This was written up by the Baltimore Sun:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/commuting/bs-md-mta-aclu-20110531,0,3380358.story

And a followup:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-mta-policy-20110601,0,2129369.story

Second Followup:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-mta-photography-20110602,0,6046710.story


Quick synopsis:
Press: "Hey MTA, that's illegal."
MTA: "Oh yeah, our bad. Won't happen again."
Press: "Sure it won't."

@5:18 the cop says the guy's making a mountain out a molehill. Um, pkb?

Man, power-tripping transit cops. Is there anything they can't do... which we could consider, you know, productive and useful. What a country.

OMG, 7:27, his logic is so backward. They make me feel unsafe with their madness.

And then they give him a hard time over his lisp?

The comedy comes in at 10:20 when you hear the guy's bbm ding's going through. They're bbm'ing for backup? Wow.

Good description of the zaniness at http://www.youtube.com/user/maxlightrail Glad the ACLU of Maryland is involved to represent him.

sighs...
i like the judge and agree with him sometimes (other times..not so much) but his synopsis here is seriously flawed.
maybe due to the fact that he is no longer a standing judge and missed this particular abomination:
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/military-commissions-act-2006
so lets give a huge middle finger to the dynamic evil duo of addington and woo who helped write this fascist piece of crap.
with the insistence of cheney these two fuckwads helped usher in presidential powers unheard of in our entire history and the complicit (wussified) media, never bothered to inform the public.
obama has not recinded ONE of these newly attained powers under bush.

so..um..yeah.
the president CAN order an assasination AND deem YOU an enemy combatant.

>> ^marinara:

everyone who voted for this is racist. make these people poor and black instead of white trash and it would be obvious.


Oh stfu. ACLU is in the room next door.

"After FDR, only one party even "pretended" to follow the Constitution, the other abandoned it for rule by men (or popularity) instead of by law."

I have not heard anyone big in the republican party support the ACLU which is a conservative organization that supports the constitution in all the cases it pursues. If you don't think they're conservative then you don't actually know what conservatism is.

Wake the fuck up my friend. I want to stage an intervention of one right here and now.

Let's take war, since we both agree.

How has the US conducted itself in it's corporate driven foreign policy over the last few decades? What is the pattern of our imperialism?

Step 1: Destabilize the economy, whether it be through violence, sanctions, puppet governments or all 3.

Step 2: We force these countries to privatize and to sell off their infrastructure to big business.

Step 3: Corporate profit.

Now take a look at our own nation. Do you see any similarities?

Our economy has already been destabilized by way of the deficit. Unfathomable amounts of money have gone towards war, corporate welfare and tax cuts for people who are making record profits, cleaning out our treasury and creating debt for many generations to come. We are now on to step two, which is to destroy and privatize the infrastructure. The same people that created this deficit are now saying that we can't afford education or social security, and you, Mr sanctimonious libertarian, in your eagerness to have anything at all to back up your shallow excuse for an ideology, latch on to this bullshit like a child hugging his teddy bear. When you say things like 'education is unsustainable' or other such provably false statements, you are a parrot of the right. If it pisses you off, then good, but don't be mad at me, talk to the guy in the mirror.

You aren't a rebel or a rugged individual. You are a pawn. Congrats for having liberal social views and supporting the ACLU, just like almost every other person on this site. I never know what response you are looking for when you trot out that unremarkable fact. Would you like a trophy? A handjob?

I don't care if you respond or not, because you are just going to trot out the same tired bullshit arguments that have already been thoroughly destroyed many times over on this site. You are being manipulated, your ego is being massaged, and Koch and Mellon Scaife are laughing all the way to the bank as they fill your head with utopian daydreams. Your own idol, Milton Friedman, supported death squads that killed tens of thousands in Chile. You've never responded to that fact, probably because you can't without having your worldview crash down on top of your head. Your economic belief system has nothing to do with liberty and everything to do with imperialism.

Everyone deserves liberty, not just rich people.

