Thread: Obama: Detention OK for 1st Amendment 'activities' Order preventing enforcement appea

WND EXCLUSIVE

Obama: Detention OK for 1st Amendment 'activities'

Order preventing enforcement appealed by Department of Justice

Published: 53 mins ago by Bob Unruh

The Obama administration is battling to restore a controversial provision of a new federal law that it admits could have been used to arrest and detain citizens indefinitely – even if their actions were protected by the First Amendment.

A federal judge this week made permanent an injunction against enforcement of Section 1021 of the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, which was declared unconstitutional.

The Obama administration then took only hours to file an appeal of the order from U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, and attorneys also asked her to halt enforcement of her order.

In her order, Forrest wrote, “The government put forth the qualified position that plaintiffs’ particular activities, as described at the hearing, if described accurately, if they were independent, and without more, would not subject plaintiffs to military detention under Section 1021.”

But she continued, “The government did not – and does not – generally agree or anywhere argue that activities protected by the First Amendment could not subject an individual to indefinite military detention under Section 1021.”

The case was brought last January by a number of writers and reporters, led by New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges. The journalists contend the controversial section allows for detention of citizens and residents taken into custody in the U.S. on “suspicion of providing substantial support” to anyone engaged in hostilities against the U.S.

The lawsuit alleges the law is vague and could be read to authorize the arrest and detention of people whose speech or associations are protected by the First Amendment. They wonder whether interviewing a member of al-Qaida would be considered “substantial support.”

“Here, the stakes get no higher: indefinite military detention – potential detention during a war on terrorism that is not expected to end in the foreseeable future, if ever. The Constitution requires specificity – and that specificity is absent from Section 1021,” the judge wrote.

Dan Johnson, a spokesman with People Against the NDAA, told WND it took only hours for the government to file an appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

“It most definitely tells us something about their intent,” he told WND.

He cited Obama’s signing statement, when the bill was made law, that he would not use the provision allowing detention of American citizens without probable cause in military facilities.

“Just because someone says something doesn’t mean they’re not lying,” he said.

Bloomberg reports the Obama administration also is asking Forrest for a stay of the ruling that found the law violates the First, Fifth and 14th Amendments.

The judge expressed dissatisfaction with what one observer described as the arrogance of the Department of Justice in the case.

Forrest asked the government to define the legal term, noting the importance of how they apply to reporting and other duties.

“The court repeatedly asked the government whether those particular past activities could subject plaintiffs to indefinite military detention; the government refused to answer,” she wrote.

“The Constitution places affirmative limits on the power of the executive to act, and these limits apply in times of peace as well as times of war,” she wrote.

She said the law “impermissibly impinges on guaranteed First Amendment rights and lacks sufficient definitional structure and protection to meet the requirements of due process.”

“This court rejects the government’s suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention, and have as their sole remedy a habeas petition adjudicated by a single decision-maker (a judge versus a jury), by a ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard,” she wrote.

“That scenario dispenses with a number of guaranteed rights,” she said.

The Obama administration already has described those who hold a pro-life position or support third-party presidential candidates or the Second Amendment fit the profile of a domestic terrorist.

Obama stated when he put his signature to the legislative plan that his administration “will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.”

Virginia already has passed a law that states it would not cooperate with such detentions, and several local jurisdictions have done the same. Arizona, Rhode Island, Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Washington also have considered similar legislation.

The case was brought on behalf of Christopher Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Jennifer Bolen, Noam Chomsky, Alex O’Brien, Kai Warg All, Brigitta Jonsottir and the group U.S. Day of Rage. Many of the plaintiffs are authors or reporters who stated that the threat of indefinite detention by the U.S. military already had altered their activities.

Constitutional expert Herb Titus filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the sponsor of the Virginia law, Delegate Bob Marshall and others.

Titus, an attorney with William J. Olson, P.C., told WND the judge’s first decision to grant a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of paragraph 1021 “affirms the constitutional position taken by Delegate Marshall is correct.”

