Gun Laws, here we go again
January 16, 2013 by Steve
Filed under Commentary
I don’t know all the details at this point on exactly what the President’s proposals are for more government control over guns and ammunition, but I can tell you that I am getting very tired of more and more big government control over my life…PERIOD!
We have definitely moved from a country of more freedom to one of much, much less freedom and much more centralized control over our lives. This reminds me, unfortunately, of all the rhetoric against the old U.S.S.R., which came tumbling down.
As much as many of us don’t want to believe that our country is moving in that direction, we must take a hard look at the reality of our situation! I shall name only 2 of the more onerous actions taken by our government (congress) and this doesn’t include any of the hundreds of ‘Executive Orders’ that also curb our freedoms; NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act, and The ‘Patriot Act’. These 2 Acts are in my mind some of the most un Constitutional ‘acts’ every perpetrated upon the American public.
When it comes to Executive orders, President Obama has ‘perfected’ what George W Bush started. As of September of 2012 he had signed 923 in just 40 months!!! Take a look at just a few:
What did Congress do in those 40 months? (The House – considerable. The Senate
-nothing, not even a budget nor allowing any House bill to be considered.) A
whole new order must prevail in Wash. DC as a result of this next election! Now
look at these:-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 allows the government to take over all modes of
transportation and control of highways and seaports.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 allows the government to seize and control the
communication media.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 allows the government to take over all electrical power,
gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 allows the government to take over all food resources and
farms.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 allows the government to mobilize civilians into work
brigades under government supervision.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 allows the government to take over all health, education
and welfare functions.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 designates the of all persons. Postmaster General to
operate a national registration-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 allows the government to
take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate
communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be
abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 allows the government to take over railroads, inland
waterways and public storage facilities.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 assigns emergency preparedness function to federal
departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued
over a fifteen year period.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency
Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in
times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce
the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to
establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate
penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to
develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and
distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money
in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also
provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress
cannot review the action for six months.Feel free to verify the “executive orders” at will… and these are just the
major ones I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of the “Frog in the Pot”… you
all comfortable???
Watch Obama’s actions, not his words! By his actions he will show you where
America is headed.
I could rant all day on this stuff…as a good friend of mine said the other day, that it was his opinion that we (our generation or 55 and older)would be ‘all right’ but our kids might not be. How sad this is. We are letting everything that our founders stood for be spat upon and ignored!
There is only one thing between ‘We the People’ and fascism, and that is action by the former to stem the tides of more centralized controls over just about everything.
A Police State
October 6, 2012 by Steve
Filed under Commentary
Where are we headed as a country? It appears that no matter which party is in power, the objective is to get more power and control.
Recently a Federal Court judge ruled that the clause in the National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA, that allowed the government to hold an American citizen indefinitely without charges was suspended, it was not constitutional. Of course the Administration went to the Federal court of Appeals and had that ruling overturned. Obviously, the executive branch is not very interested in our freedom nor rights as citizens.
This particular clause has many journalists very afraid and has affected their journalism. The problem with this clause is the question of who defines what ‘terrorism’ really is. If it suits the powers that be it can be dang near anything they want it to be. So reporters that have a more independent view of the way things happen might end up in jail or worse, Guantanamo Bay!
It really doesn’t pay to counter the government line. One very bold example of this craziness was the detention of an ex Marine because he ‘facebooked’ a message that said basically that the 9-11 investigation should be reopened since the governments official explanation didn’t cover building 7. He was detained for a month in a mental institution without charges.
I am hoping the citizens will eventually wake up and say with one voice ‘we have had enough’! Unfortunately, the way various interest groups are ‘played’ against one another that is very unlikely!
FDA Violates Federal Law: Emord and ANH Challenge Illegal Rulemaking
December 6, 2011 by Darren6688
Filed under Big Pharma
Even the mighty FDA can be brought to its knees and that is what we must do. They must be forced to play by the same legal rules as we the people. The good news is that a big lawsuit is taking place to make sure they do just that. Read below!
Bolstered by a massive outpouring of support from you, we are asking the agency to withdraw its New Dietary Ingredient (NDI) draft guidance completely!
