The Patriots

by A. Williams

I recently went to Rapid City, South Dakota located at 1313 N. Lacrosse St in Rapid City to attend a fall festival in October. The location was wonderful and it was still comfortably warm in the Black hills area. I had Selected the Rodeway inn because it had the most favorable rates. I planned to stay eight days and made my reservations by debit/credit card accordingly by phone. I was given a reservation number for confirmation. Several months before the event was to take place I gave them a call to be certain everything was in order and it was.

However, upon arrival, no one could find my reservation. I checked my cell phone while standing in line at the front desk for any messages from Rodeway.  Sure enough, there was one the VERY day of my arrival indicating that my reservation couldn't be confirmed because my card had been declined and to give them a call. What? Why would it have taken until arrival time to discover this? There wasn't anything wrong with my card, I had just used it several times the week before to buy some items and I didn't have any past due balances or shortage of funds. Why wait until check-in time to alert me to a potential problem?

I was concerned because during my stay there was to be some 30,000 Indians in town for a tribal POW -WOW and the recent problem with my card made me think that I wouldn't be able to secure a room.  I told the manager that I had just used the card the week before and then paid cash for my stay.  He didn't respond but just gave me the first batch of forms to sign and initial. The manager must have either been a lawyer or was following corporate policy because I had to initial and sign more forms than usual as well as pay an addition $150.00 damage deposit because my card had been declined. And providing me copies of the forms I signed were declined because their copy machine wasn't working at the time.  As it turned out this was just the beginning of my problems for the week.

The second floor room was nice and accessibility was good. After the first full day my room trash can was starting to fill as I had a refrigerator and microwave for snacks etc but by the next day it had been emptied. However after two successive days of it not being serviced, I had to place it outside the room with a note in the trash (easily visible on top) in the hallway to see if it would be emptied. During one of those two days the maid had knocked and tried to enter my room but the safety lock prevented her.  I opened the door and answered her question that the trash can sitting in the hallway was from my room.

Next I discovered a problem with the room refrigerator leaking water from the freezer section. A number of my snacks were sopping wet so I emptied the unit and rearranged items to diminish the problem, finally settling down to relax by watching a little TV.

Somewhere after an hour or so, as I was watching the screen, it suddenly went completely blank returning for a few more minutes before repeating the cycle.  After about 10 minutes of this nonsense I went downstairs to talk to the manager.  Someone else was at the front desk. I told him the problem with the TV and he agreed to come and look at it. When I left the room to go downstairs the TV was completely dark although still on but miraculously was playing perfectly by the time we got back to the room.  The desk man asked if I had had the window open which I did not, so much for a temperature problem.  The desk man checked the TV power and internet connections and I realized then that he didn't have a clue as to the problem.

I asked for a replacement TV or another room so I could finish watching TV and he agreed to  assign me room #111right next door to 212. But when I went back upstairs and tried to get into #111 the electronic key didn't work. And now original electronic door key didn't work either so I had to go back down and get the desk man to reconfigure it. This happened to me twice during the week of my stay. These keys are supposed to be valid for the length of a person's stay but obviously weren't.

It was then that I decided to look into the TV problem in #212 myself which I quickly traced to a digital converter box connection to the internet. Resetting the box and even rebooting the device indicated that it had developed some internal flaw. Since I would be very busy the following day and wouldn't have time to watch TV, I turned it off and read a book instead.

With now only a day to go before checkout, I decided to just make the best of it and watch what I could on the TV. Checkout day came and I was told that the hotel couldn't reach me so they had to deduct another day's charge from my security deposit for Oct 18th. Couldn't reach me? What nonsense is this?  I am about 35 feet from the front desk on the ONLY upper floor, ever heard of taping a note to the door or stopping by the room? This isn't done simply so enough time passes so one can't dispute the charge.

Checkout time at the Rodeway is obviously before 7:00 am (See the time listed on the weekly itemized list of the stay) because from the evening of Oct 9th until the morning of October 18th is EIGHT days so I should have had until 10:00 or 11:00am on the 18th to check out BEFORE incurring a ninth day charge. Amazingly as I was checking out their copying machine suddenly was working so I received a copy of my damage deposit receipt. I let them know about the faulty TV converter box and expressed my general dissatisfaction with their room service since I had to go down and tell them specifically that the room had no Kleenex or replacement hand soap. I was accustomed to trash being emptied and soap provided automatically during hotel stays. I was told since the Covid epidemic that this had been discontinued.

The hotel does not qualify as a 'choice' hotel in my estimation and is staffed by questionable people who take advantage of travelers at will. They are inhospitable, deceptive, incompetent and sullen. The hotel manager is simply an ass and I will be providing a copy of my Sitejabber complaint to their corporate office. I definitely would not recommend the Rodeway to anyone given the 97 complaints shown on their site: https://corporateofficeheadquarters.com/rodeway-inn-corporate-office/

Megyn Kelly dismantles Fauci 

  https://potuspaper.com/megyn-kelly-f-you-fauci-she-wrecks-the-doctor-over-recent-statements-watch/

by Hannah Cox & Brad Polumbo

Civil asset forfeiture is so unethical that most people won’t believe it’s true.

Civil asset forfeiture (CAF) is a legal practice so bad and so unethical that most people won’t believe it’s true until they read up on it. But under this system, police are allowed to take your property if they even just suspect you of a crime (No, not charge you with a crime. No, not convict you for a crime. Suspect). And they basically just get to keep it unless you have the ability (i.e. the funds) to challenge them in court and prove your innocence.

It’s a total perversion of our Constitution, which is supposed to ensure individuals are innocent until proven guilty and which places the burden of that proof on the accuser (the state).

“To me, it felt like being treated like a criminal, even though you’re not, it makes you question everything,” Vera said. “They tried their hardest to intimidate us, and to say that we’re basically putting our freedom on the line: ‘Give us this money, we’ll make it go away—or put your freedom on the line for it,” Vera continued.

But the women wanted to fight. Fortunately, they got in touch with pro-bono, constitutional litigators at the Goldwater Institute in Arizona who agreed to take on their case. And within a few months, the government had to return the money.

But this is their game. Police regularly use CAF to bully people out of their money and other property, and they mostly get away with it because (without pro-bono attorneys) the average person can’t afford to fight the government. The government has endless, tax-payer funded resources at its disposal, and its attorneys can easily run up the clock for those attempting to pay a defense attorney by the hour to get their money back. Police then get to keep these funds and add them to their budget much of the time.

CAF is not only a disgustingly unconstitutional law, it also leads to really corrupt police behavior. When police get to profit off the property they discover on people just because they merely suspect them of a crime, they are far more apt to behave like road pirates—targeting and profiling certain kinds of cars and finding reasons to search people and their cars. They should be focusing their time on solving and preventing violent crimes, but instead, we see a vast amount of their resources go to these endeavors instead.

All of this, unsurprisingly, traces back to the War on Drugs. Politicians and police argue that police need this authority to stop high-profile drug lords and their drug trafficking operations. It’s a bogus argument of course. The vast majority of these seizures were for less than $1000 and against people who were never even charged with a crime.

Bottom line, police should never be able to take a person’s property until they have been convicted of a crime. There’s really no ethical or constitutional if, ands, or buts about it. CAF needs to be outlawed at both the federal and state level, and you should pay close attention to the police, District Attorneys, and other politicians that benefit from this system working to keep it in place.

Litigators at places like The GoldWater Institute are heroes fighting the bad guys. Ironically, that’s what we pay the police to do.

by Charlotte O'Hara