The impact is that “the statute does not have sufficient constitutional guidelines to govern the discretion of the president in making a decision whether to hold someone in indefinite military detention,” Titus said.

The judge had noted that the law doesn’t have a requirement that there be any knowledge that an act is prohibited before a detention. The judge also said the law is vague, and she appeared to be disturbed that the administration lawyers refused to answer her questions.

Titus said the judge’s conclusions underscore “the arrogance of the current regime, in that they will not answer questions that they ought to answer to a judge because they don’t think they have to.”

The brief was filed on behalf of Marshall and other individuals and organizations, including the United States Justice Foundation, Downsize DC Foundation, Institute on the Constitution, Gun Owners of America, Western Center for Journalism, the Tenth Amendment Center and Pastor Chuck Baldwin.

Marshall’s HB1160 passed the Virginia House of Delegates by a vote of 87-7 and the Virginia Senate 36-1. Since the vote was on changes recommended by Gov. Bob McDonnell, it was scheduled to take effect without further vote.

Marshall then wrote leaders in state legislatures around the country suggesting similar votes in their states.

Marshall’s letter noted Virginia was the first state in the nation to refuse cooperation “with federal authorities who, acting under the authority of section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), could arrest and detain American citizens suspected of aiding terrorists without probable cause, without the right to know the charges against them, and without the procedural rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.”

He told lawmakers, “While we would hope that the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives would be vigilant to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens, even when addressing the problem of international terrorism, those efforts in Congress failed at the end of last year, and President Obama signed NDAA into law on December 31, 2011.”

Endorsing Marshall’s plan was the Japanese American Citizens League, which cited the detention of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II on no authorization other than the president’s signature.

The Obama administration continues to argue the law allows for detention without legal due process only those who “substantially supported” terror groups such as al-Qaida or “associated forces.”

But the plaintiffs note that the law does not define those terms.

Instead, they point to the law’s provision that such individuals may be detained “without trial until the end of the hostilities.”

Obama attorneys said the new law simply affirms what already was precedent under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was adopted in the dust of the 9/11 terror attacks.

But plaintiffs wrote, “Nowhere does the AUMF convey to the executive the power to detain any person – citizen or otherwise – who ‘substantially supported’ al-Qaida or the Taliban or their associate forces, as section 1021 of the NDAA now provides.”

“No case has ever recognized the government’s contention that the AUMF authorized the detention of noncombatants. … Neither case law nor the actual text of the AUMF supports the government’s contention that such detention power already existed.”

Obama: Detention OK for 1st Amendment ‘activities’

Obama’s Craven Betrayal of the First Amendment

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Cowboy Byte

In the Daily Caller, Neil Munro reports that the Obama administration has asked YouTube to suppress the offensive film that is the pretext for some of the Islamist rioting. This is, of course, in accordance with the demands of the Muslim brotherhood.

It goes without saying that such government interference in speech protected by the First Amendment is uncomfortably close to a complete betrayal of the President’s oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. The “speech” to which the Islamists object is, true, offensive. So is “Piss Christ” and a variety of other anti-Christian (or anti-Semitic) rhetoric. But under our foundational principles, speech rights cannot be abridged by the government unless its purpose is to incite imminent lawless action. This doesn’t cover a film criticizing a religion (even if the film is tasteless and repugnant), i.e., something that might ruffle sensitivities enough to make people want to riot once they can get a riot organized. It means instead something like a person on the spot urging on an angry and hysterical crowd, say, to attack an embassy.



Continue Reading on townhall.com

http://cowboybyte.com/12490/obamas-c...rst-amendment/




And also this : Who is this the President of again, and who does he work for????

Obama: “Islam Is Part Of Our National Story”

Posted on August 11, 2012 by Cowboy Byte

The fact that Muslims make up less than 1% of the U.S. population begs to differ.
President Obama’s remarks at his Iftar dinner

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, everybody. (Applause.) Please, please have a seat. Good evening, everyone. And welcome to the White House.


