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Obama shoots the First Amendment, aims later

Obama shoots the First Amendment, aims later

The Chinese (allegedly) have a curse: May you live in interesting times.

These are interesting times.

It is hard to overstate the significance of what it means when the free exercise of our First Amendment rights while not breaking any laws leads to this:

A Southern California filmmaker linked to an anti-Islamic movie inflaming protests across the Middle East was interviewed by federal probation officers at a Los Angeles sheriff’s station but was not arrested or detained, authorities said early Saturday.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, was interviewed at the station in his hometown of Cerritos, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Don Walker said.

Federal officials have said they were investigating the activities of Nakoula, who has been convicted of financial crimes. If the probation department determines Nakoula violated terms of his release, a judge could send him back to prison.

Let’s recap: The man made a film.  He posted it to Youtube.  People across the ocean used it as a pretext for rioting and murder that were anyway preplanned.  Yet the Obama Administration actually, really, seriously asked Google to have the video taken down (request thankfully denied).  Then the feds sent goons to interrogate the man, hoping to find some technical grounds on which to punish him for interrupting the president’s campaign narrative.

Now let’s climb into the Wayback Machine to see how a filmmaker from another era, whose output provoked murderous violence in this country, was treated by the government.

In March 1991, an amateur filmmaker testing out his new video camera captured the beating by several LAPD officers of a man we’d later come to know as Rodney King.  The filmmaker’s name was George Holiday.

The next morning, he called police and tried to find out what the black guy had done to be beaten so badly. Cops refused to say anything.

Shaken by what he’d witnessed, Holliday felt someone should know about it.

That Monday morning, he called KTLA-TV. He told them what he had and he offered to bring the tape over that afternoon.

Holiday’s footage became the first viral video.

It led to the indictments and trial of the cops involved.  A year later, when they were acquitted, citizens inflamed by the film that they’d seen dozens of times immediately began turning Los Angeles into a war zone.  Over the next six days of rioting, 53 people were killed and more than 2,000 were hurt.  Property damage totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.

And never did the DOJ or FBI show up at Holiday’s door.  For that matter, neither did the LAPD.

Of course, that was 20 years ago.  When we still had a First Amendment.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula

The “filmmaker” with L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies. Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

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Comments

yeah but…obama ate dogs
http://www.theconservativevoices.com/index.php/topic/51919-political-media-red-meatobama-ate-dog-keeps-bringing-it-up/

LOL funny ad

seriously the first amendment implications tied into the cybersecurity rules and recent EO’s concern me a LOT.
and every website owner should be concerned.
its almost to much to bear…humor saves the day.
did I mention obama eats dogs?

Obama had his fingers crossed when he took the oath of office of the President of the United States, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

He is president in name only. He doesn’t give a damn about his diplomatic officials nor his troops. He is no commander in chief. He is traitorous, cowardly, and insipid, and should be tried for treason.

If what I’ve read is correct, a condition of his probation involved a prohibition of any internet activity so he may, directly or indirectly, have violated the terms of his probation (leaving aside whether that’s ‘Cruel and Unusual’ or even enforceable). Again, if what I’ve read is true, they didn’t him bring him in for exercising his right of free speech – that just alerted them to the suspected probation violation.

Nonetheless, why it was necessary to drop in on him after midnight to bring him in for a ‘voluntary interrogation’ regarding a probation violation is a bit of a mystery (or maybe not, ‘optics’ being what things are all about these days).

    Daiwa in reply to Daiwa. | September 15, 2012 at 2:22 pm

    they didn’t him bring him in for exercising his right of free speech – that just alerted them to the suspected probation violation.

    Use of the internet was at the discretion of his PO, which I sure is also being leaned on at this moment.

      Daiwa in reply to Neo. | September 15, 2012 at 4:51 pm

      There’s always more to the story, multiple layers to the stinkin’ onion. The feds have no business meddling in a local matter, though. He was not on federal parole.

    Sanddog in reply to Daiwa. | September 15, 2012 at 3:53 pm

    There was absolutely no need for the feds to finger him in the media. If they believed the terms of his probation were being violated, that’s a matter that should have been addressed without a media blitz.

    This isn’t really a surprise (and isn’t that sad) coming from the zero accountability President. His MO has always been “blame the other”.

    Estragon in reply to Daiwa. | September 15, 2012 at 4:33 pm

    Wow, so they found a pretext? Great, that makes it all okay.

      You misread my initial reply. No, a pretext is not ‘OK’, but if the facts are that he indeed violated the terms of his parole (which is anybody’s guess at this point), the chips will fall where they may. How a parole violation is discovered is irrelevant to the fact of the violation (again, assuming there was one).

      But the ‘optics’ are what matter to those who want to deflect attention from Obama’s failures and idiocy, and these melodramatized optics are deplorable.

    sablegsd in reply to Daiwa. | September 15, 2012 at 6:11 pm

    And what if the feds coerced him and promised him immunity?

The destruction of our unalienable rights is accelerating.

