Protect Children Against Repeat Sex Offenders

Philly-Based National Group Fighting Against TSA Pat Downs on Children

Apr 20, 2011 by Randy LoBasso

WeWontFly.com, a national organization opposed to enhanced airport searches, put out a press release this morning calling for a blanket end to pat downs on children.

“The goal of the campaign is to highlight the immorality of TSA [Transportation Security Administration] pat-downs of minors, force the TSA to immediately and permanently halt all touching of minors and encourage travel industry players to join us,” reads the release, which can be viewed on the front page of WeWontFly.com, created in October 2010 by James Babb and George Donnelly.

We caught up with co-founder Babb, who lives in Eagleville and had previously helped put together “National Opt-Out Day” on Thanksgiving Eve 2010, organizing resistance at Philadelphia International (and elsewhere), right in the middle of the expansion of news coverage (and Drudge Sirens!) on the issue, which got people up in a real tussle.

Babb says the efforts to stop TSA searches remains the overarching goal of the group and others like it throughout the country, though says after watching a recent viral video of 6-year-old Anna Drexel getting what he calls “fondled” by airport security, they needed to act.

“Minors are particularly vulnerable,” says Babb. “You and I as adults can say ‘I won’t fly.’ We can choose whether we want them fondling us or irradiating us [with airport body scanners]. Children don’t have that ability.”
He says there should be a zero-tolerance policy of “abusing children in this way” and has called on supporters of WeWontFly.com – including 19,635 Facebook followers, as of the time of this blog – to begin a nationwide “Call Flood” campaign alongside efforts to collect signatures to send to the Obama Administration and TSA officials. The idea is to call huge companies the country over, like airlines and Disney destinations and say that until the companies put pressure on congress to get this stopped, their patronizing will cease.

6 year old girl sexually accosted by TSA

“The Disney Corporation, their own mission statement says protecting children is a priority,” he says. “And the fact that kids are being subjected to this assault on their way to Disney World or Disney Land or a Disney cruise, it’s just horrifying.”

The rationale for searching children is that terrorists may be disguised and be able to use anyone, including children, to get weapons on planes. Babb doesn’t buy it.

“People say there’s this big danger of terrorism,” he says. “The actual danger is so small. You’re eight times more likely to be murdered by a policeman than a terrorist. You’re four times more likely to die in your bathtub than by a terrorist. It’s not a substantial threat at all.”

Babb maintains techniques, such as scanners and pat downs not only don’t make us any safer, but make us less safe. In fact, it’s been reported the body scanners wouldn’t have detected the type of powdered explosives used by the “underwear bomber.” WeWontFly.com maintains alerted passengers, in fact, have a better track record of fighting terrorism – the underwear bomber, shoe bomber, Flight 93 on 9/11 – than do TSA scanners and pat down techniques.

“To say, ‘Look, we’re going to let our guard down if we stop putting our hands in kids’ pants is total bullshit,” muses Babb. “They’re not protecting anybody anyway.”

Link to Phillly-Blog

Common Sense Commentary:

 

TSA actions clearly violate the Fourth Amendment unless travelers clearly, knowingly, and willingly surrender their Rights via written, signed, contract with full understanding.

We only have to look to 50 year of SCOTUS Miranda Rights rulings to know that each of the above elements must be clearly, and willingly be met in order for an American Citizen to surrender their inherent GOD GIVEN Rights.

 

There is no question that should any of us citizens, be caught touching these children, in this way, we would be convicted in court as SEX OFFENDERS, and sentenced to STATUTORY SENTENCES and have to Register as Sex Offenders for life, IF we were to ever leave jail.

Bill of Rights

Fourth Amendment

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." 

Child sexual abuse - wikipedia

6 year old boy strip searched by TSA

Sexual assaults on children are normally viewed far more seriously than those on an adult. This is because of the innocence of the child victim, and also because of the long-term psychological impact that such assaults have on the child.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent abuses a child for sexual stimulation. Forms of CSA include asking or pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities (regardless of the outcome), indecent exposure of the genitals to a child,pornography to a child, actual sexual contact against a child, physical contact with the child's genitals, viewing of the child's genitalia without physical contact, or...

Blessings to all PATRIOTS!

New York Times Hammers Obama

All the President's Sanctimony 
Ross Douhat
New York Times, Op Ed

Here is how President Obama introduced his plan for deficit reduction in Wednesday’s speech:

… because all this spending is popular with both Republicans and Democrats alike, and because nobody wants to pay higher taxes, politicians are often eager to feed the impression that solving the problem is just a matter of eliminating waste and abuse. You’ll hear that phrase a lot. “We just need to eliminate waste and abuse.” The implication is that tackling the deficit issue won’t require tough choices.