>> ^blankfist:

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Public eduction is perfectly sustainable. Take a look around the rest of the world. It's just not sustainable when you spend $1,154,031,244,020 on war in the middle east, give trillions away to corporations in the form of bailouts, subsidies and bailouts, and give tax cuts to the super wealthy. When did you become such an uncritical right wing parrot? >> ^blankfist:
Maybe the government shouldn't be in the business of education? Public schools will forever be "under funded" as long as it remains "free". Completely unsustainable system.


I was going to respond favorably to your comment, until I read your last sentence. Yeah, I'm so right wing with my ACLU card and all those right wing things I do in favor of people's equal rights and civil liberties. Your personal attacks diminish the effectiveness of your arguments. Try not doing that sometime and see how it works out for you.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Public eduction is perfectly sustainable. Take a look around the rest of the world. It's just not sustainable when you spend $1,154,031,244,020 on war in the middle east, give trillions away to corporations in the form of bailouts, subsidies and bailouts, and give tax cuts to the super wealthy. When did you become such an uncritical right wing parrot? >> ^blankfist:
Maybe the government shouldn't be in the business of education? Public schools will forever be "under funded" as long as it remains "free". Completely unsustainable system.



I was going to respond favorably to your comment, until I read your last sentence. Yeah, I'm so right wing with my ACLU card and all those right wing things I do in favor of people's equal rights and civil liberties. Your personal attacks diminish the effectiveness of your arguments. Try not doing that sometime and see how it works out for you.

There already was a nutjob rightwinger who was caught on his way to the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) who was luckily stopped by the po-po and got into a 15 minute shoot out. He was on his way to start a "revolution" by mass murdering people of "importance" (ACLU?! and the Tides Foundation?!). The whole thing wreaked of a braindead FOX News, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, Glenn Beck considering only listeners of Glenn Beck would even know who the Tides Foundation are, put the word "revolution" in there and it's telltale sign of the Tea Parties neo-fascist ideologies.

Those are all interesting "common goods" that I would love the Right Wing to actually embody.

It is only individual freedom and responsibility, I've noticed, when it is your freedom and somebody else's responsibility. (I can provide anecdotal evidence in proof of that statement, from the lives of my super conservative relatives.)

Being fiscally responsible is a great thing -- so why the continuing huge tax cuts to the wealthy, where it has been proved over and over that those cuts will not help the economy and only drive us deeper in debt? And all that crap about death panels, when it has been proven that when folks plan for end of life issues, huge amounts of unnecessary, expensive and ultimately painful prolonging of life treatment are avoided?

Following the Constitution. You support the ACLU, right? They fight for the Constitution all the time. The Right Wing doesn't own the Constitution, it belongs to all of us. Including the checks and balances inherernt in the document.

Free markets. Huh. Well, Teddy Roosevelt was conservative, but he recognized that truly "free" markets are not in the best interests of the country. Unless you like lead paint in children's toys?

Life is lived on a curve -- with the far right and the far left holding positions that try to drag the middle around.

We're on the same curve, though.

Liberals don't disagree with your list of common goods. They just want to implement them in differing ways. For example -- individual freedom. Libs get behind that in a big way for personal choices in the bedroom. Gay marriage and the reproductive rights are individual freedoms, right? But Libs get a little torqued when someone else's individual freedom may cost innocent lives -- hence their concern over gun control.

All this is off topic, though. Tucker Carlson is a raving red baboon butt of a human being who cares nothing for a reasoned conversation when he can make a living out of his Monkey Island antics. (Primate Island, I know, that just isn't as funny.)

The fact that Jon Stewart hates him makes me very happy.



>> ^lantern53:

Which part of the 'right wing drivel' is BS?
The part about individual freedom and responsibility?
The part about fiscal responsibility?
The part about following the Constitution, which is the founding document of this country?
The part about free markets?

Done!

Great ideas. Thanks. I hope it helps.

DADT may be repealed! Yippee!

