End the War on Freedom

Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States - CCOPS TOTALITARIAN TIME: 10:19 P.M.: Tyranny Marches a Half Hour Nearer with "Bush Doctrine" - GW's new Homland Defense Agency, which he announced in last Thursday night's speech, is really really bad news. CCOPS moved the clock by half an hour, a very large increment. As I said yesterday, my name for the Homeland Defense Agency is "America's gestapo". I mirrored the rense.com copy of the "Roadmap for National Security" document here. It's long (5 parts plus appendix (540KB total). [jpfo]

The Homeland Defense Agency is not a new idea. Conceived by a bi-partisan commission headed by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, this Clinton-era conception, "The Phase III Report Of The U.S. Commission On National Security/21st Century," is nothing less than the framework for a permanent military-bureaucratic American police state.

The new Homeland Defense Agency is the lynchpin of a plan that extensively reorganizes both the executive and legislative functions of the U.S. government. Among other things, the plan makes the National Guard a national police force. It extensively federalizes both the study and the work of science, mathematics, and engineering. It creates numerous new sub-bureaucracies. The Homeland Security agency itself is to "be built upon the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with the three organizations currently on the front line of border security-the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and the Border Patrol- transferred to it." The plan calls for the new agency to oversee activities of the Department of Defense, as well as to assume a variety of duties now held by agencies from the Department of Commerce to the FBI.

When the plan was announced in January of this year, the media barely covered it, and shortly thereafter, the plan itself, and the government Web site created expressly for it, dropped out of sight. We found the full text of the report at only one location:

http://www.rense.com/general10/roadmap.htm

Read it and shudder as you consider how the Bill of Rights -- and your freedoms -- will be slaughtered if you remain silent now.

Below are few excerpts from the roadmap. I've only read part 1 of 5 so far. Didn't see anything horrifying yet.

We recommend, first of all, a national campaign to reinvigorate and enhance the prestige of service to the nation. The key step in such a campaign must be to revive a positive attitude toward public service. This will require strong and consistent Presidential commitment, Congressional legislation, and innovative departmental actions throughout the federal government. It is the duty of all political leaders to repair the damage that has been done, in a high-profile and fully bipartisan manner.

From these changes in rhetoric, the campaign must undertake several actions. First, this Commission recommends the most urgent possible streamlining of the process by which we attract senior government officials. The ordeal that Presidential nominees are subjected to is now so great as to make it prohibitive for many individuals of talent and experience to accept public service. The confirmation process is characterized by vast amounts of paperwork and many delays. Conflict of interest and financial disclosure requirements have become a prohibitive obstacle to the recruitment of honest men and women to public service. Post-employment restrictions confront potential new recruits with the prospect of having to forsake not only income but work itself in the very fields in which they have demonstrated talent and found success. Meanwhile, a pervasive atmosphere of distrust and cynicism about government service is reinforced by the encrustation of complex rules based on the assumption that all officials, and especially those with experience in or contact with the private sector, are criminals waiting to be unmasked.

...

Fifth, the Congress is part of the problem before us, and therefore must become part of the solution. Not only must the Congress support the Executive Branch reforms promulgated here, but it must bring its own organization in line with the 21st century. Section V, The Role of Congress, examines this critical facet of government reform.

...

Any reorganization must be mindful of the scale of the scenarios we envision and the enormity of their consequences. We need orders-of-magnitude improvements in planning, coordination, and exercise. The government must also be prepared to use effectively-albeit with all proper safeguards-the extensive resources of the Department of Defense. This will necessitate new priorities for the U.S. armed forces and particularly, in our view, for the National Guard.

L. Neil Smith at KeepAndBearArms.com - Columbine and Bloody Tuesday - Compares two days of infamy, both made possible by victim disarmament laws.

