No Questions Asked

I am afraid we now live in a police state. One wrong move and you can be beaten. It is incredible.

Watch this video:

The story below is a perfect example of how the government’s policy is bankrupting the nation. Rather than investing in the long-term reconstruction of New Orleans and other battered areas, we have instead ignored the problem. New Orleans remains in shambles. It is a national embarrassment and an economic disaster. Families are living in toxic trailers, which has led to expensive and heart-breaking medical problems. Thousands of Katrina victims remain unsettled and transient. The result is much more expensive for our country in the long run. What happened the billions of dollars that disappeared after Katrina?

Are we really so passive that we don’t care that billions are being stolen from us? First in Iraq and Afghanistan to help those whose lives we destroyed and then in our own country to help Americans?

How can we sit by and allow our savings to be plundered like this?

Is it any wonder we are in a recession?

The last three years have been hell for the Huckabees.

After their apartment was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, the Mississippi family lived in two trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, both of which contained high levels of formaldehyde.

Since moving into their first trailer after the 2005 hurricane, Lindsay and Steve Huckabee and their five children have endured a variety of illnesses  asthma, headaches, sore throats and respiratory illnesses  that read like a toxicologist’s list of likely symptoms for exposure to the carcinogen.

Six-year-old Laila has had two surgeries for sinus problems, and father Steve has now developed mouth tumors.

“The ENT [ears, nose and throat doctor] said in his 23 years of practice he had never seen a tumor in that spot before,” Lindsay Huckabee, coughing with a screaming child in the background, told ABCNews.

“He said it was extremely rare and could have been from the fumes, because he breathes through his mouth,” she said.

Now the family, whose children range in age from 2 to 13, has learned the government will move them, along with thousands of other people, into a hotel or other temporary housing.

“We’ve been through this before,” said Huckabee. “They offered us 30 days in a hotel, and it had two double beds in one room and no kitchenette,” Huckabee said.

That’s hardly enough room for a family of seven, and housing isn’t the family’s only concern. The Huckabees are now spending $300 a month on steroids for Laila’s sinuses in addition to multiple medical co-payments and money lost from missing days of work to take care of their sickly brood.

High Level of Fumes

After health complaints in 2006, about 1,000 families in Louisiana asked FEMA to move them to new quarters, and lawyers for a group of victims asked a federal judge to order FEMA to test for fumes.

The Centers for Disease Control, working with FEMA, tested the air for formaldehyde fumes in 519 trailer- and mobile homes between Dec. 21 and Jan. 23. The testing revealed that some trailers contained fumes at levels nearly 40 times the customary exposure level.

The CDC and FEMA announced Thursday that Gulf Coast hurricane victims will be moved out of their government-issued, formaldehyde-laden trailers as quickly as possible.

Of the 143,000 people who were originally given trailers, about 105,000 have since been moved, FEMA said Thursday, leaving about 38,000 people still living in trailers.

“This is really about people,” CDC Director Julie L. Gerberding said at a press conference. “They have great faith and courage in us, and I hope we can help them relocate.”

FEMA has promised an array of short-term benefits in addition to housing, including moving benefits, storage and even consultation with specialists to keep families near schools and work. Pet care is also included.

Priority will be given to families with children, elderly people or anyone with asthma or other chronic conditions.

But FEMA announced no plans to pay for the long-term health problems facing those, like the Huckabees, who lived in the toxic trailers for up to two years.

When will we realize that if we allow the rights of some to be ignored, we ultimately harm ourselves? Today we are all at risk.

Below is an article that appeared recently in Information Clearinghouse. The video is extremely disturbing and shows a female crime victim forceably stripped of her clothes by several police officers, including at least two men. Watch the video (at the end of this post), it is incredibly sad and frightening. It’s time for us all to step up and fight for our rights.

I can’t help but to be reminded of the famous poem by Martin Niemöller:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
after all I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
after all I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
after all I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Guantanamo Comes to Main Street U.S.A.

By Mark A. Goldman

“ICH” — – They say that the difference between how democracy in Europe has evolved compared to that of the United States is that in Europe the government is afraid of the People whereas in the United States the People are afraid of the government. That’s a dangerous state of affairs and it looks like it’s going to get worse.

It’s not only a matter of who you vote for… it’s a matter of how well informed you are when you do vote… and Americans now are notorious for not being nearly as well informed as the citizens of many other countries are. So in America, we don’t really think that deeply about the range of choices that are or are not available to us. Fatal mistake.

The video below is indicative of the evolving consciousness of law enforcement in our nation… and it’s our ‘Shock and Awe’ government, with its penchant for gratuitous and unconscionable violence, and the People’s refusal to hold them accountable, that is setting the stage for our future in this ‘land of the free and home of the brave.’

When we allow fear and force to dominate the way in which our government deals with people we don’t know… we open the door to despotism, for surely when we fail to protect the legitimate rights of any group or person, we sow the seeds of our own destruction. Take a look at this video if you want to know what is happening to civil liberties in our own country. I guess for some members of our community, this is not news at all.

Apparently local law enforcement officers are now being trained to treat citizens the way military personnel were trained to treat Guantanamo prisoners. Your government doesn’t seem to care anymore what you think… except maybe during an election year and even then, not so much. And like the military, many police officers who have been trained to just follow orders, are doing just that…just following orders.

Watch this video.

Customs agents have the prerogative to examine and even copy data from travelling citizens’ laptops they search.

“A new alert for travellers: be careful what you store on your laptop or your BlackBerry when entering the United States,” warns CNN’s John Roberts. “Customs agents can examine your computer and even keep your private information.”

CNN reporter Jeanne Meserve adds ominously, “Your banking records, your music choices, your emails, your business contacts — all can be examined, copied and stored by the government when you enter the country, if they’re in an electronic device.”

One Pakistani-American IT consultant says that U.S. agents searched his computer on five occasions upon returning from overseas trips, even forcing him to give them access to confidential corporate information.

The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists.

The three men were invited as part of a weeklong conference on terrorism organized by cadets at the academy’s Colorado Springs campus under the auspices of the political science department.

The three will be paid a total of $13,000 for their appearance, some of it from private donors, said Maj. Brett Ashworth, a spokesman for the academy.

The three were invited because “they offered a unique perspective from inside terrorism,” Major Ashworth said. The conference is to result in a report on methods to combat terrorism that will be sent to the Pentagon, members of Congress and other influential officials, he added.

Members of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group suing the federal government to combat what it calls creeping evangelism in the armed forces, said it was typical of the Air Force Academy to invite born-again Christians to address cadets on terrorism rather than experts who could teach students about the Middle East.

“This stuff going on at the academy today is part of the endemic evangelical infiltration that continues,” said David Antoon, a 1970 academy graduate and a foundation member.

The three men were invited to talk about being recruited and trained as terrorists, not religion, although one of them, Zak Anani, did tell students that converting to Christianity from Islam saved his life, said John Van Winkle, another spokesman for the academy.