White House Pulls Down TSA Petition 638
Jeremiah Cornelius writes with a note that on Thursday of this week "The Electronic Privacy Information Center posted a brief and detailed notice about the removal of a petition regarding security screenings by the TSA at US airports and other locations. 'At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House 'We the People' website. About 22,500 of the 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the Administration were obtained when the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition. The site also went down for 'maintenance' following an article in Wired that sought support for the campaign."
Par for the course... (Score:4, Interesting)
...for the least transparent administration in American history. Perhaps the Obama Administration will restore the petition shortly after they turn over the Fast and Furious documents Obama has claimed Executive Privilege over [latimes.com].
This is also par for the course for the Obama Administration's constant defense of the TSA. When Texas tried to pass a bill to ban TSA groping in the state, the Obama Administration threatened to impose a no fly zone on Texas [tenthamendmentcenter.com] over the right for TSA agents to grope people. Do you think think the Obama Administration will be any less protective now that they're unionized [dailycaller.com].
Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz has called for the abolition of the TSA. Given the wasteful, intrusive, and ineffective security theater they stage, does anyone think the America public would object to to their abolition?
Re:no big conspiracy...just normal maintenance (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried to sign it, but couldn't (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried to sign this petition several times over the last couple of weeks, but the system would not let me create an account.
Re:no big conspiracy...just normal maintenance (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps people should take a page from from the copyright cartel playbook and keep putting the petitions up until they get the number of signatures they need.
Flying vs. Voting vs. TSA (Score:5, Interesting)
We just recently saw a study which shows that the TSA isn't an issue -- Americans don't hate them that much.
But the study didn't control for whether you'd flown or not in the past few years.
Obviously, I'd like to see the study redone with whether you've flown. I suspect people who've flown HATE the TSA and people who haven't think they're grand.
But I'd also like another variable added. People who vote.
I suspect the people who don't hate the TSA are a complacent bunch who don't read, don't think, and don't vote. I further suspect people who don't fly don't vote. But it could go the other way. I want to see those numbers. The TSA may be a much, MUCH bigger issue than the administration thinks it is, or they may be completely right -- ignore it, because it's not something the real people who vote crare about.
Re:somewhat surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
Sometimes it is worthwhile to check other people's claims, because you may just learn other details while doing so.
Case in point: recently someone said "defense is 50%" of the federal budget. With a very brief search, I found that their claim was patently wrong, that it averaged "only" 24% for the past several years. But I also learned where VA/SS/welfare ranked in the scheme of things, too.
Back to Trepidity's comment a few posts up. You may not remember, but indeed, after 9/11 there were many kneejerk decisions and laws passed. This is how the Patriot Act and DHS and TSA came into existence. The only detail I'd clarify in his post is the statement that the Republicans were all over these decisions. But if you pull away the cobwebs of past memories, one may remember that *most* of our elected officials were pushing this shit. They all wanted to appear "tough on terrorism", and in some cases that their security-penises were much, much larger than the opposing party. This did not work out well for us collectively.
And yes, Chertoff and Rapiscan go back. Here's a 2010 article from USA Today describing it. You may want to look into "revolving door policy" to understand the limitations of some of these relationships. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-11-22-scanner-lobby_N.htm [usatoday.com]
Re:Two can play at this game (Score:3, Interesting)
The best lies contain some element of truth. And sure, the US people are weak and lazy. And the politicians reflect this.
But this is not nearly the whole truth.
In reality, the politicians work for corporate/banking/old money interests. The US people could be stronger, better, more educated, etc., and it would not matter. In fact, in times past, the people have been such and it hasn't made a difference. The world is still in endless war against whomever "the powers that be" say is the enemy.
Until there is change on who owns and runs the world, things will stay the same. The people have no way of changing this other than via revolution. And that is not likely as long as they continue to believe in the illusions of home ownership and voting.
Re:How much time? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm too lazy to dig up wherever I read it, maybe it was a comment on hacker news, but it sounded like it had about another week to go before expiration.
