Oppose Imminent Patriot Act Extension
With more and more Americans newly awakened to the dangers of the Patriot Act, particularly the loss of civil liberties once secured by the Fourth Amendment, a vote on extending the measures of the Act for another four years is predicted to be the closest ever in Congress. The Senate is set to take action on S. 1038 this very afternoon at 5 PM ET. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is calling for a cloture vote to end debate. A 60 vote majority is needed to do so, but then only a simple majority of 51 is needed to pass the bill, which could come either today, or within a day or two, before the May 27 provisions’ sunset deadline. If passed in the Senate, this deadline date would force action in the House before May 27 as well.
All three of the most objectionable measures to patriots and constitutionalists are included in S. 1038; the “lone wolf’ provision that permits government surveillance of individuals for no reason; the “library records” provision which allows national security investigators to issue seizure orders for “any tangible thing”; and the “John Doe roving wiretap” provision that ignores the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of probable cause and proper court order in favor of indiscriminate searching of citizens’ private information.
Even though passage in the Senate is expected, Senators can force votes on various amendments. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) will attempt to somewhat temper the effects of the worst provisions in the Patriot Act by introducing amendments that would limit the government’s surveillance powers by restricting the collection of “suspicious activity” reports by financial institutions and also require judges to sign off on national security letters which federal law enforcement officials issue to obtain records and other personal information.
Many of the popular Tea Party candidates elected last November failed to demonstrate a complete understanding of the principles of the Fourth Amendment when they voted to extend the Patriot Act in early 2011 using the safety-from-terrorists canard. Help educate your elected officials on these principles and protections and demand that they honor their oath to support and defend the Constitution by not extending the provisions set to expire, and to repeal the permanent provisions of the Patriot Act through amendments that will be introduced by Sen. Rand Paul.
This is the most opportune moment Americans have ever had to stop the Patriot Act in its deadly tracks. Please add your voice to a growing chorus of outraged freedom lovers by contacting your Senators and Representative immediately (this link lets you send pre-made e-mail letter). Only intense pressure from American citizens can stop the Patriot Act described by Judge Andrew Napolitano as “the most abominable, unconstitutional assault on personal liberty since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.”
Thanks,
Your friends at The John Birch Society
Debt Limit Reached: World Hasn’t Ended
Taking a page from the Obama playbook, who asserted that the world didn’t end after ObamaCare was passed, it appears that the world hasn’t ended with the Congress smashing into its own self-imposed debt limit either. Unfortunately, the inside talk is that the debt limit will be raised with nearly all Republicans planning to vote in lock-step with their leadership. Talks of devastating effects to the economy are raised to keep the limit growing. It hasn’t happened, but what has happened is that Congress refuses to accept responsibility for its irrational spending and entitlement programs. The government has immorally started to eat into pensions to fund its bloated budget. Continue to make the stand against raising the debt limit. (this link gives info and lets you send pre-made e-mail to Congressmen).
Call Congress! Find numbers at www.congress.org (go to bottom of page and click on Congress –go to search (person wanted) and click on ‘contact’
My addition to Congress letter: NO new taxes on the American People! The notion of taxing American drivers for every mile they drive is a harmful, disasterous and punitive proposal that goes to the core of practically stealing Americans for activity (that is gov’t intrusion and control) which hits all income levels of consumers that will bust People’s budgets! WE already pay a State, County and City tax for just owning our car (which by the way is a chunk of money beyond the registration and inspection costs!). Is not a 45-60 cent Federal tax in the gasoline price not already quite a payment?! Most Americans have to drive to work and a mileage tax would be yet another direct assault on Americans paychecks!
President Obama had an opportunity to reconsider his debt shattering budget, given American People’s overtaxed condition, he could’ve seen that it is the SPENDING that is the problem! Spending in the government’s largesse and in unnecessary fashion seems to want to be dismissed. President Obama also disregarded his own debt commission. Instead of looking inward and turning the spending finger at the problem’s source, Obama and many others want to point finger at American People and reach out into the American populous yet again and go looking at penalizing and taking with yet more taxation!
Caldwell TEA Party 
I agree with snaketread enirely on the issue of the Patriot Act. I cannot support it. It’s ironic that all of the support for it comes from the center: from center and right-center Republicans and from center and left-center Democrats. The only opposition comes from the extreme — non-Republican — right and from the hard left.
Also, I was a member of the John Birch Society back in the early to mid 1980s. I read all their propaganda and supported most of their positions at the time… but eventually I came to realize the faults and failings of the organization and left it behind.
If anyone is truly serious about balancing the budget they must come out against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It costs us a million dollars a year for every soldier we keep deployed in those two war zones. Afghanistan alone costs taxpayers over 100 billion dollars a year. And we have been there ten years now. Do the math. We are talking about serious money. And what are we getting? President Karzai now compares the US to the Soviet Union: we are both occupiers in his words, and we will probably be dealt with as the Afghans dealt with the Soviets in the 1980s — and this is coming from the president we are over there fighting to support and spending barrels of money on to support. All this while Opium production has dramatically increased since the US invaded Afghanistan. This is looking like Vietnam all over again in so many ways. And nobody has any clue what we are trying to accomplish there. We have killed Osama bin Laden. It’s time to declare victory and get the h__l out of that place. We are bankrupting our country. And if we are not going to get any major oil out of Iraq, we should get out of that place, too.
