Fw: The American flag is banned

Our own flag banned on our own soil.  This is what we get for forsaking God.

Response Action Network Newsletter Here is your weekly update on the politics and policies affecting our liberties. K STREET GETS ANGRY Rep. Dave Camp put out a tax reform plan a week ago that is full of ideas about making the federal tax code simpler. Some conservatives think it doesn't go far enough in cutting taxes and slimming government. But for the lobbyists on Washington, DC's K Street, Camp's ideas are poison: "Camp's reform would gore powerful industries by taking away their carve-outs. He would kill the tax credit for electric vehicles (sorry, Tesla), disallow deductions for lobbying (sorry, lobbyists), end special tax treatment for film and television production (sorry, Hollywood), phase out the tax credit for wind and solar generation of electricity (sorry, GE), and kill dozens of other targeted tax breaks." With so many special interest groups' tax goodies on the line, look for the fight to get ugly. If the GOP leadership allows Camp's ideas are brought to a vote at all. SAY "CHEESE" The Department of Homeland Security may have dropped its plan to create a national database of car license plates, but in Los Angeles, the idea of tracking the whereabouts of every motorist is alive and well. But city officials are also adding facial recognition technology to the surveillance mix: "'Smart video' programs can use facial recognition to ID people by comparing live CCTV footage to mugshot databases built from facial scans collected by police using mobile devices or during bookings. Computer programs also can learn "acceptable behavior" by humans - such as pedestrian or vehicular traffic patterns - and alert cops when something "abnormal"' occurs. "LAPD already is using a sophisticated intelligence-analysis program from Silicon Valley firm Palantir, which is partially funded by In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm. Palantir sells data-mining and analysis software to the NSA and other intelligence agencies." OR, SAY "CHEESECAKE" Los Angeles is way behind the NSA and British spy agency GCHQ when it comes to scooping-up people's pictures. The two organizations hacked into Yahoo web cams and captured millions of images of people doing all sorts of interesting things: "GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not. "In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery - including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications - from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally." You just can't make this stuff up . . . BACK IN THE U.S.S.R. Foreign policy crises generally don't have much effect on America's domestic politics unless the situation is really bad. Does the violence - and the apparent re-appearance of the old Russian Bear - qualify as really bad? Take it away, Secretary Kerry: "Kerry said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Putin is 'going to lose on the international stage. Russia is going to lose, the Russian people are going to lose, and he's going to lose all of the glow that came out of the Olympics, his $60 billion extravaganza.' "Kerry also said that the United States and its allies would consider asset freezes, visa bans and trade penalties if Russian troops continued their incursion in Crimea." It was just five years ago that Kerry's predecessor as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, presented a symbolic (and badly translated) "reset button" to the Russian foreign minister. The aim then? To let the Russians know the Obama administration wanted to be the Bear's best friend. How's that working out for us today? THE AMERICAN FLAG IS BANNED The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said a California High School was right to tell students wearing images on the American flag on their T-shorts to hide the offending pics or go home. "Live Oak officials ordered the students to either cover up the U.S. flag shirts or go home, citing a history of threats and campus strife between Latino and Anglo students that raised fears of violence on the day the school was highlighting [Cinco de Mayo]. The school's actions were reasonable given the safety concerns, which outweighed the students' First Amendment claims, the court concluded. As one commentator wrote: "Somehow, we've reached the point that students can't safely display the American flag in an American school, because of a fear that other students will attack them for it . . ." TAKE ACTION Want to find out how you can fight back against our out of control government? Then visit any of these action pages: The American Conservative Union Our Liberty is at Risk Take ACU's seven-question survey about how President Obama's doing his job--and how his policies most threaten your freedom. Take the Survey

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