One Is Punished If One Steals a Goose Off the Common; But If One Steals the Common Out from Under the Goose, One Profits

Professor Eisen discusses the privatization of publicly-funded knowledge. The taxpayers pay for the development of knowledge and then must pay again to access this knowledge. This happens across the spectrum of other activities as well. The public pays to develop medicines which are then given to private companies to own and market. The private pharmaceutical companies then charge the public for the drugs for which the public has already paid. Likewise, our courts and legislatures make decisions and establish laws with public funding. The cases and laws are then compiled by private companies and loaded into computers for which the public must pay again if they wish to access the law.

Michael Eisen, Professor, UC of Berkeley

It is a felony to share knowledge created by the faculty, staff and students of the University of California with the public.

Wait. What?

In 2011, online rights activist Aaron Swartz was accused of using the MIT computer network to download millions of scholarly journal articles with the intent of freely sharing them with the public. Federal prosecutors aggressively pursued charges against him, and, earlier this month, with a trial looming, Swartz killed himself.

The Justice Department has faced intense scrutiny for its senseless decision to turn this victimless act into a major case, but the real culprits in this tragedy are all the universities across the world that allowed articles that rightfully belong to the public to fall into private hands in the first place.

Every day, faculty, staff and students of the University of California hand over control of papers describing their ideas and discoveries to publishers, most of whom immediately lock them up behind expensive paywalls. They do this not only with the university’s knowledge— they do it with its complicity.

That the public does not have unlimited access to the intellectual output of academic scholars and scientists is one of the greatest-ever failures of vision and leadership from the men and women who run our research universities — all the more so at a publicly funded institution like the University of California.

When the Internet began to take off in the mid-1990’s, it created the opportunity to do something scholars had been dreaming of for millennia — to gather all of the writings of scholars past and present together in a single online public library — a free, globally accessible version of the ancient library in Alexandria.

But 20 years on and we are barely any closer to achieving this goal. Instead of posting their work online, scholars send them to journals, most of which condition publication on receipt of the authors’ copyright. These journals then exercise their exclusive rights to distribute these works by demanding payment for access to their collections.

If you have not yet published in a scholarly journal, you may not realize just how absurd this transaction is. Scholars at the UC system and every other research university on the planet voluntarily hand over control of their work to publishers, work that the same universities have to immediately turn around and buy back. And this is not a minor transaction — revenue for scholarly journals exceeds an estimated $9 billion per year.

It is inexplicable enough that university administrators have done next to nothing to stop this ridiculous system. But the situation is even worse than that. Not only do universities refuse to stop shoveling money to publishers, but they all but require that their faculty publish in these journals. They do this by promulgating the idea that getting a faculty position at Berkeley, and then being tenured and promoted, requires publishing in prestigious journals, most of which greatly limit access to their contents.

While I and a handful of others have resisted, most of my colleagues are unwilling to risk their careers in the name of public access to their work. And thus an insane and unjust system continues.

The situation is, however, not completely static, especially in the sciences. Alternative publishing paradigms have emerged, including the “open access” model pioneered by the Public Library of Science which I co-founded. And major funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, now require that their grantees make their works freely available, albeit with a delay.

No single action would accelerate this process more than a clear endorsement from university leaders that free public access to the works people produce is not just a good— it is a priority. The university should take the lead by making such a declaration and openly altering the criteria for hiring, tenure and promotion to emphasize the value and importance of public access and ultimately require it.

For too long the leaders of this university have sat idly by while the crisis of scholarly communication festered. Decades ago, universities should have stepped forward to take advantage of the Internet to advance their disseminating mission. They didn’t, but it’s never too late to start.

NOTE: In the early years of the Internet certain companies garnered favorable publicity announcing “partnerships” with university libraries under which the businesses promised to digitalize library resources for the supposed free use of the inquiring public. After a few major books had been digitalized, and after thousands had been provided without charge by libraries, the companies came up with a fee to be assessed whenever a user sought out a book. Again, public resources privatized for the profit of the few.