The period for comments to the FDA on the draft guidance on NDI notifications closed on December 2. Along with the hundreds of thousands of messages you sent and the 20,000 phone calls you made to FDA and Congress, ANH-USA also submitted formal comments.
The problem with the FDA’s draft guidance on New Dietary Ingredients is that it allows FDA to arbitrarily deny the sale of any supplement created (or modified) in the past seventeen years. If you’re a supplement manufacturer or distributor or possibly even a health food store, and you don’t file a NDI “notification” (actually a request for approval) for each ingredient in each product developed since 1994 in just the way prescribed by the FDA, and the court later decides the FDA is right, then you are guilty of product “adulteration,” which is punishable by prison. With your favorite supplements off the market, it also would allow the drug industry to adapt and patent them, and sell them back to you—by doctor’s prescription only—for 10 or 100 (or even more) times what you’re paying now.
Our comments, drafted by acclaimed attorney Jonathan Emord on our behalf, show that the FDA is engaged in substantive new rulemaking, in violation of the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA). “The APA says if an agency’s action is legislative in nature, that’s rulemaking,” explained Emord. “The guidance distorts the plain language of the laws that govern supplements. FDA needs to comply with the APA’s formal rulemaking requirements, not issue unilateral guidance as a deceptive means of creating new rules.”
We argue that the FDA is acting illegally. The FDA circumvented the regulatory process by issuing a guidance, which gives them cover and flexibility, instead of going through the rulemaking process, which is required when creating a new law—and we believe the guidance in fact does create new law. As a result, FDA’s actions leave interested parties little recourse within the regulatory system.
In technical terms, a guidance is supposed to be legally non-binding. It is meant to simply present the FDA’s interpretation of the rule. However, the NDI guidance goes well beyond an interpretation, and we believe it is in fact a legislative rule with legal implications:
- The NDI guidance is a departure from the FDA’s previous standards for NDI notifications. It alters and broadens the meaning of what qualifies as an NDI, and creates new—and very expensive—requirements to comply with the NDI notification process (creating what we would call a de facto pre-approval system), counter to what is outlined in Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).
- Not fulfilling the NDI notification requirements outlined in the guidance ensures that the supplement will be considered adulterated and therefore illegal. This indicates there’s a clear, legally binding impact to the NDI guidance.
- Supplements that are considered illegal can be confiscated, and under the Food Safety Modernization Act, as we noted lasted week, can now be subject to administrative detention as well.
You may recall that Joanna M. Shepherd Bailey, PhD, professor of law and economics at Emory University, demonstrated that FDA grossly underestimated the economic cost of the NDI guidance. Her report found that:
- Between 22,240 and 41,700 nutritional supplements would likely be removed from the market, at an economic loss of between $5.6 billion and $10.5 billion;
- The nutritional supplement market could shrink by between 28% and 52.5%, producing an annual loss for the industry of between $7.84 billion to $14.7 billion; and
- Between 55,720 and 104,475 jobs in the supplement industry could be lost.
FDA’s analysis did not take into consideration the costs of the expanded reach and requirements of the NDI guidance. The agency therefore misled the Office of Management and Budget, in violation of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996.
FDA has arbitrarily determined that supplement companies need to show at least “25 years of widespread use” in order it to meet the “history of safety” standard in NDI notification. In other words, only supplements on the market before October 1986 could be considered “safe.” This is patently ridiculous, since the cutoff date for grandfathered ingredients assumed to be safe, according to DSHEA, is October 1994.
The NDI notification system was intended to ensure safety. The very reason pre-DSHEA supplements were grandfathered is because they had proven themselves safe through years of use by hundreds of thousands of consumers! If safety is of utmost concern to FDA, why does the guidance document burden the supplement industry with regulatory requirements that have nothing to do with proving the safety of the supplements? It appears FDA is acting out of spite—and not in the public’s best interest. Moreover, many of the provisions in the guidance are totally unrelated to safety and serve only to limit consumers’ access to nutritional supplements.