Of all the freedoms we cherish as Americans, of all the rights that we hold sacred, foremost among them is freedom of religion, the right to worship as we choose. It’s enshrined in the First Amendment of our Constitution — the law of the land, always and forever. It beats in our heart — in the soul of the people who know that our liberty and our equality is endowed by our Creator. And it runs through the history of this house, a place where Americans of many faiths can come together and celebrate their holiest of days — and that includes Ramadan.


Continue Reading on weaselzippers.us

Obama:


Maybe Islam is part of your history bub but it isn't part of mine or most of America.

Obama submits to Brotherhood, asks for suppression of anti-


September 15, 2012
By Neil Munro /Daily Caller

President Barack Obama has bowed to the Muslim Brotherhood’s demand that the federal government suppress a satirical video of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad.

But Youtube denied the request late Sept. 14.

Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told the Washington Post midday that the White House has “reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and ask them to review whether it violates their terms of use.”

Youtube’s executives shut down videos that they deem “hate speech.” A YouTube spokesperson said Sept. 12 that the video “is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube,” and repeated that message late Sept. 14, so rejecting Obama’s unprecedented request.

Obama’s request complied with the Sept. 13 demand and threat by the brotherhood, which now governs the Arab world’s largest country, Egypt.

“Hurting the feelings of one and a half billion Muslims cannot be tolerated, and… we demand that all those involved in such crimes be urgently brought to trial,” according to an English-language statement on the brotherhood’s website.

The brotherhood’s demand included a threat of additional violence during Obama’s re-election campaign

“The people’s anger and fury for their Faith is invariably predictable, often unstoppable,” said the website.

Brotherhood-organized violence throughout the Middle East could deeply damage Obama’s election chances, just as similar Islamist violence in Iran sank President Jimmy Carter’s re-election effort in 1979.

The brotherhood’s demands were pushed Sept. 13 by Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamad Morsi, a brotherhood member who Obama helped put in power. (WATCH: The anti-Muhammad video cited as cause of unrest)

The video-makers “are not accepted, not by people in Egypt nor other Arab and Islamic countries, nor by their own people,” Morsi declared at a televised event in Brussels, Belgium.

“I affirm that the American people reject this and I’ve called on them to declare their rejection of them, at the same time with our rejection of those bad practices that bring harm and not benefit,” he claimed to his audience in Egypt, Europe and Washington.

Obama’s re-election campaign is being held hostage by Morsi, said Michael Rubin, an expert on Islamist parties at the American Enterprise Institute.

In response, Obama should repeatedly declare the First Amendment bars U.S. government action against Islam’s critics, and should also threaten to cut off much-needed financial aid to Egypt, Rubin said. (EXPERT: ‘Obama is hostage to Morsi’)

Obama and his aides, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have begun to say that their hands are tied by the First Amendment, but they also continue to denounce the video as “disgusting.”

The federal denunciation of the video bolsters Morsi’s effort to focus domestic unrest on America, rather than on the performance of his government.

Morsi depends on aid from the United States and other Arab countries, because the country’s 82 million people are wracked by unemployment, poor education, food shortages and corruption.

In contrast to Obama’s request, Gov. Mitt Romney defended the video-maker’s First Amendment rights.

“The idea of using something that some people consider sacred and then parading that out a negative way is simply inappropriate and wrong… Of course, we have a First Amendment,” he said Sept. 14 during an ABC interview. “Under the First Amendment, people are allowed to do what they feel they want to do,” he said.

The White House’s submission came two days after Obama told CBS that free speech “is one of the hallmarks of our Constitution that I’m sworn to uphold, and so we are always going to uphold the rights for individuals to speak their mind,”

It was announced shortly after White House spokesman Jay Carney publicly disavowed any plans to curb free speech. “We cannot and will not squelch freedom of expression in this country — it is a foundational principle,” he told reporters at a 11:15 a.m. press conference in the White House.

Read more: Obama submits to Brotherhood, asks for suppression of anti-Islam video | The Daily Caller

Dan Johnson, a spokesman with People Against the NDAA, toldWND it took only hours for the government to file an appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

“It most definitely tells us something about their intent,” he told WND.

