June 4, 2012

There is one thing that Barack Obama has been successful at since taking the helm of the nation and that is trampling on the US Constitution and the constitutional rights of American citizens.  The Constitution requires the President to obey and protect the laws of the land.  Nowhere does it say that he can ignore or pick and choose which laws he wants to keep and which ones he can disregard.  That’s one of the reasons our Founding Fathers established three branches of government and not one.

Obama has often expressed his desire to do away with the Second Amendment right to carry and bear arms.  More recently, he seems to be also trying to do away with the First Amendment rights to free speech, freedom of religion and the freedom to redress grievances against the government.

Now the Chicago police department is following Obama’s example and telling people that their First Amendment rights can be terminated anytime.  Check out the incident caught on camera when a couple of news reporters were trying to cover a story outside a Chicago hospital.

Following the threat, the officer arrested the two journalists.  Even though they were released a short time later, the incident has not gone unnoticed.  According to the National Press Photographers Association, there have been 70 such arrests that they have documented since last September.  Many of the arrests have involved the filming of news stories when the police decide they don’t want to allow it to be filmed.  They seem to just arbitrarily decide on their own when it is legal and when it isn’t.

The National Press Photographers Association has sent a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder in an attempt to make him take action to protect the First Amendment rights of US citizens including photojournalists.  But if I were them, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Holder to do anything about it.  Holder is an ardent disciple of the White House dictator and following his examples, Holder has also been treading on the Constitution and stripping citizens of their constitutional rights.

In the meantime, numerous civil liberty attorneys have been filing cases across the nation where individuals have been wrongfully arrest for filming police, as in the case of Luis Luna in New Haven, Connecticut.  He was using his iPhone to video police when the assistant police chief ordered he be arrested for filming them.  The police arrested Luna, confiscated his iPhone and deleted the video file from his phone.  Luna spent the night in jail on charges of interfering with police.

The use of smart phones have made this practice more common and police officers around the country are taking exception to being filmed by citizens although many of them have camcorders in their patrol cars.

I’ve always been an ardent supporter of law enforcement, as some family members have been police officers, and I once applied to the local PD only to have my vision disqualify me.  But when they start taking it upon themselves to instantly take away someone’s First Amendment rights just because they don’t want to be filmed on the job, then I have to question their integrity and even their qualifications to be a police officer.

The scariest part of all of this is that they are just mimicking the leadership of the Obama administration who has done nothing about this growing trend of wrongful arrests.  If the President and Attorney General can defy laws and make up their own rules, then why can’t police officers follow suit?  At least this seems to be the mentality that is sweeping law enforcement and leading many people to believe that we are soon to become a police state.

http://godfatherpolitics.com/5493/chicago-police-echo-white-house-s...