We have a revenue problem that is bigger than our spending problem. It’s time to quit giving global corporations giant tax loopholes that exempt them from taxation within the US.
I believe we should end all Medicaid, food stamps and other forms of welfare to illegal aliens living in this country. Heck, let me rephrase that: I believe we should cut out all social services to all non-citizens. I don’t care if they are here legally or not. And we should change the immigration laws so that children born to non-citizens living within the US are no longer granted automatic US citizenship. Cutting out the gravy to non-citizens would immediately cut hundreds of billions of dollars from federal and state budgets. But I am absolutely against cutting social programs for US citizens, especially programs like Medicare and Social Security that US citizens have paid for through their payroll taxes all their lives. It would be immoral and dishonest to break the social contacts we have made with US citizens — especially when citizens have paid for these programs. We cannot use Social Security surpluses to fight useless wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and then claim we are broke and must renig on the contract. Cut out two thirds of the Marines and Army, Navy and Air Force and use these forces to defend our own borders. To he_l with policing the rest of the world! And if Israel cannot defend themselves, then they have no right to exist. But I personally think they are able to easily defend themselves. They hardly need our economic, political and military aid. Let’s cut out all foreign aid as a matter of policy.
These are the best places to cut hundreds of billions of dollars that buy us nothing. Perhaps the only value of the US Armed Forces today is as a jobs program for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. We would be better served training these men and women to build infrastructure in things like expanding our national rail system and building alternative energy systems.
Mr. Ipock, there are some things you seem to show that you support the United States well-being, that’s good. There are several things I disagree with you about. I support capitalism and free-market enterprise that allows the economy to take care of itself and individuals gain from the fruits of their labor. The Tea Party and its members from the beginning have been saying that our current government is irresponsibly out of control, skewing elections with campaign money schemes of pork spending, getting bigger at the expense of individual liberty and hence its taxation is too much. Our U.S. Government needs to obey the U.S. Constitution and hence Government is limited based on federalism, that of which has been the best functioning outcome that has made the U.S. the greatest country in the world, based on freedom. The Tea Party has arisen by common middle class Americans that know something is wrong, that we are on the wrong track and arose more so because of Obama’s anti-american wrongness. The Tea Party should be proud of its accomplishments. The 2010 election was a disapproval of Democrats policy and fiscal handling, seeing that the Democrats policy was generally harmful.
Many Americans gave President Obama a chance and had hopes he what do right by America. First it was the $787 billion stimulus bill, Americans said OK — spend it, we’ll see if it works (which it did not–because it was wasted and more a kickback payoff to Obama buddies). Then, Americans heard of the cap and trade legislation (you know, Al Gore‘s scandal that would make American household bills go up by $2000 a year)– which started the off course, over the edge problem for Mr. Obama. Then it was the healthcare bill in summer of 2009 that was the last straw and told Americans that Obama was no good with plans that are not good for America, aka his “transformation” which then caused Americans to repeatedly march on Washington to refute the wrongful governance of Obama (which we will keep doing too). Why was Obama seen reading a book titled, “The Post-America World”?
You seem to condemn corporations, big business, banks and Wall Street as some kind of planned evil, I do not. Corporations are entities and people that employ people and do good things for society (such as charity and developmental giving to communities). Inventors that produce new useful competitive products deserve there success rewarded with profit which may make them wealthy, like say, Bill Gates (microsoft computers). Other very serious professions such as say, heart surgeons, deserve to be paid well. Many Democrats and liberals seem to want to hold contempt for corporations, calling them “evil” as if the welfare state is owed something. Dems, Liberals and their un-american progressives want to say that corporations are sitting on a stack of money and it should be taken and redistributed, as per the recent communist statement by Michael Moore, “that’s not your money”. Here is Obama’s ’social justice’ by the Progressives– Bad for America is good.
Clearly what was displayed at the Wisconsin Union protests was shameful (that shows the welfare/redistribution of wealth failure), a selfish tantrum with excessive wants at the expense of other American Taxpayers, the State and the American Spirit of the Nation. Worse so, was the misguided youth and anti-American folk calling for socialism and communism. The misguided unknowing persons calling for socialism/communism, thinking that they are promised the utopia of the ’Great Society’ are just the useful idiots being used to attempt to install communism. See, those who think that bigger government is needed in order to redistribute wealth under State socialist government, per Obama, are being duped to destroy their own freedom under an anti-American communist State. Let’s bring up the wealthy Liberals, leftist wall-street persons, or Union bosses like Trumpka, or the healthcare waiver buddies that Obama gets money from that like to make sure they stay wealthy and in power. That’s just it, the wealthy are going to make sure they stay wealthy, whether it’s the Left or the Right at the top or its communism or capitalism. For example, does not Hugo Chavez make sure he, his family and certain others remain rich while his Venezuelan people are enslaved by his communist orders? Or yet China, that worsely kills its own People for dissent? Taxing the rich and/or their corporations (or red taping with Obamacare, regulations) makes the Rich just push those expenses off on the consumer, move jobs and wealth overseas, or just not hire to protect their wealth and power. But what is far worse is communism rather than having Americanism (freedom). Most of Tea Partiers are not well to do financially, and may even stand to benefit from Obama socialism or could take welfare, but yet reject what is principally wrong with progressivism, Obamism and will never take part in defacing American founding principles.