… So here’s the truth. Around two-thirds of our budget — two-thirds — is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security. Two-thirds.

…. So any serious plan to tackle our deficit will require us to put everything on the table …

And here are some choice excerpts from the plan itself:

It’s an approach that puts every kind of spending on the table — but one that protects the middle class, our promise to seniors, and our investments in the future …

We will reduce wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments. We will cut spending on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s purchasing power to drive greater efficiency and speed generic brands of medicine onto the market. We will work with governors of both parties to demand more efficiency and accountability from Medicaid … we will slow the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services that seniors need …

… both parties should work together now to strengthen Social Security for future generations. But we have to do it without putting at risk current retirees, or the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans’ guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.

So, to be clear: We need to put “everything on the table” … except for policies that benefit the middle class and senior citizens. We can’t pretend that we can close the budget deficit by just cutting waste, fraud and abuse … but we can pretend that reining in Medicaid and Medicare spending is just a matter of cutting “wasteful subsidies” and “erroneous payments,” finding “efficiencies” and eliminating “unnecessary care.” We need to make “tough choices” and (did I mention this?) put “everything on the table” … but we can’t change Social Security benefits for current or future retirees.

This was what bothered me the most about the president’s speech. It wasn’t the partisanship and polemicism. Politics ain’t beanbag: President Obama wants to be re-elected, the House Republicans gave him a nice fat target, and I wasn’t surprised that he decided to come out swinging rather than letting the opportunity pass by. Nor was it his refusal to match Paul Ryan’s honesty about what it takes to balance the budget without tax increases with a similar honesty about what it takes to balance the budget while leaving Medicare and Social Security more or less as-is. Evading unpleasant realities is a grand bipartisan tradition: Someday, a Democratic leader will have to admit that he supports tax increases on the middle class, but I’m not at all shocked that President Obama still hopes to save that admission for his second term — or the first term of Joe Biden’s administration, perhaps.

No, it was the sanctimony that got to me. If you’re going to propose reforming entitlements by primarily cutting “wasteful subsidies” and “unnecessary care,” is it really appropriate to shake your finger at politicians who propose to cut “waste, fraud and abuse”? If you’re intent on pretending that tax increases on the rich are the only tax increases required, is it really appropriate to lecture your audience about the need to make “tough choices” and put “everything on the table”? This is a recurring tic in President Obama’s speeches, of course: He likes to frame his partisan thrusts with professorial summaries of the policy landscape, alternating between honest high-mindedness and slash-and-burn polemics. But Wednesday’s address was a particularly frustrating variation on that theme. Rarely has a politician talked so piously (and accurately) about the necessity of hard choices while proposing to make so few of them.

In a sense, I know, even a gesture toward inconvenient realities is better than no gesture at all. It’s the tribute that big-government liberalism pays to fiscal reality, you might say, and it’s a sign of the growing constraints on the progressive vision that President Obama felt compelled to acknowledge that reality at all. (Matt Yglesias and Yuval Levin, from the left and right, made versions of his point following the speech.)

But the sanctimony is still hard to swallow. This president doesn’t pander any more egregiously than his predecessors. But he spends more time trying to pretend that his pandering is really tough-minded, post-partisan truthtelling. And that two-step grows more grating with every passing day.

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/all-the-presidents-sanctimony/

Common Sense Commentary:

When you have lost the New York Times, you are no longer relevant in liberal circles. 

Obama has lost his POTUS Bully Pulpit, which is the most powerful speaking position in the world. He now has to reel in the New York Times and many others in order to win the primaries and be re-elected. 

Of course, he will get them back. But at extreme costs. And, at this moment a seated president is now standing outside the White House and has to fight his way back in.

If we Patriots keep our heads down, focus on the larger war, and stay away from fundamental internal arguments over nuanced policies, we will have a new president in 2012, and he will be a Republican. We must choose wisely!

Blessings, fellow Patriots!

Tea Time

Tea Time

Posted By Roger Kimball On April 3, 2011 @ 2:05 pm In Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Yes, it’s getting to be that time again.  During the run-up to the November 2010 elections, many observers — including me ^[1] — remarked that the tea party, which was clearly shaping up to be a major power in many states, was not so much anti-Democrat or even anti-incumbent as it  was anti-business-as-usual.  The tea partiers were united not by demographics — age, profession, education, geography, etc. — but by impatience at the sclerotic inefficiency and blundering intrusiveness of a government establishment that had lost touch with the American founding principles of limited government, fiscal accountability, and republican virtue.

