It is patriotic to object to invasions of our privacy

b. traven

For those Democratic voters who still, after five years of bitter experience, retain the forlorn hope that a real liberal or progressive heart beats in Obama’s chest, the recent revelation in The Washington Post that it was Obama who, in 2011, empowered the National Security Agency to go after Americans’ private communications should finally end that fantasy.   The revelations of Edward Snowden have shown us the perfidy of our own government in ignoring the Fourth Amendment that grants us a right to privacy.  But the blame for this cannot be assigned solely to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cronies.

No, our very own “hope and change” president, the former constitutional lawyer, has conspired to abrogate our right to privacy.  If that’s not enough to wake Obama supporters from their fantasies, consider the fact that Obama has just put forward the name of Valerie Caproni for appointment to a federal judgeship on an important “terrorism” court.  Caproni, currently a counsel for Northrop Grumman, a major defense contractor, is formerly an FBI legal adviser where she was associated with defending significant infringements of the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens by the FBI.

So much for appointing individuals who are beholden to the people.  Obama prefers judges who kowtow to defense corporations and government police agencies.

Don’t forget Obama’s authoritarian nature when the next self-appointed “progressive” hopeful, Hillary Clinton, tries to assume his mantle in the presidential primaries leading up to 2016.

News Flash: After we published this article, we learned (via another leak by Edward Snowden) that the U.S. government shares intelligence containing private data of American citizens with a foreign country, in this case Israel.  This fact was reported by the Guardian in Britain here.  There: Now don’t you feel safer?