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TSA Got Everything It Wanted For Christmas
OverTheGeicoE writes "It looks like Congress' recent jabs at TSA were just posturing after all. Last Friday, President Obama signed a spending act passed by both houses of Congress. The act gives TSA a $7.85 billion budget increase for 2012 and includes funding for 12 additional multi-modal Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams and 140 new behavior detection officers. It even includes funding for 250 shiny new body scanners, which was originally cut from the funding bill last May."
$7.85 billion is the budget, not the budget increase.
The TSA didn't receive a $7.85 billion budget increase, according to the article, their total budget is $7.85 billion with an increase of $153 million over the previous year.
If you actually RTFA the increase is $153 million and the entire budget for the TSA is $7.85 billion.
Of course it still is a huge amount, considering that the TSA is simply a security theater and ALL that money goes to waste. Plus, that money is close to half of the entire NASA budget... Yeah, way to go for ROI!
And all that does not make it right for the summary to be so off, but this is slashdot!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
For comparison, the entire budget of the National Science Foundation, across all programs and disciplines, is $6.87 billion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As opposed to some other month?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_industrial_complex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_On_Drugs
Palm trees and 8
You guys are way behind: The French are already on their fifth republic...
Do you know how hard that is?
I've seen people try. They are almost always removed from ballots on technicalities (signatures not being in cursive, or not matching a 50 year old voter registration card, its crazy to run outside the establishment)
s/40/98/
Cocaine and opiates were first made illegal in 1914 in America, although some of the states had already passed prohibition laws prior to that. Just because we did not call it "the war on drugs" does not mean that it was not the same story: racism, increased police power, and widespread curtailments of American rights. Sure, we added more and more drugs to the list, and eventually we stopped even trying to be constitutional about it (early on we used tricks with tax law to effectively make drugs illegal), but it all started in 1914.
Palm trees and 8
TSA. Keeping you safe from terrorists like this one:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/18/1027775/-TSA-Arrests-Me-for-Using-the-Fourth-Amendment-as-a-Weapon-(Tales-from-the-Edge-of-a-Revolution-2)
On the Iraq war: Democrats were opposed 126-82, Republicans in favor 215-6. If Democrats had controlled congress, it would never have happened.
On public option healthcare: It was filibustered to death. It had support of 100% of Senate Democrats, but was opposed by 40 Senate Republicans plus Lieberman, who is an independent. One more Democrat in the Senate, and it would have passed.
On torture and the prison-industrial complex: They fought against torture. The fact that they didn't do some other good thing does not erase the good thing that they did do.
On gays and women (and immigrants and Muslims, for that matter): When a large segment of the population is used as a political punching bag and denied basic rights and control over their lives, that IS a big deal. It's not like the government can only do one thing at a time, and we must solve one problem before moving on to another. We can help millions of people right now, but it seems you'd rather let them suffer because you can't get some other things you want first.
On unions: You accuse them of union busting. That's just shocking. They fought for EFCA, but it was filibustered to death by the Republicans. Also I seem to recall some Democrats fighting like hell in Wisconsin to protect the unions, only for the Republican governor to circumvent the law and pass his union busting bill illegally, and then have a Republican state supreme court judge give it the okay.
The Republicans are out to break your spirits. They want you to give up on the Democrats so that they can take power. That's been their goal for years, and it's perfectly clear to anyone paying attention. Stop falling for it.
One party fought for public option health care.
Not very hard, and what they passed instead is a bloated taxpayer funding of giant lobbyists (insurance and pharma).
They fought for increased taxes on those who can afford it,
Not very hard, they have one house and the Presidency, and they gave in.
rather than insisting that taxes only ever go down.
Not very hard. In fact, they pushed for some of the tax cuts.
They fought against the enormous and expensive blunder that was the Iraq war.
Not very hard. They signed the paper that gave Bush and the Neocons the authority to do whatever they damned well pleased. Obama even started some new policies, like summary execution of United States citizens.
They fought against allowing unlimited corporate money to influence politics.
Not very hard. They said they were fighting for it, but when Citizens United went through the Supremes, they threw up there hands in surrender.
They fought against torture.
Not very hard. We're still doing it.
They fought against teaching creationism in school.
This is one of the theatrical wedge issues. Notice how, for all the stage presence they demonstrate in the fight, no actual policy changes have happened?
they fought for the rights of gays and women
This is also a theatrical wedge issue. The only slight difference is that public opinion fell heavily on the "change the military policy" side, so one tiny corner of gay policy got changed. Until gays have they same rights as non-gay citizens, they are still not showing true support. How many of them are fully invested in truly equal rights for gays? How's Obama's position on gay marriage? They don't even get the half-a-loaf that is civil partnerships. Has there been a single substantive change in non-military policy regarding gay rights?
That is why we call this political theater. Because all the supposed support amounts to sound and fury signifying nothing.
Gridlock, you say? Hardly! We have made enormous changes in our policies, domestic and foreign. We have signed treaties and created sweeping new laws. We have completely revised our interpretation of the Bill of Rights. We have discarded any notion of respect for the War Powers Resolution.
All the truly significant changes in United States policy, happening at a truly blistering pace, are authoritarianism and expansion of monopolies and barriers to entry (copyright, patents, trademarks, insurance, drugs importation). The dramatic changes are all one of two things; the ability to control dissidents (enemy or patriot, foreign or domestic), and government influencing cashflow into the pockets of major corporations that do a lot of lobbying.
Look at the substantive change. If the substantive change does not match the rhetoric, questions must be raised. Show me substantive change, and I will believe that the rhetoric is more than theater.
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One party fought for public option health care.
In the House, 100% of the Aye votes for the health care bill that passed were Democrats.
..that maybe in two states total some single politician floated a bill that had zero chance of passing? Really?
If you want to blame the Republicans for something, at least have the fucking decency and intellectual honesty of finding one of the many things that they are actually guilty of. All those back room deals over the health care bill that completely castrated it and sold us all out, that wasn't to get enough Republicans on board, that was to get enough Democrats on board. You shouldnt need a citation since I just gave it.
Then you have the balls to call out the Republicans on the Iraq war when more Republicans voted against that than had voted for that pig of a health care bill you just fucking complained about?
This year they were overwhelmingly in favor of pushing 'In God We Trust' on school children. Thats both Democrats and Republicans.. yet you are going on about how the Democrats were against teaching creationism which wasnt even a matter in front of either House or Senate?
Your problem is that you listen to what the Democrats say, but never bother to pay attention to what they actually do. Your priorities are fucked up. You care about what the media is talking about, rather than what the politicians are passing into law. That makes you the problem.
"His name was James Damore."
Ron Paul is the only candidate that wants to eliminate the TSA
Ron Paul speaking on the House floor, November 17th 2010
"His name was James Damore."