When did the United States of America turn into the old Soviet Union? Americans are asking that question, in shock over the realization that the Obama Administration , through the NSA, has been spying on average American citizens, even though President Barack Obama insists that they are not spying on every American citizen.

Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, who introduced the PATRIOT Act on the House floor in 2001, has declared that lawmakers’ and the executive branch’s excuses about recent revelations of NSA activity are “a bunch of bunk.”

In an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Wednesday morning, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin reiterated his concerns that the administration and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court have gone far beyond what the PATRIOT Act intended. Specifically, he said that Section 215 of the act “was originally drafted to prevent data mining” on the scale that’s occurred.

Sensenbrenner, the current chairman on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, suggested that the secret nature of the FISA court has prevented appropriate congressional oversight over the NSA’s activities.

Several years ago, Obama felt differently about this subject.

On December 15, 2005, Senator Barack Hussein Obama (D-IL) gave the following Senate Floor Speech on the subject of the Patriot Act:

Four years ago, following the most devastating attack in our history, this body passed the USA PATRIOT Act in order to give our nation’s law enforcement the tools they need to track down terrorists who plot and lurk within our own borders and all over the world – terrorists who, right now, are looking to exploit weaknesses in our laws and our security to carry out even deadlier attacks than we saw on September 11th.

We all agree that we needed legislation to make it harder for suspected terrorists to go undetected in this country. And we all agree we needed to make it harder for them to organize and strategize and get flight licenses and sneak across our borders. Americans everywhere wanted that.

But soon after the PATRIOT Act passed, a few years before I ever arrived in the Senate, I began hearing concerns from people of every background and political leaning that this law – the very purpose of which was to protect us – was also threatening to violate our rights and freedoms as Americans. That it didn’t just provide law enforcement the powers it needed to keep us safe, but powers it didn’t need to invade our privacy without cause or suspicion.

In Washington, this issue has tended degenerate into an “either-or” type debate. Either we protect our people from terror or we protect our most cherished principles. But that is a false choice. It asks too little of us and assumes too little about America.

That’s why as it’s come time to reauthorize this law, we’ve been working in a bipartisan way to do both – to show the American people that we can track down terrorists without trampling on our civil liberties. To show the American people that the federal government will only issue warrants and execute searches because it needs to, not because it can. What we have been trying to achieve, under the leadership of a bipartisan group of Senators, is some accountability in this process – to get answers and see evidence where there is suspicion.

Uh huh. 

That was then. This is now.

Fast forward to 2013…

RawStory.com reports that

The FBI’s use of a controversial Patriot Act provision to demand business records has skyrocketed more than 1,000 percent under President Barack Obama versus his Republican predecessor George W. Bush, according to a report by NBC News.

The so-called business records provision of the Patriot Act, titled Section 215, is the justification used for the NSA’s massive PRISM intercept program that sucks up nearly all domestic communications and stores them for future reference. A single Section 215 order was behind last week’s revelation that Verizon is cooperating with the NSA and handing over millions of phone call records daily.

Altogether, the FBI approached the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) court to approve business records requests 212 times in 2012, reporter Michael Isikoff learned. He notes that figure also represents a 1,000 percent increase from the number of requests filed just four years earlier by members of the Bush administration.

Companies that receive demands for business records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act are also subject to a secret gag order, forbidding them from even disclosing that records were divulged. Isikof noted that FBI Director Robert Muller told Congress in 2011 the bureau began relying more heavily on Section 215 requests in 2010, when certain telecommunications firms started refusing to honor the bureau’s National Security Letters (NSLs), another provision of the Patriot Act that carries a gag order similar to Section 215.

Wow. I was going to quote the old saying, “Total power corrupts totally.” however, Obama was a master at “Chicago Politics” before he became president. Here’s a cute little story from my bio of Obama, “The Great Disconnect: The Whole, Ugly Truth about Barack Hussein Obama”:

n 2004, Illinois State Senator Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) decided to run for The United States Senate.

In order to have a successful Senatorial campaign, Scooter  had to secure tremendous financial backing and be the recipient of astute political mentoring.  No problem.

It is now very well-known that George Soros, evil genius, major Democratic Party donor and anti-Israel crusader, has been a generous contributor to Barack Obama. However, not too many people know that a loophole in McCain-Feingold allowed Soros and his family members to be extremely generous in their support of Obama’s 2004 Senatorial campaign.

Obama had to run against Blair Hull in the primary and then Jack Ryan in the general (both multi-millionaires). Obama received huge donations from individuals, to so-called “millionaires exception.”  Usually,  individuals are limited to giving $2300 to candidates in federal elections, but if the candidates are running against millionaires, these limits do not apply and candidates are allowed to receive up to $12,000 from a single individual. Soros and his family gave Barack Obama $60,000. This does not count the money that Soros was funneled to so-called 527 groups (Moveon.org, for example) that have also been politically active; nor does it include money that Soros raised from tapping a network of friends, business associates, and employees.

Besides garnering unlimited campaign funds, as the campaigns entered their closing rounds, the news ”happened to be” leaked to media outlets that both Hull and Ryan had “personal scandals” in their past. The timely release of this news wiped out both of their campaigns, leading to an easy victory for Obama in the primary and then in the general election.

The New York Times Magazine revealed that David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political and media adviser, may well have been behind the leak of the story that doomed the Hull candidacy as the primary reached its home stretch.  I’m shocked.

As he has shown over the years, Axelrod was right at home operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. One can not bring up Axelrod’s name  in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. Approaching the 2004 Senate primary, it was clear that it was a two-man race: the millionaire liberal, Hull, leading in the polls, and Obama, who was the figurehead of an impressive grass-roots campaign. One month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune “just happened” to reveal, at the end of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. This revelation proceeded to erupt into a full-fledged scandal.  This scandal destroyed Hull’s campaign and handed Obama an easy primary victory.

The Tribune reporter who wrote the story later admitted in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. However, a lot of folks in Chicago believe that Axelrod leaked the initial story. They will tell you that before signing on with Obama, Axelrod interviewed with Hull. They also point out that Obama’s TV ad campaign just happened to start at almost the same time. Axelrod swears up and down that “we had nothing to do with it” and that the campaign’s television ad schedule was in the works for a long time.

Axlerod’s explanation?

An aura grows up around you, and people assume everything emanates from you.

Obama has a history of Machiavellian political machinations, doing whatever it took at the time, to achieve the goal of his “laser-like focus”.

Just like Obama’s Promises, all of his Political Ideological Stances come with expiration dates.

If you do not believe that he knew about each and every one of the current scandals, which are threatening to topple his Regime, and have brought his second term to a standstill, and they all had, at least, Obama’s tacit approval, then you’ve been oblivious since January 21, 2009.

…or…you believe that MSNBC is an unbiased cable news channel.

Until He Comes,

KJ