|
Building a Culture of Freedom - Our Liberty Must Not Be Taken for Granted (pg. 2)
|
View this Thread in Original format
| Lepanto |
And to surrender is certain destruction.
how can you possibly believe we are fighting for nothing and to end it is right? |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lepanto
And to surrender is certain destruction.
how can you possibly believe we are fighting for nothing and to end it is right? |
I'm not willing to surrender to the corrupt, malevolent, megalomania which pervades our government and the ruling elite that controls it. |
|
|
| Lepanto |
| quote: | Originally posted by Trancer-X
I'm not willing to surrender to the corrupt, malevolent, megalomania which pervades our government and the ruling elite that controls it. |
I agree, but would you ever to any government? Probably not right? |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lepanto
I agree, but would you ever to any government? Probably not right? |
Why would ANYONE ever have to surrender to a representative, democratically elected government?
| quote: | The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to always be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.
- Thomas Jefferson |
| quote: | Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
- Ronald Reagan |
|
|
|
| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lepanto
"Laws are silent in time of war" - Cicero
|
| quote: | A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.
- Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, United States Supreme Court
|
|
|
|
| Lepanto |
| quote: | Originally posted by Trancer-X
Why would ANYONE ever have to surrender to a representative, democratically elected government? |
there are many more quotes where those come from however, why not? If your elected leaders are asking you to comprimise with them and you don't agree, it is also your right to off, no? |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lepanto
there are many more quotes where those come from however, why not? If your elected leaders are asking you to comprimise with them and you don't agree, it is also your right to off, no? |
Can you elaborate a little bit? I really don't understand. Elected leaders asking you to compromise with them? I don't get what you're trying to say. |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
Homeland Security Hassles Owner of Truck with Bumperstickers
By Matthew Rothschild
February 22, 2006
Dwight Scarbrough used to be in the Navy. He was a machinist on submarines, some of them nuclear, in the Pacific from 1975-1980.
Now he heads up the Vets for Peace chapter in Boise, Idaho.
And he’s not shy about expressing his opinion.
At any given time, he may have as many as ten bumperstickers or peace signs on every conceivable spot of his truck.
He usually doesn’t get hassled, he tells me.
But then, on February 7, at his day job for a federal natural resource agency, Scarbrough got a call from, of all places, Homeland Security.
An official told him to come out to the parking lot and said he was in violation of the Code of Federal Regulations.
When Scarbrough came out, he found two armed officers of Homeland Security, who told him he was violating the regulation against the posting of signs on federal property.
(Scarbrough, fearing trouble, brought a tape recorder along and taped the entire confrontation. You can read a transcript at the Boise Weekly, which broke the story on February 15 in an excellent article by Nicholas Collias.)
Scarbrough tried to point out that those signs were not on federal property but on his own private property—his personal truck.
And by the way, the signs were really subversive, like “Honor Vets, Wage Peace,” and “Another Veteran Against War with Iraq.”
“Sir, you’ve got signs posted on your vehicle. I’m informing you that you’re in violation,” one officer told him, according to the transcript.
Scarbrough: “That’s not illegal. That’s not illegal.”
When Scarbrough accused them of harassment, they continued to demand that he remove the signs or be cited for a violation.
“You know this is BS,” Scarbrough told them. “So any vehicle that comes on with, like a police sign, or with delivery or FedEx or something, that’s not a sign?”
To which the officer replied: “All signs are prohibited.”
“It’s crap and you know it,” Scarbrough said.
Rather than risk getting a citation, and rather than tear the bumperstickers and signs down, Scarbrough moved his truck out of the parking lot.
“I was pretty angry about it,” he says.
The next day, Scarbrough says he “drove around the parking lot and took pictures of about forty vehicles that had signs of them.”
According to Scarbrough, some of the signs said, “My Dad Is a Marine,” and “Support the Troops.”
“I wanted to make the point that if they were going to apply the law equally, they were going to have to tell everybody that they had to peel off their signs,” he explains. “This was an obvious attempt to suppress my right to free speech.”
