Always Say No - Please read

OFF THE WIRE 

It is too bad that things have come to this, but I guess we expected it.
The suggestions mentioned, appear to be fair and reasonable logic.
I fear we will see things this next four years that we cannot now even imagine.  Hold on tight, it's going to be a rough ride!!!!  

On any questionnaire that might end up in any government file, I would never admit to having a gun in the house.  I will always say “No”. Is it a lie.  Sure.  If you answer “None of your business”, it is obvious by your noncommittal that you do and refuse to answer.

How to Answer, "Do you have a gun in the house"?
Believe it or not-BUT be aware and keep your private business to yourself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GOOD TO KNOW!

When I had my gangrene gallbladder taken out and spent 10 days in the hospital for what should have been an overnight stay the insurance company kicked me out. I had home nurse visits for two weeks and was asked if I had guns in the house. I respond that if I did I would not tell them. So the below has some merit.

FYI, I am passing this along... there are comments from two other people I have also been asked if we keep guns in the house. The nurse just kinda slipped it in along with all the other regular questions. I told her I refused to answer because it was against the law to ask.

Everyone, whether you have guns or not, should

give a neutral answer so they have no idea who does and who doesn't. My doctor asked me if I had guns in my house and also if any were loaded. I, of course, answered yes to both questions. Then he asked why I kept a loaded gun close to my bed. I answered that my son, who is a certified gun instructor and also works for Homeland Security, advised me that an unloaded, locked up gun is no protection against criminal attack.

The Government now requires these questions be asked of people on Medicare, and probably everyone else.

Just passing this along for your information: I had to visit a doctor other than my regular doctor when my doctor was on vacation. One of the questions on the form I had to fill out was: Do you have any guns in your house?? My answer was None of your business. So it is out there! It is either an insurance issue or government intervention. Either way, it is out there and the second the government gets

it into your medical records (as they want to under Obamacare) it will become a major issue and will ultimately result in lock and load!!

Please pass this on to all the other retired guys and gun owners... Thanks. From a Vietnam Vet and retired Police Officer: I had a doctors appointment at the local VA clinic yesterday and found out something very interesting that I would like to pass along. While going through triage before seeing the doctor, I was asked at the end of the exam, three questions: 1. Did I feel stressed? 2. Did I feel threatened? 3. Did I feel like doing harm to someone?

The nurse then informed me that if I had answered yes to any of the questions I would have lost my concealed carry permit as it would have gone
into my medical records and the VA would have reported it to Homeland Security.

Looks like they are going after the vets first. Other gun people like retired law enforcement will probably be next. Then when they go after the civilians, that argument will they have? Be forewarned and be aware. The Obama administration has gone on record as considering veterans and gun
owners potential terrorists. Whether you are a gun owner, veteran or not, YOU'VE BEEN WARNED !

If you know veterans and gun owners, please pass this on to them. Be very cautious about what you say and to whom. They are coming for us, so unless you're an ostrich, do not stick your head in the sand..........

USA - Older vets to post-9/11 vets: 'We had it harder.' Did they?

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Brennan Linsley, AP

World War II combat veteran Ben Kauffman, 86, carries an American flag as he listens to a speaker during a Veterans Day ceremony in Loveland, Colo., on Nov. 11. Cultural fault lines clearly run between the generations that saw action in different conflicts or that wore the uniform in different eras, including peacetime.

By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor

The war stories from his grandfather, though sparse in detail, blended one moment of explosive drama with a vague reference of death — all wrapped around a description of how old-school military men used to handle both experiences.
David Weidman, who spent two tours in Afghanistan with the Air Force, recalls his late grandfather, a veteran of World War II and Korea, telling him that he survived having his body and his Jeep blown through a wall. He did not reveal to Weidman where that attack happened. He also gave his grandson some advice: “You don’t want to be in a foxhole talking to a guy one minute and then you turn around and he’s dead. You just don’t want to experience that.”

“He said he just dealt with it all. It’s that same mentality: ‘I did what I had to do. I got myself better then I went back to work.’ Other than that, he never spoke about the wars at all. That tells me he never did deal with it,” added Weidman, 32.