Perhaps the most conspicuous targets of the tea party were high-profile Democrats like Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer, but plenty of Republican politicians also learned to their chagrin that they could no longer treat their office as a perpetual entitlement or the American taxpayer as an inexhaustible mammary gland. As was repeatedly noted in the aftermath of the election, while the tea party lost a handful of high-profile races (Nevada, California, Delaware), the spirit of reform rushed like the waters of the Alpheus and Peneus through the Augean stables of state and local legislatures. Commentary is not prophecy; nevertheless, I predict a reappearance of those cleansing waters come 2012. How thorough a job they will do depends, of course, on the people directing the flow.  A key question is exactly who will be standing in for Heracles on  the Republican side of the ledger.

We’ll know that soon enough. For now, it’s perhaps worth underscoring that anti-business-as-usual, a-pox-on-both-your-houses theme.  In the 2010 election, the primary focus was on domestic issues: the economy, ObamaCare, the economy, immigration, the economy, gun rights, the economy, the economy, the economy.

Domestic issues are still front and center. But the embarrassing spectacle of the Obama administration lurching from paralysis to spasmodic incoherence and back on the Middle East and North Africa suggests that foreign policy will also loom large on the tea party’s agenda.

I say “foreign policy,” but there has been precious little policy — precious little in the way of thoughtful and consistent  activity — in the Obama administration’s tergiversations. On the contrary, Obama’s signature formula ^[2] — arrogance undergirded by the twin pillars of incompetence ^[2], on the one hand, and thuggish ^[3] if naïve progressivism, on the other — has ruled the roost these last weeks as the United States has lurched from embracing to expectorating one strong man after the next. It’s been a disastrous — and potentially a very dangerous — minuet that Obama and his minions have performed.

But the fiasco that is American action in the Middle East and North Africa at the moment is not the provence of Democrats only. There are also several Republicans who have bought into the “Arab Spring” narrative and seem to believe that what we are seeing in that part of the world is a reenactment of 1776 instead of an anarchistic uprising unified by sundry criminal and Islamist elements.  Indeed, the rose-colored glasses have been donned not only by Republican politicians but also by various conservative commentators who have traded common sense and appreciation of political reality for the emotion of virtue, a neo-Wilsonian sort of exchange that unfailingly ends in disillusion.

I’ll leave the starry-eyed commentariat to one side today in order to concentrate on a few prominent politicians who, when it comes to Libya, believe in walking loudly and carrying a preposterous shtick. I am thinking in particular of Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joseph Lieberman who, for the last 15 minutes, anyway, have been loudly beating the war drum. (See this excellent piece ^[4] by Andy McCarthy.)

The time qualification is important. In the last few days, Sen. Graham has publicly described ^[5] Col. Gadhafi (“Gaddafi,” “Kadafi,” whatever) as an “international terrorist” and an “unlawful enemy combatant,” and has wondered why we couldn’t just “drop a bomb” to rid the world of him.  Sens. McCain and Lieberman, meanwhile, have been falling all over themselves to praise President Obama for bombing Libya. In a remarkable piece in the Wall Street Journal ^[6] the other day, they declared that “regime change” should be the goal of our military action in Libya. “[A] successful outcome in Libya,” they write,  “requires the departure of Gadhafi as quickly as possible.” OK. Then what? “By all accounts [all accounts, Kemo Sabe?]  the Transitional National Council is led by moderates who have declared their vision for (as their website puts it) Libya becoming “constitutional democratic civil state based on the rule of law, respect for human rights and the guarantee of equal rights and opportunities for all its citizens.” Isn’t that nice?

Now, I believe Ronald Reagan had it right when he described Col. Q. (or “K,” depending on your orthographic preference) as “the mad dog of the Middle East.” ^[7] After all,  the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, in which nearly 200 Americans died, was the handiwork of Libyan agents. The creepiness, to say nothing of the evil malevolence, of the “psychotic transvestite” (in Mark Steyn’s phrase ^[8]) is not in dispute.

The point is, however, that Col. Q. is not the only bad guy around.  And, despite the McCain/Lieberman valentine to the “Transitional National Council,” the fact is that the opposition, a.k.a. the “rebels,” in Libya are liberally represented by people every bit as scary ^[9] as Qaddafi. Besides, it seems only yesterday — actually, it was about 18 months ago — that the Three Musketeers  McCain,  Lieberman, and Graham went on a state junket to Tripoli to (as McCain himself put it ^[10]) cement and “deepen” the “ties between the United States and Libya” which (he said) “have taken a remarkable and positive turn in recent years.”