Scarbrough contacted the local ACLU, which found him an attorney, Michael Bartlett of the prestigious law firm Nevin, Benjamin, and McKay.
“My jaw dropped,” Bartlett says, when he heard what had happened to Scarbrough. “These are the kinds of political statements most protected under our Constitution.”
Bartlett has offered to represent Scarbrough pro bono, but there appears to be no need to just yet.
Scarbrough has since returned to work, and to the parking lot, with signs and stickers on his truck bumper and doors.
And he hasn’t been hassled again.
“I suspect nothing will happen,” Bartlett says. “This is such a clear violation of the law he’s probably going to be left alone.”
He applauds Scarbrough for piping up, though. “Dwight is a great example of a good American who is not only willing to express his right to free speech but is willing to stand up for it,” Bartlett says. “We should be proud of him for that.”
Neither the federal Department of Homeland Security nor the Idaho branch could help clear up what happened.
“It’s not anyone I represent,” says Lt. Col. Stephanie Dowling, public affairs officer for the Idaho Military Division, which, she says, “includes the Idaho State Bureau of Homeland Security. We’re the emergency management agency. We do floods, and work with FEMA, and all of that. It certainly wasn’t the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security.”
The press office for the federal Department of Homeland Security did not return phone calls for comment.
Back at work, with his adorned truck in the federal parking lot, Scarbrough seems to be doing just fine.
“One of my co-workers’ wives made a cake for me with a pick-up truck and signs on it,” he says. “That tells you the sentiment around here.”
http://progressive.org/mag_mc022206 |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
VA Nurse Investigated for “Sedition” for Criticizing Bush
By Matthew Rothschild
February 8, 2006
Laura Berg is a clinical nurse specialist at the VA Medical Center in Albuquerque, where she has worked for 15 years.
Shortly after Katrina, she wrote a letter to the editor of the weekly paper the Alibi criticizing the Bush Administration.
After the paper published the letter in its September 15-21 issue, VA administrators seized her computer, alleged that she had written the letter on that computer, and accused her of “sedition.”
Here’s what her letter said.
“I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” it began. “The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!” She mentioned that she was “a VA nurse” working with returning vets. “The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she wrote, and she worried about the hundreds of thousands of additional cases that might result from Katrina and the Iraq War.
“Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence,” she wrote. “This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil. . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.
Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.”
After her computer was seized, Berg wrote a memo to her bosses seeking information and an explanation.
Mel Hooker, chief of the human resources management service at the Albuquerque VA, wrote Berg back on November 9 and acknowledged that “your personal computer files did not contain the editorial letter written to the editor of the weekly Alibi.”
But rather than apologize, he leveled the sedition charge: “The Agency is bound by law to investigate and pursue any act which potentially represents sedition,” he said. “In your letter . . . you declared yourself ‘as a VA nurse’ and publicly declared the Government which employs you to have ‘tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence’ and advocated, ‘act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.’ ”
Berg, who is not talking to the press, is “scared for her job” and “pretty emotionally distressed,” says Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU of New Mexico.
“We were shocked to see the word ‘sedition’ used,” Simonson tells The Progressive. “Sedition? That’s like something out of the history books.”
In a press release, Simonson also said: “Is this government so jealous of its power, so fearful of dissent, that it needs to threaten people who openly oppose its policies with charges of ‘sedition’?”
The ACLU of New Mexico is working in Berg’s behalf. It has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to this incident. And it is asking “at the very least” that Berg “receive a public apology from Mr. Hooker to remedy the unconstitutional chilling effect on the speech of VA employees that has resulted from these intimidating tactics,” according to a letter from the New Mexico ACLU to the VA’s Office of Regional Counsel.
Hooker refused to return a phone call, and the VA’s Office of Regional Counsel refused to comment but referred questions to public affairs.
"While VA does not prohibit employees from exercising their freedom of speech, we do ask that such activity occurs outside government premises and not during their official tour of duty,” says Bill Armstrong, a public affairs specialist for New Mexico’s VA Health Care System. “When we have reason to believe that this policy is not being adhered to, we have the obligation to review an individual's computer activity."
