2011 Special Session: Get ready for tax increases & gerrymandering! Tell your family and friends about the upcoming 2011 Special Session that will occur in late summer - early fall. We must stop the MD legislature from raising taxes on residents. We must also work to keep the Maryland re-districting process honest and fair--and that means adhering to the Constitution and the rule of law! Stay tuned for updates on the 2011 Special Session!
Cecil County Budget: In January 2012, another budget cycle will kick off in Cecil County. We need to be prepared to call for decreases in spending & no new taxes. The Cecil County Commissioners will vote on the Cecil County budget for approval and adoption in May 2012. What we do between January and May will determine your local tax rates! Get involved now!
How To Become Involved!
The Cecil County Campaign for Liberty is always active in the grassroots fight to take back our liberties. The following list provides several ways you can get involved. These small efforts contribute greatly to the growth of our organization.
Registering will connect you with liberty minded individuals around your area and give you access to a calender of local events.
2. Take action!
We regularly send out emails advising how you can help mobilize against those that would take away our freedoms. We are going to call on you to take action. When we do, make sure you stand up to be heard!
The strength of our organization comes from our presence in our local communities. Our Local Coordinators are the front line soldiers of the force that will march us towards liberty by bringing our organizational mobilization into your local neighborhood.
Unlike the federal government, Campaign for Liberty cannot just print money out of thin air. Only your financial support allows us to do the vital work necessary to restore liberty in our county, our state and our country.
We host a wide range of speakers such as local politicians, local candidates, professors, activists and authors covering topics such as activism and strategy, local and national politics, economics and history.
6. Ask how your skills and interests can be utilized
We have several running initiatives where various skillsets can be utilized and we can find you a role that you are enthusiastic about. If you are interested in working on one of our special initiatives please contact me (Ted Patterson) at443.350.5065 or cecilcampaignforliberty@gmail.com
Senator Paul's speech was just one highlight of an amazing day. Thanks to Tom Woods, Jack Hunter, Congressman Paul, and Senator Paul for an incredible Liberty Forum last night, where the standing room crowd easily surpassed 1,000 and set a new record for a C4L event at CPAC.
At the end, Senator Paul used his father's catchphrase: Freedom is popular!
Everyone is greatly looking forward to Congressman Paul's speech today at 3:30pm eastern! (Occasionally, CPAC's main event runs a bit behind, so if you turn it on CSPAN 2 and don't see him, just give it a few minutes.)
Please see the below article from the Cato Institute. This is probably one of the best articles I have seen that succinctly explains in a logical fashion why the Patriot Act, including these three provisions that Rep. Harris will be voting on next week, should not be extended. The author is responding to well circulated attempts by the Heritage Foundation to justify extension of the Patriot Act provisions. He takes the Heritage Foundation talking points, which are the same talking points that GOP House leadership are using, and addresses them on their lack of logic or fact, piece-by-piece. This writing listed below gives links to information and data that further explain why extending the Patriot Act is a terrible idea. I would encourage you to talk with Mr. Julian Sanchez, the author of this writing, to get more information about this law. In a nut shell here are the key objections to these three provisions that are better enumerated below:
1) At the very least it is inconclusive on all three of these provisions as to how they have actually aided us in apprehending terrorists or stopping terrorist plots 2) The Patriot Act permits roving wiretap warrants that do not name an individual target--THIS IS A DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT 3) Prior FISA law did not require "probable cause" for obtaining warrants for business record orders and the Patriot Act requires even less than FISA--THIS IS A DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT 4) The Lone Wolf provision has never been used--yet somehow we are still told that we need it? Why? Explained further below. 5) Federal Courts have already found gag provisions of the "National Security Letter" statutes of the Patriot Act to be UNCONSTITUTIONAL. 6) The Inspector General of the Dept. of Justice has said that his office found that FBI misuse of Patriot Act authority is "widespread and serious." 7) The FBI has been breaking the law and shredding up the Constitution under Patriot Act authority for years. [Read this report]
Please call Rep. Andy Harris at 202-225-5311 to tell him to vote against extension of the Patriot Act provisions this upcoming week.
