No longer our own masters.

Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, April 20, 2012.

Two items in the news, both rather obscure, caught my eye this week.

First comes news about swimming pools. Hotels, motels, local community centers, fitness clubs and just about anyone else who operates a swimming pool that is open to the public has until mid-May to install chair lifts for the purpose of helping individuals with physical disabilities get into and out of the pool. This came about as a result of a 2010 modification to the Americans With Disabilities Act, no doubt without your knowledge.

An article I read on this subject listed 16 bullet points of the law setting forth in minute detail the specifications for design, installation, operation and capabilities of these new chair lifts. Estimates for purchase and installation of equipment that complies with the law come to about $14,000 per unit. Depending on the size of the pool, some pools will require more than one. Failure to comply with the law carries a fine of up to $55,000 on the first offense and double that amount for subsequent offenses.

Pool owners are now scrambling to comply before swimming season begins and they are hampered by the fact that the government took its sweet time finalizing every jot and tittle of the specifications. Manufacturers of the equipment are now swamped with orders that they cannot possibly fill before summer begins. Many pool owners say they are going to close their pools rather than risk the penalties attendant to non-compliance.

The second story that caught my eye concerns the car you buy three years from now. The Senate has passed and the House is expected to rubber stamp a provision that will require all automobiles built from the 2015 model year forward to have “black boxes” for the purpose of tracking and recording where the car has been. This law will mandate a continuous recording of your daily travels. Disabling the box will be a federal crime.

Of course, proponents of this measure, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), are quick to point out that the recorded data remains the property of the car owner and is subject to government inspection only under certain circumstances including the showing of probable cause that a crime has been committed.

But such is the nature of the erosion of liberty. It happens in increments. Few alive today know that the federal income tax as we know it started at a mere one percent on all incomes up to an amount equal to $10.5 million in today’s dollars. The first iteration of the Americans With Disabilities Act didn’t mandate chair lifts at swimming pools.

So how long will it be before some court or some future Congress decides that it’s OK for the government to use the black box technology installed by law in your vehicle to find and disable your vehicle until you pay your disputed taxes or get your child support payments caught up? How long before automobile black box data is routinely subpoenaed by courts in divorce proceedings?

Chair lifts for the disabled are not objectionable per se. Knowing where the bad guys go to be bad guys will no doubt help law enforcement. But these considerations stand at a distant remove from the point.

Under what authority as set forth in the Constitution does the federal government get to dictate the accoutrements of the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn in Chanute, Kansas? By what constitutional authority does the federal government have the right to require that your comings and goings, particularly when they are wholly within the state of Texas, be continuously recorded?

For more than three years, the Congress has not performed its most basic duty under the Constitution and passed a budget. Harry Reid said just last week that the Senate was going to punt on the budget again.

A Congress that refuses to do its job, while working overtime on laws that infringe basic liberties, is dangerous and has ceased to be representative of those that elected it.

And we have thus ceased to be our own masters.

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Paul Gleiser

Paul L. Gleiser is president of ATW Media, LLC, licensee of radio stations KTBB 97.5 FM/AM600, 92.1 The TEAM FM in Tyler-Longview, Texas.

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5 Responses

  1. L Miles says:

    The totalitarian masterminds always justify their subjugation of the masses as being in the “best interest” of the “disadvantaged” because “life is unfair”. Hence, the reality of their demented dreams are forced on society at large to create the utopian nirvana that we must all accept to be good citizens in their benevolent dictatorship! All hail to Obama-the-Great, the wonderful savior of mankind!

    When are we going to place his beautiful image on our national flag?

  2. Rick Armstrong says:

    Just another circumnavigation of the Constitution. There is no Nanny State authority in the Constituion. Those in DC need to read the darn thing every hundred years or so. It works, it ain’t broke. The idiots that keep tryin’ to fix it are eat up with, what dad used to call, Dum Butt.

