Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Tuesday 08-17-10

While i agree with Pat Buchanan on a lot of things. In the following article he is trying to treat the symptoms and not cure the disease. It is like how people keep knocking down the spider webs, while they will keep you busy and feel like you are accomplishing something, but the only way to really take care of the problem is to kill the spider. The way you solve the problem with politicians, is term limits.

Putting Government First
by Patrick J. Buchanan 80/13/2010

Where a man's purse is, there his heart will be also.

If you would know where the heart of the Obama party is today, consider. In the dog days of August, with temperatures in D.C. rising above 100, Nancy Pelosi called the House back to Washington to enact legislation that could not wait until September.

Purpose: Vote $26 billion to prevent layoffs of state, municipal and county employees whose own governments had decided they had to be let go if they were to meet their constitutional duty to balance their books.

Workers their own governments thought expendable, Congress decided were so essential, it borrowed another 26 thousand million dollars from China to keep them on state and local payrolls.

A nation whose national debt is approaching the size of its gross national product, that goes abroad to borrow money to keep non-essential workers on government payroll is a nation on the way down and out.

And anyone who thinks this Obama party is ever going to cull the armies of tens of millions of government workers or scores of millions of government beneficiaries to put America's house in order is deluding himself.

As long as this Congress and White House remain in power, a U.S. default on its national debt is inevitable. The only question is when.

Nor is this the first time the Obama administration has rushed to save workers whom their own state, city and county governments were prepared to let go. Among the reasons the $800 billion stimulus failed is that so little of it was directed to firing up the locomotive of the economy, the private sector, and so much of it was spent to ensure that government workers did not have to share in the national sacrifice.

Why Pelosi & Co felt compelled to return to D.C., to ensure that state and local government payrolls were not pared, is not hard to understand.

Which party does the American Federation of Teachers; the National Education Association; and the American Federation of State, Municipal and County Employees usually contribute to, work for, vote for? At which of the two party conventions are teachers and government employees hugely over-represented?

Consider, too, the states deepest in debt and facing the largest cuts in employee ranks, pay and benefits: California, Illinois, New York.

In these states, public employees earn at least $10,000 per year more in pay and benefits than the average America worker, who is bailing them out.

Hence, we have a situation where private sector workers in Middle America are being taxed, their children being driven ever deeper into debt to China, so government employees who have greater job security than they do, and earn more in pay and benefits than they will ever earn, can stay in Fat City.

And folks wonder why so many Americans detest government.

In the same week Congress came back to prevent AFSCME from taking a haircut, the Wall Street Journal reported that, in 2009, only three of 52 metro areas with over 1 million in population saw "net earnings and the broader measure of personal income both rise."

Are you surprised to learn Washington, D.C., was among the three?

That same day, USA Today had a startling report on how, during the last decade, U.S. Government workers, like Wall Street bankers, left their fellow Americans in the dust.

"Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.

"Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. ... The Federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year."

Remarkable. U.S. government workers, who enjoy the greatest job security of any Americans, now earn twice as much in pay and benefits as the average American. This is not the D.C. some of us grew up in.

Nor is this all Obama's doing. For most of the fat years of the federal work force came while Washington was being run by a Congress of Big-Government Conservatives and a White House of Bush-Cheney Republicans.

No wonder the tea party is targeting both parties.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to believe that the Obamaites, who intervened twice and massively with bailouts to prevent minor layoffs of local and state government employees, have the stomach to do the major surgery needed to cut the federal monolith down to size.

For the vast majority of the tens of millions of government workers vote Democratic, as do the vast majority of the scores of millions of beneficiaries of federal, state and local programs.

What Pelosi & Co. were saying with that $26 billion bailout this week is, "We are going to protect our own."

Which is why either Obama, Pelosi, Reid & Co. go, or we are gone.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38536


Lucky escape for boy, 13, hit by lightning at 13:13 on Friday the 13th
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38710593/ns/world_news-weird_news

Group: Prop 19 Would Mean Pot-Smoking at Work
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/politics/Group-Prop-19-Would-Mean-Pot-Smoking-at-Work-100625869.html

Prairie dog died of plague
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/travel/Prairie+died+plague/3398247/story.html

Smile! Aerial images being used to enforce laws
RIVERHEAD, N.Y. – On New York's Long Island, it's used to prevent drownings. In Greece, it's a tool to help solve a financial crisis. Municipalities update property assessment rolls and other government data with it. Some in law enforcement use it to supplement reconnaissance of crime suspects.

High-tech eyes in the sky — from satellite imagery to sophisticated aerial photography that maps entire communities — are being employed in creative new ways by government officials, a trend that civil libertarians and others fear are eroding privacy rights.

"As technology advances, we have to revisit questions about what is and what is not private information," said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology.