If you wonder why House Republicans were so keen on ramming through an extension of the Patriot Act without hearings or debate, take a gander at the Heritage Foundation's blog post and Web memo on the topic. I want to run through the latter in some detail, because I think it's telling just how poorly the case against reform stands up to scrutiny in the rare instances when the law's defenders feel obliged to make an argument more sustained than "Boo! Terrorists!" Here's how they begin:
With at least 36 known plots foiled since 9/11, the United States continues to face a serious threat of terrorism. As such, national security investigators continue to need these authorities to track down terror leads and dismantle plots before the public is in any danger. These three amendments-which have been extensively modified over the years by Congress and now include significant new safeguards, including substantial court oversight-are vital to this success.
I've debated co-author Jena McNeil Baker on Patriot a few times, and she invariably leads off with a running tally of foiled terror plots. I'm not sure exactly which cases make her current list, but in the past she's cited yahoos like the Lackawanna Six, who don't appear to have had any actual plot to dismantle, and since our last exchange the FBI has augmented the count via its innovative strategy of planning terror attacks for itself to foil.
But let's all agree the terror threat is real and serious even without this sort of inflation. What evidence do the authors have that any of the three expiring authorities were "vital" in any of those cases? There just isn't any. Even if it were true, the authors would have no basis in the public record for the assertion. The evidence we do have, however, suggests just the opposite. Lone Wolf has never been used, so it certainly wasn't vital. FISA roving authority has been granted an average of 22 times per year since Patriot, and in many of those cases, investigators found they didn't end up needing to use it. And none of the reports I can recall reading on apprehended wannabe-terrorists suggested that they were practicing sophisticated countersurveillance tactics. The Office of the Inspector General couldn't find any major case developments attributable to 215 business record orders, which also don't seem to be used that frequently. If one of the sunsetting powers had played an important role in disrupting a concrete plot or attack, though, you'd think Justice Department officials would have every incentive to say so loudly and unambiguously, even if they couldn't get into operational specifics.While these facts are suggestive, of course, I can't say with certainty that the two powers that have actually been used definitely didn't play a vital role in any of those (let's be generous) 36 cases. It would be more convenient if I could say so, but I'm at something of a disadvantage here: In the absence of evidence, I lack the panache needed to make whatever sweeping assertions would help my position. I can only say that all the evidence we do have cuts against that bold claim.
We move to roving wiretaps, which we're told are a "garden variety" surveillance tool used "routinely" in criminal investigations. The authors seem to be operating with highly idiosyncratic definitions of those terms: In 2009, there were 2,376 wiretap warrants issued for criminal investigations, of which 16 were roving. But routine or not, pretty much everyone in fact agrees that roving authority should be available for intelligence investigations. Astonishingly, the Heritage memo never even mentions the actual issue civil libertarians have with this provision: that unlike the parallel criminal authority, it permits roving warrants that don't name an individual target. So the authors spend five paragraphs mounting an irrelevant defense of a power nobody contests in principle, but never bother to so much as inform their readers about the real point of controversy, let alone argue for the asymmetry.
Next, business record orders. The blog post summarizing the Web memo confusingly claims that there was no FISA authority to compel the production of records before Patriot, which isn't true. There just had to be some factual basis (not even "probable cause") for thinking the records belonged to a terrorist or foreign agent. Oddly, while the Heritage memo does reference Patriot's expansion of the types of records that could be obtained, it fails to mention the elimination of this key requirement-which, again, is precisely the change to which critics have objected. We're also told that heightened standards apply to demands for records that "might have the slightest relation to freedom of speech and expression," which is ridiculous. Library and bookstore records get a bit more protection because librarians raised an admirable fuss about this provision, but there's no similar protection for records of people's online reading habits, which have at least as much bearing on modern speech and expression as someone's library borrowing.There's the usual analogy between this authority and prosecutorial or grand jury subpoenas, but (perhaps you're noticing a pattern here) the big, glaring difference between them is not even mentioned: Those processes are ultimately public, and that publicity serves as the strongest practical check on prosecutors who might be tempted to sweep too broadly, while giving third-party record holders a far stronger incentive to challenge improper requests on behalf of their customers.
By the time we get to Lone Wolf, it feels like they're not even trying anymore:
While the FBI has confirmed that this section has never actually been used, it needs to be available if the situation arises where a lone individual may seek to do harm to the United States.
Why can't they use the same criminal authority they're forced to rely on when a lone individual who's a citizen seeks to do harm to the United States? Why are the extraordinary breadth and secrecy of FISA surveillance, designed for dealing with state-sponsored espionage agencies and global terror networks, necessary when the adversary is some guy acting alone? Crickets.
