Utah Rep. Carl Wimmer is set to introduce a bill (sometime next year?) that would restrict TSA agents to Constitutional searches only at airport checkpoints.
…Wimmer told KSL News it is the role of the state Legislature to protect Utah residents from illegal searches and seizures, and he said the TSA is violating people’s rights every day in the airports.
Wimmer also said people all over the country should be outraged that the federal government threatened Texas after a bill there to regulate the TSA pat downs started moving through their house of representatives.
A somewhat misleading headline but an informative article:
…”The absolute overbearing audacity of the federal government in threatening Texas while Texas is trying to protect their citizens should really offend any red-blooded American,” he said.
We’re being told that there’s not time for debate, no time for dissent, no time for freedom. Is this the America you want for you and your kids? Is there anyone in the Senate besides Rand Paul that hasn’t sold us out?
Essentially it appears that Harry Reid’s fearmongering and anti 4th Amendment rhetoric has all but won over Congress. See video of Rand Paul’s response to Reid’s childish remarks below:
Senator Rand Paul on Patriot Act Amendments
In related news, Alex Jones calls for Protest at Texas Capitol over TSA bill:
This is disgusting and is getting worse. People need to speak out and oppose these extreme violations of privacy rights and human dignity. Notice the terminology “enhanced” pat down, just like “enhanced” interrogation. They try and make the oppression sound reasonable and progressive.
Joe Leiberman’s bill, S.3480 the ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010′, would give the president power to shut down the internet. Not a new idea but as always, they shuffle the bills around, changing name and bide their time in order to push them through. It’s all under the guise of security
The bill amounts to a remarkable claim of presidential power, claiming a large portion of the global economy as a specific asset of the United States and further claiming the right to nationalize or destroy it in whole or part on a whim. The news may be disquieting enough for Americans faced with this sort of power grab from their own government, but for foreigners the idea that another nation can commandeer the Internet, cut them off from it, or render it unusable is totally shocking, and not surprisingly, a source of no small consternation.
An important reminder, keep in mind that the author is referring to a man, as in an individual or family man:
“…the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent. For the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires that the people should have property, without which they must be supposed to lose that by entering into society which was the end for which they entered into it; too gross an absurdity for any man to own. Men, therefore, in society having property, they have such a right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs, that nobody hath a right to take them, or any part of them, from them without their own consent; without this they have no property at all.”
The fact that a bill like this is passed in the House late on a Saturday (with greatly decreased news coverage and less people watching news) shows how little regard Congress has for the American people and that they know most Americans on the whole wouldn’t approve of the bill if they fully understood its details.
The taxes certainly don’t end there and it seems that small business owners have the most to lose with this bill, during a time of deep recession and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. But probably worst of all is the loss of individual choice and health freedom–another dagger to the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
[The End of America happens in the middle of the night, Freeman Institute ]
While normal everyday oblivious Americans were preparing their beds to sleep Saturday night their elected officials quietly passed H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act. Indeed, the passage of this act deals one of the final death blows to the Constitution and with it our liberties.
…It is the everyday middle class American that will suffer the consequences of this travesty. Indeed, while the economy is reeling and unemployment pushes depression-era levels the arrogant Congress has decided to pass the biggest expansion of government in the history of the United States. It will create a new tax that will primarily be felt by the middle class, the ones most likely affected by the current depression. This is because as Americans are forced to purchase health insurance, the wealthy will have no problem paying for escalating costs. Nor will the poor feel the burden as they will receive government health insurance subsidies. Yet, the forgotten man will be the middle class working American who now already struggling against the burden of economic ruin will be forced to pay fines or even face possible jail time for not complying with our government’s take over of his/her health care. As this tax sinks in, the middle class will be forced downward into the ranks of the working poor and therefore into the ranks of government rationed medical care. Inevitably, government healthcare will swallow the whole of the medical insurance world and there will be no escape.
This dystopian vision will consist of patients waiting in long lines and when they are finally permitted to see their doctor there will be much fruitless begging and pleading for the treatment that they desperately need. But no mercy will be given because the doctor will have become nothing more than a desk-clerk, simply following the government treatment protocols.”