    The states can regulate whatever they chose as long as it’s not in the the Constitution to prohibit it. The Federal Government has to follow it’s powers as laid out in the document.

    simple as pie unless you are an idiot who doesn’t agree then you seek ways to “get around it”. America doesn’t need a new Constituion…it needs to follow the one it has…

    Ricko

  3. C M Solomon says:

    “And we have thus ceased to be our own masters.” -P Gleiser

    This is the reality that we must all accept in the present domain of our government that is predominately being run by Marxist sympathizers. It does not matter what the Constitution says (the supreme law of the land). It does not matter that we are supposed to be a Representative Republic that honors, upholds, and defends the personal liberties and freedoms that our fore-fathers fought and died for.

    Pointing out the apostasy of elected government officials that are subverting the Constitution that they swore to support is a waste of time – they have no conscience. The American people have been “conditioned” to accept “government benevolence” that is cruel in scope and result as they become hypnotized to give up their freedom and liberty to succeed in their finite life span – succeed far beyond anything that BIG GOVERNMENT could hope to give them.

    In the end, the goal of the Marxists is to destroy personal freedom, liberty, and the opportunity to excel in a free market, capitalistic society, that has been the envy of world and has been the most successful in all of world history to raise the prosperity of ordinary citizens.

    I believe that arguing the illegal conduct of our Marxist masters regarding the Constitution falls on deaf ears since most of the ignorant American citizenry have little or no knowledge of the magnificence of the Constitutional Rights that they should cherish.

    Maybe we should try to expose the REAL purpose of the Marxist’s dogma in that the modern citizen is on a path for complete domination by evil, would-be dictators, that will suck them into partial slavery (at first) as a subject of the state where their every activity will be directed by a command-and-control government system in which they lose their identity and freedom of choice in exchange for “freedom from want and fear”.

    This should scare the daylights out of any complacent citizen if the pattern of creeping, dictatorial control is shown to them. Very few people are that stupid, even when a bunch of government goodies are dangled in their face if they realize that they are being lured into a trap of permanent slavery where their masters are forever in control. Am I wrong? God help us all if I am.

  4. Steve King says:

    We don’t have to wait for the Big Brother Black Boxes to monitor our every move. A few states are already implementing the Smart Grid with their digital Smart Meters on both residences and businesses with Texas and California leading the way.

    There are many benefits, we are told., that these electric meters will save us money and the electric companies can remotely read your meter thus saving the expense of employing meter readers. But many complaints about people’s bills going up and not down have been filed. If all you use is off peak power, then it is conceivable your bill could in fact go down. What you don’t find out until you get your first bill is that you pay a much higher rate during peak hours than you do off peak hours. So to save money, don’t use your AC when you actually need it. It doesn’t matter about you having locked in a low rate for one year or longer. That agreement has been broken.

    Two things that are not mentioned when they put these meters on your house, without your permission, is that the transmission of Smart Meter readings from your meter to the company is done by harmful microwaves that are many times what cell phone towers and phones send to each other. If there is a risk of getting brain tumors from high cell phone usage, than the signals to and from these meters, being several times higher runs a substantially higher risk of causing these tumors especially when you consider that we aren’t talking about exposure being only the time you have the cell phone close to your head. No, these meters are continually putting out these hazardous signals 24/7. On top of this, the further down the line from the company you are the more signal it takes. Those who already have these meters are reporting more frequent and longer lasting migraine headaches as well as moderate to severe nausea.

    The other item of concern is the communications between your meter and your lights and appliances inside your home. The company already has the ability to shut your house off, or a particular neighborhood, or a city (Smart Grid). Once complete the power of America will be controlled by a few. They will have the capability of adjusting your thermostat for you since that will work better for the common good and prevent some from using more than their fair share. They will be able to shut down sections of your house and shut down appliances at their choosing. They will even know, by an increase of energy consumption in one area of your house, if maybe you have started a business which you are not paying the required fee for, or you are housing extra people, or whether your bedtime patterns or habits have changed. But of course, this kind of monitoring and control is always for our own good.

  5. Joe Pine says:

    We should spend a decade withholding credentials from lawyers until they have succeeded in removing a law from the books whether local, state or federal. Thereafter we should make it illegal to pass a new law without removing an existing one. We are snarled in a web of our own making and the only cure is to start removing laws via peaceable means or there will be a violent revolution to do so. We are stifled in laws and regulation to the limit of endurance and survivability.

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