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
The name Seth Walsh may not ring many bells, but people in the US are generally aware of the recent spate of gay teen suicides. Therefore I might re-title it:

Gay teen suicide: Seth Walsh speaks from the grave

In the description I would write: 13-yr old Seth Walsh committed suicide because of unrelenting gay-bashing by his peers. With this video, the ACLU begins begins its campaign for substantive and not BS anti-harrassment measures.

With 2 power points you can *promote your own video, so maybe you ought to give that a whirl. Maybe I'll throw another promote at it later.

In reply to this comment by bareboards2:
I'm disappointed that this video isn't getting more views. I can handle it not getting voted for -- getting people to watch is more important in the long run.

Can I empower you to make changes to the title or the description to grab more eyes? Write something snappy for the verbal recap? I don't feel proprietorial about it and you know the community better than I do.

It may be too late, of course.

I do have two power points that I haven't a clue how to use. Can you advise me on how to use them to gain my objective?

Taiko boy is stuck in low votes, too, which doesn't bother me. Except for how cool would it be to hit the top 15 with my first post? Not meant to be....

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
*doublepromote *dark

Yeah, I know. Maybe you can just link through to Dan Savage's blog and read about it.

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/12/16/aclu-demands-change-at-school-where-seth-walsh-was-bullied

I can't hardly stand that Seth's mom is willing to share her grief so baldly. Oddly, it was Seth's last wish. If you can stand to go back and listen to the whole thing.

I understand if you can't.

In reply to this comment by eric3579:
Thirty-eight seconds in and it's way to hard to watch.

I got this video from Dan Savage's blog. He has a lot to say on the subject. You can read this instead of watching the video.

If it helps, this was Seth's last wish.

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/12/16/aclu-demands-change-at-school-where-seth-walsh-was-bullied

>> ^NetRunner:

Yeah, that pretty much sums up how I feel about having the people on the right "join" us. I was happy at first when I noticed that liberal complaints about the TSA that had gone completely ignored were all of a sudden getting national media attention...until I noticed that this was another case of the national media pimping the latest right-wing outrage, not really paying attention to the civil liberties aspect at all.
After all, I haven't really seen much mainstream reporting that did anything more than say "see, it's invasive, and maybe there's abuse too, but the officials deny both charges", rather than "we talked to ACLU and Constitutional scholars, and they argue it's a violation of the 4th amendment..."
PS: Amanda Marcotte of pandagon.net got published in the Guardian? That's pretty cool.


Did you see the post Blank had where the guy just flat out says we are violating your 4th amendments rights...now sit down and shut up....I might be paraphrasing a bit.


Also, while I understand that "privatization" of security seems right wing, but isn't it more akin to how security works most everywhere else? Bouncers aren't state employees, or even certified that I know of. While police and military are, I don't see their job primarily as security but as law enforcement and war machine respectively. Just because it has a corporate backing doesn't necessarily make it the bad choice, just as long as they don't get to write the new law regulating their competition out of business, which is, unfortunately, likely to happen given the current state (unless Washington grows some scruples in the next couple of years...I won't hold my breath).

What if the airports hired COPS with police dogs and were 100X more effective in ever measurable way? Surely, if every Air port had their own security team making decisions, you would end up with a variety of tested solutions that other airports would copy, adapt, and master in time...like everything else in life, right?

Yeah, that pretty much sums up how I feel about having the people on the right "join" us. I was happy at first when I noticed that liberal complaints about the TSA that had gone completely ignored were all of a sudden getting national media attention...until I noticed that this was another case of the national media pimping the latest right-wing outrage, not really paying attention to the civil liberties aspect at all.

After all, I haven't really seen much mainstream reporting that did anything more than say "see, it's invasive, and maybe there's abuse too, but the officials deny both charges", rather than "we talked to ACLU and Constitutional scholars, and they argue it's a violation of the 4th amendment..."

PS: Amanda Marcotte of pandagon.net got published in the Guardian? That's pretty cool.

A liberal learned a valuable lesson today. Thank the ACLU (and to a lesser extent, the NAACP) for helping create a society where vermin feel free to run roughshod over the law.