Critics say it proves Senator wasn’t being detained

Security video of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s run in with the TSA earlier this week has been leaked to a newspaper, and critics say it proves that Paul was not detained by the federal agency.

The footage, obtained by The Tennessean shows the Senator seated in a chair within a glass walled cubicle in the security area of Nashville airport after refusing to undergo a pat down.

As Paul talks on the phone, presumably to his office as he had stated in interviews, three TSA officials stand guard, along with police officers standing outside the cubicle.

The video then shows Paul later being escorted through the airport by an official. The footage represents about one minute of the incident which Paul said lasted over an hour.

The Senator is partially obscured by a column blocking part of the cubicle for some portions of the video. When asked why the camera would be set up only to be obscured by a column, airport spokeswoman Emily Richard told The Tennessean that cameras are “placed for the widest view possible, not a specific area.”

The airport authority and the TSA have declined to comment on the footage.

Watch the video below:

Although the report in The Tennessean points out that the footage contradicts a police report that claimed Paul was “irate”, critics jumped on the footage to suggest Paul over reacted and exaggerated the incident.

Max Read of blog site Gawker said he believes the video proves the Republican was “totally full of sh-t” when he called his spokesperson.

“I got a lot of mail, some of it syntactically and orthographically correct, disputing my account of Rand Paul’s full-of-sh-tness by referring to the dictionary definition of the word ‘detained.’” Read wrote.

“Here is my feeling: when your argument centers around ‘the dictionary definition’ of anything and involves the adverb ‘technically,’ you are full of sh-t. When you tell someone you are being ‘detained by the TSA,’ you don’t mean ‘sitting in a chair while they decide what to do.’”

Another blogger suggested that “the way Paul was treated (not a finger laid on him) doesn’t quite illustrate the harshness that word [detainment'] usually suggests.”

In response Paul supporters pointed out that just because Paul wasn’t shackled and pushed around doesn’t mean he wasn’t being detained by the TSA.

“‘Detained’ is a legal term that very much applies to this situation. It does not matter that he is not in handcuffs or behind bars; when a peace officer restricts your freedom to vacate an area through verbal instruction (the consequence of disobedience being immediate arrest for disorderly conduct), you are detained.” one commenter noted.

Following the incident Monday, Rand Paul told reporters “I tried to leave the cubicle to speak to one of the TSA people and I was barked at: ‘Do not leave the cubicle! So, that, to me sounds like I’m being asked not to leave the cubicle. It sounds a little bit like I’m being detained.”

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, andPrisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

Source: Prison Planet.

Sen. Rand Paul told his communications director this morning he was being detained by TSA at the Nashville airport.

The Twitter account associated with Paul staffer Moira Bagley, @moirabagley, tweeted around 10 a.m., ET, “Just got a call from @senrandpaul. He’s currently being detained by TSA in Nashville.”

A TSA spokesman said the agency was looking into the matter but could not immediately comment.

Paul apparently set off  an airport security full-body scanner “on a glitch,” a spokesman in Paul’s office told ABC News.

The Paul staffer said TSA agents would not let Paul walk back through the body scanner and were demanding a full body pat-down.

The Paul spokesman said his office called TSA administrator John Pistole about the incident this morning.

The Senate is back in session today at 2 p.m., with votes scheduled at 4:30 p.m.

The issue of pat-downs has been an important one to Paul, the son of libertarian-leaning Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Sen.  Paul brought this issue up at a hearing earlier this year.

Source: ABC News. Video at link.

My Two Cents: There was a more in-depth look at this that Fox aired yesterday, which had Jack Daniels rebuttal in it, but no one uploaded it. End Two Cents.

My Two Cents: Cobra called their special task force Vipers too. Just sayin’. End Two Cents.

*Taken from News Channel 5. Video at link.

You’re probably use to seeing TSA’s signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

“Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate,” said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from the Wall Street Journal.

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson’s chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company’s manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. “The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier,” he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn’t the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian’s ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name “United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms.”

CONTINUED..

*Taken from People.

Thousands of Elvis Presley fans held a candlelight vigil at Graceland late Monday night to mark the 34th anniversary of the King’s death.

An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 devotees from all over the world – including Japan, England and Germany – gathered at Presley’s home overnight, processing through the Presley family cemetery and leaving flowers and other mementos at the singer’s gravesite. Some even sported sideburns and pompadours in tribute to the late superstar.

The vigil is the cornerstone of “Elvis Week,” an annual celebration held at the Memphis estate where he died on Aug. 16, 1977, at 42.

“I try to be like him, in the ways that he was nice to people and how he treated people,” one fan, a pompadour and sideburn-sporting Patrick Lucas, told the Associated Press. “He was a giving person.”

*Taken from WATE.com. Video at link.

Police in Spring Hill arrested a local music teacher Thursday morning after he was caught engaging in a sex act with a doll outside a local elementary school.