He cited Obama’s signing statement, when the bill was made law, that he would not use the provision allowing detention of American citizens without probable cause in military facilities.

“Just because someone says something doesn’t mean they’re not lying,” he said.

Bloomberg reports the Obama administration also is asking Forrest for a stay of the ruling that found the law violates the First, Fifth and 14th Amendments.

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We lost ground on civil liberties with the Patriot Act and poerful government people, regardless of party, will continue eroding our civil lliberties if we don't scream loud enough to be heard! Like research who voted for the Patriot act and vote them OUT!

City Prepares To Outlaw First Amendment


Winter Park, Florida’s City Commission gave a preliminary approval to make an “emergency public safety ordinance” permanent. It would effectively shut down most if not all protests within fifty feet of any home and no ability to protest in a residential area. This is the First Amendment under attack.

The ban comes after pro-life protestors picketed the home of a notable resident on August 18. Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando CEO Jenna Tosh said, “I literally had to push through these folks who were carrying massive protest signs and signs that said, ‘Jenna Tosh kills babies and hurts women.’”

That night the Commission passed and emergency 60-day ordinance that banned protesting in residential areas. Then on September 10 they voted to make that ordinance permanent.

The Winter Park/Maitland Observer reports,

The 4-1 vote, which was opposed on the Commission by Mayor Ken Bradley, grabbed the interest of a local constitutional lawyer, who said the city went “way too far” to stop anyone from protesting within 50 feet of a residential home in the city. Attorney and UCF political science instructor Derek Brett said the ordinance would ban protesting in “huge swaths of the city,” referring to it as “unconstitutionally overboard.”

On Monday night, the mayor denounced the protest at the Tosh home as “heinous.” But though the protest in question involved signs depicting aborted fetuses, Bradley said that he couldn’t stomach voting to make protesting illegal.

“I understand the need to have some sort of public safety… but I just can’t get around our Constitution on this matter,” Bradley said. “I just can’t vote to stop free speech.”

The remaining four members of the Commission disagreed, stating that the city’s need for public safety trumped its need to allow protests. The ordinance will require a second vote before it officially becomes law.That could occur as soon as Sept. 24.

It’s quite amazing actually that many of these commissioners claim that “personal safety trumps free speech.” This is especially curious since no one was threatened or harmed in any way. While people do not have a right to protest on private property, to say they cannot protest on public sidewalks or within a certain distance of a house is government stepping over its bounds.

Isaac Babcock goes on to write:

Winter Park resident Paul Vonder Heide said there is no added danger from protestors because there are already laws in the city to protect residents if they’re in danger.

“Laws that prohibit rioting, assault, noise and trespass for example,” Vonder Heide said. Those laws, he said, would be enforced on site by the same police officers who would now be dispatched to stop protests before any of the existing laws were broken.

Vonder Heide pointed to the interesting timing of the city recently honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. before curtailing speech rights in the city.

“You put a sign up in a public park to honor a civil rights leader, yet your ordinance mocks his life dedicated to peaceful protest as the most effective weapon against a racist and unjust society,” he said.

He’s right. If there are no laws broken, the people have the right to peaceful assembly under the Constitution.


Commissioner Steve Leary said, “I hate that we have to do this. I hate that our friends or neighbors or guests would have to feel fearful in their homes or any other place. Just for me, protecting our residents and their children, and if they have fear of walking out of their door, that’s a tough call. No one should live in fear of that.”

Well since you hate it so much Mr. Leary, why do it? Again, no one is in danger. Perceived fear is not a reason to violate people’s rights.

City attorneys claim the ordinance will hold up in court. They cite Frisby v. Schultz that was decided by the Supreme Court in 1988. The Court ruled 6-3 that the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly and protest was not violated when the the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, suburb of Brookfield passed an ordinance banning protests outside the home of Dr. Victoria, who performed abortions.

