Suddenly the Occupy movement is under siege everywhere. There's been a wave of simultaneous, seemingly coordinated clampdowns on peaceful demonstrators in cities all across the country. Why now?

It could be nothing more than one heck of a coast-to-coast coincidence, at least theoretically speaking. But there are indications that this might have been at least partially planned and coordinated at a national level.

Either way the timing's very interesting - and, for some people, very convenient. The nation's expecting a deficit package from the undemocratic Super Committee, anticipating another possible free trade deal, and waiting to see whether Wall Street will go unpunished for its foreclosure crime wave. All that makes this a very good time for dissident voices to suddenly disappear.

Unfortunately for them, it's not going to be that easy.

The Ides of November

Occupy Oakland became famous after the brutal police suppression that led to the wounding of Scott Olsen, the Iraq war veteran. And Occupy Wall Street is the flagship site, the Tahrir Square of the new movement. That makes them high-value targets.

This week the Oakland location was struck first, followed by the blow against Wall Street. Similar police crackdowns occurred in Portland, Denver, and Phoenix. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan may have let a little too much information slip when she told an interviewer that she “was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation."

The Oakland crackdown was quickly followed by Bloomberg's move against Occupy Wall Street. That one-two punch took out the two most visible occupations, and it was quickly followed by similar moves in other cities.

That led to widespread speculation that this wave of police actions was planned and executed at the national level. As Joshua Holland commented, it's unclear whether this wave of activity was "coordinated" or not.

There are a range of possibilities. This might have been a coordinated assault. or those mayors may have only been sharing information and ideas. Or it could have been something in between.

To know the answers we'llneed to know who was on the call, whether anyone participated from the Federal government (either on the call itself or in the planning process), and what was said. Whatever happened on that call - or before and after - there's been a lot of action all of a sudden. Doesn't it make you wonder?

Why now?

Whatever the background story is, if you're working for the 1 percent this is an excellent time to make the occupations vanish. Look what's coming down the pipeline:

Unrepresentative Democracy: The Congressional "Super Committee" has a deadline coming up. Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the President of the United States are pressuring its members to come up with a deal. One of the proposals on the table would protect the tax privileges of the 1% by preserving their Bush tax cuts, and would fund that cushy deal for the rich by cutting Medicare and Medicaid while very possibly raising taxes on the middle class.

And that's the Democratic offer. What are the Republican ones like? Don't ask.

The Committee's ideas have been overwhelmingly rejected by a majority of American voters in poll after poll. But if the committee "succeeds," its agreement will be unveiled to the US public and then fast-tracked to Congress for a procedurally-rigged voted, on November 23. That's just about a week from now.

Free trade ain't free: Today President Obama attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and worked his fellow leaders on behalf of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade accord. That accord is strongly supported by the US Chamber of Commerce and the same large corporate interests who pushed NAFTA and other free trade agreements.

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I'm a little late to this. You know I'm no fan of Rand Paul, but his thoughts on free speech and racial profiling with Hannity are just loony tunes.

Alex Seitz-Wald:

Libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made headlines last week for single-handedly obstructing the renewal of the Patriot Act, calling the law an unconstitutional infringement on civil liberties. His demand to insert a series of amendments to weaken the law nearly allowed it to lapse and put the country at “risk,” but Paul said it was worth it to prevent the government from continuing to “blatantly ignor[e] the Constitution.” But when Paul went on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s radio show Friday to discuss his opposition to the national security law, he suggested implementing a far more serious infringement on civil liberties. While discussing profiling at airports, Paul called for the criminalization of speech:

PAUL: I’m not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they’ve been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they’ve been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn’t be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.

Listen here:

Paul’s suggestion that people be imprisoned or deported for merely attending a political speech would be a fairly egregious violation on the First Amendment, not to mention due process. What if someone attended a radical speech as a curious bystander? Should they too be thrown in prison? And who defines what is considered so “radical” that it is worth imprisonment?