Cultural fault lines clearly run between generations of veterans who saw action in different conflicts or who wore the uniform in different eras, including peacetime. The refrain echoed by some older veterans to some younger ex-service members: “We had it so much harder than today’s military.”

---

It is, quite likely, a tradition that hearkens back to the Civil War or possibly the Revolutionary War, according to some ex-service members. But many post-9/11 veterans who have chatted with older veterans revealed the sentiment they've often heard carry the same note: “We just came home, put our heads down and got to work — without any whining."
Buried, not so subtly, in that message is that the current crop is a tad less tough and lot more needy. Some of that cultural gap may have to do with how aging veterans were taught not to talk about combat stress whereas today's military members are constantly urged to open up about any symptoms of anxiety they're feeling. It's a battle of Macho circa 1945 or 1970 versus Macho 2012.
This age-old cultural chasm between military generations has been further fueled in recent years as the modern American armed services welcomed far more women into its ranks (about 15 percent are female), and as the federal government repealed the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which barred openly gay people from serving their country, modern veterans say.
“Human nature is that we all resist change, especially as we get older. The cultural changes, especially within the military, are hard to swallow by some people my age,” said Craig Roberts, who served as a carrier-based Naval pilot, flying missions over Vietnam from 1969 to 1971.
“I’m in my 60s now. And (some veterans my age) just take a blanket view of the military as softer now, that it is a less-difficult experience to live through. I don’t think that’s true at all,” Roberts said. “In combat, it doesn’t matter what gender is next to you, the experience is the same.
But the generational disconnect among veterans also impacted Roberts and tens of thousands of his fellow service members after they returned from an unpopular war in the early 1970s.
Click here for more military-related coverage from NBC News.
“We of the Vietnam era experienced some of that when we joined veterans services organizations — or attempted to join — and many felt rejected by the older fellas there from Korea and World War II,” Roberts said. “Because there was a resentment — they perceived that they had seen more severe combat than we were in. There may be some truth to that.
“So I think it may be a generational thing. As one gets older, one views one’s past life — the hardships and, sometimes, the triumphs — as being greater.”

Heroes of long-ago wars find new homes with families across the country through a program that keeps the veterans out of nursing homes or hospitals.

While heading an organization that represents more than 200,000 veterans of from Iraq and Afghanistan, Paul Rieckhoff said he’s become well aware of what he calls “a little bit of a sibling rivalry” between generations of veterans.
“We all generally stick together (as veterans) but some of it is just more deeply ingrained,” said Rieckhoff, founder and chief executive officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. In Iraq, he served as an infantry platoon leader, leading 38 men on more than 1,000 mounted and dismounted combat patrols.
“This is also just the military: Everybody thinks everybody else had it harder than every generation that came after them. You go to Fort Bragg and they'll tell you how much harder basic training was (years ago). That’s always there,” Rieckhoff said. “I think there’s also some some level of fear and apprehension just around the evolution of our culture. It’s happening in the military, too."
That this version of the American military is the first to include so many women “is hard for some people to accept,” Rieckhoff added. “And now that ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ has been repealed, that too is hard for some people to accept.”
While some young-old divides certainly exist within pockets of the veteran community, Rieckoff said “a tremendous sense of unity also descends generations." As evidence, he cited the fact that that the chairman of IAVA’s board (Edward Vick) is a Vietnam veteran and that, before Thanksgiving, Rieckhoff received a letter of support from former Sen. Bob Dole, a World War II veteran.
“I think most veterans, no matter what era, including my era — Vietnam — are not resentful, whatsoever, of the treatment given to today’s veterans,” Roberts added. “In fact, we celebrate this. We applaud it. This is what is due to them. Their combat experience and ours, while it is apples and oranges in some ways, was still — all — combat experience. The stresses of combat are the same, no matter what the venue is, no matter what the era is.”

While heading an organization that represents

“THE BIKERS OF AMERICA (THE PHIL and BILL SHOW)” 11/20 by Bikers of America | Blog Talk Radio

“THE BIKERS OF AMERICA (THE PHIL and BILL SHOW)” 11/20 by Bikers of America | Blog Talk Radio

WHAT THE FUCK....Homeland Security 'Fusion Centers' Target Fishing, Marriage Counseling, At Huge Cost

OFF THE WIRE
WASHINGTON -- A marquee federal effort to share intelligence about terror threats with state and local law enforcers has produced no evidence of any. But it does appear to have caught a motorcycle gaxxx telling members to obey laws, suspicious fishing at the border, and Muslims offering advice on marriage, success and reading.

