awareness of this horrific government menace. So here's a little of the back story the rest of you may have forgotten, a little recap for those not keyed into the underground.

The Federal government's warrantless wiretapping program began in 2001. Most people, even in the underground, are confused over this, thinking President George W. Bush started the program in response to 9/11. The reality is that the warrantless wiretapping program started in February, within weeks of Bush even taking office.

The method of the program was ingenious, and affected not only carriers and telecommunication corporations, but also product manufacturers and other peripheral industres. Basically, the NSA would commission from each corporation, privately, an insistence on access to all "company data". The private business contracts would also make it clear that the company was expected to record and save every phone call and internet data transmission. In the case of cell phone manufacturers, your everyday producers were legally required to have on-board wireless wiretapping technology or else they wouldn't be allowed to sell product in the USA.

If a corporation was smart enough to figure out that what was going on and decided to protest, NSA pulled the contracts, affacting corporate worth, and then arrested the CEOs for insider trading. Do some research on the cases of Bernie Ebbers and Joe Nacchio, who served jail time for not bowing to Bush. Also, feel free to dig up some former executive-level employees of MCI-WorldCom and Qwest Telecommunications, and you'll hear first-hand what those guys had to say about their arrests.

See, all the energy Americans put into getting Bush out of office was because of stories like this. We were disgusted that a sitting American president could have such contempt for our ways and traditions. We were also disgusted that most Republicans would not join the Democrats in getting rid of Bush, and we were disgusted that such anti-Americanism on Bush's part would nevertheless win him re-election. (Then again, John Kerry was probably the worst choice to head the Democratic ticket, but that's another discussion for another day.)

When America voted for Democrats to control Congress in 2006, we hoped that Bush would be brought to bear for his crimes against us. Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that any legal action against President Bush was "off the table". In 2008, when our agitation got Obama elected, the new President also declared that he would not pursue charges against Bush because it would be looking backward instead of forward. Imagine a prosecutor saying that to a family of a teenager who was raped and murdered: "We don't want to prosecute the murdering criminal because we want to move forward."

And yet Democrats bought the argument hook, line, and sinker. So now the shoe is on the other foot. Now it's Democrats who are abusing an illegal government program that shouldn't be in existence. Now it's the Democratic Party and its President who can squarely bear the blame for not putting a stop to criminal behaviour that threatens our nation and erodes the rights of every citizen.

If Democrats want a Congressional majority before Obama leaves office, they need to reverse course, pack up the program, and throw Bush in jail. Believe me, once Republicans understand the criminal actions that went on in the White House from 2001-2009, they won't be voting Republican for a while. Of course, to prosecute Bush is to prosecute only a small piece of the mess in Washington.

The excuse "this program protects us" is bunk. That's like me saying I need a nuclear bomb to protect my home from intruders. How can a program protect me if it makes it easier for the government to stifle my speech, take my money, and prevent me from my right to protest and rebel? How can I be free if every phone call I make or email I send can be read by my President?

So the Democrats and Republicans are both morally compromised. Let's do away with both parties so we can fix this system. Focus on third parties until Democrats and Republicans are but a footnote in history. Neither of the major parties has what it takes to run America, obviously. Neither knows how to protect us from terrorists and neither is able to protect us in any manner that doesn't fundamentally hurt us. It is high time for change....