I believe Paul has said he's not as rigid as his father on certain Libertarian ideas, but Paul Krugman puts it this way:

He’s not unusual. There are genuine libertarians out there. But political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much

Digby describes him thusly:

How shall I put this delicately? The man isn't playing with a full deck. He's not the sharpest tool in the shed. He's a few tacos short of a fiesta platter. His jogging trail doesn't go all the way round the lake...He's an idiot. The fact that we have to count on him to be the guardian of the constitution in the US Senate says everything you need to know about the state of civil liberties in this country.

GGreenwald writes:

Indeed, the First Amendment not only protects the mere "attending" of a speech "promoting the violent overthrow of our government," but also the giving of such a speech. The government is absolutely barred by the Free Speech clause from punishing people even for advocating violence. That has been true since the Supreme Court's unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had threatened violence against political officials in a speech.

Liberals and Libertarians agree on civil liberty issues all the time, but it's the rest of their belief system that turns out the Rand Pauls and poses a danger to the health of our Democracy. Rachel Maddow exposed him pretty easily. Sean Hannity does have a way of extracting cuckoo for cocoa puffs rants from those that actually try to hide them to look more reasonable.

(h/t blue aardvark)

In the span of just a few days, Sarah Palin has demonstrated that her ignorance of the First Amendment is total. One day after repeating her earlier call for Muslim Americans to "refudiate" their freedom of religion, Palin defended the disgraced Dr. Laura Schlessinger. But in tweeting that Dr. Laura's "1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist," Palin showed once again she has no idea what they are.

With no sense of irony, the former half-term Governor of Alaska and the same woman who once accused candidate Hillary Clinton of "whining" rushed to defend Dr. Laura not from government censorship, but from the "shackles" of public criticism:

Dr.Laura:don't retreat...reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence"isn't American,not fair")

For her part, Dr. Laura told CNN's Larry King the night before that she was quitting her radio show to "regain my First Amendment rights" supposedly lost after her staccato on-air use of the N-word:

"I want to be able to say what's on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry or some special-interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent."

If that language of faux victimization sounds familiar, it should. After all, it's been a staple of the Palin persona since the moment she stepped onto the national stage.

Sarah Palin's first unfortunate run-in with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution came during the home stretch of the 2008 presidential campaign. During an interview with conservative WMAL radio, she regurgitated her usual talking points against the "elitism" and "filter" of the "mainstream media" before coughing up this nugget:

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

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On this, the 4th of July, I, a Canadian, want to talk to Americans about their values. Perhaps that's presumptuous. Perhaps I should just shut it and say "it's none of my business."

I could argue that it's my business on purely pragmatic grounds: where goes the US, Canada often follows. We are a US subject state in all but name, and your failure to fix your problems makes it much harder and sometimes impossible to fix our problems.

But forget that. I don't primarily care about the US because of Canadian interests, I care about the US because I care about the American dream.

I sometimes think that many of us who aren't Americans believe in American ideals more than American citizens do. We imbibe, in other countries, a particularly pure form of the American civil religion. We hear about doing the right thing, about always giving the accused a day in court, about freedom of speech, about division of power and about rights that are rights not because they are given by government to its subjects, but because they are inalienable human rights.

Oh, as time goes by, you realize that America has always had problems with its virtues. You learn of the red scares, the Japanese internments, the genocide against the Indians, slavery and Jim Crow.

And yet... and yet, both people and countries are defined not just by their failures, but by the ideals they strive towards. America's ideals, and its striving towards them, were what gripped the world and gave others hope. If the American experiment in freedom, in rights, could succeed, then perhaps it could succeed in other places.

But what we see today is the American Dream dying. Not just the dream of every generation being better off than the one before, though that's dying, but the dream of a country where the citizens actually had rights, where they actually were free.

There are a number of reasons, but I think Jefferson's prescient phase sums it up best:

I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies

I'm not so sure that banks are more dangerous than standing armies, but certainly the two of them together have brought the US to where it is.

