To Lynch Liberty

You gotta make the knot good and tight.

It is important to remember, as Bush continues to keep his dwindling Fundy base mesmerized with his Goober Christ, Superstar act, the men who are doing the heavy lifting and slashing – the oligarchs who are busily ripping to ribs right out of Democracy’s chest – don’t believe one minute in the Father, the Son or the Holy Whatever.

The Bible bibble is just razzle for the rubes.

These are the fuckers who learned at the feet of Nixon. And who believe that the mistakes Nixon made had nothing whatsoever to do with him trying to do a sweep-and-clear of the Constitution with a flamethrower.

According to their Milhousology, the only errors Tricky Dick ever made were tactical. That in the end he didn’t have the nerve to do what needed to be done: burn the tapes, chuck a few dozen journalists and liberals into federal graybar – maybe have one or two executed for ginned war crimes to tune up the rest -- and roll a few tanks in the streets if necessary.

That he pussed out when he should have gone Full Metal Pinochet.

They learned that if you want to garrote Liberty, you gotta grab both ends of the rope and really pull.

Pull until you hear her windpipe pops. Until she goes cyanotic. Until she first goes limp, and then goes into the ground.

Once and for all.

First, at one end of the rope, exempt the loathsome slug who actually runs the government and who nourishes himself by feasting on the heartmeat of the nation from even the most rudimentary check on his paranoid fetish for suppression.

This via the Mercury News

Cheney exempts his own office from reporting on classified material

BY MARK SILVA
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration has dramatically accelerated the classification of information as "top secret" or "confidential," one office is refusing to report on its annual activity in classifying documents: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and "any other entity within the executive branch" to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist he is exempt.

Explaining why the vice president has withheld even a tally of his office's secrecy when such offices as the National Security Council routinely report theirs, a spokeswoman said Cheney is "not under any duty" to provide it.

That is only one way the Bush administration, from its opening weeks in 2001, has asserted control over information. By keeping secret so many directives and actions, the administration has precluded the public - and often members of Congress - from knowing about some of the most significant decisions and acts of the White House.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the administration has based much of its need for confidentiality on the imperative of protecting national security at a time of war. Yet experts say Bush and his closest advisers demonstrated their proclivity for privacy well before Sept. 11:

Starting in the early weeks of his administration with a move to protect the papers of former presidents, Bush has clamped down on the release of government documents. That includes tougher standards for what the public can obtain under the Freedom of Information Act and the creation of a broad new category of "sensitive but unclassified information."
…

The White House has resisted efforts by Congress to gain information, starting with a White House energy task force headed by Cheney and continuing with the president's secret authorization of warrantless surveillance of people inside the United States suspected of communicating with terrorists abroad. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., recently threatened to withhold funding for the surveillance program unless the White House starts providing information.

The administration has withheld the identities of, and accusations against, detainees held in its war on terror, and it censored the findings of a joint House-Senate committee that investigated the events leading to Sept. 11, including a 27-page blackout of Saudi Arabia's alleged connections to the terrorists.
…
Bush and Cheney have made it clear they are intent on reclaiming presidential powers lost by Bush predecessors. That erosion of power started with Richard Nixon's losing fight over the privacy of his papers after the Watergate scandal and continued through Bill Clinton's impeachment.

"This is a presidency in which, from the start, there were important forces to accentuate the executive prerogative, and all of that became more important after 9/11," said Fred Greenstein, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University and author of "The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino maintains that the White House has "struck the right balance "between national security and openness.

"We need to ensure that national security information is properly classified and protected," Perino said. "We endeavor to make as much information available to the public as possible. ... We are accountable to the American people. The president doesn't want it any other way."

…
Bush has a partner - some say mentor - in Cheney, who from the start resisted all efforts to disclose the inner workings of a task force devising the administration's energy policy. He defeated an unprecedented lawsuit by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to unveil that task force and carried his fight successfully to the Supreme Court.