That's according to a report by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee released Tuesday evening that found the work of some 77 U.S. "Fusion Centers" launched since 2003 have been fraught with troubles -- including trampling constitutionally protected activities -- while the Department of Homeland Security cannot even say how much has been spent on the effort.

According to the report, DHS estimates for cost ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The costs may be even higher, the report said.

In spite of the expense of the fusion centers, the report said it could "identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot."

The probe by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations lasted more than two years and reviewed 610 homeland information reports produced by the fusion centers. Of them, 188 were squelched by DHS reviewers because they are useless or may have broken rules meant to guard civil liberties, the report said.

Of the ones forwarded to the borader intelligence community, most had nothing to do with terrorism or were too slow to be of use. Some may have violated privacy laws, were cribbed from newspapers or federal agency press releases, and some duplicated work done much faster by the FBI or National Counterterrorism Center.

"DHS-assigned detailees to the centers forwarded 'intelligence' of uneven quality -– oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism," concluded the authors of the bipartisan report led by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

The subcommittee said numerous current and former officials involved fusion centers also found them lacking.

“A lot of [the reporting] was predominantly useless information,” one former official told committee investigators after working for the "Reporting Branch" of Intelligence and Analysis unit of the DHS from 2006 to 2010. “You had a lot of data clogging the system with no value."

Another former official estimated 85 percent of reports were “not beneficial” to anyone, the report said.

Beyond being useless, some reports are downright embarrassing.

One that never saw the light of day wrote how a pair of men were fishing in a suspicious fashion on a reservoir that spanned the U.S.-Mexico border. Another worried that the notorious Mongols Motorcycle Club -- recently busted in a major federal operation -- had printed pamphlets for members advising them to be courteous to police in traffic stops, to properly care for their vehicles, and to designate a sober driver. About 40 of the reports the committee examined were blocked because of potential infringement on liberties.
One report was focused on a document that was entitled “Ten Book Recommendations for Every Muslim.” Another DHS intelligence officer filed an item on a U.S. citizen who, the report said "was appearing at a Muslim organization to deliver a day-long motivational talk and a lecture on positive parenting."

The rejection of the latter report was blunt. “Intelligence personnel are not authorized to collect information regarding [u] solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the U.S. Constitution,” the report recounted.

Another report by an investigator focused on a lecturer who once ran an Islamic school that was mentioned in a terrorism database. The investigator's would-be intelligence report highlighted the subject's participation in a daylong seminar on marriage.

In blocking that "intelligence," one DHS official declared “the number of things that scare me about this report are almost too many to write" and included the constitutionally protected rights to free speech, assembly and religion. It also offered no evidence.

Not all the embarrassing reports were blocked. On Nov. 13, 2009, DHS circulated a homeland information report, reaching as high as the White House situation room, that warned that terrorist leader Anwar Al-Awlaki was praising the Fort Hood shootings on his blog from Yemen. That might have been useful information, except the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and other news outlets had reported on the information four days earlier.

According to the subcommittee study, the author of that report later received an evaluation of "Achieved Excellence" from bosses who recommend him for promotion, citing the cribbed media stories as "a signature accomplishment."

Also, there appeared to be little penalty for agents who overstepped their authority.

"The DHS officials who filed useless, problematic or even potentially illegal reports generally faced no sanction for their actions, according to documents and interviews," the Senate committee found. "Supervisors spoke with them about their errors, but those problems were not noted on the reporting officials’ annual performance reviews. ... In fact, the subcommittee investigation was able to identify only one case in which an official with a history of serious reporting issues faced any consequences for his mistakes -- he was required to attend an extra week of reporting training."

The senators' report echoes the fears of a separate report issued last month by the Constitution Project, which warned that because the fusion centers are so poorly organized and ill-defined that they pose a high risk of violating Americans' civil liberties while providing little useful information.

Matthew Chandler, a DHS spokesman, did not answer HuffPost requests for a better estimate of the fusion centers' cost, or point to any terror cases that they have helped to combat.

