Patriot Act deux

Can't agree more, Cross...but when you vocalize a threat not related to the stereotypical middle eastern terrorist, somehow you always end up looking like a paranoid freak shut in the closet in the fetal position clutchin a flag and a worn copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. (Guess someone should have told the family on Ruby Ridge that there was nothing to fear...wonder if it should have been done before or after the wife and child were shot)...I really have no use for the scare tactics of the terrorist, the government here is scary enough.

Before I wander off into the political for an evening of wine guzzling and debauchery...I will say this:

I love America. I love the freedoms that I have. I love my right to annonimity. I love the fact that I can wake up and read the paper, disagree with 90 percent of what is said, fume about it for 2 hours, drink 3 cups of coffee and 2 beers then sit down and write about what makes me angry. I relish the fact that I can disagree, loudly, with whatever I choose, that I can search for facts, that I can read the Patriot act II in it's entirity uneditied and uncensored. It is for this reason that I cannot stand for the squelching of everything that I love. It is for that reason that I do not want my library card to be traced (check it out it is coming to a information vendor near you), my upper arm tagged, my phones tapped, my emails read or my home illegally (but legally under the new pat act) searched. It is for that reason that I do not want to give the gov-co more rights than it is given by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. It is for that reason that I want those luscious checks and balances to remain intact instead of being gobbled up like a rum cake at a mitzfah. I don't speak out for the sheer purpose of being rude or incorigable (although it does make me tingle). I do so because I LOVE AMERICA.

If you don't see the same things that I do in Pat I and the sequel then so be it. It is, for now, your right. But just remember, there may come a day when it is no longer your right. I am just not willing to wait for that day. I want to pick it apart and question it now. Before it is too late. Before I thwack myself on the head with a homeresque Duh.

Party lines are party lines but in the end we are all human. We are all deserving of opinion, denial, protest, pondering, property, aha moments and mistakes. We are all right and we are all wrong. But we have the choice to sit on our laurels and wait for an answer or use our intellect and seek that elusive it, the truth, for ourselves. The choice is yours. Best of luck to all involved and to those who don't think they are...You are in my prayers may God, Allah, and all the other guys and gals in the great beyond bless you.

No Wiggle... they don't have to prove anything. That's the whole point. They only need to suspect you and then your property can be seized and searched and you can be detained indefinitely without charges and without legal representation. Think about that real hard.

We all need to take into account the ramifications of this new vocabulary. The definitions are erroneous at best and at worst vague to the point of abuse. By the way if my spelling is off I have 20 liberals playing presidential trivia with tequila shots....I'm a constitutionalist and a light weight when it comes to liquor so guess who is losing lol...and in turn cannot spell a flocking word if it were to save my shallow self consumed life.

Yes, I understand now, I am a blind lemming and you all know the future.


i already bowed out of this discussion because it is very ONE WAY.

Lemme say this one thing and seriously ponder it and check it out.

Do you really believe we have less rights today than we did 50 years ago? 80 years ago? 200 years ago. I would say not. We have so many laws that protect us from the man now. You think military tribunals during wartimesd didnt used to happen. Well, they did. Abraham Lincoln instituted it during the cival war and people did not get the protection that they are getting now, it was martial law.

Keep believeing that it used to be better than it is now, but it wasnt.

