When: Thursday June 24th 9:00p.m.
Where: Wisconsin Public Television (PBS)

On Thursday, June 24th, Chris Rye & Corey Kealiher’s critically acclaimed documentary film “For Liberty: How the Ron Paul Revolution Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty” will air state-wide in Wisconsin on PBS. Tune in at 9:00pm for their 30 minute appearance on ‘Director’s Cut’ where they discuss the film with host Charles Monroe-Kane. Immediately following the interview, the film will start at 9:30pm and run for 110 minutes.

For Liberty was released in September 2009, and has since been screened in theaters and venues in over 30 states. It’s being screened at the Melbourne Film Society in Australia in the coming months and has been shown in a number of other countries around the world.

http://www.forlibertymovie.com/catalog/

by Declan McCullagh

A new U.S. Senate bill would grant the president far-reaching emergency powers to seize control of or even shut down portions of the Internet.

The legislation announced Thursday says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines, or software firms that the government selects “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined.

That emergency authority would allow the federal government to “preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people,” Joe Lieberman, the primary sponsor of the measure and the chairman of the Homeland Security committee, told reporters on Thursday. Lieberman is an independent senator from Connecticut who caucuses with the Democrats.

Because there are few limits on the president’s emergency power, which can be renewed indefinitely, the densely worded 197-page bill (PDF) is likely to encounter stiff opposition.

TechAmerica, probably the largest U.S. technology lobby group, said it was concerned about “unintended consequences that would result from the legislation’s regulatory approach” and “the potential for absolute power.” And the Center for Democracy and Technology publicly worried that the Lieberman bill’s emergency powers “include authority to shut down or limit Internet traffic on private systems.”

The idea of an Internet “kill switch” that the president could flip is not new. A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August allowed the White House to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to “order the disconnection” of certain networks or Web sites.

On Thursday, both senators lauded Lieberman’s bill, which is formally titled the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, or PCNAA. Rockefeller said “I commend” the drafters of the PCNAA. Collins went further, signing up at a co-sponsor and saying at a press conference that “we cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government realizes the importance of protecting our cyber resources.”

Under PCNAA, the federal government’s power to force private companies to comply with emergency decrees would become unusually broad. Any company on a list created by Homeland Security that also “relies on” the Internet, the telephone system, or any other component of the U.S. “information infrastructure” would be subject to command by a new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC) that would be created inside Homeland Security.

The only obvious limitation on the NCCC’s emergency power is one paragraph in the Lieberman bill that appears to have grown out of the Bush-era flap over warrantless wiretapping. That limitation says that the NCCC cannot order broadband providers or other companies to “conduct surveillance” of Americans unless it’s otherwise legally authorized.

Lieberman said Thursday that enactment of his bill needed to be a top congressional priority. “For all of its ‘user-friendly’ allure, the Internet can also be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets,” he said. “Our economic security, national security and public safety are now all at risk from new kinds of enemies–cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.”

A new cybersecurity bureaucracy

Lieberman’s proposal would form a powerful and extensive new Homeland Security bureaucracy around the NCCC, including “no less” than two deputy directors, and liaison officers to the Defense Department, Justice Department, Commerce Department, and the Director of National Intelligence. (How much the NCCC director’s duties would overlap with those of the existing assistant secretary for infrastructure protection is not clear.)

The NCCC also would be granted the power to monitor the “security status” of private sector Web sites, broadband providers, and other Internet components. Lieberman’s legislation requires the NCCC to provide “situational awareness of the security status” of the portions of the Internet that are inside the United States — and also those portions in other countries that, if disrupted, could cause significant harm.

Selected private companies would be required to participate in “information sharing” with the Feds. They must “certify in writing to the director” of the NCCC whether they have “developed and implemented” federally approved security measures, which could be anything from encryption to physical security mechanisms, or programming techniques that have been “approved by the director.” The NCCC director can “issue an order” in cases of noncompliance.

The prospect of a vast new cybersecurity bureaucracy with power to command the private sector worries some privacy advocates. “This is a plan for an auto-immune reaction,” says Jim Harper, director of information studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “When something goes wrong, the government will attack our infrastructure and make society weaker.”

To sweeten the deal for industry groups, Lieberman has included a tantalizing offer absent from earlier drafts: immunity from civil lawsuits. If a software company’s programming error costs customers billions, or a broadband provider intentionally cuts off its customers in response to a federal command, neither would be liable.

If there’s an “incident related to a cyber vulnerability” after the president has declared an emergency and the affected company has followed federal standards, plaintiffs’ lawyers cannot collect damages for economic harm. And if the harm is caused by an emergency order from the Feds, not only does the possibility of damages virtually disappear, but the U.S. Treasury will even pick up the private company’s tab.

Another sweetener: A new White House office would be charged with forcing federal agencies to take cybersecurity more seriously, with the power to jeopardize their budgets if they fail to comply. The likely effect would be to increase government agencies’ demand for security products.

Tom Gann, McAfee’s vice president for government relations, stopped short of criticizing the Lieberman bill, calling it a “very important piece of legislation.”

McAfee is paying attention to “a number of provisions of the bill that could use work,” Gann said, and “we’ve certainly put some focus on the emergency provisions.”

Dudley Rutherford, senior pastor of Shepherd of the Hills Church in Porter Ranch, California, explains the story behind the “Star Spangled Banner” – our National Anthem. This story is the first nine minutes of the sermon delivered on the Fourth of July.

This is a sermon that we need to hear all the time.

God Bless America.

