Media Matters just released a study in which the main stream media’s coverage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Cenk Uygur breaks down the shocking results of this study.
Browsing Posts tagged rights
“We were going to take our grandson, he’s five and visiting from California, to see Santa and we were just sitting around the table having something to drink, talking about what we were planning and that’s when my husband took the picture,” said Grandmother Debbie Cassella.
Cassella said immediately a mall employee instructed them to stop taking pictures or they would be thrown out of the mall.
“I believe she said you can’t take pictures at the mall. I thought she was joking and I said ‘I’m taking a picture of my grandson’, I’d understand if I was taking pictures of the architecture or the products in the stores and she became a little hostile and aggressive,” said Grandfather Don Oberloh.
No. You should be able to take photos of the architecture of the mall as well. This is a ridiculous rule.
“I asked to speak with a mall manager and she flashed a badge at me, and I didn’t see it, and asked ‘is this good enough?’ and I tried explaining things to her and she came back, I apologized and she was more belligerent and I asked again ‘may I speak with the mall manager’ and she said ‘that’s me’ and I said ‘there’s nobody higher than you?’ and she said ‘one person’, ‘may I speak with that person’ and then security came over,” said Oberloh.
Oberloh left the mall after being asked by security, but Cassella stayed behind to wait on her daughter, who had gone into a store.
“I told him I can’t just leave and then he said that he would remove me physically and then he called another security guard and that guy came over and then my daughter showed up and I said we were just here to take my grandson to see Santa and he said you can’t see Santa,” said Cassella.
These people need to apologize to the grandparents. Not only were they apologetic when they didn’t need to be, the mall security grew more belligerent as time went on.
We speak with Kamran Loghman, the expert who developed weapons-grade pepper-spray, who says he was shocked at how police have used the chemical agent on non-violent Occupy Wall Street protesters nationwide — including students at University of California, Davis, female protesters in New York City, and an 84-year old activist in Seattle. “I saw it and the first thing that came to my mind wasn’t police or students, it was my own children sitting down having an opinion and they’re being shot and forced by chemical agents,” says Loghman, who in the 1980s helped the FBI develop weapons-grade pepper -spray, and collaborated with police departments to develop guidelines for its use. “The use was just absolutely out of the ordinary and it was not in accordance with any training or policy of any department that I know of. I personally certified 4,000 police officers in the early ‘80s and ‘90s and I have never seen this before. That’s why I was shocked… I feel is my civic duty to explain to the public that this is not what pepper spray was developed for.”
This is a truth annotated version of Viacom’s new pitch for gobal Internet Censorship (SOPA – Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA – Protect IP Act). For more information on this topic, please see Lauren Weinstein’s Blog.
10 years after its creation, the TSA has drawn the ire of just about everyone who has been forced to endure their ever-changing rules and regulations while observing the fact that the TSA has never succeeded in its objective of stopping terrorism. What it has done is anger innocent Americans unjustly assumed to be guilty of something, simply because they desire to travel.
Today, there are numerous calls to end the TSA.
“Americans have spent nearly $60 billion, and they are no safer today than they were before 9/11,” Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) announced when releasing the report. In other words, the TSA has squandered as much money as has been “lost to contract waste and fraud in America’s contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan…,” according to NPR and the “independent and bipartisan” Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pres. George W. Bush signed the bill establishing the TSA on November 19, 2001. The agency took about a year to nationalize aviation’s security; in 2002, it spent $1.3 billion – a whopping increase over the $725 million “private” screening annually cost. (But was that industry really “private”? The FAA mandated and minutely supervised everything it did. Which is exactly why terrorists succeeded on 9/11: incompetent bureaucrats controlled security at airports and fined any airline that didn’t obey their silly whims.)
By 2003, that budget was rocketing upward: $4.8 billion. It’s continued climbing stratospherically ever since, frittering away $8.1 billion this year.
What do we have to show for it? Not a single terrorist caught anywhere at any time by anyone in the TSA’s employ.
The TSA is beyond a useless organization. It continues to harass and demean the very citizens it was trusted to protect while costs continue to spiral out of control. It has never made anyone safer and, after reading Congressional reports [pdf], it is clear that it probably makes things easier for anyone with nefarious purposes at the airport. Among the government’s findings are
Since 2001, TSA staff has grown from 16,500 to over 65,000, a near-400% increase. In the same amount of time, total passenger enplanements in the U.S. have increased less than 12%
Over the past ten years, TSA has spent nearly $57 billion to secure the U.S. transportation network, and TSA‘s classified performance results do not reflect a good return on this taxpayer investment.
TSA‘s primary mission, transportation security, has been neglected due to the agency‘s constant focus on managing its enormous and unwieldy bureaucracy.
Some critics have gone further. Rep. Ron Paul in October called for the elimination of the TSA, as part of his budget-reduction plan.
And this week, he was joined by former U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, who demanded that not only the TSA, but the Department of Homeland Security be dismantled.
The TSA is incompetent on its best days, but, until more people stand up and demand change, their behavior and its skyrocketing budget will continue until everyone is on the no-fly list and the airports are empty save for a few select “trustworthy” citizens.
