A repository for Marcospinelli's comments and essays published at other websites.

Robert Dean Cites 4th Amendment Violation, Sues TSA Over Full-Body Scans

Tuesday, November 23, 2010


You don't give up your Constitutional rights to get on an airplane.

In modern times, where people's jobs are dependent upon their being able to get from point A to point B in record time, or get home from vacations at a particular time in order to make it back to work on time,  plane travel is a *have to*.

Right after 9/11 (before, actually, when my family fell victim to an act of t3rr0r), I said that it's very easy for the government to keep Americans safe from terr0r attacks by locking everybody up into controllable quadrants, & by invading all of our privacy & restricting our freedom of movement.  We'd all be living like the world was one great big prison (the rich, of course, would be exempt from this, able to fly in private jets & live behind gated communities with private security forces).  To do that would have a chilling effect on our very nature & identities as free people.

By law, the government can't do it, nor is it necessary. Anyone running for public office who suggests it or resorts to it is the wrong person for the job.  Every generation of this country has faced this sort of challenge and not shredded the Constitution to keep Americans' covenant with their government.

Nothing of the abuses being committed by our government have anything to do with keeping us safe. The reason for the scanners is to bilk taxpayers out of money to pay a manufacturer for these machines.  It's about lending the illusion that we're safe, in order that commerce continues.  

If you have been reading and watching news reports, these scanners wouldn't necessarily have prevented what you're so terr!fied of.  There are serious questions about their safety, as well.  The grope-r@pes also wouldn't prevent what you're so terr!fied of.  The grope-r@pes are not SOP, & aren't being performed correctly.  The grope-downs are NOT how pat downs are supposed to be done, so the persons groping are either s3x offending id-jits or warped, twisted nvtcases practicing their own ideas for catching t3rror!sts.  Nothing of what's going on is what we should expect of professional security services in the US. It's as if the Three Stooges took over the Department Of Homeland Security.

An anti-terrorism specialist for the Israeli Secret Services, and the former director of security for El Al Airlines (and currently running a security consulting firm in New Jersey) was on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last week and explained why and how Israel and other nations have the most secure airlines in the world, nearly perfect safety and security records, without using scanners or body searches.

Transcript  |  Video
About Airlines
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What Obama 2010 Can Learn From Obama 2008

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges




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Conservatives and the Power of Overly Positive Thinking

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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'America By Heart,' New Sarah Palin Book: What You Need To Know


The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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Democratic Operatives On Creating Outside Group: 'Something Big Needs To Be Done'


The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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Holiday Travel Anxiety: 17 Classic Travel Books To Take Your Mind Off Your Worries (PHOTOS)


Hardly "unrelated".

And "spam"?

No.

Spam is electronic junk mail or email advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.  Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited email. However, if a long-lost brother finds your email address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Nor is spam the invited comments on a public website in which you are a guest.  Comments that you don't agree with (or by people you don't particularly like, or that you perceive to be off-topic, or that frustrate your efforts to avoid intelligent thought and lively intelligent discussion) aren't "spam".
About Thanksgiving
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David Axelrod May Leave White House Earlier Than Planned


"But I still do not see why people are so impressed with it. I agree that the political system is largely broken. I am not so cynical as so many on this thread about Mr. Obama, I agree he has made some mistakes but his heart is in the right place and he has tremendous abilities if he will get his act together."
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Oy.
About David Axelrod
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The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush's Memoir


Why is George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney, too, for that matter) being allowed to crawl back into polite society to rehabilitate his image and the Bush family name, and spread revisionist history about 9/11, WMD in Iraq, the economic meltdown, and the nightmare he caused us and the world?

Why isn't he having to spend 24/7 with his lawyers, working on a way to stay out of prison?

Oh, that's right, I forgot: Because Obama and the DLC-Democrats have blocked all investigations and prosecutions into Bush-Cheney and Republicans, and have allowed them to resurrect themselves and take back control over government.