The Story Behind The \”Star Spangled Banner\”

DeMint: Over 90% of Bills Passed Secretly With No Debate, No Vote

by Ron Paul

The administration’s terrible healthcare reform bill is now law, but the debate over how– and whether– the federal government should be involved in providing healthcare services is not over.  It is not too late for America to correct its course and stop the march toward a government run, “single payer” healthcare system.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans don’t want Obamacare.  Congress should seize the opportunity to repeal the very worst aspect of this new legislation, namely the mandate that forces every American either to purchase health insurance or face an IRS penalty.  This mandate represents nothing more than an unconstitutional, historically unprecedented gift to the insurance industry.  I introduced the “End the Mandate Act” (HR 4995) expressly to prevent the administration from ever putting this provision into effect.

Instead of mandating the same failed entitlement healthcare schemes that are bankrupting Europe, Congress should fundamentally re-examine the case for free-market healthcare.  Our current model, based on employer-provided health insurance, did not arise based on market preferences.  On the contrary, it makes no sense to couple health insurance with employment.  But federal wage and price controls instituted during World War II left employers with no alternative to attract workers in a tight labor market other than offering extra benefits such as health insurance and pensions.  Over time these nonwage benefits became the norm, especially since employers could deduct the cost of health insurance premiums from their income taxes while individuals could not.  The perverse consequence is that employees lose both their paychecks and their health insurance when they lose their job.

As reliance on third-party health insurance grew, patients became detached from the true costs of their doctor visits.  In the 1970s the Nixon administration, along with the late Senator Edward Kennedy, championed the cause of health maintenance organizations (HMOs).  Congress accepted the faulty premise that HMOs would reduce costs through centralized management of patients, when in fact the opposite was true: more bureaucracy would only lead to higher costs, less accountability, and worse patient care.

In recent years Congress has only intensified the problem with more laws and more regulations, especially with the disastrous Medicare prescription drug benefit.  The drug benefit was another example of naked patronage to a politically-connected industry, and it exponentially worsened the federal government’s balance sheet.  Obamacare will be the last nail in the coffin of our bankrupt entitlement system.

More laws are not the answer.  Instead, we need to allow a market system to operate that reflects consumer choices while rationally pricing services.  In a market system patients likely would pay cash for basic services, while maintaining relatively high-deductible catastrophic insurance for serious illnesses and accidents.  The cost of most routine medical care would drop if the patient paid the bill on the spot, especially if doctors no longer needed to employ large staffs solely to deal with insurance and billing.

Let me repeat: we need a system in America where patients pay cash for basic services, and carry insurance only for serious illnesses and accidents.  “Health maintenance” is the responsibility of each of us individually.  We cannot continue to collectivize the costs of healthcare and expect things to get better.

Authoritarianism is bad for your health.  Congress should end the Obamacare mandate and allow market-based medicine to flourish.

With a national debt now over $13 trillion, $6.3 trillion in Fannie/Freddie debt and $60 trillion in unfunded obligations for programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. government has total obligations of over $79.1 trillion or 5.5 times our GDP of $14.2 trillion. It is our belief that the United States for all intents and purposes is bankrupt and Americans need to take steps immediately to protect themselves from the potential loss of the purchasing power of their U.S. Dollars.

Please click on the link below to watch a video on this subject.

MUST SEE!
Meltup

by Ron Paul

This past week several emerging and ongoing crises took attention away from the ongoing sovereign debt problems in Greece.  The bailouts are merely kicking the can down the road and making things worse for taxpaying citizens, here and abroad.   Greece is unfortunately not unique in its irresponsible spending habits.  Greek-style debt explosions are quickly spreading to other nations one by one, and yes, the United States is one of the dominoes on down the line.

Time and again it has been proven that the Keynesian system of big government and fiat paper money are abject failures in the long run.  However, the nature of government is to ignore reality when there is an avenue that allows growth in power and control. Thus, most politicians and economists will ignore the long-term damage of Keynesianism in the early stage of a bubble when there is the illusion of prosperity, suggesting that the basic laws of economics had been repealed.  In fact, one way to tell if a bubble is about to burst is if economists start talking about how the government and the Central Bank have repealed the business cycle.

The truth is the laws of economics are constant and real, no matter how inconvenient they might be to politicians and bankers.  This reality is setting in and the bills are coming due.  In the mean time, countries that have no money have bailed out other countries that have no money, except for the phony money created by politicians, bureaucrats, and their partners-in-crime at the central banks.  This may be preventing big well-connected banks from having to take on massive losses, but it is all at the expense of the taxpaying citizen.

As governments and central banks continue the cycle of spending and inflating, the purchasing power of their currencies is constantly being degraded.  These currencies are what the people are working for and saving.  This inflation guts the savings and earnings of the people, who have very limited options for protecting themselves against these ravages.  One option is to convert their fiat currency into something out of reach of central banks and government spending, such as gold or silver.

It is fairly typical in the midst of economic crises like these for gold to come under attack from Keynesians economists and their amen corner in the media.  The arguments against gold are usually straw men, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of buying gold.  Gold is not a typical investment.  It is a defense against the predictable behavior of governments to debase a fiat currency under its absolute control.  The people who run the printing presses have trouble shutting them off.  In order to limit one’s exposure to this reckless behavior, it is wise to exchange unsound assets for sound ones.

As the foundation of their power, their fiat currency, is rejected or avoided, government power is compromised.  Fiat currencies trade the people’s freedom and security for the government’s freedom to squander the wealth of the nation on wasteful pet programs, wars, and corruption.  This is why the freedom of the people is so intertwined with a sound monetary unit.  This is also why the founders liked gold and silver, and supporters of big government hate them.

We here at WestAllisGOP.com are always trying to make it easier for you to stay on top of all the latest local and statewide political news.  In that light, we have added RSS feeds from candidates and other news sources right on the right side bar of this site.

Care to see more sources on the sidebar?  Submit them in the comments!