Attorney Larry Brown said, “When I dug into these laws, they stated that protecting residential tranquility was a paramount issue.”

Mr. Brown cited a legal precedent, Carey v. Brown, for such ordinances in other states as well.

The problem comes when cities fail to cover all of its bases with their ordinances, says constitutional law specialist Derek Brett. “What happens if you have a Baptist church that’s sponsoring an operation rescue rally, and that happens to be in a residential neighborhood?” Brett said. “Not only do you have conflicts of free speech, but also conflicts of free exercise of religion.”

All this will end up doing is making criminals of law abiding citizens exercising their First Amendment rights and allowing for more totalitarianism at the local level.

Read more: City Prepares To Outlaw First Amendment

We lost ground on civil liberties with the Patriot Act and poerful government people, regardless of party, will continue eroding our civil lliberties if we don't scream loud enough to be heard! Like research who voted for the Patriot act and vote them OUT!

What bothers me most is that if this were strictly a Democrat or far left action, I could see where they are coming from. But this has predominant GOP support. Moreover, conservative talk show hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, have actually not only supported the Patriot Act, but have stated that anyone that does not support the Patriot Act is NOT a true conservative. As far as I am concerned a true conservative supports the US Constitution as written. The Patriot Act is not Constitutional. It was rammed through to take advantage of the 9/11 crisis by government toadies too incompetent or too lazy to comply with the due process and privacy provisions of the Constitution. Indefinite Detention is more of the same and God Bless the judge who has ruled it unconstitutional.

Obama vs. the First Amendment
By Andrew C. McCarthy
September 15, 2012 4:00 A.M.

Democrats and their sharky Obamedia defense lawyers are in a snit. For three dreamy convention days in Charlotte, they told themselves that, for the first time in decades, it was their guy who had the upper hand when it came to national security. Now that bubble has burst, the way contrived narratives do when they crash into concrete challenges. At that point, an airy president of the world won’t do; we need to have a president of the United States, a job that has never suited, and has never been of much interest to, Barack Obama.

Defense against foreign enemies is the primary job of the president of the United States. The rationale for the office’s creation is national defense — not green venture capitalism, not rationing medical care, not improving the self-image of the “Muslim world,” not leaving no child behind, not blowing out the Treasury’s credit line. Yet, though we are entering the late innings, foreign policy and national defense have not been factors in the 2012 campaign.

That is worth bearing in mind when we hear the laugh-out-loud narrative of Obama as foreign-affairs chess master. The president badly wants to win reelection. If there were anything to his alleged prowess, we’d not have heard the end of it. What we’ve heard, instead, is a bumper-sticker: “Obama killed Osama.” The Left hoped to paste it over the president’s generally dreary record. Even with the Obamedia in coordinated overdrive, the plan can work only if Mitt Romney lets it work — and, thankfully, it looks like he won’t.

Give the president his due: In 2008, he said he would go hard against terrorist havens, no matter how upset this made John McCain’s cherished “allies” in Pakistan, and he has. But even the welcome slamming of jihadist redoubts is undermined by the mess Obama has made of terrorist detention — so our forces kill in situations where they could capture, drying up the intelligence reservoir that has been vital to thwarting new cells and plots.

Moreover, any president would have given the order to take bin Laden out, and just about any post-9/11 president would bomb jihadist hideouts. What’s extraordinary about Obama’s performance in this regard is that he’s one you might have wondered about — he gets graded on a curve. But, thankful as we may be, this is thin camouflage for the rest of Obama’s agenda, which is post-American, anti-constitutional, enabling of the ideology that spawns terrorism, faithless toward our real allies, and feckless in the face of menacing Iran.

The game never goes according to plan. The batted ball always manages to find the suspect fielder, no matter how hard the coach, or the campaign, tries to hide him. On the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, the world and its affairs found the Obama administration — intruding on the president’s effort to win reelection by a brand of domestic class warfare that gives new meaning to the word “small.”