^[11]

  “Late evening with Col Qadhafi at his ‘ranch’ in Libya,” McCain tweeted at the time, “interesting meeting with an interesting man.” Lieberman thought he was pretty interesting, too, though standing mutely, mascot-like at McCain side he seems more like Howdy Doody than a U.S. Senator.

^[12]

  When Liberman does get around to talking, though, he, too, is effusive. Here’s a Wikileaks cable ^[13] about the chummy, high-level meeting:

“We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi,” remarked Senator Lieberman. He stated that the situation demonstrated that change is possible and expressed appreciation that Libya had kept its promises to give up its WMD program and renounce terrorism. Lieberman called Libya an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends.

The dynamic trio was in Libya to discuss — wait for it —  expanding U.S. military aid to Libya and also — not incidentally — to try to stage manage the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie terrorist who had been incarcerated in Scotland but who was about to be set free on “humanitarian” grounds because he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer. The Obama administration was complicit in the release, asking only that he not be given a “hero’s welcome” in Tripoli. In the event, that’s just what he got ^[14] and, moreover, he seems to be living happily ever after, for that “terminal” cancer turned out to have many more stops before it reached the terminus, if it ever does.

Col. Q.’s rehabilitation started in 2003 when President George W. Bush told the world that Libya had given up its program to acquire nuclear weapons. Various diplomatic upgrades followed, including a visit from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in September 2008. In 2009, John McCain blathered on about the “mutual respect and friendship” that subsisted between Libya and the United States while Joe Lieberman  hailed Libya as an “important ally” in the war on terror. As recently as February 2011 — just a few weeks ago — President Obama asked Congress to increase military aid for Libya in order (so Fox News reports ^[15]) “to train Libyan military officers, improve its air force, secure its borders and to counter terrorism.”

Well, that was then. Now, in March and April 2011, we’ve rediscovered that Qaddafi is a mad dog after all. As I say, I never doubted that.  Senators McCain, Graham, and Lieberman had no reason to doubt it either. Still, as Andy McCarthy ^[4] notes, they went blithely ahead and embraced him. “With eyes wide open,” he writes:

The interventionist senators abetted the U.S. aid to Qaddafi and the legitimizing of his dictatorial regime. Given that this policy has contributed mightily to Qaddafi’s current capacity to consolidate his grip on power and repress his opposition, one might think some senatorial contrition, or at least humility, would be in order. But, no. Having been entirely wrong about Qaddafi, the senators would now have us double down on Libya by backing Qaddafi’s opposition — the rebels about whom McCain, Lieberman, and Graham know a lot less than they knew about Qaddafi.

What is more dispiriting, the Three Senatorial Musketeers falling over themselves in 2009 to praise Qaddafi, or the same trio in 2011 calling for his assassination in order to . . . what? After Qaddafi, then what? An army of young James Madisons just waiting to install themselves in Tripoli? And here’s another question, from William Hazlitt: “Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now?” As I say, in 2010 the tea party had its hands full with various domestic issues.  Those haven’t gone away, but I reckon we’ll be hearing a lot about our North African adventures in 2012. Here’s a question: do you suppose Qaddafi will still be presiding over the Libyan oil wells then? It would be a rash man, I suspect, who said No with any confidence.

---

Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2011/04/03/tea-time/

URLs in this post:

[1] including me: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2010/11/15/who-governs/

[2] formula: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2010/05/31/the-secret-ingredient-in-the-obama-formula-for-success/

[3] thuggish: http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2011/03/14/the-aroma-of-illegality/

[4] excellent piece: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/263694/senators-sway-andrew-c-mccarthy

[5] publicly described: http://mobile.salon.com/politics/war_room/2011/03/31/graham_gadhafi_libya/index.html

[6] Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576233112828325424.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

[7] mad dog of the Middle East.”: http://lonelyconservative.com/2011/03/video-ronald-reagan-called-gaddafi-mad-dog-of-the-middle-east/

[8] Mark Steyn’s phrase: http://articles.ocregister.com/2011-03-25/news/29193259_1_military-action-gadhafi-arab-league

[9] every bit as scary: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/19/extremists-among-libya-rebels_n_837894.html

[10] McCain himself put it: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/22/john_mccain_libya

[11] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNfztA1i0ts

[12] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYVWT_kDTsU

[13] Wikileaks cable: http://213.251.145.96/cable/2009/08/09TRIPOLI677.html

[14] that’s just what he got: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32487856/ns/world_news-terrorism/

[15] Fox News reports: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/03/24/did-qaddafi-deserve-funding-foreign-aid-scrutiny-amid-mideast-unrest/#ixzz1ISbNXNc6