Loo, I am 100% against the theft of intellectual property. But I fail to understand why Homeland Security is involved with the confiscation of domain names – especially without a trial and ‘guilty’ verdict. Theft is a crime that should be investigated and tried by the FBI. It has nothing to do with Homeland Defense. No good cause is worth losing our constitutional rights.

And whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’? Were is the United States of America – we seem to have lost her in the past few decades.

We are going to be experiencing problems because we got a top of the page link from Watts Up With That. Will be turning off comments for a while to see if we can weather the storm! Thanks Anthony and Joe!

Happy Thanksgiving America!

Hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving

Leave it to the Obama White House to be completely clueless about the law regarding invasive searches (since they don’t have a clue on just about everything they face). Andy McCarthy sums it up best:

But what makes the search appropriate is the record of the people involved, not the abstract possibility of violence. A savage act is always possible. If that is all it took to justify gross infringements of liberty, such infringements would always and everywhere be justified. An intrusive search is reasonable, or not, based on what the people involved have done to prompt it, not simply because life is fraught with peril.

That is because probable cause is not the same as possible harm. In fact ‘possible‘ is not the same as ‘probable‘ – something the left forgets. When Bush made his famous changes to FISA to let the NSA pass on terrorist leads to the FBI, there had to be a probable cause trigger. In those cases, anyone in the US in contact with a known and monitored terrorist (detected by the NSA as they monitored the terrorists) would trigger an FBI investigation to see if there was probable cause for extending the surveillance to the person in the US. In no case was anyone targeted because they simply might be a terrorist. People had to be in contact with known terrorists – a definition the Obama administration foolishly limited with deadly results.

This is how Major Nidal (Ft Hood Massacre) ended up being the subject of TWO counter terrorism investigations, beginning under Bush and continuing as Obama took over the reigns of government. I was able to piece together a time line indicating how AG Holder and Obama likely suspended the investigation and monitoring of Major Nidal in the summer of 2009, as part of their dimwitted policy to dial back the war on terror from the Bush era. See, Nidal had been in contact with the American traitor Anwar al-Awlaki who fights for al Qaeda in Yemen. Under the Bush rules, once Nidal contacted al-Awlaki he triggered the probable cause alarm. His actions gave the national security apparatus the right to investigate and infringe on 4th amendment rights. Obama and Holder saw Nidal and Awlaki as US citizens, and Yemen not part of the war on al Qaeda.

A position they clearly learned was wrong, now that Obama has put an assassination order out on al-Awlaki. Talk about a pendulum swing. First he has protected speech, then he can be killed without a trial or verdict.

This is clearly not what TSA and DHS is doing now. They have stolen our constitutional rights on the basis of a possible attack. All those people getting molested in public are being wrongfully infringed upon, since there is NO probable cause they are a threat. We are all guilty until patted down, felt up and deemed innocent.

Massive violations of the US Constitution is a high crime – and needs to be seen as such. We cannot let panicked bureaucrats steel our constitution to cover up their mistakes. There needs to a high price for this kind of law breaking. We are off the slippery slope and now falling into the hole of dictatorship.

MAJOR UPDATE: Anyone who thinks the Constitution is something that can be polled and waved by some sort of voice vote really has to go back to US Government class in High School.

Despite a reported uproar about full-body screening procedures now in broader use at U.S. airports and calls for a boycott, Gallup finds that relatively few frequent U.S. air travelers are angry about the new procedures or inclined to cut back on flying as a result.

Public opinion is irrelevant in this matter. The public can be of the view that it is not right to home school, teach abstinence or not allow a 9 year old watch Jurassic Park. My rights and my decisions are not up for national polling. This is the straw that is breaking the backs of We The People. I don’t care if 95% of the people wave their rights – I do not! And you can only confiscate my constitutional rights from my cold dead hands – at which point America will have died anyway.

The question at the core of the TSA security mess is what individual rights are We The People willing to give up for security. Are we willing to be groped and scanned, or should we use sophisticated profiling to detect evil human beings bent on mass murder?

We face blood thirsty enemy in the form of Islamic Fascism – a deadly combination of religious fervor and soulless cruelty that makes the human holocausts of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia look pale in comparison. The future vision of Islamic Fascism is best seen in Iran and the Taliban, with al Qaeda being their version of the Nazi SS, East German Stasi or the Soviet Union’s KGB. The atrocities al Qaeda (and Iran) were willing to commit on Arab Muslims in Iraq indicates these animals will do anything to gain control of humanity’s destiny.

The Obama administration’s original plan to not speak of Islamo Fascism and their Terrorist-based war on the West was as naive as it was stupid. In return for Obama’s efforts to pretend Islam does not have a deadly cancer growing inside of it, we experienced more near-successful attacks on our country in 2 short years than in all the years since 9-11. Team Obama dialed back what would trigger a national security (FISA) investigation, and where it would be triggered (ignoring Yemen for a time) and we ended up with the Ft Hood Massacre and the near misses of the Christmas Day Bomber and Times Square Bomber.

