Pinellas Patriots

"DISCLAIMER: Pinellas Patriots as an organization will not ever officially endorse any candidate. However, we highly encourage our members to step up, endorse and support the candidates they like! "

"Welcome to all New Members of Pinellas Patriots. You have joined a fabulous family of Patriots. ... MoreWe are active, educated on the issues and well informed - and speaking of well informed, below are some helpful hints which should enable you to navigate the website with ease. Once you are logged in, you may want to click on "Expand". This will give you some additional information about the group. All of the links are at the top of the Home Page. We will take you through each one and give you a little info on each. HOME: Home Page - latest comments by members at a glance. Events on the right. Sponsors on the left. ABOUT: Who/What we are about plus various videos of previous events we held. MEETUPS: This is where you will find the Calendar for all past and upcoming events. Once you are in the Calendar, click on the event of your choice and you will see all the pertinent information for that event. While you are there, you may want to RSVP for that event as well. MEMBERS: An easy way to find someone. Type in the members name and their profile will appear. You can click on "send email" from this page and send a personal message to the member. This will not be seen by anyone other than you and the member. If you click on "Greeting", your message will be seen by everyone. So, be careful which you click on. PHOTOS: All albums with pictures of members at our various events. MESSAGE BOARD: The "heart" of the website. This is where we are encouraged to post any information which is pertinent to the issues of today. You can also tell the most recent post by checking the dates on the right side of the screen. To POST a message, simply click on Start a New Discussion. Type in your message and click "Submit". If you would like to track your discussion, simply click on "Track this Discussion". You will then receive an email from meetup.com when someone replies. If you want to reply to a discussion which has already started, simply click on "reply" at the end of the most recent post and type your information. MORE: Occassionally, we will post a POLL. We would ask that you vote for whatever it is that we need your opinion on. And remember, Majority Rules. Now, for some information on controlling your emails. Click on "Account" at the very top of the Home Screen. When your account page comes up, look to the left side and click on "Membership and Communication". You are given choices as to who you want to receive email from. Some want it from only the Organizers but others want it from everyone. You decide by clicking on your choices. It is up to you. Also, while you are in your "Account", you may want to check your personal information. Be sure it is accurate and that it is information you want all to see. If not, click on "Change" and modify your info. We have also initiated a "Buddy System". If you have any difficulty at all with posting, the amount of email you receive or any other problem, we will assign a Member to you who can walk you through the process. We are more than willing to work with you by phone, by email or even at home. Simply click on "WE THE PEOPLE email me" on the left side of the Home Screen (beside the WATCHDOG) and let us know. We will respond immediately. One last thing. On the left side of the Home Screen, you will find your Patriot Library where you have many, many books at your disposal which you can borrow at any time. The list is quite impressive. Please take advantage of this whenever possible. No need to buy a book - just borrow from the library. Also on the left side you will see our Patriot Sponsors. Please check them out as your needs arise. They support Pinellas Patriots and they are one of "US". We are also in the process of creating our "Company Store" which will be filled with goodies. It will be coming soon. Again, WELCOME TO PINELLAS PATRIOTS where We The People run this organization. "

"ID Cards For Workers Is At Center Of Immigration Plan WallStreetJournal.com By: Laura Meckler Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a nat ... Moreional biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain. Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker. The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past. The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card. "It's the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. "If you say they can't get a job when they come here, you'll stop it." (Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ... "

"The Stimulus Bill's Hdden Attack on What We Eat, Drink & Smoke By: Phil Kerpen Big Government.com One of the more extreme proposals floated early in the national health care debate was the idea of taxing soda and other sugary beverages. ... MoreThat trial balloon was almost immediately shot down by the American public, but the Obama administration is attempting to achieve, by subterfuge, soda taxes and a lot of other ways to micromanage our lives in the name of public health—whether or not ObamaCare passes. The mechanism is buried in last year’s $862-billion-and-counting stimulus bill, and works by diverting hundreds of millions of dollars that should be promoting economic growth to instead pay lobbyists to push for higher taxes and nanny-state controls over our lives. It’s on pages 66 and 67 on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which created a $1 billion “Prevention and Wellness Fund.” Of that, $650 million went to Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services and has been used to start a new program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called “Communities Putting Prevention to Work” (CPPW). Where does that giant pot of grant funding under the CPPW go? What it calls “MAPPS Interventions for Communities Putting Prevention to Work.” MAPPS stands for “Media, Access, Point of decision information, Price, and Social support/services.” In other words, strategies for changing our behavior, for social engineering on a large-scale, and, it seems, circumventing the normal democratic process. In a 14-page guidance for grant applicants, the CDC details tactics that grant applicants should include in their plans. It includes “counter-advertising” against targeted products, complete tobacco usage bans, limiting “unhealthy food availability” (the really bad stuff like “whole milk, sugar sweetened beverages, high-fat snacks”), and of course taxes (or in CDC lingo: “changing relative prices of healthy vs. unhealthy items”). A supplemental document explains in more detail what the targets are, including restricting availability of soft drinks “in homes, schools, work sites, and communities.” It also recommends local zoning changes to put fast food restaurants out of business, trans-fat bans, salt regulation, and food taxes. They even suggest a TV ban of sorts, recommending: “specific regulations/policies that limit television and other screen media.” The first $120 million of funds has already been awarded to the states, and local grant recipients are expected to be announced soon. In Wisconsin, for example, we already know that the state department of health submitted a grant to use federal stimulus dollars to hire lobbyists to push for bans on flavored tobacco programs at the local level. Although the grants under this program are supposedly restricted from funding lobbying activities, there is imply no way these objectives can be accomplished without major legislative changes at the state and local level. Our federal stimulus dollars are being used to hire lobbyists to push for these taxes, bans, restrictions, rules and regulations on what we eat, drink, smoke, and do for recreation. It’s a sweeping micromanagement of our lives that we didn’t vote for, made even worse by the fact that it’s being funded by stimulus money that was supposed to put people other than lobbyists back to work. "