But the most important resemblance that the two events, Columbine and Bloody Tuesday, bear to one another is that both had precisely the same cause: illegal denial by the government of the fundamental rights of ordinary people -- particularly the right enumerated by the Second Amendment -- the unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon, rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything, any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

I said it at the time: Columbine happened, not because there were too many guns at the school that day, but because there were too few. Twelve people died because there were too few guns, and now the same error has cost the lives of five thousand unique, irreplaceable human beings. This is the price we've paid -- the butcher's bill -- for gun control. And now it's plain for anyone to see, in letters of fire written across the sky, why the proper name for gun control is victim disarmament.

Vin Suprynowicz at the Las Vegas Review Journal - Are we too Politically Correct to appropriately defend our way of life? - Vin worries that political correctness will make it impossible to win the war on terrorism. He doesn't like wars, thinks our meddling in other countries' affairs is the cause of our problem, but also thinks that once a war has been thrust upon you, you should fight to win.

Political correctness costs lives, and lies and euphemisms and double-talk invite confusion and mistakes. If our limited security resources are expended tossing the luggage of every black and Asian and Scandinavian air passenger in a relentless search for deadly TOENAIL CLIPPERS and plastic picnic knives, those resources will not be available to run a better background check on a young minimum-wage contract janitor named Fatima Mujahadeen, who's going to be alone in your plane later tonight, vacuuming the seat cushions.

...

Are we serious about winning a "war against terrorism"? President Bush could begin by declaring an end tomorrow to the fruitless and expensive "War on Drugs." If heroin and morphine were legal, their prices would quickly drop by more than 90 percent. What do you suppose that would do the profitability of the Afghan poppy crop?

Wayne Hicks at Sierra Times - What To Do When The Power Company Gets Hit? Build your Own - and Here's How! - How to charge 12-volt car batteries with a lawn mower. Car tail lights make good, long-lasting, lamps. [sierra]

Aaron Zelman at KeepAndBearArms.com - Don't Finance the Murder of the Bill of Rights or Why I Am Canceling My Appearance at the Freedom Summit - Mr. Zelman refuses to fly until he can exercise his inalienable human right of self defense on the airplane. He asks us to give the airlines the Smith & Wesson treatment until they tell the feds to shove it. [kaba]

I will never set foot on a commercial airliner until the airlines, the airport authorities, the FAA, and all other would-be regulators of air travel respect my rights. (And I'm talking about inborn rights, the ones Americans have bled and died for, not government-granted privileges that can be withdrawn at the whim of some faceless bean counter.)

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Don't pull out your checkbook. Don't hand over your credit cards. Don't give the government-regulated airlines your business. They're already in financial trouble, and they've earned it. Let them go bankrupt. Let them pay the price for conditioning us to act like cattle and lulling us into submission with their phony FAA-inspired promises to keep us "safe."

The airlines are private companies, even though they and the federal government are in each others' pockets (like so many other big corporations). The jets they fly are privately owned. Airlines have the power to tell the government to go to hell. And if they don't, then we should tell THEM to go to hell.

bob lonsberry - It Was Part Truman, Part Roosevelt - I think Mr. Lonsberry has lost his mind. Never have I seen such drivel in one of his columns. GW's speech on Thursday night was good, but only war-fever induced insanity could cause anyone to praise it to this degree.

Oh captain, my captain.

What a speech.

What a window into pure greatness. The greatness of a plain-speaking president, and the greatness of a freedom-loving Republic.

It wasn't Gettysburg, but it was close...

firewort at Slashdot - Legislating Insecure Encryption - Senator Gregg bad. Representative Goodlatte good. [/.]

Reimposing export limits would not limit the availability of encryption software, as it is widely available overseas, he said. Instead, it would place U.S. software companies at a competitive disadvantage. Goodlatte said more U.S. businesses and government agencies should use encryption to guard against future computer-based attacks that could disable power plants, banking systems and other critical infrastructures.

Goodlatte said he would bring his concerns to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who was appointed yesterday to head U.S. efforts to defend against terrorism.

Maura Reynolds at the LA Times - Afghanistan Is Like Nothing You've Ever Seen, Soviet Vets Say - The soviet war on Afghanistan through the eyes of some of the soldiers who were there.

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