I dont deny and never had denied the fact that the government needs to watched, that's the way it's supposed to be, but the frikin sky is not falling.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm a realist. We should be learning from the past, not repeating it. One "Red Scare" and McCarthy era should have been enough that we'd be smart enough not to go down that road again, yet here we are, being encouraged to spy on our neighbors and to live in fear of the boogie man. I live near DC. Over the highways there are programmable signs that display traffic conditions and warnings. When they're idle they display the message "Report Suspicious Activity" and give the TIPS hotline number. With all due respect Wiggle, the sky IS falling. How many times have you heard a politician (especially a right winger) say "everything changed on 9/11"? You were correct in your previous post that fear of terrorism after 9/11 is irrational and overblown. Your bathtub is a thousand times more likely to kill you than a terroris; but fear works, and it's being cultivated and manipulated by political opportunists with agendas that are not benign. The neo-conservative agenda is about projecting empire and hegemony and they don't seem very shy about selling out our civil rights to those ends. This is not stuff to be complacent about. There are already American citizens being detained without legal recourse. There have already been political activist groups infiltrated by the FBI. There have already beein warrantless searches and seizures for cases that have nothing to do with international terrorism. There are already thousands of people who are not allowed to board an airplane because they share a name with someone on the watch list. These are the kinds of repressive and draconian measures that we pay lip service to fighting against in other parts of the world. We have an attorney general who said in a public speech that we have no king but Jesus. We have fundamentalist Christians in the highest offices of the land and they've started a war against fudamentalist Islam under the banner of fighting terrorists. The time to wake up and smell the coffee is now, not when it's too late to stop. A bit of paranoia and fear is what we need right now, but not about terrorists hiding under our beds with a suitcase full of yellow cake. The more legitimate fear is that the cure is likely to be worse than the disease.

You act like those things you have listed are new things, but they are not. EDIT: Not new during wartime. We were attacked you know.

We have always had christian fundamentalist running the government.

We have been told throughout times in our countries history to spy on our neighbors.

There have been several times throughout the US history that US citizens have been held without charges.

Guess what? We are still a free and democratic nation and one of the biggest donators of goodwill to the world and still very very free.

Our governement is ran by humans and there will always be mistakes made, but some damn smart people layed out a pretty good plan that has allowed an unprecidented amount of freedom and prosperity to continue and advance throughout our history. Yes, some people are corrupt and need to go away, but that doesnt bring the whole system down, because it isnt ran by one person or even just a few people, it is ran by many many people.

Think about all of the equality and freedom certain people have achieved recently.

Think about worse times in our history and realise that the US keeps going and getting better even after these times.

Think of the times before we had watchdog groups barking up everyones tree making sure they arent cheating.

There is a war between Fundamentalist Islamics and the rest of the world, if you cant see that, then I dont know how you can call yourself a realist. What about the Fundamentalist Islamist in Chechnya? What about the Taliban? You think you can reason with these people. One of their own people who is a humanitarian cant reason with these people, she dies just the same, because she doesnt have their radical views or was in the wrong spot at the wrong time.. They kill children to make a point. I'm not saying all Islamic people are like this, but Fundamentalist Islamics are the ones doing these fucked up things. Yes there is a war against these people and there damn well should be. It IS very hard to pick them out because they dont wear uniforms, or insignia, they look just like any other brown skinned person from the middle east and that is the dillema. Last time we had a scare from a certain group of people we just put them up in concentration camps. WEll, it's not happening this time.

The great thing is that we are both entitled to our opinions and my opinion is that both you and I will be able to continue to have our opinions even after the worst of times which I dont think we are having right now. Worse things have happend in our history and here we are, still some of the most privaledged people on the face of the earth. Yes, we are so much more lucky than most of the world. We have more and can do more than pretty much any other country in the world. Even after rough times like the cival war and the spread of communism we have prevailed and continued to be a great nation. Hell, our bums live better than much of the world, sitting around drinking beer buming plenty of money to survive off of the spare change that we have.

It's a new age and with it come new problems and many new ideas on how to deal with them. We just have to keep at it untill we find the right solutions and I have faith that we will do it again.

I gotta reiterate though, that our government has used several times what is written there in the patriot act, they just didnt write it before. The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Military tribunals. Spying. None of it new, but in fact a very real part of our history.

Gah, a lot of writing stream of though, so sorry if it's kinda here and there.

Oh yes there is a boogey man. Lots of em all over the place.


ANOTHER EDIT::: Lol I've been reading about these civil rights abuse created by the patriot act. Prisoners being talked to mean...OH NOES. Some, but probably very few illegal search and seisures. All being investigated of course. Not being swept under the carpet of governemtnconspiracy.