Actually you can't look it up. I was surprised when I did a search for the link that no hits from the actual site came up. So I tried forcing the link in googlecache and still got nothing so I checked the page source at petitions.whitehouse.gov and all the links have no-follow on them. Strange really, why would such an exercise in open government want to make sure there were no search engine results that brought people to the petitions or any record of what had appeared on the site.
I'm thinking someone needs to set up a shadow copy of the site with links to all the pages created on petitions.whitehouse.gov so they get seeded into the search engines, since supposedly the no-follow only stops the initial indexing, if the page gets in from some other link it should stay in the search engine.
Re:Two can play at this game (Score:5, Interesting)
While on the other hand it was just a puppet revolution setup by the banks to get rid of their bad-debt risks with lending huge sums of warfare money to kings and queens where the inheritor of the same would deny responsibility for paying back those debts. With governments you don't have this problem because then it's the whole country which is liable for the debt, and countries don't change that often.
So the whole french revolution was nothing more than a good PR, suckering 'the people' in taking over responsibility of their countries' loans.
While keeping those in control who already were...
(I think the current 'debt crisis' proves my point.)
Re:Two can play at this game (Score:4, Interesting)
You see, capital investment comes from savings, not from the printing press, that's why the current Western societies are all on the brink of the complete economic collapse, they are indebted so much, that they can NEVER pay the debt back, but they won't admit it, they will most likely try to print their way out, and if they do, they'll print their way into abject poverty.
Japan is the exception. They are trying to grow their way out of a recession, and having quite a time of it. Sadly, I think that default would be better for the US than inflation. Why? Because default will push much of the ill effect to other countries who hold the debt, spreading the problem more evenly. Inflating out of it will ensure the collapse of the USA and only the USA (possibly Canada or Mexico too, but that depends more on oil and resources). No, China wouldn't be that hard hit if the US never placed another order for goods. The US is about 20% of Chinese exports and imports. The drop of exports orders would be countered by the drop in cost of the imports, and they'd just focus on other markets. The US isn't as integral to the world market as the US thinks.
The US was capable of paying off the debt at the end of Bush. I had a nice plan to do so. It even included universal health care, as medicare, covering old people, spends more money per citizen than most countries do to cover everyone, and they only cover a few. So it wasn't all about cut-cut-cut, but cut and spend intelligently (for one, until the debt is paid off, abolish the standing military except where abolishing it is more expensive than not, like nukes and such) But increase funding to national guard and coast guard. There are plenty of large programs that can go. Department of Defense, Education, Energy, and everything related to the war on drugs. Then, of course, tax intelligently. Our rates are at historical lows, when our costs are at historical highs. We need tax rates at emergency levels, like they've been before. 80% to 90%.
Do all that, and 20 years from now, we'll have no debt. But it's hard. We'd rather dig ourselves a larger hole. It's easier.
Re:Two can play at this game (Score:5, Interesting)
You know I think it's also bad that police officers put themselves in danger to protect the public. How about you use the same drones to attack suspected violent offenders on home ground too and help avoid the danger they present to the police?
What's that you say? You're not happy? You think it wasn't fair to blow up the dude who might have been a murderer as while he wasn't a nice person, you weren't sure if he actually killed anyone or not? And you're angry the missile killed some his friends, family and children that were at the bowling alley at the same time? Oh I understand - you think that they should have been afforded due process and rights because they were your people not someone that doesn't share your language?
Let's get something straight : drone attacks may keep some military personnel safe in the very near term but they're constantly indescriminately killing people. In the past years in pakistan they've killed somewhere between 400 and 800 people, of which around 160 were children. How would you be feeling if another country had flown drones into your country and been killing those numbers of people?
Don't you think that if those peoples surviving family, friends and neighbors didn't previously think that western powers deserved a good kicking, the wanton and unashamed murders by drones will have changed their minds? If one of the angry relatives pulled off something even half as awful as the WTC attacks, would you still say the drones saved "your people" successfully?
Are you not paying attention, or are you just plain stupid?