And because of Obama's failure to restore the Constitution and return us to the rule of law by holding Bush, Cheney, et al, accountable, JEB Bush was all over the news on election night as the man behind Florida's new Tea Party Senator, Marco Rubio. So expect a Jeb Bush run at the presidency in the not-to-di tant-future. Perhaps with Liz Cheney on the ticket with him.

This is Obama's fault -- The buck stops squarely at his feet.

When Obama came into power, the GOP wasn't on the ropes; it was down for the count because of the devastation that Bush-Cheney had caused the nation. And Obama issued Bush-Cheney and Republicans (essentially) a pardon.  None of them express any remorse or contrition.  As a matter of fact, they're rested and ready for another round of tax cuts for the rich and slicing-and-dicing Social Security, Medicare, and anything else they can get their hands on that would help the People.

And even now, Obama wants to continue to make nice with them, cave some more, water down Democratic values & legislation.

Obama's not any kind of real Democrat; he's a DINO.

And if you didn't like the Republican Party of the last 35 years, the party of Reagan (forget just the past 10), you're going to hate where Obama and the DLC are taking the 'new & improved' Democratic Party from which they hope "to govern for 100 years".  
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Body Scanner Makers Doubled Lobbying Cash Over 5 Years


The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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Blake Farenthold Beats Solomon Ortiz: Democratic Congressman From Texas Concedes


The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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What Ever Happened to Real Journalism?

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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Is Black Political Power Under Siege?

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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Do it Yourself Health Care Reform


The problem with shifting people to Medicaid is that states are required to share the costs with the federal government, and have to pick up anywhere from 24% to 50% of the expenses. States are already going broke, and many have Constitutions requiring balanced budgets. That means (and we're already seeing it happen) they are cutting Medicaid services and dropping out entirely of the program.

By passing and signing that healthcare legislation, Obama and Congress were working to protect the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' profit-making, not get affordable quality medical care for Americans. That's the problem.
About Inside DC
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Do it Yourself Health Care Reform


The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Read more...

Holiday Travel Anxiety: 17 Classic Travel Books To Take Your Mind Off Your Worries (PHOTOS)


The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Read more...

David Axelrod May Leave White House Earlier Than Planned


“Great message. "Do nothing, it's hopeless, you don't matter."
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What??

It's one thing not to read an entire article.  

It's entirely another to not read the entire article and then make a statement such as yours that anyone having read the entire article would know wasn't accurate.
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Nine GOP Senators Opt Out Of Brief Calling Health Care Reform Unconstitutional


“This new legislation [passed earlier this year] does not change any of that,” she said. “It does not make it easier for doctors. It adds more administrative complexity. We are going to continue to have a shortage of doctors. As the new law rolls out they are giving waivers as the provisions kick in because corporations like McDonald’s say they can’t comply. Insurance companies such as WellPoint, UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna and Humana that were mandated to sell new policies to children with pre-existing conditions announced they were not going to do it. They said they were going to stop selling new policies to children. So they got waivers from the Obama administration allowing them to charge higher premiums. Health care costs are going to rise faster. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that after the legislation passed, our health care costs would rise more steeply than if we had done nothing. The Census Bureau reports that the number of uninsured in the U.S. jumped 10 percent to 51 million people in 2009. About 5.8 million were able to go on public programs, but a third of our population under the age of 65 was uninsured for some portion of 2009. The National Health Insurance Survey estimates that we now have 58 or 59 million uninsured. And the trend is toward underinsurance. These faulty insurance products leave people financially vulnerable if they have a serious accident or illness. They also have financial barriers to care. Co-pays and deductibles cause people to delay or avoid getting the care they need. And all these trends will worsen.”