The VA in Washington also refused to comment on the sedition charge.
“We don’t discuss internal personnel issues,” says Phil Budahn, a VA spokesman in Washington, D.C.
Berg has an additional concern: that the VA may have got the FBI on her case.
A union employee “shared with me that Mel Hooker conveyed to him that my letter had been reported ‘up through VA channels’ to the FBI in Washington, and that this had been discussed and confirmed” with union officials at the national office, Berg wrote in her November 2 complaint. (The union she belongs to is the American Federation of Government Employees.)
Hooker denied that the VA had contacted the FBI. “The Agency has no knowledge of any report alleged to have been made to the FBI regarding you or your letter,” he said in his November 9 memo.
Meanwhile, Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, has taken up the Berg case.
“I am writing to express my deep concern regarding news reports that Ms. Laura Berg . . . was investigated for sedition after writing a letter that was critical of the current Administration,” Senator Bingaman wrote to R. James Nicholson, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, on February 7. “In a democracy, expressing disagreement with the government’s actions does not amount to sedition or insurrection—it is, and must remain, protected speech.”
http://progressive.org/mag_mc020806 |
|
|
| Lepanto |
What I mean is this is a time of war, technically or not, it simply is a time of war. Do you think this is only happening cause Bush is in power? A patriot act of some sort would've been passed under any administration simply because it's a logical ingredient in homeland security. Now, perhaps it would've been more refined and no so...hmmm, fascist but some sort of version of the current patriot act would've been implemented anyways.
So, what i meant is that, be it Bush or someone else we must comprimise certain freedoms so that they can get their job done. Now, i'm against it all because this admin is way too shady and is no better than the enemy they are fighting. However, if Clinton was holding the reigns right now i wouldn't complain to much at all. |
|
|
| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lepanto
What I mean is this is a time of war, technically or not, it simply is a time of war. Do you think this is only happening cause Bush is in power? A patriot act of some sort would've been passed under any administration simply because it's a logical ingredient in homeland security. Now, perhaps it would've been more refined and no so...hmmm, fascist but some sort of version of the current patriot act would've been implemented anyways.
So, what i meant is that, be it Bush or someone else we must comprimise certain freedoms so that they can get their job done. Now, i'm against it all because this admin is way too shady and is no better than the enemy they are fighting. However, if Clinton was holding the reigns right now i wouldn't complain to much at all. |
That's a bunch of crappola from someone who obviously has little to no clue about the history of our country and/or why the Constitution was originally framed the way that it was.
We have a bungling bureaucracy that let's the tragic events of 9/11 occur, so in order to fix it we simply create more layers of bureaucracy with more alphabet agencies than ever before? I don't buy that and I don't buy into the justification of the Gestapo-like tactics that are being used to investigate otherwise law-abiding, private citizens.
The Patriot Act is just another tool for them to invade our personal lives. It defines terrorism with such broad strokes that it can in effect be used domestically on U.S. citizens (while infringing upon their Constitutional rights) via eavesdropping, secret searches, etc., all with little to no judicial oversight. It's a tool that was designed to spy on the people, not on the terrorists (whose international communications they were already able to monitor anyway, through Echelon.)
There is no compromising when it comes to the U.S. Constitution, hence the reason why both it and the Bill of Rights were created - so that our "God given" liberties would be permanently and irrevocably secured.
| quote: | The Bill of Rights comprises the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Those amendments were adopted between 1789 and 1791, and all relate to limiting the power of the federal government. They were added in response to criticisms of the Constitution by the state ratification conventions and by prominent individuals such as Thomas Jefferson (who was not a delegate to the Constitutional Convention). These critics argued that without further restraints, the strong central government would become tyrannical. The amendments were proposed by Congress as part of a block of twelve in September 1789. By December 1791 a sufficient number of states had ratified ten of the twelve proposals, and the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution |
|
|
|
|
|
