The US Supreme Court is currently considering allowing police to draw your blood involuntarily without a warrant in the event that you refuse a breathalyzer test if you are suspected of drunk driving. It is an incredibly invasive procedure, but the authorities and the courts are siding with the cops because, incredibly, they complained that sometimes it is too difficult to get search warrants for your veins and arteries quickly enough before your blood alcohol level dissipates to legal levels.
Vein Rape
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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…..and yet the main route to becoming (or intensifying, as the case may be) the Police State is an assault weapons ban? Utter shredding of the Bill of Rights is a popular activity for authoritarians, those who say they’re keeping their guns to protect our rights from our government. Question: When are they going to show up to protect our rights? At what point do they even speak up? They sure as hell were quiet when the Patriot Act fast-tracked its way through, and the MCA, and NDAA….in fact, they only started bitching about drone strikes when a Democrat was elected.
Whatever, why don’t they just insert a chip in our brains that just blows up the moment we have an unpatriotic thought?
What sort of venipuncture training do police officers in the US receive ? How many litres of blood do they get to take ?…
Henri
Slight digression: it never occurs to the gun-obsessed that it’s in the government’s best interest to have a heavily-armed citizenry, since the threat to law enforcement justifies law enforcement resentment of said citizenry. Authoritarian societies want to be as heavily armed as possible in order to restrict freedom from violence in its citizens.
On topic: Note that this is a burden-shifting measure. The rural areas do not have a moral or conceptual problem: they have an insufficient income. They have insufficient income because their state and federal governments have stolen their monies and redistributed them to the rich. Due to this shortfall, the same conspiracy of governments that created the shortfall are placing the burden of the shortfall on the immediate victims of both the shortfall and the theft that created it: the citizens of the rural areas themselves.
This is the key to authoritarian cycles of policy creation: at all points, the citiz — the subject — pays for the government.