The problem with standing armies is simple enough: if you've got one, politicians are always tempted to use it. When it's a professional standing army, so the majority of the population is not effected by its use, that temptation increases. When the army is the most powerful (though not the most effective) in the world, well, that temptation increases even further.

War is an executive function. A war cannot be run by a legislature. As a result, during war the power of the executive grows. In the US the executive can now hold people without charge indefinitely, meaning President has the ability to lock people up without a trial. If he does bother to grant a trial, the accused does not have the right to face their accusers or to see the evidence against them and evidence obtained through torture can be used.

The President can spy on any American he wants, and you have essentially no recourse, since it is illegal to let you know that you're being spied on. The President can declare American citizens combatants and have them assassinated, which is capital punishment without a trial.

Meanwhile, instead of the whole country being a free speech zone, free speech is only allowed in small areas if anyone important is nearby. Lord save the important people from having to actually see the people whom their policies are impoverishing and whose rights they are destroying.

The right of association has been severely crippled, since the executive can now declare any organization a terrorist organization without any trial and without any appeal. Any American who works with "terrorists" is a criminal. Even if they are, say, like Jimmy Carter, helping Hezbollah participate in fair elections.

To sum up, the President can do all of the following, in most cases without meaningful appeal or a trial: execute Americans, imprison people indefinitely, spy on anyone he wants, forbid people from flying, torture people, kidnap people, forbid people from associating with whoever they want, and deny them the right to speak freely anywhere except in small cordoned off zones.

This is America?

This is what the American dream has come to?

Your founders warned you about this. Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom.

And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it.

Are Americans who don't believe that everyone is endowed with inalienable rights still Americans worth the name?

That is my question to you on July 4th.

Happy Independence Day.

Obsidian Wings: Afghanistan – the absence of option C, about that timeline, and the real revelations of the McChrystal story.

They Gave Us a Republic: R.I.P. free speech.

A Tiny Revolution: Why is Robert J. Samuelson so incredibly awful?

World-O-Crap: Abortion-seeking women - won’t someone think of the man-child?

Brilliant at Breakfast: Why does Mike Huckabee spend so much time thinking about gay sex?

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com.

There's an interesting convergence of politics and law going on right now around the Pandora's box that is campaign finance. Round II of the Citizens United case will likely be SpeechNow vs. the FEC. In this round, the issue is the relationship between the law, 527 tax exempt organizations, and independent expenditures (money spent for direct mail, TV, radio and internet advertising).

The Players

SpeechNow.org is a group formed with the purpose to oppose candidates who, in their view, act to squelch free speech. The named principals are David Keating (Club for Growth Executive Director), Edward Crane (Cato Institute founder), Fred Young (Cato Institute board member), Brad Russo and Scott Burkhardt.

Their stated purpose and goal

The stated purpose of SpeechNow.org is as follows (from appellate court opinion here):

...to promote the First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom to assemble by expressly advocating for federal candidates whom it views as supporting those rights and against those whom it sees as insufficiently committed to those rights.

To illustrate how they proposed to carry out their purpose, SpeechNow.org supplied ad copy from ads they had planned to run in 2008 against Republican Congressman Dan Burton and Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu. Examples were carefully chosen to demonstrate their non-partisan bent. Sample copy for one television ad read this way:

[P]oliticians like Dan Burton don’t like free speech. Burton voted for a bill to restrict the speech of many public interest groups. Under this bill you could go to jail for criticizing politicians.

Hey Dan Burton. This is America, not Russia.

But we still have the right to vote. Say no to Burton for Congress. Say no to censorship.

And against Landrieu:

“Our founding fathers made free speech the First Amendment to the Constitution. Mary Landrieu is taking that right away. Don’t let her do it again.”

What's at stake

Non-profit groups organized as 527 organizations have some specific rules to limit the amounts an individual may contribute. Currently the annual maximum contribution from an individual is $5,000. SpeechNow argues that because contributions are being passed through the organization as "independent expenditures" (e.g., funds used to pay for direct mail campaigns, TV, radio and internet advertising) the limits shouldn't apply, just as they do not apply to corporate "persons" in the Citizens United case.

