The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Thanks to BrahmaFear for recommending this article... Merle Haggard and the Lost “Free Life” BY   JAMES BOVARD Facebook mail President Nixon shaking hands with country western singer Merle Haggard, and sharing a laugh onstage with the Osborne Brothers singers and The Strangers band after their Evening at White House East Room performance on St. Patrick’s Day. March 17, 1973. Photo: White House. “Is the best of the free life behind us now?” Merle Haggard asked in a haunting 1982 country music hit song. Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song “Okie from Muskogee” for President Richard Nixon. But reflecting widespread loss of faith in the American dream in the 1970s, his “free life” song lamented Nixon’s lies, the Vietnam debacle, and the ravages of inflation. The issue of lost freedoms helped spur me 30 years ago to write a book titled  Lost Rights  chronicling how “Americans’ liberty is perishing ...

  Democrats Respond to Trump’s Plea to Kill Police State FISA Act PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS The House Democrats, not the Republicans, Respond to Trump’s Plea to Kill the Unconstitutional FISA Act, while the Republicans Vote for the Police State Measure The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed as a result of the public hysteria that was orchestrated in response to a non-existent “Muslim terrorist threat” that was spun off of 9/11, the only claimed Muslim terrorist act in the US, an event now understood as a neoconservative operation to create “the New Pearl Harbor” necessary for their wars in the Middle East against Israel’s enemies. The FISA Act was totally unconstitutional as it vitiated the US Constitution’s prohibitions against arrest and spying without warrants. The FISA Act is a police state measure and nothing else. That Americans, Congress, and the federal courts accepted it proves the absence of any commitment to freedom. In this pre-election fundraising season ...