And as the administration has sealed an increasing number of documents as secret or sensitive, and cut the number of documents being declassified each year, the refusal of Cheney's office to report on the number of its decisions stands out.
…

Cheney's office maintains that its dual executive and legislative duties make it unique, as the vice president also serves as president of the Senate.
"This matter has been carefully reviewed," said spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride. "It has been determined that the reporting requirement does not apply to the office of the vice president."
…

Organizations including the Sierra Club also carried the fight to the Supreme Court, which in 2004 voted 7-2 to uphold "a paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation" and returned the case to an appeals court, which last year ruled in favor of the White House.
…

Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, had insisted on "a presumption of disclosure." But Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, arguing that "no leader can operate effectively without confidential advice and counsel," implored all agencies to disclose information requested by the public "only after full and deliberate consideration ... of the privacy interests that could be implicated."
…

"Anyone who calls or writes a government agency for information encounters barriers that were just not there a decade ago," he said. "The government is undergoing a mutation in which we are gradually shifting into another kind of government in which executive authority is supreme and significantly unchecked."

It’s worth reading the whole thing, but Jesus, this is so deeply, gangrenously sick.

White House sycophants baldly asserting that – surprise! – everything is just Jim Dandy over at the House that Ruthless Built. That after careful review, the spokeslackey for Cheney has determined that Cheney has every right to take a chainsaw to the Constitution and play “Face-Shoot the Founders” with any of those annoying, anti-tyranny checks and balances that are still impeding his turning Pennsylvania Avenue into Red Square.

And now, after Clinton was tasered into a witness chair and then sandbagged by the strategic use of baseless charges in a partisan vendetta-fueled lawsuit, suddenly the Supremes have a come-to-Jesus moment and get very keen on “protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation".

So having asserted limitless monarchical powers on the part of the junta in the White House – with one fat fist firmly grasping the bitter end of the Thuggee scarf they have wound around the neck of Democracy – its time to give a fierce yank on the other end of the line.

Time to roll out the final solution to the few, pesky remnants of a free and fair press that still remain.

From the NYT

April 30, 2006
In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists
By ADAM LIPTAK

Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.

But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.

Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades. Leaking in Washington is commonplace and typically entails tolerable risks for government officials and, at worst, the possibility of subpoenas to journalists seeking the identities of sources.

But the Bush administration is putting pressure on the press as never before, and it is operating in a judicial climate that seems increasingly receptive to constraints on journalists.

…
Surprising Move by F.B.I.

One example of the administration's new approach is the F.B.I.'s recent effort to reclaim classified documents in the files of the late columnist Jack Anderson, a move that legal experts say was surprising if not unheard of.

"Under the law," Bill Carter, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said earlier this month, "no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them."

Critics of the administration position say that altering the conventional understanding between the press and government could have dire consequences.
"Once you make the press the defendant rather than the leaker," said David Rudenstine, the dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and a First Amendment scholar, "you really shut down the flow of information because the government will always know who the defendant is."

…
Others say the law is unconstitutional as applied to the press under the First Amendment.

"I don't think that anyone believes that statute is constitutional," said James C. Goodale, who was the general counsel of The New York Times Company during the Pentagon Papers litigation. "Literally read, the statute must be violated countless times every year."

Rodney A. Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond law school, took a middle ground. He said the existing laws were ambiguous but that in theory it could be constitutional to make receiving classified information a crime. However, he continued, the First Amendment may protect newspapers exposing wrongdoing by the government.

The two newspapers contend that their reporting did bring to light important information about potential government misconduct. Representatives of the papers said they had not been contacted by government investigators in connection with the two articles.

That is baffling, Mr. McCarthy said. At a minimum, he said, the reporters involved should be threatened with prosecution in an effort to learn their sources.
…

If you believe that democracy is a government that belongs to the people and a free and vigorous press is a prerequisite to the people exercising that ownership responsibly, then you can feel the knife at your throat.

If you believe democracy is a quaint relic that has no place in the modern world, then you love this shit. You’ve been waiting in state of frustrated fascist blueballery since Nixon called it quits.

You believe the people have no business knowing what the government is up to.

You believe your rights as alienable as hell. That they’re on loan to you from the State, who has every right to take them away from you when you get all uppity. Or curious. Or you persistently keep your melanin levels willfully and premeditatedly high.

You believe that the purpose of “News” is to keep you entertained. To slip its aardvark tongue deep into your ear to tickle you and tell you only what you want to hear.

You believe people who tell you pretty lies and fuck your children’s future into a shallow grave are your friends, and people who tell you blunt truths and try to keep you and everyone you love from flying off the cliff towards which you are being stampeded are your enemies.

You are, in other words, a loyal Republican.