If SpeechNow.org is successful, any group who spends money on direct mail, TV, radio or internet advertising can use a non-profit entity to make unlimited contributions. They further object to the reporting requirements imposed on 527 organizations, and are seeking to have those abolished.

The political stakes

The line SpeechNow.org is walking is extraordinarily fine. They claim to be an issue-focused group (i.e., free speech), but it's clear they intend to target candidates and pour money into those targeted districts to influence the outcome of elections.

It's equally clear (to me, at least) that this particular group will be completely partisan about who they apply their "free speech" standards to, which raises this question for me: What bright-line standard could be applied to ad copy to distinguish one ad as an "issues ad" from another that's a "candidate ad"? The two are inextricably linked. I can't see where any group worth their salt would buy ads to say "Vote Candidate X out of office. That is all."

Ads generally wrap around an issue with the goal of defeating the candidate, while promoting the issue as a second outcome. If SpeechNow.org succeeds, what we will have here is direct advocacy for or against candidates by groups allowed unlimited donations for buying such advertising while eliminating all disclosure as to who the buyers are.

As one who spends a lot of time following campaign money, I see this as a disaster.

This case is also about to become a political football in the pending nomination of Elena Kagan.

SCOTUSblog:

The FEC and the U.S. Solicitor General’s office have not yet decided whether to take to the Supreme Court the FEC’s unanimous loss in the D.C. Circuit Court in the SpeechNow case. While the time to file a challenge before the Justices does not expire until late June, the motion filed Friday in U.S. District Court will put added pressure on government officials to make up their minds on the next step. They must respond to the new motion in 14 days, for example — that is, before the end of this month.

One of the issues surrounding Kagan's confirmation is the question of her recusal in cases where she has acted on behalf of the United States as Solicitor General. Forcing this case to the front seems to be pure politics to me. If she has acted on this case as Solicitor General, she will not be able to hear it as a Supreme Court Justice.

Given the decision of the appellate court and the Supreme Court in the Citizens United matter, it may not matter anyway. It could be that they've won this outright already, in which case we all lose.

Here's what concerns me the most. Even if we have publicly financed elections, this kind of activity will not stop. Voters will be barraged with ad after ad after ad for a candidate, against a candidate, via a known organization or via an astroturf group. While public financing will certainly separate candidates one degree or so from the money, the inarguable influence of these independent expenditures will still hold sway with the candidate and with the public and continue to subvert the process.

Really, the only hope we have for free and fair elections is an educated, engaged electorate with the ability to discern the difference between candidates without 30 second sound bites or propaganda films to promote or defeat them.

It's people like this who I most fear, because they are completely irrational, own guns, and embrace violence. It's also why I loathe Michele Bachmann and her ilk. They actually encourage this type of behavior.

Watch this exchange. This man starts out angry, but controlled. He's got a problem with our new "socialist-communist" health care bill, and he'll tell anyone within 50 feet about it. When pressed on specifics, he just rolls out of control, first shouting for death to the communists, then death to the videographer.

"Get out of here before I run you up with this flag and throw you to the river," he cries. "I fought for this country, you sonofabitch. What did you do?"

With all due respect for his service to our country, he seems to have a disconnect when it comes to Constitutional rights. Evidently free speech, which he is exercising liberally in this clip, is only acceptable when it's right wing free speech.

Part of me really dislikes giving any attention to these people. At the same time, ignoring them also ignores the fact that when mentally unstable people are stirred up and their anger ignited, it will not end well.

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Every time we run a Glenn Beck post, someone trolls into the comments and asks, "Why bother with this guy? We should just ignore him! Post more videos on [insert name of preferred progressive figure here]!"

We'd like to refer them to this week's special report from the ADL on the rise of populist anti-government rage, the one that officially dubbed Beck our national "Fearmonger in Chief".