Online services like Google and Bing give users very detailed images of practically any location on the planet. Though some images are months old, they make it possible for someone sitting in a living room in Brooklyn to look in on folks in Dublin or Prague, or even down the street in Flatbush.

Sean Walter, an attorney and first-term town supervisor in Riverhead, N.Y., insists he is a staunch defender of privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

But Walter supported using Google Earth images to help identify about 250 Riverhead homes where residents failed to get building permits certifying their swimming pools complied with safety regulations. All but about 10 eventually came to town hall.

Walter said the focus was safety, not filling town coffers with permit money, which averaged about $150 depending on the size of the pool. A 4-foot fence is required, gates have to be self-closing and padlocked. All pools must have an alarm that sounds when sensors are activated indicating someone is in the pool.

"We have a town employee who is a personal friend of mine whose son was found face-down in a swimming pool," Walter said. "He's OK, but I don't want to be the supervisor that attends the funeral of a child that drowns in a swimming pool."

Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., fears that while Walter's focus was safety, other municipalities may use the images to check for other transgressions.

"It's only a matter of time," Coney said. "There are lots of ordinances where this can be used. In California, where they deal with brush fires, could a satellite image show if a homeowner has brush growing too close to his home? What if someone has junk cars on their lot in violation of ordinances?"

Riverhead resident Tony Villar said the town's action "could be considered Big Brother looking down at you."

"But at the same time, if the government can listen to your telephone conversations in the name of terrorism," he said.

Standing outside the Riverhead Public Library, Walter Casey of Flanders agreed. "I think it's a great intrusion on people's privacy; they should use it on the politicians' backyards."

The New York Civil Liberties Union's Donna Lieberman said there are ways to enforce requirements "without this sort of engaging in Big Brother on high. Technically, it may be lawful, but in the gut it does not feel like a free society kind of operation."

In Greece, officials are struggling with a debt crisis and have sought to catch tax-evaders by using satellite photos to spot undeclared swimming pools — indicators of taxable wealth.

Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said in a statement that Google Earth acquires its information from a broad range of commercial and public sources.

"The same information is available to anyone who buys it from these widely available public sources," she said. "Google's freely available technology has been used for a variety of purposes, ranging from travel planning to scientific research to emergency response, rescue and relief in natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake."

At least nine lawsuits seeking class-action status have been filed in the United States, contending that Google collected fragments of e-mails, Web-surfing data and other information from unencrypted wireless networks as it photographed neighborhoods for its "Street View" feature. Google is also facing investigations or inquiries in 38 states as well as in several countries, including Germany, Spain and Australia.

The Mountain View, Calif., company said in May it had inadvertently collected the data from public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries, but maintains it never used the data and hasn't broken any laws.

Google Earth posts updates about every two weeks on selected images from its providers, with images ranging from a few weeks to a few years old.

For big cities like Chicago, tracking illegal pools, porches and decks through Google Earth requires frequent imaging updates, so the Chicago buildings department uses it as a reference tool on a case-by-case scenario, said spokesman Bill McCaffrey.

"We're not opposed to adopting new technology, but until it advances where we can get photos of more recent updates, we don't have any plans to implement it," he said.

Smaller towns such as Champaign and Naperville, Ill. opted to use satellite images as reference only.

"Mostly it's so we can see that we're going to the right building when we go to do inspections," said Ann Michalsen, lead inspector for code enforcement in Naperville.

It's also important for police officers to know they have the right destination when executing search warrants, said Joe Pollini, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "Most departments would use it as a preliminary step, but they would also use active surveillance with their own aircraft," he said.

The nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog is seeking to determine the extent of the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration's use of Google Earth in its investigations, spokesman John M. Simpson said last week.

Federal contracting records reviewed by Consumer Watchdog show that the FBI has spent more than $600,000 on Google Earth since 2007. The Drug Enforcement Administration, meanwhile, has spent more than $67,000.

Simpson has called on Congress to investigate how U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are using Google technologies. The group says it has concerns that data could be used for racial profiling.

The New York Police Department's Real Time Crime Center uses satellite imaging and computerized mapping systems to identify geographic patterns of crimes and to pinpoint possible addresses where suspects might flee — information relayed to investigators on the street. The NYPD also has two major security initiatives where a network of public and private cameras will eventually link and be searchable.

The NYCLU has filed lawsuits in opposition.

"We live in an environment where we are told that if it's on camera, if you have a video record, that will make us safer," Lieberman said. "That may be appealing, but it is an unproven assertion. There's no evidence of that. Yet we see millions, if not billions, of post-9/11 money has gone to law enforcement for installing cameras in every conceivable nook and cranny."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100814/ap_on_hi_te/us_eyes_in_the_sky

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