We believe FDA will be unable incorporate enough changes to their draft guidance to bring it in line with existing law, preserve supplement access for customers, and remove needless regulatory hurdles for industry. Because of this, we asked FDA in our formal comments to withdraw the draft guidance at the earliest possible moment.
Now that the FDA’s comment period is closed, the agency is supposed to review the comments and prepare a final version of the guidance document—though they are under no legal obligation to do so. In fact, because it is guidance, they are under no legal obligation even to take public comments into consideration. Nor is there any timeline: the agency is still sitting on a guidance, now nearly three years old, that was meant to create a distinction between beverages and liquid dietary supplements.
Even worse, since this is presented as guidance and not formal rulemaking, the FDA is very likely to enforce the provisions in the draft guidance as though they were final—with limited legal recourse for affected parties!
We believe FDA’s actions require them to follow the Administrative Procedure Act, which calls for a formal rulemaking procedure. Under this law:
- FDA will be forced to have a formal comment period, and to review and consider all comments before they issue a final rule. This includes a rulemaking record that shows the data and analysis behind a proposed rule, and sometimes even public hearings.
- If the result is not to the liking of interested parties, “Each agency shall give an interested person the right to petition for the issuance, amendment, or repeal of a rule.” This means, that unlike a guidance, it is possible to challenge a rule in court. It is very likely that FDA conveniently issued a guidance, instead of going through the rulemaking process, to avoid this very outcome.
Now that the NDI comment period is closed, we will start implementing the next phase of our strategy—which will include both legal and legislative components. We will, of course, keep our supporters and allies in the loop.
Thank you all again for your tremendous outpouring of letters and phone calls! It has laid important groundwork for our next actions.
Are the senate going to take away our constitutional rights in this week’s vote?
November 30, 2011 by Darren6688
Filed under Commentary, Featured, General News, Survival Info
In this article from infowars we see yet again how dangerous it can be for us when the charlatans in Washington who are supposed to protect our interests are doing nothing but eroding them.
With the bill expected to be up for a vote within 48 hours, Senator Rand Paul has offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that will kill a provision allowing the militaryto detain individuals, including American citizens, without trial or due process.
The “indefinite detention” sections of the NDAA bill would turn the whole of the United States into a “battlefield” and hand the executive branch the power to have the military arrest U.S. citizens and hold them without trial.
The provision is merely an update to the “parallel legal system” had been in place under the auspices of the war on terror for over a decade, “In which terrorism suspects — U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike — may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system,” as the Washington Post reported in December 2002.
In attempt to kill the indefinite detention provision of the legislation, Senator Rand Paul aims to strike Section 1031 from the bill, which reads as follows.
“Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force…includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons…Detention under the law of war without trial”.
The amendment is seen as having more teeth than a change offered by Colorado Senator Mark Udall which the ACLU has urged voters to support. “There are other similar Amendments too, however none of them completely eliminate the Constitutionally offensive section,” reports the Tennessee Campaign for Liberty website.
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Writing in the Washington Post today, Udall emphasizes the fact that the bill does affect American citizens.
“The provisions would require the military to dedicate a significant number of personnel to capturing and holding terrorism suspects — in some cases indefinitely — even those apprehended on U.S. soil. And they authorize the military to do so regardless of an accused terrorist’s citizenship, even if he or she is an American captured in a U.S. city,” writes Udall.
Republican Congressman Justin Amash also warned that the bill had been “carefully crafted to mislead the public,” in suggesting that the indefinite detention provision didn’t apply to American citizens when it clearly does.
“Note that it does not preclude U.S. citizens from being detained indefinitely, without charge or trial, it simply makes such detention discretionary,” Amash wrote on his Facebook page.
As we documented yesterday, every single piece of legislation passed in the name of catching terrorists has been used against American citizens on countless occasions.
In an op-ed for the SIlicon Valley Mercury News, S. Floyd Mori, national executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, warns that the legislation would create the legal framework for internment without trial on a similar scale to how Japanese-Americans were held in concentration camps during World War II.
“Indefinite detentions based on fear-driven and unlawfully substantiated national security grounds, where individuals are neither duly charged nor fairly tried, violate the essence of U.S. law and the most fundamental values upon which this country was built,” he writes.