The reason the country is being sexually assaulted and its personal privacy invaded on a massive scale – without a hint of probable cause – is because this administration woke up and realized Islamo Fascism is real and very deadly. And now they are in full panic mode and claiming the only way to protect us is to violate all of us equally.

To this I say ‘bullshit’! First off, our constitutional rights do not disappear when we go certain places in this country. You can no more search me without cause in an airline terminal than on the street. We cannot have the government just decide when the constitution applies when they feel like it – or else we don’t have a constitution.

Secondly, when the TSA instituted screening of baggage after 9-11, the nation went along VOLUNTARILY! We allowed this of our own free will as a prudent step to stop terrorists from bringing a weapon on board a plane and taking it over and make it a weapon. This was not an act of giving up our rights, it was an act of common cause.

And it has gotten way out of control (e.g., nail clippers are not weapons). We can protect ourselves now, even from box cutters. We know that seat cushions double as flotation devices and shields capable of dealing with box cutters and small knifes. We are not sheep who cannot deal with 5 lightly armed terrorists. This has been proven many times, just review the Shoe Bomber and Christmas Day Bomber – not to mention flight 92 on 9-11.

But this latest TSA intrusion is too much and illegal. We don’t need mass molestation and invasion of privacy to stop terrorism. We need profiling.

And before another liberal moron cries ‘racism’ I must note that looking at race or clothing is not profiling – it is another version of liberal ignorance. Profiling for terrorists has to look well beyond race, nationality and garb. It has to look at human behavior. It has to transcend the obvious, since the obvious can be faked or a facade or a home grown terrorist. Some of our most notorious enemies in AQAP are Americans turned traitor. The Times Square bomber was American, as was the Ft Hood murderer.

So don’t believe the cries of racism that come with the phrase ‘profiling’ – that is just another liberal exposing his lack of intellect.

We are not going to export the invasion of privacy and sexual assault across this land because this administration is filled with incompetent boobs. I have never been for impeachment, but if there ever was a cause this would be it:

The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary.

“[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,” Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on “Charlie Rose.”

“I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?”

These pat downs and body scanners are not protecting us – it is a lame act. The previous screening for guns and weapons that might allow 5 people to overrun 100 other airline passengers was a reasonable precaution. But you cannot stop shaped charges of plastic or powder by these methods. This is why defensive measures in a war on terror are only temporary. It is why terrorists must be located and destroyed in their hiding holes. It is why terrorism is only successfully fought on the offensive, not by restricting the freedoms of potential victims.

This group in the White House has violated our constitution because it is afraid. Not afraid for us as much as afraid it will be blamed if a terrorist gets through. After years of fighting Islamo Fascism, and losing many brave heroes, the left has yet to figure out we have always been willing to pay the price to DEFEND our freedoms. We don’t cower.

And we sure as hell don’t feel up children or take revealing pictures of them to protect our freedoms. Either end this madness now and get back to the war on terror or face the consequences. I for one have had it. We should be looking for terrorists via profiling, listening in on all their calls and communications to discover their support network, seeking them out and capturing them, and then interrogating them until they lead us to their evil allies. We need to be hunting terrorists, not assaulting innocent civilians.

Violating our constitutional rights on a massive scale is a high crime folks. Plain and simple.

Update: Look who the government has decided can keep their constitutional rights.

Update: The tide of growing anger is building. Of Democrats think the 2008 election was bad because of the economy, just wait and see what months of assaulting Americans does to their party.

Has our nation’s security come down to a choice between profiling and sexual molestation?

I chose profiling. Put it to a vote and let the people decide. It is our country after all. DC needs to take directions and stop giving them.

As I wrote before, there needs to be binding conditions attached to any bill raising the debt ceiling:

1. Cancel all the unspent funds left in the Stimulus Bill
2. Permanently extending all the current tax rates (no need to call them Bush’s tax cuts, they are OUR current tax rates).
3. Freezing Obamacare for 4 years until we figure out what it really is doing to us – now that we can read the law the Dems passed.
4. Put all discretionary funding back to 2006 levels.
5. Establish a panel to go through each element of government and determine what we can live without, what can be privatized and what can be moved to the states.

The last item is the most important. We need to look at government as a pool of wasted resources that need to go back to the people and the states. We need to look at the federal bureaucracy and determine what we can live without. Just like all of us trying to get through these rough economic times individually, the ‘ruling class’ needs to be forced to cut back to the bare minimum – since they have no ability to control themselves on their own. We need less taxes and government process across the board to infuse money and reignite our nation’s inspiration and innovation. And to do that we need much less government.

For example, we don’t need the National Endowment for The Arts. We spend tens of billions on every school child throughout their public education experience exposing them to music, dance, theater, art, writing, photography, computer graphics, etc. Every child is given the opportunity to discover and nurture their inner muse. This investment establishes the basis for our national arts to grow and evolve. We don’t need to waste tax payer money on bottles of piss with crosses in them.

