Florida’s delegates to the Republican National Convention are getting snubbed in their own house, after the national GOP decided Wednesday to ramp up penalties on the state for holding an early primary in violation of party rules.

Though Florida is hosting the party’s national convention in Tampa later this year, a Republican National Committee panel voted unanimously to give the state’s representatives second-class access to the whole affair.

Under the resolution, the national party will make sure Florida’s delegates have poor seating and poor hotel options — as in, hotels that are not close to the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the convention venue. According to an RNC official, the delegates will also be limited in the number of guest passes they can hand out.

The Rules Committee voted for the sanctions Wednesday, and the RNC official said no further action is needed to carry out the punishment.

“They will be penalized with reduced guest passes, reduced priority seating on the floor and hotels further away,” the official told Fox News.

A Florida Republican official claimed the national party still has to take one more step to finalize the penalties, but suggested there would be no hard feelings going into November. The official said the state party will “do nothing but (commit) ourselves to making sure that a Republican wins the state of Florida.”

The latest penalties would come on top of the hit the Sunshine State already took to its delegate count.

The state is expected to lose half its 99 delegates as a result of its decision to hold the Republican presidential primary on Jan. 31.

Under RNC rules, Florida was not supposed to hold what’s known as a “winner-take-all” primary before April. That’s a primary in which all the state’s delegates are awarded to the winner, as opposed to one in which the delegates are awarded proportionally.

The very beginning of the 2012 primary calendar is also supposed to be reserved for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. Florida’s decision to get in on the early primary action follows a similar move in 2008, and a similar punishment by the RNC.

Leonard Curry, chairman of the Florida GOP, said in a statement that he’s hoping to move forward despite the new penalties.

“I understand why today’s vote took place and we will continue to work to protect Florida Republicans’ interest at the national convention,” Curry said. “With today’s action, I hope that all Republicans can move together, unified and committed to the most important goal we have — the election of a Republican president in 2012.”

When the state party first announced the date in September, Curry said the early vote “properly reflects the importance Florida will play on the national stage.”

A true swing state, Florida, with its 29 delegates to the Electoral College, is considered essential to win the general election. Barack Obama won the state in 2008.

Source: Fox News.

*Taken from USA Today. Video at link.

Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Innand other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.

During the PSA, which starts with a woman exiting a yellow taxi in front of a train station, a narrator says, “Maybe you see something suspicious. Can you be sure? If you see something, say something to authorities.”

The PSA, which will be interspersed with other messages on the welcome screen, will be the same in all 5,400 hotels that LodgeNet serves. It ends by telling viewers to contact “local authorities.”

CONTINUED..

*Taken from the Daily Caller.

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers.

Other common waiver recipients were labor union chapters, large corporations, financial firms and local governments. But Pelosi’s district’s waivers are the first major examples of luxurious, gourmet restaurants and hotels getting a year-long pass from Obamacare.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from Infowars. Written by Kurt Nimmo.

As we predicted, Homeland Security and national security state officialdom are in the process of expanding the police state and citizen humiliation grid from airports to hotels and shopping malls.

“The United States is stepping up security at ‘soft targets’ like hotels and shopping malls, as well as trains and ports, as it counters the evolving Al-Qaeda threat, a top official said Sunday,” reports AFP.

“We look at so-called soft targets — the hotels, shopping malls, for example — all of which we have reached out to in the past year and have done a fair amount of training for their own employees,” DHS boss Janet Napolitano said.

Big Sis Napolitano knows the government’s “See Something, Say Something” program to acclimate citizens to a police and surveillance state designed to rival anything established by East Germany’s Stasi is more Big Brotherism.

“It just sounds very Big Brother to me, turning in the next door neighbor.” CNN’s Candy Crowley said to Napolitano during an interview on “State of the Union.”

“It’s not,” Napolitano argued. “It depends on the common sense of the American people. I think they have common sense. And it depends on, again … getting through this notion that our safety, our security and the world we live in today is a shared responsibility.”

For bureaucrat Napolitano, the “common sense” of the American people means they will remain timid and apathetic. It means they will not protest and will tolerate going through porno-scanners and having goons stick their hands down their pants before they are allowed to shop at the local mall.

Napolitano defended the ambiguity of the snoop program. She said citizens can figure out for themselves who to snoop on and report to the authorities. Because there is no threat posed by al-Qaeda to the “homeland” – a word Big Sis used during the interview to refer to the United States – the government will receive thousands of calls from people turning in their neighbors for smoking marijuana, discipling their children, or possessing entirely legal firearms.

“The overall message is everything is objectively better than it was a year ago, particularly in the aviation environment. But we’re also looking at addressing other areas,” Napolitano said about the plan to turn malls and hotels into Gestapo zones where the Bill of Rights does not exist and citizen-subjects are obliged under threat of violence and $11,000 fines to allow minimum wage goons to stick their hands down their pants.

“And so we have enhanced measures going on at surface transportation, not because we have a specific or credible threat there, but because we know, looking at Madrid and London, that’s been another source of targets for terrorists.”

Evidence largely ignored by the corporate media reveals that the Madrid bombings were an inside job. Two patsies, Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras and Antonio Toro, were government informants, a fact reported by the New York Times and the Times Online. Trashorras had had the private telephone number of the head of Spain’s Civil Guard bomb squad.

In 2005, John Loftus revealed on Fox News that the supposed mastermind of the London bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, worked for British intelligence. In 1999, the U.S. Justice Department told prosecutors in Seattle to leave Aswat alone because he was a British intelligence asset.

Napolitano and the government cite the absurd underwear non-bombing as the reason they are aggressively moving the police state from airports to malls and hotels.

“The Detroit Christmas bomber was deliberately and intentionally allowed to keep his US entry visa as the result of a national security override issued by an as yet unknown US intelligence or law-enforcement agency with the goal of blocking the State Department’s planned revocation of that visa,”Webster Griffin Tarpley wrote in February.

Patrick F. Kennedy, Undersecretary of State for Management, revealed this when he testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on January 27.

The underwear non-bomber “Mutallab was a protected patsy being used by rogue elements of the US intelligence community for the deliberate and intentional creation of a high profile incident with the goal of obtaining a large-scale political effect,” argues Tarpley.

The staged event is also providing a pretext to turn malls and hotels into Gestapo zones. It was used earlier this month to promote the government’s snitch program.

It should be obvious where all of this is headed. Following the next staged non-bombing by a clueless patsy, the government will move from malls and hotels into the streets and neighborhoods of America.

How long before you will be subjected to a virtual strip search before you can buy food or other necessities?