OldTrader, seriously, the Ft Dix "terrorists"? What a bunch of pinheads. If you're going to let guys like that terrorize you, you might as well sing "home of the cowards" next time you're at a ball game. I can't believe the freakin' pansies we're holding up as deadly terrorists. The London & Glasgow patio-store clowns, the morons who thought they could kill thousands of people with a jet fuel pipeline, shoe bombers and liquid explosives, this isn't terrorism its a day at the circus. Martin
Because it's eliminating a basic legal protection for people who will almost certainly be predominantly Muslim. We are naturally suspicious of people who are not like us and do not behave in a way that we are used to. This legislation would eliminate the last vestige of personal responsibility (i.e. fear of being sued) that acts as a check on our rampant national paranoia. Don't hide behind weasel words and other people's opinions. Do YOU think it was a terrorist probe? I read a detailed account of the incident and it sounded to me like a bunch of freaked out rednecks overreacting to perfectly ordinary behavior that they just didn't happen to understand. Martin
Did you really read it? Was the part about the fellow MUSLIM ARABIC SPEAKER who notified the airlines omitted? Do you remember the FELLOW MUSLIM ARABIC SPEAKER being interviewed saying the men on the plane were talking about Jihad etc? As I said, you are more dangerous than the terrorists.
Liberals, who are terrified of entire food groups, not to mention some guy smoking a cig 20 feet away, suddenly want the rest of us to bear crazy risks just so we don't hurt some arab's feelings. They want to ruin our economy because they are convinced we are causing "global warming', but they dismiss terrorism as a bumper sticker slogan. Guess what, 9/11 happened. So did transit bombings in Spain and the UK. So did attacks on our embassies, Bali, the first WTC bombing, the USS Cole, Khobar Towers, etc.
There is no "basic legal protection" to file meritless lawsuits designed to inflict financial damage on people who are doing their civic duty to report suspicious behavior. The police and TSA act as a buffer to filter out the baseless charges from the reasonable. An arab in an airport or on a plane has no more right against being asked to explain something suspicious than I do to refuse to go through a metal detector. I do not know the exact details of the Flying Imam incident, so I have to rely on what I have read. The fact that multiple people were alarmed enough to notify the authorities would seem to establish pretty conclusively though that they were doing something weird. Their subsequent actions tend to substantiate that they were up to no good. If a person or group alarmed a large number of fellow travelers, I would think the normal reaction would to apologize, not to file vindictive lawsuits. The idea that there is this national paranoia targeting every dark-skinned person is a typical liberal invention. We bend over backwards to avoid doing anything to offend muslims. That is why 75 year old grandmothers are strip searched at airports and 30 year old saudi "students" waltz through.
"Crazy risks"??? What, you mean the one in 100,000 chance I'm going to die from terrorism this year? It doesn't take much in the way of stones to look a risk like that in the eye and refuse to be terrorized. Learn some statistics. Eating the wrong food group kills more Americans in a day than terrorists kill in a year. http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2006/08/wait-arent-you-scared.html Martin
If the lawsuits are in fact meritless, then they get thrown out of court. You still get a jury of your peers, and in America that means a jury that's mostly not going to be brown and mostly going to be scared shitless. Do we really need legislation to ward off that sort of lawsuit? I think not. I would have loved to believe that. In fact I did believe that until I spent some time here and saw so many posts denigrating Arabs as a race and Muslims as a group. If you really want to claim that Americans are above that sort of racism, just take a look around you... and start by looking in a mirror. Martin
The point is that people have to spend a fortune to defend against a meritless lawsuit, filed solely to force them to spend a fortune to defend against it. Our crazy legal system allows that sort of thing, and there is no real recourse. These activist groups know it and exploit it. If you want to throw around names like racist, just because people disagree with you, that pretty much confirms you are one of the left wing kook brigade. You can't win an argument, so you resort to name calling.