Keith Olbermann invited Arianna Huffington onto Countdown to discuss the report last night:

OLBERMANN: It would be nice to think of Glenn Beck just as a joke, as fodder for this show and the “Daily Show” and others that point out how stupid some of this stuff is. But this report, you know, suggests something else, this is—fearmonger-in-chief term is frightening.

HUFFINGTON: It is frightening. Well, I would say the fearmonger-in-chief title should still be reserved for Dick Cheney, even in retirement. But barring that, there is something that we need to really pay attention to with Glenn Beck. We cannot just dismiss him. Because the truth of the matter is that there is a good reason why we have an exemption to the free speech protection by the first amendment when we say you cannot shout fire in a crowded theater.

And he's doing that every night. He's basically using images of violence to bring together with all that he's accusing the Obama administration of, which varies from racism to communism, Nazism and everything else in between. So, all that has definitely an impact. I believe words matter, language matters and he's using it in incredibly irresponsible ways night after night.

OLBERMANN: What do you say to the argument that this country has always self corrected, that whether Father Coughlin on the radio in the ‘30s or Bo Carter (ph) who was a newscaster who presented literally stuff that was made up on the hour in CBS News in the ‘30s or the columnist Westbook Pegler or Senator Joe McCarthy? All these people a finale in which they exited the stage and suddenly. What is to say that that‘s not going to happen here?

HUFFINGTON: Well, I hope it's going to happen, but it's not going to happen without people pointing out what Glenn Beck is doing.

Indeed, since the report was issued, Beck seems to have turned up the Wingnuttery Dial all the way 11.

We put together a compendium of Beck's finest fearmongering of just the past year on Fox, inspired largely by the instances cited by the ADL -- with a few of our own favorite moments thrown in for good measure.

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As Arianna says, confronting the Becks is vital to keeping our discourse healthy -- because he is polluting it daily with the toxic garbage of disinformation, paranoia, and scapegoating.

We discussed this recently in the matter of Lou Dobbs:

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For the second day in a row (Monday's show being so chockful o'wingnuttery that we didn't have time to post on it) Glenn Beck devoted two whole segments to the subject of net neutrality.

And for the second night in a row, the discussion featured a guy named Phil Kerpen from Americans For Prosperity, which has a long history of shilling for whatever right-wing corporate agenda it can suck out money for: tobacco interests, health-insurance companies, corporate polluters have all pitched in money so that AFP can variously promote tobacco, lobby against health-care reform (it was one of the original promoters of the Tea Parties) and push the idea that global warming isn't really happening.

And now he's out pushing the notion that somehow, regulating Internet providers so that they cannot determine or limit public access is the same thing as communism. Or something like that. When you have Glenn Beck as your No. 1 cheerleader, logic doesn't actually have to enter into it.

Especially not facts. Because Beck appears to have no idea at all what Net Neutrality is actually all about.

As Timothy Karr explained on Democracy Now last month:

And net neutrality is really the fundamental openness principle of the internet. Whenever you connect to the internet, net neutrality makes sure that you can connect to everyone else who’s on the internet. And this has been a tremendous engine for free speech, for economic innovation, for equal opportunity. And we are now fighting with some very prominent internet service providers, very powerful companies, to try to preserve that fundamental openness, so that whenever we go online we can choose, as users, where we go and what we do via the internet.

Somehow, Beck is able to transform this into an attack on "freedom of speech" -- when it obviously is precisely the opposite.

To guys like Beck, you see, the only threat to our liberties is from the government. Giant corporations that control our means of information, not so much.

Indeed, his argument boils down to a simple proposition: "Freedom" means letting powerful business interests control the public's access to the internet.

Hm. That's some kinda freedom.

ThinkProgress has more:

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The Political Carnival: You can't reason with a sick mind

Brad DeLong: GOP congress critters couldn't find their asses with a map and two flashlights dept.

D-Day: Justice and accountability by inches

Newshoggers: Paging Dr. Mengele of the CIA

Economist's View: Do corporations have a right to free speech?

Informed Comment: 60 said killed in NATO bombings; US Aid money may support Taliban activities