When it came, Obama’s moment was entirely predictable. It was, after all, self-inflicted: the inevitable fallout of policy crafted by the faculty-lounge pinhead, whose ideas are so saccharine smug there’s never a thought of anything so jejune as their consequences. Obama being Obama, when the consequences came, he crawled under his desk — before escaping to a Vegas fundraiser.

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” So declared the Obama State Department in a statement issued on the website of its Egyptian embassy. At the time, it was clear that another episode of Muslim mayhem was imminent.

The statement is a disgrace, just as Mitt Romney said it was. It elevated over the U.S. Constitution (you know, the thing Obama took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend”) the claimed right of sharia supremacists (you know, “Religion of Peace” adherents) to riot over nonsense. Further, it dignified the ludicrous pretext that an obscure, moronic 14-minute video was the actual reason for the oncoming jihad.

Here is the important part, however, the part not to be missed, no matter how determined the president’s media shysters are to cover it up: The disgraceful embassy statement was a completely accurate articulation of longstanding Obama policy.

As Obama struggled to put daylight between himself and his record, the press was duly pathetic. The president, Politico was quick to cavil, had nothing to do with “the statement by Embassy Cairo.” An administration official declaimed that it “was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government.” You are to believe the Obama White House exists in a galaxy separate from the Obama State Department, which itself inhabits a frontier distant and detached from the U.S. embassy in Cairo — except, one supposes, for the $38,000 in taxpayer funds the embassy spent on Obama autobiographies, apparently thought to be craved by Egyptians, at least when they’re not ever-so-moderately chanting “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”

In point of fact, the embassy’s statement perfectly reflects the views of the United States government under Obama’s stewardship. It is anathema to most Americans, but it has been Obama’s position from the start.

In 2009, the Obama State Department ceremoniously joined with Muslim governments to propose a United Nations resolution that, as legal commentator Stuart Taylor observed, was “all-too-friendly to censoring speech that some religions and races find offensive.” Titled “Freedom of Opinion and Expression” — a name only an Alinskyite or a Muslim Brotherhood tactician could love — the resolution was the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by the 57-government Organization of the Islamic Conference (now renamed the “Organization of Islamic Cooperation”). The OIC’s explicit goal is to coerce the West into adopting sharia, particularly its “defamation” standards.

Sharia severely penalizes any insult to Islam or its prophet, no matter how slight. Death is a common punishment. And although navel-gazing apologists blubber about how “moderate Islamist” governments will surely ameliorate enforcement of this monstrous law, the world well knows that the “Muslim street” usually takes matters into its own hands — with encouragement from their influential sheikhs and imams.

In its obsession with propitiating Islamic supremacists, the Obama administration has endorsed this license to mutilate. In the United States, the First Amendment prohibits sharia restrictions on speech about religion. As any Catholic or Jew can tell you, everyone’s belief system is subject to critical discussion. One would think that would apply doubly to Islam. After all, many Muslims accurately cite scripture as a justification for violence; and classical Islam recognizes no separation between spiritual and secular life — its ambition, through sharia, is to control matters (economic, political, military, social, hygienic, etc.) that go far beyond what is understood and insulated as “religious belief” in the West. If it is now “blasphemy” to assert that it is obscene to impose capital punishment on homosexuals and apostates, to take just two of the many examples of sharia oppression, then we might as well hang an “Out of Business” sign on our Constitution.

The Obama administration, however, did not leave it at the 2009 resolution. It has continued to work with the OIC on subordinating the First Amendment to sharia’s defamation standards — even hosting last year’s annual conference, a “High Level Meeting on Combatting Religious Intolerance.” That paragon of speech sensitivity, Secretary of State Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton, hailed as a breakthrough a purported compromise that would have criminalized only speech that incited violence based on religious hostility. But it was a smokescreen: Speech that intentionally solicits violence, regardless of the speaker’s motivation, is already criminal and has always been exempted from First Amendment protection. There is no need for more law about that.

