Hmmmmm, must be a tour going on over there.  : )  It's a killer of a flight, Katie.  Although to Sydney is not as bad.  Husband has been back and forth to Perth, and total flight time with layovers....32 hours.  Thirteen/Fourteen hour time difference (depending on time of year) is a real killer....if you go plan on staying a while so you can see everything.  We're planning on going next year when my husband will hopefully be retired, or at least working part-time as consultant, but we're staying at least 5-6 weeks....maybe longer.  There is just too much to do and see.  But damn....it's a long haul.  I know you are not crazy about flying like me....already told hubby the only way I'll go is to fly first class, and I want to stop in Figi as well.

 Fed up with both parties? Then gnaw on this platform

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$('div.floatingContent').css({display:'block'});</script>“Vote Brisketarian,” the T-shirt proclaims, flanked by images of two American flags. The T-shirt appeared last spring during the annual Dripping Springs Cook Off. More than 100 brisket teams took the heat to see who made the best brisket.

There may have been some disappointed producers among the Brisketarians, but there were no unhappy consumers. Trust me, no one muttered about the lack of two chickens for every pot. I just wish the Brisketarians could be a little more serious about their politics.

Why? They may be our only hope. As I see it, if Brisketarians in the red states formed a coalition with the blue Pastramian states in the Northeast, we’d never hear from the Democrats or Republicans again.

It’s pretty clear today that neither party would be missed if there were an alternative. Skeptics should consider the current 12 percent approval rating of Congress, a tie for the lowest rate in history. If that isn’t enough, consider the choices the parties are providing in November.

Whatever their differences, the Brisketarians and Pastramians share the same cut of beef, so I think they have a future. What they need is a platform to save the country. So here it is. And fear not: Potato salad, cole slaw and pickles come with the plate.

Chuck the entire tax code. Do it now. Commit any incumbent who defends it, or wants to continue tinkering with it, to life occupancy in the nearest mental institution secure enough to handle the criminally insane. Replace the employment tax, personal income tax and corporate income tax with a national sales tax. Make it genuinely progressive with a hefty prebate based on household size, unlike the largely fictional and highly uncertain progressivity of the current system. Stop the insanity. This single action will do more for our country than any other. It will increase tax revenue. It will reduce prices to consumers. And it will tax our ever-growing shadow economy.

Make bankers take risks with their money, not ours. This can be done through something called limited-purpose banking, which, as the name suggests, limits the amount of risk banks can take. Banks that want to take risks can, but the bankers, not taxpayers, will bear full liability for losses. No more bailouts from taxpayers. Watch how the presence of actual risk will improve attention to loan quality.

Create a unified savings plan for what workers don’t spend. Since money saved is money not taxed under a national sales tax, the current hodgepodge of tax-deferred savings plans can be simplified and contributions would be unlimited. It would be handy, however, to have an automatic, low-cost and easily managed plan. With automatic deposit of paychecks, this can be done through our new limited-purpose banks offering a wide variety of dirt-cheap exchange-traded funds.

Restore Social Security to a pay-as-you-go basis. And pay for it with national sales tax revenue. Return the fraudulently taken overpayments of employment taxes collected since 1983 to workers, as I suggested some time ago.

Cap Medicare as a percentage of GDP. Remind current and future retirees that 80 percent of all advances in life expectancy were from improvements in public health, not heroic doctors and warm-hearted hospital administrators. Stop allowing the medical-pharma complex to use government to increase its revenue faster than anyone can pay or the economy can grow. Trust me, the result will be innovation, improvement and reasonable use of health care, not shorter lives or poorer health. Provide federal funding for medical education of doctors, physician assistants and nurses, increasing the supply of all three and reducing the pressure that medical education debt creates to focus on specialties rather than primary care.

Make friends and feed the world. Do it by ending subsidies for ethanol and redirecting crops from fuel to food, reducing prices by increasing the available supply of food crops. Couple it with aggressive expansion of all domestic energy sources.

Be energy-efficient, produce domestic energy and starve a terrorist. Set our drillers free; unleash Amory Lovins’ ideas in Reinventing Fire. Every dime we don’t spend importing oil is a dime very well not spent. Anything close to energy independence would allow major reductions in military spending.

Scott Burns is a syndicated columnist and a principal of the Plano-based investment firm AssetBuilder Inc. Email questions to scott@scottburns.com.


http://www.dallasnews.com/business/columnists/scott-burns/20121020-fed-up-with-both-parties-then-gnaw-on-this-platform.ece

After being detained and questioned at the airport for over an hour, Aaron Tobey put forth a civil rights lawsuit against a host of defendants seeking $250,000 in damages.

Tobey approached the Richmond airport terminal in December 2010 and opted out of the radiation-firing nude body scanner; instead, he chose the enhanced pat down where he stripped down to his shorts and staged a silent protest via his body.

What Mr. Tobey had written on his body is likely what incited consternation among the screeners. On his chest and gut, Mr. Tobey had inscribed in black marker the words, “Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.”

