Someone cranked up the Quick Meme generator and there already are almost 1500 copies of posters based on the photo of the arrest of film maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. H/T to Sister Toldjah and PJ Tatler. Zombie on PJ Tatler lists several of his favorites, and I include two my favorites here:
Frederick Douglass said in an 1860 speech, "Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down".
While the first amendment may be under more threat today, don't forget the attacks on pretty much all religions except Islam, the second amendment is under constant threat from outsiders. The Supremes may have been marginally accommodating to the right to bear arms, the same doesn't apply to the UN. So, yeah, the last meeting of the UN Arms Trade Treaty broke down, but they're still working on it.
The fourth is pretty much gone, between the TSA's groping children and randomly seizing cupcakes, no-knock SWAT raids, and courts ruling, for example, you have no right to resist police entry into your home even if it's unlawful entry.
Of course, the constitution is more than just the Bill of Rights. They're tearing it all apart at an amazing rate. Time to read it before it's all gone.
And weep.
You might find the posts a Popehat interesting. He makes two important points. One is that the guy is a convicted fraudster who was doing business and arranging financing under an alias and that federal probation officers really frown on that(and can react quickly and sternly). The other is that there are many much better examples of government abuses of rights. This convicted fraud, who set up the cast and crew under their real names while trying to hide himself behind a fake one, is not a good "poster boy".
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip to go read Popehat. While I like Popehat in general, and I see the points, in my little engineer's mind, that's irrelevant.
DeleteI don't care if he committed financial fraud (I covered that the other day), if they rolled him up for expressing a politically incorrect viewpoint. The freedom of speech is not a right the government grants, it's a right we have by virtue of being sentient beings. If he was really rounded up for the fraud thing, it's such exceptionally incompetent work on the part of the prosecutor's office that it makes my eyes bleed. Talk about "bad optics"!! If he was rounded up for making a stupid, incorrect movie, that's just as bad - it is absolutely constitutionally protected speech
I'm of the school of thought that if a federal prosecutor wants to get you, they will get you on something. As they say, we all commit three federal crimes every day, it's just a matter of how much of that infinite checkbook they want to spend to get you. I've covered stories about that several times.
Likewise, while I didn't use the term brownshirt, it certainly isn't the first story about improper use of police or SWAT teams that I've run.
You're so far from having the facts on this it is pathetic.
ReplyDeleteSam Bacile was in jail for years for fraud (if that is his real name) and was out for a month, just long enough to spend the hundred thousand he got to use his name, was not a film maker in any respect, was a former gas station owner who stepped out of jail to make a trailer that has NO accompanying film and got his but back to jail before a single reporter could ask him a single thing AND we don't even get to see if this is really Bacile because in every shot of his transport his face is hidden.
Still certain people gobble up what is spoon fed to them and call it getting an education.
Joseph Nasrallah Abdelmasih is the guy legally responsible for Media for Christ, the outfit that produced the trailer without a film known as Innocence of Muslims. He is very close to one Morris Sadek (lives near Langley) who is the guy that plugged the incendiary trailer all over the place in the days preceding September 11, 2012. Abdelmasih has done a lot of Islamophobic "activism" like saying, at a Ground Zero Mosque rally, that it would go up over his dead body. So, we have one guy making the film and generating anti-Muslim sentiment here at home and his buddy out there, dutifully, fanning the flames of anti-American and anti-Christian and (scapegoating an Israeli for the film-not-film) anti-Jewish sentiment abroad. Why, then, has the media ignored these two figures? It's just the tip of the iceberg or, if you prefer, rabbit hole.
Confidentially, if you want to get noticed, you shouldn't comment to a thread that's 90 days old and add a bunch of non sequiturs to it.
DeleteI don't see what anything you posted has to do with the subject, the death of the constitution.
Thanks for insults, though.