The sharia countries were happy with the compromise, though, because it also would have made unlawful speech that incites mere “discrimination” and “hostility” toward religion. Secretary Clinton’s feint was that this passed constitutional muster because such speech would not be made criminally unlawful. Yet the First Amendment says “make no law,” not “make no criminal law,” restricting speech. The First Amendment permits us to criticize in a way that may provoke hostility — it would be unconstitutional to suppress that regardless of whether the law purporting to do so was civil, as opposed to criminal.

But let’s put the legal hair-splitting aside. Knowing her legal position was unsound, and that traditional forms of law could not constitutionally be used to suppress critical examination of religion, Secretary Clinton further explained the administration’s commitment “to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” The government is our servant, not our master — besides enforcing valid laws, it has no business using its coercive power to play social engineer. More to the present point, however, the administration was effectively saying it is perfectly appropriate to employ extra-legal forms of intimidation to suppress speech that “we abhor.”

That is precisely what the Egyptian mob was about to do when the U.S. embassy issued its statement. The Obama administration’s position? The president endorses extortionate “peer pressure” and “shaming,” but condemns constitutionally protected speech. That’s exactly the message the embassy’s statement conveyed.

Mind you, what is playing out in Egypt — as well as Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia — is a charade. It has nothing to do with the dopey movie. There is as much or more agitation to release the Blind Sheikh — which the Obama administration has also encouraged by its embrace of Islamists, including the Blind Sheikh’s terrorist organization. The latest round of marauding is about power.

Islamic supremacists see themselves in a civilizational war with us. When we submit on a major point, we grow weaker and they grow stronger. They win a big round in the jihad. President Obama’s anti-constitutional policy — the one he lacked the courage to stand by when, shall we say, the “chickens came home to roost” — has made speech suppression low-hanging fruit. The Islamists are going for it.

In a situation that called for a president who would actually defend the Constitution, Mitt Romney rose to the occasion. The administration’s performance was, as he asserted, “disgraceful.” Further, Romney admonished,

America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and against our embassies. We’ll defend also our constitutional rights of speech, and assembly, and religion. We have confidence in our cause in America. We respect our Constitution. We stand for the principles our constitution protects. We encourage other nations to understand and respect the principles of our constitution, because we recognize that these principles are the ultimate source of freedom for individuals around the world.

Can you imagine the current incumbent, the guy sworn to defend the Constitution, ever saying such a thing — or, better, saying it and actually meaning it? Me neither. It will be remembered as the moment the race for president finally became about the real job of a president. It will be remembered as the moment Romney won.

Obama vs. the First Amendment - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online
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Written on September 15, 2012 at 9:31 am by FPP Obama: Detention OK for 1st Amendment ‘Activities

U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest made permanent an injunction against enforcement of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which was declared unconstitutional. Section 1021 is a provision that allows the federal government to have the military detain and hold indefinitely any person, including U.S. citizens, on simply claiming that they are suspected of terrorism or involved with terrorists and requires absolutely no evidence be provided against them. No due process is given to the detainee. consequently Section 1022 is tied to 1021 in that it requires military custody, not local authorities.

Judge Forrest said the section was a “chilling impact on First Amendment rights.”

The NDAA’s indefinite detention policy was signed into law by Barack Obama on January 1 of this year, supported by members of the Democrat, as well as, the Republican Parties and was supported by the Republican candidate for President Mitt Romney during the primary debates.

The Obama administration took only a few hours to file an appeal of the judge’s ruling and attorneys even asked her to halt enforcement of her order.

Obama: Detention OK for 1st Amendment ‘Activities’*|*Front Porch Politics

The Obama Administration plans to appeal the District Court decision blocking enforcement of certain sections of the National Defense Authorization Act [NDAA].

The article below cites one objectional provision:, "...a provision that allows the federal government to have the military detain and hold indefinitely any person, including U.S. citizens, on simply claiming that they are suspected of terrorism or involved with terrorists and requires absolutely no evidence be provided against them. No due process is given to the detainee. consequently Section 1022 is tied to 1021 in that it requires military custody, not local authorities"....

Liberty is not automatic and does not defend itself. Liberty can never be taken for granted.