Me neither. The tea leaves show Romney winning and not much changing. Except the IQ of the White House increasing a bit.
This has been going on for ages, TSA assists the Secret Service on many campaign stops for all the candidates.
No decent candidate would allow those police state wanna-bes anywhere near their supporters. I keep waiting for Obomney and Co to show me something, anything I can support. I see nothing. They are scum.
by some accounts, there has also been use of passive millimeter wave scanners at some political functions. Nobody would care if you folks had never started reaching for our genitals.
More accurately, the TSA takes these campaign stops as an opportunity to put on an entirely useless side-show - right down to the blue-gloved and blue-shirted freaks.
Not sure the candidates have any choice in matter. Secret Service protection is assigned to the front runners and the decision of how security is handled is made by them. It is possible that the Secret Service or government operative within the administration deliberately put TSA there to harass supporters. I would have hoped that Ron Paul would have shooed them away but it's just a likely he wouldn't have learned about their presence until well after the fact. I'd be surprised if a Tea Party candidate had any sympathy for TSA. This could be a good opportunity to send the campaign a message by contacting Ryan via the campaign and asking him what was going on with TSA thugs harassing supporters. The only available strategy is to pressure the Romney campaign to come out against TSA. Otherwise we're guaranteed four more years of groping and perhaps worse. http://www.mittromney.com/
It's a good strategy but I'd stop short of saying it's the only one. We need to push the underdog parties to take a stand as well. Dyed-in-the-wool Democrats are going to vote Democrat, but there are also those Obama voters who lesser-of-two-evil'd him when it was between Obama & McCain. A lot of people, back in '08, voted (D) because Obama had a very good shot at winning and people wanted something, anything, different than the disaster that was GWB. Now, though, after 8 years of that monkey idiot Bush and 4 of "I'm a Constitutional professor but I seem to have forgotten what due process and the Bill of Rights are" Obama showing people that both big parties can screw up (with Romney looking a lot like a quintessential rich-folks' candidate), it's not a bad time for third parties to push ahead. People - even left-leaning types (though they do seem a little eager to forgive Obama) - are sick of civil-rights violations and the talk of yet another foreign war isn't helping. Meanwhile, one need only look to Planned Parenthood and HRC to see the kind of fervor that's pushing back against Romney on reproductive-rights and marriage-equality grounds. People voting (D) or (R) this election are going to be either A. dyed-in-the-wool partisan voters who'd vote for a one-armed orangutan with cerebral palsy as long as it came from their home party, or B. so jaded and disaffected that they're barely paying attention at all, punching any old thing on the ballot while shrugging and saying "what's the point, it's all the same every time anyway." And half of camp B will be staying home on election day. The people who really give a crap, who are vetting the candidates, will only be voting (D) or (R) for very specific, very pointed reasons if they do at all. And neither candidate has given us much fuel for those specific reasons. The pump is primed for third-party advances. If they'd get their act together I could see a Green or Libertarian candidate performing much better in this election than they have in years past. Independents maybe a little less as they don't have the publicity muscle of a party behind them, but I know I still hear Gary Johnson's name now and then even without actively watching for it, so you never know. Personally I'm still rooting for Jill Stein and the Greens. All the socially-liberal policy of Obama but also has expressed an intent to roll back police-state encroachments, particularly with regard to protests like OWS. Still haven't found any explicit statement on TSA, which irks me, but I'm still hopeful.
The ones who limit themselves to (D) or (R) are the same ones who prefer multiple-choice exams to anything that actually makes them think about a correct answer. It's no wonder the TSA has lasted as long as it has. The general public doesn't care to think. It's too hard. Much easier to simply sit and watch "celebrities" make fools of themselves in public.
It reminds me of "Idiocracy," which I think would be too painfully prophetic for me to watch anymore. Election years make me want to start a pool on how long it'll be before "Ow, My Balls" actually airs for real.
People seem to willing to accept that it's a two party league. Personally I'll miss Ron Paul who at least said the things that needed saying even though he never got anywhere with them. Unfortunately, no matter the November outcome, DC will be populated with "big government" politicians who just want to control the spending. Either way we lose more rights, personal freedoms and get more big government. I'd be happy to see the emergence of a party committed to restoring the rule of the Constitution. That old piece of paper worked really well for 200 years before the elites decided we didn't need it anymore.
Indeed, Juvenal is turning over in his grave. Or smirking and thinking about how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