Equal Justice (Huh! Oh, Yeah, Sure, Ha-Ha) Under the Law

One of the things we’re told to make us happy, and to keep us working, and to keep us buying, and to keep us from causing our overlords any difficulties, is that we all enjoy equal justice under the law.

Do you believe this? If you do then I’ve got a bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis which would be a perfect investment for you.

Justice is available for those who can afford it. If we push the speed limit a might, we’ll get a ticket and pay a fine. Even if we didn’t really speed, or if we’re accused of any other violation of the law, we still pay the fine or perform the community service. It doesn’t matter if we’re guilty or not because unless you can afford to hire a dream team in your defense, you really have no alternative.

That’s true for Joe and Jane Six-Pack regardless of collar, blue, white or pink. But it does not apply to the lords of the land. F’rinstance, today AMERICAN AIRLINES after months of legal hassle, used to treating passengers (other than first-class) like cattle, and subject to a multitude of fines imposed by the Government, decided to pay $ 25 MILLION in fines.

What !?! Doesn’t this prove that the high and mighty are also subject to the  law?

No, you see, the actual fines were $ 162 MILLION for repeated violations of the law and aviation regulations but AMERICAN AIRLINES just didn’t want to pay what was imposed. (Imagine, if you said, “Sorry, Judge, I don’t want to pay the $ 200 for the wrong turn, but I’ll give you $ 30″)

No, the Government was just happy to get 15% of what was owed and accepted what the Corporateers deemed appropriate. Much like France before the Revolution in 1789, the Nation’s Nobility could choose to be bound by the law or could choose to ignore it. We sans-culottes don’t have this choice.

Contempt for the Courts

The audacity and the sheer criminality of the blatantly partisan Republican courts is beyond belief.

A Republican-dominated * Federal Appeals Court ordered the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to stop requiring employers to inform employees of their legal right to organize. The NLRB, the agency responsible for regulating labor-management relations, had required employers to post a notice advising employees of certain rights under the law. The Court has decided that employers will no longer have to advise employees that they have legal rights.

The tortured logic of these ethically-challenged stooges for the Plutocracy holds that the First Amendment protects free speech and the NLRB interfered with employers’ free speech by making them tell their employees NLRB’s opinion. Opinion!?!? The NLRB simply required that employees be told what the law already requires — it’s not an opinion, it’s the law!

The Court essentially used the same reasoning as found in the court cases which held that schools could not order children to say the pledge of allegiance. It is nonsense, it is bull—-! Labor law IS mandatory, the Pledge is not, and to confound them is a specious violation of common sense.

This by the way is the very same Court which also has decided that ALL of President Obama’s appointments to the NLRB are illegal and hence the NLRB cannot operate. So although created 80 years ago and charged by statute with labor law enforcement by the Congress, the Court has effectively abolished the agency. Their argument here is that the appointments were made during a Congressional recess and therefore not subject to Congressional approval. Heck, Congress is always in recess, it is impossible not to appoint or conduct operations unless done during a Congress recess.

The Republican caucuses have refused to act on Presidential appointments thus leaving agencies and courts without responsible policy-makers. Presidents have always made recess appointments when the Congress neglected to act. Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents have exercised this power and now a Republican Court has overturned appointments with precious little legal basis other than adherence to to the McConnell Rule: “Republicans will do anything to contribute to the failure of Government under the Obama Presidency”. The McConnell Rule is a corollary to the Republican Fundamental Principle: “Who cares if we wreck the country as long as we own the wreckage”.

___________________________________________________

* The Courts have been increasingly dominated by Republican appointees since 1980 for one very lamentable reason. When Presidents Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 had appointed judges, the Senate approves them. But when Presidents Clinton and Obama have attempted appointing anyone other than a Republican or Bluedog Democrat, the Republican caucuses have done everything they can to stymy the appointment. As a result the Courts have 70 vacancies and Republican-appointee majorities in 10 of the 11 Circuits.

Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, How Can You Sleep at Night?

Tomas Young enlisted shortly after the attacks of 9/11. He joined to fight for his country and to defend its people and its freedoms but found himself in a war without purpose in Iraq. Disabled by a bullet in that war, Tomas has suffered ongoing pain and continuing medical treatment but has not regained his ability to walk. On the anniversary of the beginning of the Bush War on Iraq, Tomas decided to write Bush and Cheney. The letter reproduced here was originally published at TruthDig.com

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

 

“GIDEON” One Step Forward, 1963 — The Courts 20 Steps Back, 2001-2012

On this date in 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that poor defendants being prosecuted for criminal offenses had a right to a court-appointed publicly-funded attorney. The Constitution established a right to counsel but that right was effectively possessed only by those who could afford to pay legal fees, it was a right conditioned upon wealth, and no wealth, no right.

The case known as GIDEON vs WAINWRIGHT was novel for several reasons, first, the defendant, Clarence Gideon had the gumption to write his own appeal once convicted on a charge of larceny for allegedly stealing a few beers, Cokes and jukebox change and sentenced to a five-year term for the $ 50 infraction. That in itself was remarkable because most people are too beaten down by the system to complain much less take action. Second, Earl Warren, Chief Justice and his colleagues were willing to read and consider a handwritten appeal from an indigent defendant.

The drama contained within the case was sufficient to support an award-winning book by New York journalist Anthony Lewis and then a film adaptation starring Henry Fonda.

It was one of several reforms accomplished by judicial review which helped to extend rights to the oppressed and to render our democracy closer to the ideal for which it was founded.

As the 50th anniversary of the decision has been reached the Right to Counsel remains on the books and is black-letter law but is observed only in civics texts and Law 101 classes while ignored in practice. Sure the rights exist but State Legislatures refuse to appropriate the funds to pay for lawyers thus effectively placing legal defense out of the reach of at least half, if not more of the population. Public Defenders, those assigned to provide a legal defense for the poor, are so overworked and so strapped for office support that it is estimated that an average attorney can devote only six minutes per client before arraignment.

In a way it is worse now than in 1963. At least the poor knew they were being shafted then, now we promote an official illusion that they will be represented while knowing full well that it is a scam.

Why are the Courts abdicating their role to protect the rights of the poor and dispossessed? Within the last 20 years the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy suitably provided with millions in donations have led a guerrilla campaign to takeover the Courts on behalf of Corporate interests. Tony Scalia, the squat fascist and his puppet, Clarence “Cokecan” Thomas, didn’t get to the bench by accident. There is a network of jurists and lawyers called the Federalist Society which recruits right-nutters in law school and prepares them with money, training, recommendations and jobs leading to clerkships, professorial appointments and judgeships. The Right’s co-conspirators in Congress have  declined to approve of judicial appointments made by Democratic Presidents while ramming through wingnuts whenever blessed with a patsy in the White House. The result is the most biased, most ideological and most anti-democratic judiciary in our history. Yes, even worse than then.

Ask yourself when has the Supreme Court ever before the 21st century overturned State election laws in order to appoint their own candidate? When has any Court overturned 100 years of legal decisions to extend a right to carry firearms that even  the Marshal of Dodge City in the old west would not recognize? Or put the kibosh on years of Federal and State regulation of campaign financing so as to effectuate corporate dominance of the electoral process. We don’t have objective judges, we have political stooges disguises in robes.

We’ve got a long fight ahead of us. The first thing we must achieve is the recognition that it is not a series of ad hoc differences of opinion among professionals but rather an incessant counter-revolutionary movement intent on overturning the Revolution of 1776, Jeffersonian democracy, Jacksonian democracy, the struggle for the Union of 1861-65, the Reconstruction of 1866-76, the Populist crusades of the 1870s and 1880s, the good-government reforms of the turn-of-the-century and the New Deal of the 1930s. Once recognized the threat of the new Corporate Feudalism may be faced square on and Democracy given a 50/50 chance of winning.