He did offer a broad general defense of the centers, noting that they also help combat other crimes and serve as a conduit for intelligence to flow to local agencies as well as guarding against terrorism. Here is Chandler's statement:

The committee report on federal support for fusion centers is out of date, inaccurate and misleading. In preparing the report, the committee refused to review relevant data, including important intelligence information pertinent to their findings. The report fundamentally misunderstands the role of the federal government in supporting fusion centers and overlooks the significant benefits of this relationship to both state and local law enforcement and the federal government. Among other benefits, fusion centers play a key role by receiving classified and unclassified information from the federal government and assessing its local implications, helping law enforcement on the frontlines better protect their communities from all threats, whether it is terrorism or other criminal activities.

The Department of Homeland Security supports fusion centers, working in coordination with other federal partners, through training, technical assistance, technology and grant funding, as well as the deployment of DHS intelligence officers who work side-by-side with fusion center personnel to assess threats and share information. Homeland security begins with hometown security, and fusion centers play a vital role in keeping communities safe all across America.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/02/homeland-security-fusion-centers_n_1933998.html

CA - San Diego Sheriff’s Department to Obtain Drones

OFF THE WIRE
Increasingly, police become militarized (more here and here). Police would have you believe that it’s because the world is becoming more and more dangerous, but that’s likely not the case. When 40,000 new laws are passed each year, it becomes harder and harder for the ordinary person to not be a criminal. The frivolous and dangerous war on drugs continues to rage on, wasting lives and taxpayer money.
The police lovers out there can rest assured, the lives wasted are not those of police, for the most part. They are ordinary, harmless, unsuspecting Americans such as Eurie Stamps and Jose Guerena - or somewhat insolent teenagers with a bit of weed in their pocket, such as Ramarley Graham. And the money wasted certainly isn’t of any harm to police. They waste your money enforcing bogus laws to pad their paycheck and ensure job security.
If a cop beats you, it’s because you deserved it. If you beat a cop, it’s battery on a peace officer, with harsher penalties. When a cop kills you, it’s because you deserved it. When you kill a cop, it’s a homicide of a peace officer with harsher penalties. You know, because obviously, they are of a higher class of human being than the rest of us. Murdering Mother Teresa and kindergarten teachers is just ordinary homicide, but god forbid you kill a cop!
Resisting arrest charges, which exist in most of the 50 states (except 10 or 11 of them) effectively assume an individual is guilty, and assume that police officers are flawless. It’s all in the name of “safety” and “order,” and it seems Americans have no limit to their tolerance for invasive, police-state type intrusions.
Now they are trying to obtain drones. According to RT, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department is “now under fire for not being forthcoming with the facts about its own plans for UAVs.” Brandon Weiber of MuckRock filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to shed light on the purpose of drone acquisition. The San Diego Sheriff’s Department did not provide responses explaining any motivations in acquiring drones, although responses from the Seattle Police Department implied that a sales quote for a drone was sent to San Diego (see here). RT further reports,

The Federal Aviation Administration expects as many as 30,000 surveillance drones to be hovering in America’s airspace by the end of the decade, but little information is publicly known about unmanned aerial vehicles, except for their use overseas where they’re equipped with high-tech fire power, transforming them into remote controlled killing machines.

That would be your taxpayer money going to a bunch of psychopaths with more dangerous toys than they could possibly ever need, so that they can buy more dangerous toys that they won’t possibly ever need, but most certainly will play with. And they don’t want you to know about it.
They have tanks, assault rifles, and now drones, all while they forcibly disarm citizens. Just look to how cops, who themselves are armed to the teeth, freak out when ordinary citizens carry guns peacefully. They increasingly support laws that forbid people from having guns, or even knives, and when crime inevitably rises because people are forcibly prevented from defending themselves, they claim this is why they need more of your money, more guns, more tanks, more drones, and why people should further be disarmed.
When will enough be enough?
COMMENT
Published: June 28, 2005
WASHINGTON, June 27 – The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html?_r=0
Time and again the courts affirm the police have no duty to protect an individual, Washington D.C. tells the public they are at war with terror. So if the police do not have to protect me, and I’m to be afraid of every shadow because it’s the bogyman of terror going get me ;
WHY DO THEY WANT TO DISARM ME ?