I fear this is not going to end well…

This is just Religulous. Bill Maher should be able to post $1 million bail for the poor filmmaker.

If he does end up in prison, he’ll likely have his sentence reduced with good behavior and a promise to promote Obamacare through any future Religulous-type documentaries or sitcoms he produces.

Excellent article. Obama’s actions demonstrate a truth: The is no limit to what Obama will do to get reelected, and I mean none. No constitutional protection carries weight, no lie is too big. Further, this demonstrates how lawless a second term would be. We are seeing the transformation Obama promised.

    Rick in reply to Rick. | September 15, 2012 at 2:55 pm

    “The” should have been “There”. Sorry

    JerryB in reply to Rick. | September 15, 2012 at 4:01 pm

    You’ve hit on the whole point of this. It’s not about the video. It’s not about Muslims. It’s about Obama. The guy makes Obama look totally incompetent, and he must be taught a lesson.

    Four more years? Can you say Stalin?

Joel,

This Christmas in Santa Monica will be the first one in some 50 or 60 years that there won’t be the nativity scenes set up in Palisades Park overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Militant atheists finally made the endearing displays impossible.

Those atheists will now be brought in for questioning, I suppose.

Investigating the guy who made the movie that really had nothing to do with the attacks is completely consistent with regarding terrorism as a law enforcement problem. Enforce the law even against little fish or people who are not really connected to the main issue, because the law is the law and enforcing it is part of the job.

I believe this is not merely misdirection on the part of the administration but actual policy. It is massively, dangerously, incompetent and exactly what we should expect from them.

Vote Obama! Because it’s safer to harass some clown on youtube than to actually go after terrorists.

Found via LI’s Amazon search feature: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. “The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day.”

From free country to ubiquitous regulation to surveillance society to police state.

A next step in the progression is a database associating each citizen with “crimes” for which they can be hauled in whenever the powers that be find it convenient. If you had the right federal contacts, I bet you could get funded right now for work along those lines.

If, that is, the work is not already ongoing.

……………..{Busily combing through this article to see if Professor Jacobson posted anything on the internet that may hurt islamic religious feelings……}……

As Obama’s former Thief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel said, never let an opportunity go to waste.

Being the First Amendment has long been on the American left’s hit list when the left is a target, what a wonderful opportunity this presents.

There are a lot of people who need to re-examine what the term, “liberal” means. Because it isn’t what they’re practicing.

This sort of thing, and issuing rules and waivers and decrees that exceed specific statutory authority, is what Obama does in the year before his “last election.”

How will he behave in a second term when he no longer has to care about any voters? Will he have more “flexibility?”

It is still the video narriative that they want to play out and not take responsibility for Obama bragging constantly about killing Muslims leaders. If the media is not going to take up the real reason, then we need to.

This is all messed up. More thoughts here: ‘The Muslim World Still Hates America’.

[…] From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion: Obama shoots the First Amendment, aims later […]

theduchessofkitty | September 15, 2012 at 8:49 pm

Professor Reynolds read The One the Riot Act. And well-read.

Best bit:

By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated [the Oath of Office]. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.

Since The One will never resign, may I suggest that we begin a push in Congress to draft Articles of Impeachment against that bastard?

Major face-palm moment. I’m still stunned by it. The only explanation is that the producer is insane.

NBC News, this evening’s newscast. Lester Holt presiding. A reporter conducts an interview of Libya’s President in which the President states unequivocally that the consulate attack was not a spontaneous uprising in response to a film or any other thing but rather a well-planned attack that had been in preparation for some time. Stated flatly that they have irrefutable proof.

Immediately, immediately, at the conclusion of the interview, Holt goes to a segment ‘on the film at the center’ of all the trouble (I’m paraphrasing), including an on-site report from in front of the alleged filmmaker’s home and extensive critical coverage of what people and groups might have had anything to do with the film. Time devoted was longer than the segment including the Libyan President’s interview.

Talk about ‘shiny object journalism’. Squirrel !!!

All I can say is, “Gob. Smack.”

    Daiwa in reply to Daiwa. | September 15, 2012 at 10:03 pm

    And for the icing on the cake. Of course.

    The local NBC affiliate’s newscast which followed included a segment on the continuing anti-American unrest in the Muslim world ‘triggered by an internet video’ (I’m paraphrasing again).

    My wife, an Obamaphile if there ever was one, understands how dishonest this is.

    (An aside – I live in a ‘neutral’ home, one with no net influence on any election one way or the other.)

[…] that is offering political commentary. Professor Jacobson and I were thinking along the same lines: Click HERE for his and this is my […]

Why the surprise? Global warming has been debunked numerous times yet obama and the greens are still pushing it like it is still viable. It never was viable except for their agenda which was world taxation to the UN. This is their agenda and they will stick to it through thick and thin. It doesn’t make any difference whether something is true or false, right or wrong, illegal or lawful, they will promote what is best for them. This film guy made bambi look bad so he will have to pay. It is a whole lot easier to blame this film guy for these atrocities than bambi’s foreign policies.