Officers were called to Allendale Elementary School on Prescott Way in Spring Hill amid reports of a white male with a duffle bag under a bridge on school property.  The bridge provides access to the school from the main road.

Spring Hill police told Nashville’s News 2 the responding officer witnessed the man, identified as 56-year-old Daniel Torroll, performing sex acts on a child-like doll police later discovered he’d cut holes into.

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*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Robert P. Murphy.

A shocking news report recently documented how Tennessee police were stopping drivers on the interstate and confiscating large amounts of cash, even if the drivers were accused of no crime. The report was particularly shocking because the special unit was operating far outside of its jurisdiction in exchange for giving a cut of the seized cash to the local government in question.

This episode is outrageous enough that any regular American can see the problem. Yet most people who see the report will probably conclude that the government “went too far” in this instance, and some reforms are needed. The real lesson here is that the War on Drugs — just like every other war waged by our politicians — doesn’t solve the ostensible problem, and in fact strips away other liberties.

More generally, the report is a perfect vindication of the Rothbardian point that, in a very real sense, government is a gang of thieves writ large. Such a radical viewpoint sounds crazy to most Americans in the abstract, but when they watch the video, it’s hard to deny.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from AP.

The Mississippi River rose Monday to levels not seen in Memphis since the 1930s, swamping homes in low-lying neighborhoods and driving hundreds of people from their homes. But officials were confident the levees would protect the city’s world-famous musical landmarks, including Graceland and Beale Street, and that no new areas would have any serious flooding.

As residents in the Home of the Blues waited for the river to crest as early as Monday night at a projected mark just inches short of the record set in 1937, officials downstream in Louisiana began evacuating prisoners from the state’s toughest penitentiary and opened floodgates to relieve pressure on levees outside of New Orleans.

In Memphis, authorities have gone door-to-door to 1,300 homes over the past few days to warn people to clear out, but they were already starting to talk about a labor-intensive clean up, signaling the worst was likely over.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from MSNBC.

Searchers in western Tennessee continued looking Thursday for a nursing student who was last seen being dragged from her house by a man wearing camouflage.

Some 300 people gathered in Parsons on Thursday morning to resume the search for Holly Bobo, 20, after volunteers searched the rural area around her home Wednesday.

Bobo’s 25-year-old brother told investigators he saw a man dragging her across the carport at her family home and toward a wooded area, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said.

Bobo’s brother was inside the house and the kidnapping was outside in the rural area of small, modest homes about 100 miles northeast of Memphis, the TBI said. A spokeswoman would not give more details on what the brother told them.

“It’s very disturbing to our community, it’s very disturbing to us as law enforcement. We are praying for the family and the young lady,” WTVF-TV quoted Decatur County Sheriff Roy Wyatt as saying. “It’s our hopes and our prayers that we find her alive.”

Investigators are looking into the possibility that someone may have checked out Bobo’s home before the abduction and are asking neighbors to report any unusual people or cars in the area.

‘Walking in a nightmare’
Since news of the case spread, neighbors and people in nearby communities have poured out to help search, bring food and support. Family members who are holding together reasonably well, Decatur County Mayor Michael Smith said.

Additionally, country music singer Whitney Duncan took to Twitter to spread news of the disappearance and make a plea for help in the case, saying Bobo is her cousin.

“Lord have mercy. I feel like I’m walking in a nightmare,”she said in a post to her Twitter account.

Authorities used dogs and a helicopter in the search Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, volunteers had set out on horseback, four-wheelers and on foot to search for Bobo, WTVF reported.

“It’s the least we can do, and if we were in the same situation, I would hope and pray that everybody would come out for us also,” volunteer Mary Cruse told the station. “These are friends of ours and even if we didn’t know them, we’d still do it.”

Bobo is 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 110 pounds. She was last seen Wednesday morning wearing a pink shirt and light blue jeans.

‘The whole community is praying’
Smith said the close-knit community has little crime, so word of this has come as a shock. Parsons has about 2,500 residents.

Bud Grimes, a spokesman for the University of Tennessee at Martin, said Bobo was studying to be a licensed practical nurse through the Tennessee Technology Center. She was taking classes at the university’s extension campus in Parsons, but was not a UT-Martin student.

Bobo’s mother is an elementary school teacher and her father works for a tree service company.

Courtney Jeffreys, 20, went to school with Bobo since preschool and said she loves animals and always had a lot of different kinds of pets growing up.

“She is just a really sweet girl,” Jeffreys said.

Family friend David Ivey, whose son went to high school with Bobo, said the young woman has an “angelic voice” and loved to show it off in talent contests at school. She also would sing solos at Corinth Baptist Church where she was a member, he said.

Bobo’s pastor, Don Franks, said he has known her all her life and said she is “a fine young Christian girl.” He said the community response has been exceptional.

“They’re searching, bringing food and holding prayer vigils,” Franks said. “The whole community is praying for her safety and well-being.”