About U.S. Senate
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Nine GOP Senators Opt Out Of Brief Calling Health Care Reform Unconstitutional


“Those who are working for effective change are not going to get foundation dollars,” she stated. “Once a foundation or a wealthy individual agrees to give money they control how that money is used. You have to report to them how you spend that money. They control what you can and cannot do. Robert Wood Johnson [the foundation], for example, funds many public health departments. They fund groups that advocate for health care reform, but those groups are not allowed to pursue or talk about single-payer. Robert Wood Johnson only supports work that is done to create what they call public/private partnership. And we know this is totally ineffective. We tried this before. It is allowing private insurers to exist but developing programs to fill the gaps. Robert Wood Johnson actually works against a single-payer health care system. The Health Care for America Now coalition was another example. It only supported what the Democrats supported. There are a lot of activist groups controlled by the Democratic Party, including Families USA and MoveOn.MoveOn is a very good example. If you look at polls of Democrats on single-payer, about 80 percent support it. But at MoveOn meetings, which is made up mostly of Democrats, when people raised the idea of working for single-payer they were told by MoveOn leaders that the organization was not doing that. And this took place while the Democrats were busy selling out women’s rights, immigrant rights to health care and abandoning the public option. Yet all these groups continued to work for the bill. They argued, in the end, that the health care bill had to be supported because it was not really about health care. It was about the viability of President Obama and the Democratic Party. This is why, in the end, we had to pass it.”

“The Democrats and the Republicans give the illusion that there are differences between them,” said Dr. Flowers. “This keeps the public divided. It weakens opposition. We fight over whether a Democrat will get elected or a Republican will get elected. We vote for the lesser evil, but meanwhile the policies the two parties enact are not significantly different. There were no Democrats willing to hold the line on single-payer. Not one. I don’t see this changing until we radically shift the balance of power by creating a larger and broader social movement.”


KEEP READING
About U.S. Senate
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Nine GOP Senators Opt Out Of Brief Calling Health Care Reform Unconstitutional


 “There was nobody in the House or the Senate who held fast on universal health care,” she lamented. “Sen. [Bernie] Sanders from Vermont introduced a single-payer bill, S 703. He introduced an amendment that would have substituted S 703 for what the Senate was putting together. We had to push pretty hard to get that to the Senate floor, but in the end he was forced by the leadership to withdraw it. He was our strongest person. In the House we saw Chairman John Conyers, who is the lead sponsor for the House single-payer bill, give up pushing for single-payer very early in the process in 2009. Dennis Kucinich pushed to get an amendment that would help give states the ability to pass single-payer. He was not successful in getting that kept in the final House bill. He held out for the longest, but in the end he caved.”

“You can’t effect change from the inside,” she has concluded. “We have a huge imbalance of power. Until we have a shift in power we won’t get effective change in any area, whether financial, climate, you name it. With the wealth inequalities, with the road we are headed down, we face serious problems. Those who work and advocate for social and economic justice have to now join together. We have to be independent of political parties and the major funders. The revolution will not be funded. This is very true.”


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About U.S. Senate
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Nine GOP Senators Opt Out Of Brief Calling Health Care Reform Unconstitutional


Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:


Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland who volunteers for Physicians for a National Health Program, knows what it is like to challenge the corporate leviathan. She was blacklisted by the corporate media. She was locked out of the debate on health care reform by the Democratic Party and liberal organizations such as MoveOn. She was abandoned by those in Congress who had once backed calls for a rational health care policy. And when she and seven other activists demanded that the argument for universal health care be considered at the hearings held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, they were forcibly removed from the hearing room. 

“The reform process exposed how broken our system is,” Flowers said when we spoke a few days ago. “The health reform debate was never an actual debate. Those in power were very reluctant to have single-payer advocates testify or come to the table. They would not seriously consider our proposal because it was based on evidence of what works. And they did not want this evidence placed before the public. They needed the reform to be based on what they thought was politically feasible and acceptable to the industries that fund their campaigns.” 


KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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Nine GOP Senators Opt Out Of Brief Calling Health Care Reform Unconstitutional


The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Read more...

Whoopi Goldberg: TSA Pat-Downs Are Necessary (VIDEO)


The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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As the Presidency Turns: Obama's Political Soap Opera

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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The Shock Doctrine Push to Gut Social Security and Middle Class

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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Body Scanner Makers Doubled Lobbying Cash Over 5 Years


It is.  Thanks.
About Airlines
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