Statistically this is what is scaring me:

This is from a report that includes updates of data from a previous BJS report, Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison. At yearend 2001, over 5.6 million U.S. adults had ever served time in State or Federal prison. With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons as of 2003, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country in the world.

If incarceration rates remain unchanged, 6.6% of U.S. residents born in 2001 will go to prison at some time during their lifetime.

The scary thing is that the rates are not remaining unchanged but increasing. Only 49% of the people currently in prison are made up of violent offenders. The rest fall into property, drug and public disorder catagories. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm

Yes - you can go to prison for public disorder. Apparently to the tune of 11% of the inmates currently in prison.

All the things that Chip mentioned in his post above coupled with the drastic culling of our constitutional rights (via the Patriots Act 1 & 2), then enforced by existing technology such as intelligent databases, GPS, RF Chip technology and a penchant to put cameras everywhere - become predicators of a disastrous erosion of both freedom and privacy.

We are turning out new technologies on a daily basis and there are no protections with regard to their use against individuals. Things are fine now because at least 50% of the population of this country would not give up freedom for safety.

But put that kind of power in the hands of an attorney general who said in a public speech that we have no king but Jesus and in the hands of admitted fundamentalist Christians in the highest offices of the land coupled with 50% of a population that would give up just about anything to be safe and it dosen't seem sane. Historically, it's proven to be a disaster.

Wiggles I respectfully disagree, this country has not always been led by fundamentalists, please see what the founding fathers had to say very specifically about religion:

http://altreligion.about.com/library/weekly/aa070202a.htm

This is inclusive of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and so on.

Besides all of the above, here are three more recent additions that endorse the separation of church and state:

"Because we are unqualifiedly and without reservation against any system of denominational schools, maintained by the adherents of any creed with the help of state aid, therefore, we as strenuously insist that the public schools shall be free from sectarian influences, and, above all, free from any attitude of hostility to the adherents of any particular creed." (Theodore Roosevelt)

"In the experiences of a year of the Presidency, there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish." (Warren G. Harding)

"The fundamental precept of liberty is toleration. We cannot permit any inquisition either from within or from without the law or apply any religious test to the holding of office. The mind of America must be forever free." (Calvin Coolidge.)

None of these leaders were Christian fundamentalists.

It depends on the definition you use. Some describe it as a literal belief in the writing in the bible. Others definitions say something to the effect of religeous intollerance.

I was using it as someone who firmly believes in the bible, which those people did.

"""When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."""

Just because someone mentions god or jesus doesnt make them out to get you.

Some of them are I concede, but I know many very nice and tolerant christians too.

This dosen't sound much like someone who believes much in the bible:

I have examined all the known superstitions of the Word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world ...

The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes; fools and hypocrites. To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.

Thomas Jefferson

Though I have to say - I very much agree with him.

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
George Washington, address to Congress, 8 January, 1790

I can come up with more from George, but this was the one I liked best and I'd have to dig.

I'm not saying that our founding fathers were immoral, I believe that you can be moral without being Christian or religious. I think that the bottom line is that all of these founding fathers of democracy felt that religion corrupted liberty and took steps to assure that it was not the foundation of our American government.

There has been an a great deal of erosion of those steps taken by them since the 1950's that I find disconcerting.

But this is a bit off the thread topic - so sorry for that.

I agree - I know some fantastic people that are Christian and it is not their intention to legislate or judicate their beliefs. Unfortunately, they bear the brunt of those that do.

So true, I had to fight tooth and nail to get my ex to stop blaming every christian for the nutjob ones beliefs.

She finally conceded as I gave more and more examples of nice, non-judgemental people, that were christian.

Ps. I just voted. Straight baby eater ballot

Naw... GO KERRY/EDWARDS!!!

MAybe I'm a bit mislead in what they thought, perhaps they are more spiritual with a belief in God, than fundamental. I always thought they were firm believers.