Tom Tomorrow’s Professor Droney

CLICK ON TO ENLARGE

Don’t Look Now But You Too May Be a Criminal

As we posted earlier, Aaron Swartz, was cruelly hounded by Federal prosecutors and threatened with criminal imprisonment for 35 years for seeking to open up information on the Internet. As a result of the prosecution turned persecution, the young man committed suicide. Here is a letter from his partner seeking to memorialize Aaron’s death by repealing or amending the law under which he was attacked.

On January 11, 2013, facing decades in prison on trumped up charges, my partner, Aaron Swartz, made the tragic choice to take his own life. He was only 26.

Aaron’s supposed crime? He was accused of checking out too many articles (4.8 million), too fast, from an online academic library called JTSOR, to which he had authorized access. He never used or distributed the articles and later returned them. For that, he faced 35 years behind bars and endured two years of relentless persecution.

The outdated Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) made this tragedy possible by giving absurdly broad powers to corporations and prosecutors to criminalize an array of online activity. That includes breaching a website’s terms of service–that long fine print you “agree to” but never read.

All of us who knew and loved Aaron never want to see anyone suffer this kind of abuse of power again. So, we’re urgently calling on Congress to reform the CFAA. Please join us.

Tell Congress: REFORM THE COMPUTER FRAUD & ABUSE ACT TO REMOVE THE DANGEROUSLY BROAD CRIMINALIZATION OF ONLINE ACTIVITY AND PROTECT US ALL FROM THE ABUSE OF CORPORATE AND PROSECUTORIAL POWER.

Aaron was an innovator, entrepeneur, and social justice advocate who co-authored RSS 1.0 (the web’s format for sharing and distributing content) at the age of 14, co-founded the social news website Reddit, and led the fight to stop SOPA and PIPA–the internet censorship bills.

His fight to stop SOPA and PIPA started with a petition just like this one, so we know this can work. In fact, there’s already been a strong, bipartisan reaction to Aaron’s death and legislation is in the works to reform the CFAA right now. But it won’t happen without a big public push.

We can’t get Aaron back, but can you help us honor his memory by signing this petition and sharing it with everyone you know?

Yes, I can.

Thank you for listening.

–Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman

Go to the ACLU website at http://www.aclu.org/ and click on “Take Action” and look for the link to “Save the Next Aaron Swartz”

 

Aaron Swartz R.I.P.

History will ultimately absolve Aaron Swartz as it will Julian Assange and Bradley Manning for quite separate activities. If the world is to be free information must be liberated from those who would confine it and ration it only to those who can afford to pay. Aaron Swartz is a hero he died so that we could be free.

The following excerpt from copyrighted material is being reprinted to allow for fair use and comment, the complete article may be read at http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-reddit-aaron-swartz-suicide-20130115,0,798899.story

LOS ANGELES TIMES (January 15, 2013)

Aaron Swartz saw a closed world and wanted to crack it open. His suicide by hanging in New York last week has reignited the conflict between the values of property possession and digital openness and intensified debate over the government’s determination to send him to prison.

In Swartz’s world, data constituted knowledge, and knowledge demanded to be shared. In service of that goal, he helped start Reddit, a news and entertainment website, and RSS, the information distribution service.

He was also a formidable hacker, which led to an indictment in Boston for wire fraud and the possibility of 35 years behind bars.

According to his girlfriend, aggressive prosecution and the embarrassment of asking friends for help and money as part of a defense campaign wore down Swartz, 26, who had a history of depression and was battling the flu.

“I was never as worried about him as the last few days of his life, and there’s no doubt in my mind that this wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the overreaching prosecution,” Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, 31, said in a phone interview from Chicago, where she’d flown for Swartz’s funeral. She added, “He couldn’t face another day of, ‘Have you done this, have you asked people for money.’ I think he literally rather would have been dead.”

