Rand is totally right, consumer choice is being overridden by control freaks in government, with the force of law backing them up. All the while the same government is trumpeting rhetoric about providing more choice. The woman here smugly tells Rand Paul that Congress and the president basically got together and decided that consumer’s do have a choice: buy what we tell you to buy, be fined or go to jail. Those are the new options.
Update: 2-8-2011 PATRIOT Act Extension Fails, For Now, OpenCongress.org
Read the short article at the link above, written by Donny Shaw, some good information. This issue is still very much alive, contact your representatives.
Kucinich: “…In 2007 the justice department’s inspector General told Congress the FBI may have violated the law or government policy as many as 3000 times since 2003 in the course of secretly collecting telephone, bank and credit card records without warrants, instead using so-called national security letters that give them the ability to demand this information and get it. The Patriot Act is a destructive undermining of the Constitution …How about today we take a stand for the Constitution to say that all Americans should be free from unreasonable search and seizure…”
Go Ron Paul! Government is supposed to protect our rights, period. “Taking away all our liberties won’t solve our problems!”
The lady argues that the TSA just hasn’t done a good enough job of explaining why it’s groping us? Ridiculous! How does explaining that you’re violating someone’s rights make it any better?
Napolitano is a liar! liar! liar! They already admitted that they store the images and that’s what the machines were intended to do!
Government does NOT have the authority to GIVE OR TAKE AWAY our rights. Just because they are the so-called “authorities” does NOT mean they can grope and/or molest you! The TSA is now a criminal organization with what their agents are doing daily!!! As usual, Ron Paul leads the charge in Congress, will other Congressman step up or will they stand idly by as usual while our freedom disinigrates? Don’t let up, and don’t let them pacify you on this, one of the most important issues to ever face our nation.
“This TSA version of our rights looks more like the “rights” granted in the old Soviet Constitutions, where freedoms were granted to Soviet citizens — right up to the moment the state decided to remove those freedoms.” —Ron Paul
Other Congressman not cowering behind Homeland Insecurity:
It sounds like many lawyers are stepping up to help Tyner out if this does go to court, sounds like even pro bono.
How can the TSA fine him when legally airports aren’t even required to have the TSA there? I think it’s time for the airports to opt-out of TSA:
Did you know that the nation’s airports are not required to have Transportation Security Administration screeners checking passengers at security checkpoints? The 2001 law creating the TSA gave airports the right to opt out of the TSA program in favor of private screeners after a two-year period. Now, with the TSA engulfed in controversy and hated by millions of weary and sometimes humiliated travelers, Rep. John Mica, the Republican who will soon be chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is reminding airports that they have a choice.
Mica, one of the authors of the original TSA bill, has recently written to the heads of more than 150 airports nationwide suggesting they opt out of TSA screening. “When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees,” Mica writes. “As TSA has grown larger, more impersonal, and administratively top-heavy, I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law.”
“Good for you I can’t see why you shouldn’t have been allowed passage. I have a friend who was almost denied passage at terminal C in IAH the other day. The TSA screener threatened him with a pat down at which he stated he had no problem undergoing a pat down. The TSA screener a female then stated, “she would grab his crotch.” I wish I was making this ***** up. It’s the blind leading the blind at the TSA. Good luck with your incident I was harassed myself in terminal E and I understand the lack of accountability that TSA agents have when dealing with the public. You can be threatened at a moments notice by an agent if they see fit…”
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.
After the Rand Paul Rachel Maddow interview and the media assault that followed against Rand Paul, Paul absolutely deserved a chance to clarify his position on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which the media repeatedly misrepresented. It should be noted that Rand never said he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act had he been a Senator at the time, nor did he say anything to indicate that he favored segregation, whether it be in public or private sector, as the media claimed and ran with. In fact he said the opposite. Also, Paul isn’t off base to question how and what the government should be able to dictate with regard to a private entity’s property rights and 1st Amendment rights. These are all important civil rights questions that relate to all aspects of our society, for example with socialized healthcare— Do people have a right to someone else’s service or labor? Do people have a right to someone’s business? Or in general, do people or businesses have a right to speak or write racist, offensive, or unpopular things?
As Rand said, calling him “racist” for his position on property rights is dishonest, he was clear in his position of being firmly against racial discrimination. This interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN gave Rand a chance to clarify how he might have voted on the Civil Rights Act, had he been a Senator in 1964:
Also worth a listen is the Rand Interview on the Laura Ingraham Show from 5/20/2010:
It’s all part of a regular exercise that the MSM undergoes with popular non-establishment political candidates— seeking to twist their words and demonize them, most often using the “racist” label as their tool. It seems that if they can even suggest the idea that the candidate might maybe, possibly have said or suggested something close to being racist then maybe some non-informed voters will be afraid of him and never investigate or find the truth. The truth being that Rand Paul will likely be much more of a protector of the rights of individuals’ from all races than probably 99.9% of all other senatorial candidates or sitting Senators. It’s an effective distraction as the country faces a massive currency and economic crisis, and as they work on passing the “finance reform” bill.
The healthcare bill is proving to be another “conceptual” unread bill that sold-out legislators will attempt to ram through Congress. Lawmakers are refusing to provide the text of the actual bill, leaving it’s cost and other details completely unkown to all except those who are writing it. Idaho Congressman Mike Crapo has so far been unable to obtain the text of the bill.
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.
This would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. Many state governors rightfully oppose the idea as the latest assault on states rights. The ACLU is on the correct side of this one:
Mike German, the ACLU’s national security policy counsel, expressed amazement “that the military would propose such a broad set of authorities and potentially undermine a 100-year-old prohibition against the military in domestic law enforcement with no public debate and seemingly little understanding of the threat to democracy.”
There is a dangerous trend here with the recent pushes for martial law. Notice that the push for martial law is always coming from those in power, not those who would be subject to it.
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