Though the bill is estimated to expand coverage from the current 83 percent to 96 percent of legal U.S. residents, the windfall of projected penalty payments also exposes a potential contradiction in reform. A significant part of the plan to expand coverage relies financially on fines from the uninsured.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in its study last week that the House bill would bring in $167 billion over 10 years — $33 billion from fines paid by individuals who decline to buy insurance, and the rest from employers who don’t offer insurance to workers or contribute enough toward premiums.
Ernest Istook, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma who is now a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, calculated that anywhere between 8 million and 14 million people would end up paying the fines.
This raises a few problems, he said. First, if those millions somehow get covered and don’t pay the fine, then the health program is faced with a budget hole.
Second, he said, it speaks to a flaw with the insurance packages that are being offered. “If you say people would rather pay $167 billion in penalties rather than buy insurance under your new plan, what’s wrong with your new plan?” he asked.
The answer, Istook said: “It’s expensive.”
11/9/09 Ron Paul: Healthcare “Reform” Will Make a Flawed System Immeasurably Worse
Tough guy riot cops trap, tear-gas and pepper spray college student bystanders on the University of Pittsburgh campus during the G20 protests. Pretty sickening, likely won’t find it on the evening news.
Here’s an excerpt from a reddit article today written by a student in the middle of the storm trooper invasion:
…Here is the part where I felt most violated — The riot cops then ENTERED our dormitory and shouted that students needed to return to their rooms immediately. Anyone arrested, they said, would be expelled from the University of Pittsburgh, no questions asked.
Reddit, is that legal? Would police be able to force someone on the sidewalk back in their home and make them barricade themselves in their basement?
Here’s another part that got me — I saw students try to get in the doors closest to their dorm building (there are 3 towers), and the door was LOCKED. These students did not have time to run around the building. And they were grabbed.
We don’t know what to do. We’re shocked. BECAUSE THE DEPUTY POLICE CHIEF RELEASED A STATEMENT CLAIMING THEY WERE SECURING THE AREA FROM ANARCHISTS AND THAT “SOME” STUDENTS “PROBABLY GOT CAUGHT UP” IN WHAT HAPPENED.
So, in the news, you’ll hear that police secured the campus from anarchists. Not that students were attacked by security forces supposedly there to protect them. PLEASE, help me get the word out. I’ll be around all day tomorrow for questions.
The lone AP article of course starts out with info about “anarchists”. From the other video footage I saw there were definitely some idiotic “anarchists”/provocateurs there but the majority of people and students there were peacefully assembling and had their rights violated by the Pittsburg police:
Police say Californian did most of damage at G-20 So the justification for downtown Pittsburgh basically being placed under martial law and terrorized by 4,000 Darth Vader-like storm trooopers comes mostly from the actions of one guy?
Video: Activists rail against the “military-style occupation” that resulted in the gassing and arrest of dozens of bystanders, including students and journalists. http://www.post-gazette.com/multimedia/?videoID=102382
Many of the 110 people arrested that night were trying to follow a dispersal order, but they were encircled by police near the Cathedral of Learning on the University of Pittsburgh campus, many activists said.
“It was not a failure to disperse that I was charged with. It was a failure to escape,” said Keith DeVries, 23, a Pitt student who was among those arrested.
I just wanted to say that my daughter Martha, a 19 year old sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, on Thursday night was rousted by police from the school library where she was studying, ordered to leave her belongings behind and herded into the street where she was tear-gassed, sound cannoned and hit by a plexiglass shield for exercising her right to be a young person outdoors on her campus on a pleasant fall night. I suppose I should be grateful because other kids were roughed up much worse by the police that night. This is just one aspect of the G20 that will never receive the attention it deserves. You have no idea how bad it was here.
Also, you might be interested in the linked article in which Pitt’s police chief pats himselfs on the back for his handling of the situation and cynically refers to the victims as “innocents” who chose to put themselves in harm’s way. Note the Chief’s presumption that the police have the right to break up any assembly. Very disturbing.
For two weeks in November, delegates representing The People of the fifty states will join together in the tradition of the Founding Fathers and their Continental Congress of 1774. Continental Congress 2009 will convene as a national assembly of We The People and attest to the increasing abuses of our Governing Documents. Together, we will decide what peaceful, legal steps can be taken to bring about compliance with our Freedom documents.
When the Young Americans For Liberty (high school and college students) peacably gather in D.C., this is how they are greeted by the government enforcers.
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