On Monday, as a formality in response to his death, federal prosecutors dropped multiple felony charges against Swartz, and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier, a spokeswoman said prosecutors wanted to respect the family’s privacy.

According to the indictment, sometime between September 2010 and January 2011 Swartz physically broke into a wiring closet at MIT, where he wasn’t a student or faculty member, to hack into the school’s networks so he could download millions of academic articles from an expensive database, JSTOR. Authorities said he repeatedly rebuffed the school’s and the service’s attempts to prevent his downloads and planned to distribute the articles for free on file-sharing services.

Prosecutors, plus legal experts such as George Washington University’s Orin Kerr, thought Swartz’s acts clearly broke U.S. law, which bans taking “property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses.”

Swartz likely could have accessed JSTOR from Harvard, where he was a member of the university’s ethics center, and which, like most universities, has access to JSTOR’s subscription service.

The act of snatching academic work was not an act of need, however, but apparently one of politics — an attack on the same law that Swartz himself had said contradicted common-sense values of openness and public stewardship.

In his 2008 “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,”  Swartz wrote, “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier*. ”

He added, “There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world.”

_____________________________________________

“Reed Elsevier” is one of two companies which collectively own the Law in the United States. The other company, Thompson-Reuters (formerly Thompson-West) along with Reed Elsevier collect statutes, regulations and case law from the various States input the compilations into computers, collate it and add notes and then turn around and sell the Law to lawyers and the very governments that produce it. So if you, or the lawyer you pay, want to know what the law is on any topic, you will have to pay one or the other, and sometimes both, of these companies for the privilege.

God Must Intend for Us to Work for Justice Because He Made So Much Injustice to Correct

SISTER MEGAN RICE is an 82-year old Catholic nun. She participated in a nonviolent demonstration against nuclear weaponry which resulted in a trespass at a nuclear power plant. Usually simple trespass is dismissed with a fine or a day or two in the hoosegow.

Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama Justice Department wants to make an example of this nun and her friends and so have augmented charges so as to impose a 16 year criminal sentence. But even that “death sentence” isn’t enough for the Government to prove its point, the Department is considering even more serious charges which could entail a sentence of 65 years.

Really? Is that what the Government wants to do? Make such an example of minimal misdemeanor offenses so as to turn it into a felony. Banksters rob the country of BILLIONS and they get invited to the White House to dine. Bishops coverup massive child abuse and they are consulted for their ethical advice. A nun trespasses and she is banged up with a chamber pot for what remains of her natural life.

_______________________________________________

P.S. Most people think, quite naturally, that if one commits an offense then one is charged for that offense. It doesn’t work that way. For any possible set of actions there are prospectively 20 or 30 would-be charges. Prosecutors can charge various different things for the very same offense. So while the Sister only trespassed she may do time for all sorts of things. For example, when Martha Stewart was supposedly involved in insider trading, the prosecutor couldn’t find any evidence to support that charge. So he charged her with “lying”. Yes, she lied to a Federal Officer when she said she was innocent of insider trading and did time, not for insider trading, but for lying. It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack.

 

Murdering Children

Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, a sixteen-year-old American citizen, was killed on the order of President Barack Obama.

Why? We really don’t know but it is believed it was because the teenager “may” have been a terrorist. Not that he committed any crime, not that he had ever been prosecuted and convicted of a crime, just because he may someday commit a crime.

The Constitution and a tradition of due process under the law have always held that no one should be punished, or killed, unless duly convicted in a court of law based upon evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Under the Constitution and due process no one person can accuse, prosecute, try and execute.

Mr. Obama claims authority to supersede 800 years of legal tradition and the Constitution and the laws of the nation. How did he get that authority? He gave it to himself by Executive Order.

Not to worry. Mr. Obama is a Liberal. He believes in Hope. He taught constitutional law. He’s taking care of us. We can trust him. Really?

If he can kill Abdul what keeps him from killing your son, or your grandson?

SOURCE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/12/06-0