Letters to the Editor
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To submit comments on Real ID
To submit comments on the Real ID regulation, go to
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Submitting comments on the Real ID rules
Of course, my link didn't work.
To submit comments, you go to http://www.regulations.gov, and search for docket number DHS-2006-0030
You then click on the link in the search results, and can submit comments using a rather complex form system.
Or you can send snail mail marked with docket number DHS-2006-0030 to:
Homeland Security
Attn: NAC 1-12037
Washington, DC 20528
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And all these years...
... I thought my tinfoil hat was protecting me from the government tracking…
As Glenn mentions, anyone in support of such big-brother laws is probably too far gone to even try to engage with on a rational level, and I am glad you mentioned the right’s abandonment of its (former) core states-rights issue. Anyone who could set up or attend something called “Resolved: Better More Surveillance Than Another 9/11” must have suppressed their irony meter long ago (not to mention their gag reflex and ability to write coherent English). They want a tsk tsk-ing Nanny State run by amoral, power-hungry ninnies … luckily history shows these crumble under their dubious foundations, but not before the damage is done.
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Not To Mention
All the government laptops containing private/personal data on thousands of citizens that are lost, seemingly, every year or so. Of course I'm sure that the same people advocating this insanity would argue that there is no innate 'right to privacy', anyways.
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silence
I thought your first comment was damned funny. Too bad it wasn't intentional.
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Police state
We live in a police state and I for one do not think that can be argued about.This country is doomed because of the corruption that is the district of criminals of both parties.
Example, today in the salt lake tribune newspaper is a story about the deep involvement of the FBI in the Oklahoma city bombing and you will not hear this on TV news.
Another example, the shooting at V tech, it will be discovered that the guy was on some kind of drugs as Glenn has already referred to that was issued by the state. This happens in every case of mass shootings over and over again it is always the same formula, and this is to grab your guns away so you will not be able to stop the police state from further terror of all of us from the state to make you get in line with the program.
The war on terror is directed at the American public from the government. The evidence is already there of the great brainwashing that has happened. The students that lined up against a wall and stood there to wait for the killer to walk by them and shoot them.In a "normal" setting people would have rushed the killer in order to defend themselves at all costs but due to the brainwashing the end result was 30 something dead. The answer for this type of thing is to arm more citizens not disarm them.Armed citizens with proper training would have stopped this in its tracks with a much smaller number dead.
Be a good citizen, give up your right to protect yourself against the corruption from on high, or else.
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Good points Nick
These are the guys who use "Nanny state" as a term of derision, and yet this is exactly what they are proposing to create. Well, I guess there will be one major difference in how this is done, in the so-called conservative (neo-con) nanny state, the government will have control of all the information regarding any aspect of your life as you try to maintain a job and life in an increasingly hostile economic environment. In the liberal nanny state that the neo-cons hate so much, the nanny state would actually be proving health care for everyone, voting rights, civil rights, you know, useless stuff like that.
How they went from being the "Black helicopter" fear mongers to the guys putting the fuel in these choppers is a truly stunning example of their ability to turn black into white as long as it serves their ideological underpinnings.
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hmm
i guess the devil's advocate position on this one is that there are lots of government jobs that you supposedly are not 'fit' for if you've ever had to rely on psych meds before.
i also recall reading about a story recently where the VA is denying vets from iraq disability for 'PSTD' under the guise that they had pre-existing psychological problems and it's not the army's/marine corp's fault that you got fucked up in iraq, because you already had a screw loose due to that two week span doctors put you on prozac your freshman year of high school when you're parents were concerned with how you were sleeping in more than normal. so, no to the lifetime paycheck for your troubles.
and i'd have to imagine their using that database for coming to those conclusions.
another thing is, social security disability will look back on your record of med usage when trying to determine if you are, in essence, 'untreatable' to the extent that you have tried medication and it doesn't work for you well enough to get you back to normal 'working condition'.... whatever that means.
i suppose if the SS admin. has a record of someone taking tons of different medications, and they have doctor testimony saying someone isn't responding to treatment, it might be a little easier to corroborate then.
which, i don't know. i would assume in most cases talking to doctors and going through hard-copies of people's records would be sufficient.
that said, i don't endorse it at all, and i think it's an extremely cheap way to try to assess someone's psychological makeup.
how many people have been healthy all their lives and have had something happen to them (spouse/close one passing away or the like) and had to rely on anti-depressants for a while to get through it?
it's just such a slippery slope, and obviously that's where reasonable people object.
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Privacy amendment
The U.S. needs a privacy amendment to the Constitution.
I've worked in European countries with strong privacy laws, some embedded in their Constitutions. (Germany is particularly strong in this regard, mostly as a result of how the Nazis used written public records to sniff out Jewish ancestry.)
The differences are enormous. Companies are limited in what personal data they can collect and must strictly control who can view that data. The concept of "mailing lists" distributed amongst telemarketing firms is virtually unheard of. The credit report industry is wholly different too.
Moreover, there is an attitude amongst the populace that personal data should be private -- and any transgression generates outrage. In contrast, although there is a lot of lip service in the US to keeping data private (such as having people sign the privacy statement when going to a doctor or pharmacist) it seems that most people have become acclimated to having their data in government databases.