The National Defense Authorization Act is set for a procedural vote at midday on Wednesday.
GPS surveillance legal now!
August 27, 2010 by Steve
Filed under Health News
This is just one more intrusion into our privacy. Now a Federal court judge has ruled that agents of the government can secretly attach GPS device to your car and that information can be used against you in court.
I don’t do anything that would be considered illegal, at least not by todays measure, but I have to protest this ruling. I don’t think that Big Brother has the right to watch you or track you without a warrant. This is going a bit too far don’ you think?
Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars
By Dugald McConnell, CNN
(CNN) — Law enforcement officers may secretly place a GPS device on a person’s car without seeking a warrant from a judge, according to a recent federal appeals court ruling in California.
Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Oregon in 2007 surreptitiously attached a GPS to the silver Jeep owned by Juan Pineda-Moreno, whom they suspected of growing marijuana, according to court papers.
When Pineda-Moreno was arrested and charged, one piece of evidence was the GPS data, including the longitude and latitude of where the Jeep was driven, and how long it stayed. Prosecutors asserted the Jeep had been driven several times to remote rural locations where agents discovered marijuana being grown, court documents show.
Pineda-Moreno eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to grow marijuana, and is serving a 51-month sentence, according to his lawyer.
But he appealed on the grounds that sneaking onto a person’s driveway and secretly tracking their car violates a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy.
“They went onto the property several times in the middle of the night without his knowledge and without his permission,” said his lawyer, Harrison Latto.
The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the appeal twice — in January of this year by a three-judge panel, and then again by the full court earlier this month. The judges who affirmed Pineda-Moreno’s conviction did so without comment.
Latto says the Ninth Circuit decision means law enforcement can place trackers on cars, without seeking a court’s permission, in the nine western states the California-based circuit covers.
The ruling likely won’t be the end of the matter. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., arrived at a different conclusion in similar case, saying officers who attached a GPS to the car of a suspected drug dealer should have sought a warrant.
Experts say the issue could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
One of the dissenting judges in Pineda-Moreno’s case, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, said the defendant’s driveway was private and that the decision would allow police to use tactics he called “creepy” and “underhanded.”
“The vast majority of the 60 million people living in the Ninth Circuit will see their privacy materially diminished by the panel’s ruling,” Kozinksi wrote in his dissent.
“I think it is Orwellian,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which advocates for privacy rights.
“If the courts allow the police to gather up this information without a warrant,” he said, “the police could place a tracking device on any individual’s car — without having to ever justify the reason they did that.”
But supporters of the decision see the GPS trackers as a law enforcement tool that is no more intrusive than other means of surveillance, such as visually following a person, that do not require a court’s approval.
“You left place A, at this time, you went to place B, you took this street — that information can be gleaned in a variety of ways,” said David Rivkin, a former Justice Department attorney. “It can be old surveillance, by tailing you unbeknownst to you; it could be a GPS.”
He says that a person cannot automatically expect privacy just because something is on private property.
“You have to take measures — to build a fence, to put the car in the garage” or post a no-trespassing sign, he said. “If you don’t do that, you’re not going to get the privacy.”
I guess we are all going to have to start looking under the car and checking the engine compartment for bugs…
Miranda rights fading fast
August 4, 2010 by Steve
Filed under Health News
In news that is not so new…but just a continuation on the history of the past decade or so as our rights just continue to recede bit by little bit. Before you know it they are all gone and then we wonder what happened!
Incrementalism, and the fact that humans don’t tend to remember anything at all, are our worst enemies!
Wake up and act!
High court trims Miranda warning rights bit by bit
By JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer Jesse J. Holland, Associated Press Writer – Mon Aug 2, 10:46 am ET
WASHINGTON – You have the right to remain silent, but only if you tell the police that you’re remaining silent.
You have a right to a lawyer — before, during and after questioning, even though the police don’t have to tell you exactly when the lawyer can be with you. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you, which, by the way, are only good for the next two weeks?