Finally, we get these two howlers in the conclusion:
Little evidence has ever been proffered to demonstrate any PATRIOT Act misuse.... The act has been narrowed and refined continuously, contributing to the fact that no single provision of the PATRIOT Act has ever been found unconstitutional.
Now, as it happens, both of those claims are pretty clearly false. Federal courts have, in fact, found the gag provisions of the National Security Letter statutes to be unconstitutional-though the court opted to impose its own set of requirements rather than voiding the statutes outright.As for misuse, I'll defer to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, who characterized the FBI misuse of that authority uncovered by his office as "widespread and serious."
But these are, in any event, absurd standards. Covert surveillance whose targets are never informed about it turns out to be rather difficult to challenge in court-harder still when the government can assert a state secrecy privilege that prevents courts from reaching the merits of the challenges that do arise. The identification of rule violations mostly relies on self-policing by intelligence agencies-which report plenty, though they often take their sweet time about it. More importantly, if the intended use of these authorities is to allow the government to siphon up vast amounts of information about thousands of mostly innocent Americans, and retain that information forever in massive classified databases, focus on "misuse" is something of a red herring. The "correct" use is too intrusive.
So this is what the best case for Patriot reauthorization without reform looks like, apparently: bold assertions offered without supporting evidence, and a persistent refusal to engage the actual objections raised by critics. No wonder they're so anxious to bypass a debate.
Imagine that China someday becomes the world's only superpower, and that a declining America receives foreign aid and direction from them.
Wouldn't many Americans resent China for its meddling? And wouldn't that feeling turn to hatred if our country was governed by a DICTATOR whom Chinese politicians were supporting?
If you can imagine this then you can also sympathize with how an Egyptian feels toward America. U.S. politicians have given Egypt's Dictator-President, Hosni Mubarak, $60 billion over the past 30 years.
I'm angry that tear gas canisters used against Egyptian protesters said "Made in the USA."
I'm upset that Congress forces me to support dictators like Egypt's Mubarak.
I consider it criminal that Congress has funded Mubarak to the tune of $60 billion.
I reject the claim that foreign aid builds good relations with other countries. Instead, it makes foreigners think that we want to dominate them, and hold them in bondage to their corrupt rulers.
The $15 billion we spend on foreign aid each year buys us hatred and enemies around the world.
The Constitution was designed to protect me from this. It confers no authority on you for my giving tax money to foreign rulers. This means that foreign aid VIOLATES the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Please honor your oath of office. End all foreign aid, especially to dictators.
I am quite competent to handle my own foreign aid program, thank you very much. I do this through the contributions I make to voluntary groups with an international reach. I neither need nor want you to coerce me to fund your aid preferences. Aid is a job for civil society, NOT politicians.
Congress is once again trying to sneak through an attack on our rights by reauthorizing the so-called "PATRIOT" Act with as little debate and scrutiny as possible.
You see, a vote is expected on Tuesday to place "PATRIOT" Act reauthorization on the Suspension Calendar, and it will pass easily unless you and I take immediate action.
No amendments will be allowed, and debate will be limited to 40 minutes.
It's vital you contact your representative immediately and demand they oppose any effort to reauthorize the so-called "PATRIOT" Act through legislative trickery without debates or amendments.
Click here to find your representative's contact information. Tell your rep. that a vote for a suspension calendar with the so-called "PATRIOT" Act on it is a vote for roving wiretaps, secret sneak and peek searches conducted without the knowledge of the subject, search and seizure of library records, and so-called "national security letters" signed by anonymous bureaucrats replacing warrants signed by a judge.
Last year, the statists slipped reauthorization of the so-called "PATRIOT" Act through with little opposition.
You and I cannot allow the Constitution-shredding "PATRIOT" Act, with its roving wiretaps and secret searches, to be reauthorized through parliamentary shenanigans and without debate or amendments.
Click here to find your representative's contact information. Tell your rep. that a vote for a suspension calendar with the so-called "PATRIOT" Act on it is a vote for roving wiretaps, secret sneak and peek searches conducted without the knowledge of the subject, search and seizure of library records, and so-called "national security letters" signed by anonymous bureaucrats replacing warrants signed by a judge.
You and I must speak up in defense of every American's civil liberties and the Bill of Rights.
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