The states can definitely teach our children without the Department of Education – which has wasted untold billions since its inception in the 1970’s and has only falling test scores to show for their efforts.

Instead of raising taxes, we need to cut back. We need to combine efforts. In the science and technology front you have NASA, you have the Department of Energy Laboratories, you have the FFRDCs (Mitre, Aerospace, JPL, APL etc), you have NOAA (which I just learned is in the Department of Commerce of all places), you have USGS in the Department of Interior, there is DARPA and the DoD labs, and on and on and on ….

These resources are critical to America staying on the leading edge of science and technology, but they overlap and duplicate efforts and waste money. A common infrastructure for accounting, contracts, security, communications and vendor pools could streamline these organizations and bring innovation back into the moribund hallways.

We need the FAA to remain diligent on safety and energy efficiency, pulling the aviation industry together in common cause. We don’t need it promoting aviation – that is the job of private industry.

And we better not still have a national helium reserve left over from the war of the dirigibles (World War I).

And, we can could remove a good chunk of our debt by auctioning off the USPS.

This Congress needs to look at the Federal Government as a huge source of stimulus which needs to be removed from the backs of the people (e.g., taxes) and moved to the states and the private sector or the individual to deal with. Not until then will I feel the Political Industrial Complex ‘gets it’.

Could President Obama become one of this nation’s worst one-term presidents of all time? The historic drubbing his party took this month sure could leave some to that conclusion. His naive stimulus efforts, chasing those mythical federal ‘shovel ready’ jobs, have proven once and for all the impotence of Keynesian theory. The fact more people are being waved out of Obamacare than being covered is another sign of how this president has been a rolling disaster – all hat and no cattle.

The results he has produced in the Middle East are just one more enormous sign pointing in the same bleak direction:

Instead of becoming a heady triumph of his diplomatic skill and special insight, Obama’s peace process is viewed almost universally in Israel as a mistake-riddled fantasy.

Liberalism is a fantasy. An intellectually lazy fantasy about saving the planet every other day because it is all so obvious even a liberal can do it! Fixing the economy, winning the wars on terrorism, fixing the Middle East, providing cheap and available health care for all! All so simple, to the simple minds on the left.

All products of a liberal education system. Anyone else detecting a pattern here?

Update: Even more harsh reality:

Many senior Israeli leaders have concluded that Hillary Clinton and John McCain were right about Obama’s naivete and inexperience.

“The naïve liberals who are at the heart of the administration really believe in all the misconceptions the Palestinians and all their friends all over the world are trying to place,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, a former high-ranking military intelligence officer who is now deputy director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

One has to note The Politico is not a right wing news outlet by any stretch of the imagination.

So, the GOP has won an historic election in the House of Representatives and in state governments across the nation. So what can a cornered and desperate democrat party do? It can trick the new GOP members into the lame game of conspiracy theories. It can lay out some poisonous bread crumbs that will bring out the inner ‘Birther‘ of the fringe in the Tea Party – and set the stage for another voter backlash. This time against the GOP.

I have been following the story of the ‘Washington Insider’ posts for a while, and they seemed to be legit – if not stubbornly useless (see here, here and here). One reason I was starting to believe this yarn being spun by a niche web author and a supposed ‘white house insider’ is because of the information I uncovered in the link listed above. I discovered direct testimony of President-elect Obama’s involvement with selecting who should take over his senate seat. The testimony is clear, unambiguous and from those directly involved – one who is his top adviser bar none. This testimony and what it represents is clearly a lever Democrats could use to distance themselves from Obama’s mistakes and missteps.

But these insider posts also could be misinformation, meant to trip up the GOP and send them down the wrong path. America really could care less about Obama’s birth certificate. The initial claims of forgery were completely and thoroughly debunked. The only thing that could save the Democrats right now is if the GOP goes off the deep end.
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People will not be sitting on unemployment for years anymore, waiting for the perfect job:

The House of Representatives on Thursday voted down a measure that would have reauthorized extended unemployment insurance for another three months, leaving no clear path forward to prevent the benefits from lapsing as scheduled on Nov. 30.

Without a reauthorization, the Labor Department estimates that two million long-term unemployed will prematurely stop receiving benefits before the end of the year.

What these people fail to explain is these 2 million people have been living off the rest of us for YEARS. Sorry, but time is up – find a job.

Federally-funded extended benefits, which give the unemployed up to 73 weeks of benefits once they exhaust 26 weeks of state benefits, have needed several reauthorizations in the past year, and Congress has let them lapse three times.

52 weeks per year mean these people have to avoid finding any job for almost 2 years (104 week) before these extra extensions need to kick in. Want the unemployment to go down? Force people to get out and start working again. And yes, I have been there myself the last few months finding just about any work possible to keep going. Sympathy has an expiration date – and 2 years is well past that point.