The Supreme Court made major revisions to the now familiar Miranda warnings this year. The rulings will change the ways police, lawyers and criminal suspects interact amid what experts call an attempt to pull back some of the rights that Americans have become used to over recent decades.
The high court has made clear it’s not going to eliminate the requirement that police officers give suspects a Miranda warning, so it is tinkering around the edges, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, co-chair of the amicus committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Fisher said. “For the past 20-25 years, as the court has turned more conservative on law and order issues, it has been whittling away at Miranda and doing everything it can to ease the admissibility of confessions that police wriggle out of suspects.”
The court placed limits on the so-called Miranda rights three times during the just-ended session. Experts viewed the large number of rulings as a statistical aberration, rather than a full-fledged attempt to get rid of the famous 1966 decision. The original ruling emerged from police questioning of Ernesto Miranda in a rape and kidnapping case in Phoenix. It required officers to tell suspects taken into custody that they have the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer represent them, even if they can’t afford one.
The court’s three decisions “indicate a desire to prune back the rules somewhat,” Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group. “But I don’t think any overruling of Miranda is in the near future. I think that controversy is pretty much dead.”
The Supreme Court in 2000 upheld the requirement that the Miranda warning be read to criminal suspects.
This year’s Supreme Court decisions did not mandate changes in the wording of Miranda warnings read by arresting police officers. The most common version is now familiar to most Americans, thanks to television police shows: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”
However, the court did approve one state version of the Miranda warnings that did not specifically inform suspects that they had a right to have a lawyer present during their police questioning.
The Miranda warning used in parts of Florida told suspects: “You have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any of our questions. If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be appointed for you without cost and before any questioning. You have the right to use any of these rights at any time you want during this interview.”
Lawyers — and the Florida Supreme Court — said that didn’t make clear that lawyers can be present as the police are doing their questioning. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing the 7-2 majority decision, said all the required information was there.
“Nothing in the words used indicated that counsel’s presence would be restricted after the questioning commenced,” Ginsburg said. “Instead, the warning communicated that the right to counsel carried forward to and through the interrogation.”
The next day, the court unanimously limited how long Miranda rights are valid.
The high court said for the first time that a suspect’s request for a lawyer is good for only 14 days after the person is released from police custody. The 9-0 ruling pulled back from an earlier decision that said that police must halt all questioning for all time if a suspect asks for a lawyer.
Police can now attempt to question a suspect who asked for a lawyer — once the person has been released from custody for at least two weeks — without violating the person’s constitutional rights and without having to repeat the Miranda warning.
“In our judgment, 14 days will provide plenty of time for the suspect to get reacclimated to his normal life, to consult with friends and counsel and to shake off any residual coercive effects of his prior custody,” said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion.
And finally, the court’s conservatives used their 5-4 advantage to rule that suspects must break their silence and tell police they are going to remain quiet if they want to invoke their “right to remain silent” and stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.
All the criminal suspect needs to say is he or she is remaining silent, wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. “Had he made either of these simple, unambiguous statements, he would have invoked his ‘right to cut off questioning.’ Here he did neither, so he did not invoke his right to remain silent.”
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority’s decision “turns Miranda upside down.”
“Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent — which counter intuitively requires them to speak,” she said. “At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so.”
Police officers will look at these decisions and incorporate them into their training, said James Pasco of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “Officers are expected to adapt to changes required by the Supreme Court,” Pasco said. “This will be no different.”
But Fisher thinks the court’s Miranda decisions will make it easier for police to get confessions out of people who don’t want to confess. “Those decisions open up ways for cops to work around Miranda,” Fisher said.
There are ample sources for great information about just how far our rights have deteriorated!
The truth about vaccines and swine flu
August 19, 2009 by Andy Morris
Filed under Big Pharma
Listen at 6 pm Central Standard Time on Wednesday and get the straight scoop as Mike Adams, The Health Ranger, speaks out on the Swine Flu.
Mike Adams, known popularly online as the “Health Ranger”, is the editor and Chief of NaturalNews.com, an independent news resource that covers the natural health and wellness topics that empower individuals to make positive changes in their personal health. NaturalNews offers uncensored news that allows for healthier consumer choices via informed skepticism.
