hpcatx wrote:newschannel5.com (link in original post) wrote:"Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.
This finally ought to get those who just say "don't fly" concerned. That simplistic solution is not practical for many business travelers. Should those that need to fly be denied the same freedom of travel as drivers and make them subject to invasive and abusive TSA inspections?
Hopefully, articles like this and the fact that the TSA is coming to a highway near you will put the focus back on the real, underlying problems. We need discussions regarding true fixes and the balancing of our liberties with security. Where are our real law enforcement officials? Who knows, maybe before long the TSA will be tasked with stopping bicyclists for scans and pat-downs.
I have said words to that effect, but I have also protested mightily against TSA's policies and procedures at airports.....not to mention anywhere else. I have stated on many occasions that Janet Napolitano is toad, and that TSA is merely a front excuse for government to gain more control over what it views to be an unruly population.
I
don't fly precisely because of TSA. But I'm not going to stop driving. OTH, I don't have to visit states where TSA does this. I have no business calling me to Tennessee, so I'll just avoid it.
This begs the question..... Since federal law enforcement are not fully vested LEO by
Texas law, if TSA were to put up such road blocks say in DFW, would a CHL be required to show both IDs to a TSA officer if stopped at such a checkpoint?
Last comment......... I do not desire or want there to be a violent revolution to overthrow our government. I may consider myself a Texan by choice (since Texan by birth is not something I can claim), but I am an
American first. I love my country unapologetically. But, I will also say that if this crap spreads nationwide, I can't think of a more likely way for one to start. The constant and deliberate provocation of the public while exercising their constitutional right to freedom of movement, even in their daily local travels, will not last for long before some sort of militia movement or other decides to do something about it. If that ever happens, the responsibility for it will lie squarely on the shoulders of a monstrous and ever more encroaching government, not on the people. The people, for the most part, just want to be left alone to enjoy their lives. When the quality of life's liberties is eventually ground away to what the soviets "enjoyed" before the collapse of communism, what happened there will someday happen here. I very clearly remember the pictures of Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank on August 19th during the 1991 coup in Russia, when their people spoke loud and clear about what they were and were not going to put up with any longer:
If DHS in general and TSA in particular do not back away from this gradual soviet style control of the peoples' movements, that is where we are headed. I don't like it one bit, and I don't want to see it happen. But it
will happen if someone doesn't get control over this runaway bureaucracy and reform it. BTW, here is what happened in Russia just two years later.....Boris Yeltsin found the continued existence of the Russian parliament to be inconvenient to his particular ambitions, and so he ordered it dissolved. When they refused to be dissolved, he sent tanks to fire on the same building in the above photo:
People who entertain with relish the possibility of an armed rebellion never include in their fantasy the actual likely outcome—the emergence of a strongman who is averse to either a democracy
or a republic. This is part of why it would be far,
far better to solve the nation's problems politically. The problem with this is that, for better or for worse, politics is the art of compromise, and ideological purists of whatever stripe are not ever going to get everything they want. I consider
myself a purist, but I recognize that others may not agree with me.
Somehow, we have to figure out how to make it all work. But I firmly do believe that the existence of DHS and TSA is a threat to our national stability. The idea is a noble one—to ensure national security, and to force all the different agencies to cooperate with one another in the common goal of defending us from external threats. But we pride ourselves on being an open society. We cannot possibly defend ourselves from every possibly conceivable internal threat; nor am I convinced that we
should be doing so. The reason I am not convinced we should do so is that every effort, even with the most pure, noble, and selfless motivations, to prevent internal terror by monitoring and clamping down on the movement of the people is a step in the direction of a closed and restrictive society—exactly what the soviet citizens endured for 75 years. At some point, we are no longer the free people we claim to be.