Doing the same thing and expecting different results is called insanity. Newsflash for Democrats, Liberals, Progressives: the ‘Great Society’ utopia is a failure that makes things worse. It would serve liberals well to listen to one of their own Democrats, JFK who stated, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
Most conservatives, like yourself (snaketread) and other Tea Party people talk about capitalism and defending it. You think of small businessmen and independent tradesmen, independent farmers and ranchers and small companies when you think of Capitalism. I’m all for enabling such people. They truly are the bedrock upon which our Western society rests. But when I speak of “capitalism,” I think of giant global corporations. Many of these corporations began as American businesses: PepsiCo, Weyerhaeuser, Caterpillar, Ford, GM, Coca Cola, IBM and countless others. But they have gone global. They owe their alliegance not to the United States, or really to any nation state. They seek a world without borders or restrictions that can hamper their growth. They want to swim freely in a global ocean. Nation states are obstacles that get in their way, so they naturally seek to weaken or even destroy nation states. This is global capitalism. It works exactly the way the international Communist movement worked during much of the 20th century. But for different purposes. If you love your nation, you have to understand the threat that global capitalism poses to it.
The problem is that American conservatives don’t see this threat from global capitalism. Perhaps because most conservatives like and desire wealth above almost everything else in life. They like wealth and the power it buys. The international communist movement is dead, despite everything Glenn Beck says to the contrary. It has no power or influence. It is a failed ideology. It is dead even in mainland China. Global capitalism is consuming the planet. It owns the Republican Party in the US and about half of the Democratic Party. It already controls our national government and uses our state department and military to advance its interests.
For these reasons, I see someone like Michael Moore to be a true American Patriot because he cares much more about the American people than he does global corporations.
I understand your worldview, Snaketread. As I said, I used to be in the John Birch Society, too. I read all Robert Welch’s books and all of the JBS propaganda of that time. There was a reason to be a Bircher back in the 1980s. The Soviet Union was still a powerful threat. Communism was still a threat within our own country. I think Senator Joe McCarthy was absolutely right in his day, except that there were many more powerful Communists within our government and in influential places in society than even he imagined. But that was 60 years ago, and much has changed since then. Today it’s international capitalism that’s the threat to our sovereignty and freedoms.
I don’t put money first, Snaketread. I put people first. If you have high-quality people you can utterly destroy a nation’s wealth (think of Germany and Japan in 1946) and that people can rebuild their nation and create an even greater and richer state. True wealth resides within the talent and character of the people of a nation. That is what is truly valuable.
The flaw within conservatives and conservative organizations like the John Birch Society is that they do not recognize this truth about people and wealth. People create all wealth. They are the goose that lays the golden egg. A great nation recognizes this and structures its laws and policies to maximize the talents of its people and allow them to use those talents. Today’s pro-capitalist conservatives believe that capitalism creates wealth. The problem is that unfettered capitalism is just like cancer. It grows and grows and consumes and consumes. It consumes natural resources and human beings (which it treats as just another natural resource to be exploited for maximum profit); unfettered capitalism would cut down the last Redwood tree and butcher the last Blue whale if there were a profit to be made from it. It would — and has — work children 12 and more hours a day. It would work adults 80 hours a week for subsistance wages until that human’s health failed him and then cast him off to die without a thought. This had been the situation in China for generations until the Communists offered the peasants of that nation a more humane alternative — and the common people accepted that alternative. Just as cancer will eventually kill it’s host, uncontrolled capitalism will eventually destroy a nation.
Free enterprise on a national scale is good. It is essential to build a strong and prosperous nation. Unregulated international capitalism is a greater threat than communism. It is the cancer that will destroy all nations and perhaps even the planet. Conservatives need to understand the difference between the two.
Today the Republican Party represents the interests of international capitalism within the United States.
On a related issue in your previous post, you speak about public employees in Wisconsin like school teachers, policemen, and other state workers as though they are welfare cheats and overpaid bums. These workers had already made concessions in wages and benefits. They had accepted cuts in pay and cuts in benefits. And for what what? So the Republican Party could give bigger tax cuts to big corporations — virtually all of which are from out of state.
Republicans like the Governor Walker of Wisconsin talk about shared sacrifice, but they demand all the sacrifice from the working people and give that sacrifice — not to the state or its taxpayers — but to big business.
What is fair about that, snaketread? What is honest about it?
Why do so many working people in the South believe it is wrong for a working person to make more than five dollars and hour? I’ve never been able to understand that.