Circuit Judge Roger Gregory, in his majority opinion, offered a more precise version of events:

In anticipation that he might be subjected to enhanced
screening, Mr. Tobey had written the text of the Fourth
Amendment on his chest as he believed AIT scanning was
unconstitutional. Before proceeding through the AIT unit, Mr.
Tobey calmly placed his sweatpants and t-shirt on the conveyor
belt, leaving him in running shorts and socks, revealing
the text of the Fourth Amendment written on his chest. Agent
Smith advised Mr. Tobey he need not remove his clothes. Mr.
Tobey calmly responded that he wished to express his view
that TSA’s enhanced screening procedures were unconstitutional.

At this point, Agent Smith radioed for assistance. As commanded
by her supervisor, Appellant-Agent Jones, Agent
Smith ordered Mr. Tobey to remain in front of the AIT unit.
Agent Jones and unknown Appellant-Agent Doe then asked
RIC police for assistance. At no point did Mr. Tobey refuse
to undergo the enhanced screening procedures. Nor did he
decline to do anything requested of him. In fact, Mr. Tobey
alleges that he “remained quiet, composed, polite, cooperative
and complied with the requests of agents and officers.

The lawsuit claims that Tobey, “in the exercise of his rights to Free Speech and to petition the United States government for the redress of grievances, was arrested without probable cause, falsely imprisoned and maliciously prosecuted for the partial removal of his clothing and display of the text of the Fourth Amendment on his chest…”
http://www.infowars.com/tsa-protester-with-4th-amendment-written-on-chest-wins-trial-over-airport-arrest/

Police in Seattle, Washington have responded to a major public outcry by disabling a recently discovered law enforcement tool that critics said could be used to conduct sweeping surveillance across the city.

Last week, Seattle’s The Stranger published an in-depth look at a little known new initiative taking place within the city that involved the installation of dozens of devices that would create a digital mesh network for law enforcement officers. The devices — small white-boxes equipped with antennas and adorned on utility poles — would broadcast data wirelessly between nodes so police officers could have their own private network to more easily share large amounts of data. As The Stranger pointed out, however, those same contraptions were able to collect data on internet-ready devices of anyone within reach, essentially allowing the Seattle Police Department to see where cell phones, laptops and any other smart devices operating within reach were located.

The SPD said they had no bad intentions with installing the mesh network, but The Stranger article and the subsequent media coverage it spawned quickly caused the system to receive the type of attention that wasn’t very welcomed. Now only days after citizens began calling for the dismantling of the mesh network, The Stranger has confirmed that the SPD are disabling the devices until a proper policy could be adopted by the city.

The SPD told The Stranger previously that the system was not being used, but anyone with a smart phone who wandered through the jurisdiction covered by the digital nodes could still notice that their devices were being discovered by the internet-broadcasting boxes, just as a person’s iPhone or Android might attempt to connect to any network within reach. In theory, law enforcement could take the personal information transmitted as the two devices talk to each other and use that intelligence to triangulate the location of a person, even within inches.

When the SPD was approached about the system last week, they insisted that it wasn’t even in operation yet. David Ham of Seattle’s KIRO-7 News asked, however, how come “we could see these network names if it’s not being used?”

“Well, they couldn’t give us an explanation,” Ham said at the time.
... 
Now just days later, the SPD has admitted to The Stranger that indeed the mesh network was turned on — it just wasn’t supposed to be.

“SPD maintains it has not been actively using the network — it was operational without being operated, having been turned on for DHS grant-mandated testing and then never turned off — so shutting it down won't hamper any current SPD activities,” The Stranger reporter.

A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency program which collects information on nearly all telephone calls made to, from or within the United States is likely unconstitutional.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon found that the program appears to violate the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. He also said the Justice Department had failed to demonstrate that collecting the information had helped to head off terrorist attacks.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/national-security-agency-phones-judge-101203.html#ixzz2nfcQaNWW

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Leon

“Then they told me I tested positive for explosives,” Steenhoek said during an interview with CBS4.

She explained to the agents that the positive hit from her hand swab was probably the result of her pumping gas into her car earlier in the day.

“She said, ‘We’ll have to do a search.’ So I thought, ‘Okay.’ “
...
Eventually TSA officers released her without finding anything and she managed to get her daughter to her flight on time. Steenhoek complained to the TSA about her treatment but felt that would not yield any results.

Three days later she went to Denver police and filed a police complaint against the unnamed female TSA agent who searched her. In the report Steenhoek complained of an “intrusive search,” characterizing what happened to her as being “sexually assaulted.”

“I was looking for consequences, for TSA to be accountable for what they do to people,” Steenhoek told CBS4.

“You want one or more of them to be charged with sexual assault?” she was asked.

“I do,” she responded.

http://denver.cbslocal.com/2014/01/15/tsa-pat-down-at-dia-leads-to-sex-assault-investigation/

A reporter asks a real question of a democrat?  Inconceivable!

http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/pelosi-confronted-teen-reporter-nsa