"Culled outPublic input period for federal fishery strategy has ended By Robert Montgomery ESPNOutdoors.com This is a column from Robert Montgomery for ESPN Outdoors and the opinions represented are not necessarily those of ESPN.com. ... MoreAs a Senior Writer for BASS Publications, Montgomery has written about conservation, environment, and access issues for more than two decades. It's part of a series of articles from Montgomery on the issue. The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters. One sign at the United We Fish rally at the Capital summed up the feelings of recreational and commercial fishermen. This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is "fluid" and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn't issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters. That's a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning. "When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario," said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano. "Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. The current U.S. direction with fishing is a direct parallel to what happened in Canada with hunting: The negative economic impacts on hard working American families and small businesses are being ignored. "In spite of what we hear daily in the press about the President's concern for jobs and the economy and contrary to what he stated in the June order creating this process, we have seen no evidence from NOAA or the task force that recreational fishing and related jobs are receiving any priority." Consequently, unless anglers speak up and convince their Congressional representatives to stop this bureaucratic freight train, it appears that the task force will issue a final report for "marine spatial planning" by late March, with President Barack Obama then issuing an Executive Order to implement its recommendations — whatever they may be. Led by NOAA's Jane Lubchenco, the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling, but its indifference to the economic, social and biological value of the sport has been deafening. Additionally, Lubchenco and others in the administration have close ties to environmental groups who would like nothing better than to ban recreational angling. And evidence suggests that these organizations have been the engine behind the task force since before Obama issued a memo creating it last June. As ESPN previously reported, WWF, Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, Pew Environment Group and others produced a document entitled "Transition Green" shortly after Obama was elected in 2008. What has happened since suggests that the task force has been in lockstep with that position paper. Then in late summer, just after he created the task force, these groups produced "Recommendations for the Adoption and Implementation of an Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes National Policy." This document makes repeated references to "overfishing," but doesn't once reference recreational angling, its importance, and its benefits, both to participants and the resource. Additionally, some of these same organizations have revealed their anti-fishing bias by playing fast and loose with "facts," in attempts to ban tackle containing lead in the United States and Canada. That same tunnel vision, in which recreational angling and commercial fishing are indiscriminately lumped together as harmful to the resource, has persisted with the task force, despite protests by the angling industry. As more evidence of collusion, the green groups began clamoring for an Executive Order to implement the task force's recommendations even before the public comment period ended in February. Fishing advocates had no idea that this was coming. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the New York Times reported on Feb. 12 that "President Obama and his team are preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal and other domestic policy priorities." Click here for archiveMorlock fears that "what we're seeing coming at us is an attempted dismantling of the science-based fish and wildlife model that has served us so well. There's no basis in science for the agendas of these groups who are trying to push the public out of being able to fish and recreate. "Conflicts (user) are overstated and problems are manufactured. It's all just an excuse to put us off the water." In the wake of the task force's framework document, the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation (CSF) and its partners in the U.S. Recreational Fishing & Boating Coalition against voiced their concerns to the administration. "Some of the potential policy implications of this interim framework have the potential to be a real threat to recreational anglers who not only contribute billions of dollars to the economy and millions of dollars in tax revenues to support fisheries conservation, but who are also the backbone of the American fish and wildlife conservation ethic," said CSF President Jeff Crane. Morlock, a member of the CSF board, added, "There are over one million jobs in America supported coast to coast by recreational fishing. The task force has not included any accountability requirements in their reports for evaluating or mitigating how the new policies they are drafting will impact the fishing industry or related economies. "Given that the scope of this process appears to include a new set of policies for all coastal and inland waters of the United States, the omission of economic considerations is inexcusable." This is not the only access issue threatening the public's right to fish, but it definitely is the most serious, according to Chris Horton, national conservation director for BASS. "With what's being created, the same principles could apply inland as apply to the oceans," he said. "Under the guise of 'marine spatial planning' entire watersheds could be shut down, even 2,000 miles up a river drainage from the ocean. "Every angler needs to be aware because if it's not happening in your backyard today or tomorrow, it will be eventually. "We have one of the largest voting blocks in the country and we need to use it. We must not sit idly by." . "

"I've updated this Meetup. For more details, see the full listing: http://www.pinellaspa... ... MoreWhen: Saturday, March 13, 2010 12:30 PM Where: St Petersburg Police Pistol Club 1845 13th Ave N Saint Petersburg, FL 33713 If the changes affect your plans to attend, please take a moment to update your RSVP. (You can RSVP "No" or "Maybe" as well as "Yes".) You can always get in touch with me through the "Contact Organizer" link on Meetup: http://www.pinellaspa... "

"MyWay Broad business coalition opposing health care bill Mar 9, 2:01 PM (ET) WASHINGTON (AP) - Major business groups say President Barack Obama's health care overhaul is a job killer, and they're launching a multimillion-dollar a ... Mored campaign to take that message to voters. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and groups ranging from contractors to retailers said Tuesday the Democratic health care bills would raise their expenses, while failing to control health care costs. Advertisements will start airing nationwide Wednesday on cable television and shift in a few days to 17 states, targeting moderate and conservative Democrats whose votes are critical to passing the bill in the House. The campaign is estimated to cost between $4 million and $10 million, with the insurance industry paying part of the cost. "

"The Government is mailing spending our money to write and mail out letters to let you know they are mailing the Census in a week. May this was a job created out of the stimulus money!"