Thank you Sen. Rand Paul
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I stopped by on March 7 2024. First time in many years, had to update payment info. Hope all is well. Politicians suck. Bye. Posts: 9,487
Despite what you think about him he has been on the Senate floor for the last seven hours holding up the vote that Harry Reid is trying to ram through on the PATRIOT Act.
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The thought of Harry Reid ramming anything through makes me queasy.
"With our thoughts we make the world"
"When the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, we would be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor Wednesday. In unusually personal criticism of a fellow senator, he warned that Paul, by blocking swift passage of the bill, "is threatening to take away the best tools we have for stopping them."
Paul, after complaining that Reid's remarks were "personally insulting," asked whether the nation "should have some rules that say before they come into your house, before they go into your banking records, that a judge should be asked for permission, that there should be judicial review? Do we want a lawless land?"
It's amazing how government always manages to break all the rules that they've written to keep them restrained while simultaneously imposing MORE unjust laws on the people themselves. It's even more amazing how many people prefer that their representatives actually vote in support of this arrangement all the time. What people have to understand is that repealing or modifying The Patriot Act does not mean that the government will be prevented from finding terrorists. It's quite the contrary. It will actually force them to focus on people with which there is actual reasonable suspicion that they may be involved in these types of illegal activities instead of searching everyone constantly. To make EVERYONE a suspect-- what good does that do? The goal is to find needles in a haystack, and provisions in The Patriot Act like roving wiretaps on the general population create a much larger haystack all while making telecom corporations unpaid government spies on their customers. It's a complete intrusion on the privacy of innocent people, a right guaranteed by the fourth amendment, and it's a complete waste of time and money. The ability of Federal agents to write their own warrants is ludicrous as well. The fact that a judge has to decide if a warrant can be issued is one more necessary safeguard to guarantee that citizens would be protected from this misuse of power. But what is most disturbing is that this legislation was authored well before 9/11 and never had the popular support to get passed in Congress, until people were scared into believing it's necessary. When introduced after 9/11, the bill was changed just hours before the vote on it allowing stricter surveillance of the American people, with the word "terroist" taking on even broader definitions over time. We gave it a shot-- all it has done was prove to be another victory for the people that attacked us on 9/11 as it wasn't they who changed the American way of life away from freedom, but our own reactionary misinformed democracy.