The coup...

...is on.  You people awake now?
This Executive Order basically gives Obummer ultimate power over any damn thing he likes, whenever he likes.  We are now officially living in a banana republic.

Our only saving grace is this line:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America...

By the Constitution and the rule of law, Obummer is--at the very least--acting far outside his Constitutional authority.  At the most, he's a usurper and not our legal President.  But none of this has mattered so far to anyone in Washington, and I don't expect that to change now.

How's your armory stocked?

UPDATE 3/18/12:  Many people have joined a chorus of head-in-the-sand bleating about how this 'really isn't so different' from past EO's.

Bullshit.  This is entirely and completely different.  I've elaborated on that in different comment areas on different sites, and now Ann elaborates further:

Why the NDRP E.O. of 3/16/2012 is Different
Posted by Ann Barnhardt - March 18, AD 2012 8:46 PM MST

I'm getting really, really sick of these pundits and talking heads on the so-called "right" clucking their tongues at the unwashed masses and telling us that we're crazy and paranoid to be the least bit concerned each and every time the Obama regime takes another stride toward totalitarianism. And it is EACH AND EVERY TIME.

Let me break it down for Ed Morrissey, and all of the other pundits in that social circle so that you can get your heads around this. We are concerned and even, dare I say it, panicked, because we can see the big picture of the Obama regime for what it is. We can take the totality of the dataset and draw not just a logical, reasoned conclusion, but a conclusion that is supported by centuries - nay millenia - of past precedent. We are, as Patrick Henry put it, "willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it."

Why is the 3/16/2012 Executive Order worthy of grave concern? Simply put, because of the man and the regime who published it. This is a man, and a regime, that has done the following:

-Sent the Secretary of Defense (Leon Panetta) to Congress to put them on notice that despite the explicitness of the Constitution, the consent of the Congress to wage war will neither be solicited nor required by the Commander in Chief or his regime. The CiC and SECDEF may, if they feel like it and can find the time, MAY inform the Congress of "kinetic military actions" henceforth.

-Declared the First Amendment null and void by mandating that every American must, as a condition of legal residency in the United States, pay for abortions. Mr. Morrissey, being a Catholic, you should understand that what the Obama regime has done is demand your very soul. In order to remain corporeally "free" in the United States of America, you must enter into mortal sin, reject Jesus Christ in totality, turn your back on your Crucified Savior, excommunicate yourself from the Church, and consign your immortal soul to eternal hell.

-Committed acts of war upon the sovereign nation of Mexico and her people, willfully arming narco-terrorists with the intent of using the optics of hundreds if not thousands of brutally murdered Mexicans in order to stir up and justify the overthrow of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. 

-Has coordinated with regime cronies in the Legislative Branch to enable the Obama regime to operate for an entire term WITH NO BUDGET WHATSOEVER. In this time, the Obama regime has looted the United States Treasury and debased the currency of the United States to the tune of SEVEN TRILLION DOLLARS, or roughly one-half the gross domestic product.

This is just a very, very, very short list. Additionally, with each passing day it is being further revealed that EVERY SINGLE PERSON Barack Obama has ever associated with has been not merely a Marxist, not merely a Socialist, not merely a Communist, but a TOTALITARIAN hellbent on the destruction of the United States of America.

I'll concede the point that if this Executive Order was issued by - get this - Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton, I could buy the idea that it was merely an emergency protocol housekeeping item of some sort geared toward the reaction of the Federal Government after a nuclear attack. I'd be skeptical, but I would be open to the argument.

Not so now. These people are totalitarian tyrants who are no longer even trying to hide their intentions. See the bulleted items above. There comes a point where you have to pull your head out of the sand, synthesize a massive dataset into its obvious, coherent output, and be willing to know the worst, and to provide for it.

Denying the obvious, even when the obvious is horrific, is not some sort of virtue. Keeping people numb to reality and drunk on a sugary treacle of distraction and reassurance that "everything's okay" even when every iota of data and experience tells us that everything is NOT OKAY is not a virtuous public service. It is a massive failure in charity, both towards those who are misled and falsely-consoled by your assurances, and toward those whose intellects and intentions you backhandedly insult.

Remember, people exactly like Ed Morrissey and his ilk were calling everyone warning of Hitler's danger to mankind "alarmist", "conspiracy theorists" and "paranoid" up until 4:40 am on September 1, 1939 when the Lufewaffe attacked Weilun. And before that mess was over, 70 million human beings were dead. The hell that the Obama regime is determined to unleash on the world will make World War II look like a mere bar fight.

Yeah, I'm sorry I can't tell you the day, hour and minute that open war is going to break out, both overseas and here in the homeland. If that failure makes me non-credible and paranoid, then I wear that sash with pride, and am consoled and flattered by the caliber of the company of Jeremiahs and Cassandras that I join. But I do know that it is coming, and that the NDRP Executive Order of 3/16/2012 is, WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE DAY AND THE REGIME THAT ISSUED IT, entirely ominous and certainly tactical.

I'll leave you with the video of Larry Grathwohl, which can never, ever be posted, spread and publicized too much. Recorded in 1980, when Barack Obama was nothing more than a drug-addled foreign student at Occidental College and not yet even a glimmer in the eye of the Totalitarians who would later adopt him as their public persona, Grathwohl recounts conversations led by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the founders and leaders of the Weather Underground, the Marxist-Communist-Totalitarian terrorist group that Grathwohl was tasked to infiltrate, and the eventual intimates, ghostwriter and political handlers of Barack and Michelle Obama. The Totalitarian cabal that runs the Obama regime has intended, for decades, to collapse the United States, overthrow it, establish a Totalitarian oligarchy, and as a necessary corollary to that, murder at least ten percent of the population as "die-hard, unreformable capitalists." In 1980, that 10% worked out to 25 million human beings. Today, it would be 31 million - but heck, what's another Holocaust (6 million) give or take?

Today, you are either Churchill or you are Chamberlain.

(HT Ann)