No, you base it off the charge of the capacitor. It gets low enough, it trips a relay, power comes on for some amount of time.
However, this is idiotic. Instead of a capacitor, they should be using a rechargeable battery. Almost all 'sleeping' electronics should use rechargeable batteries. Monitors for detecting line voltage, TVs for IR sensing, microwaves for the clock, VCRs for the clock, etc. They shouldn't draw any voltage for the power lines until you start using them.
Microwaves don't actually need clocks, of course. The need a time counter that operates when the microwave is on, but not a 'clock'. Same thing with damn stoves. (Incidentally, I've owned a cheap microwave with a mechanical timer. A physical switch that released power to the rest of the device, and cut it off when it hit 0. Of course, mechanical timers that can go up to 45 minutes or so are not very accurate when measuring out a minute and a half, so that was annoying.)
VCRs do need a clock, but, OTOH, do not need a stupid clock display running when the device is off.
A single AAA battery replaceable from the front panel would probably last the entire life of the device. Hell, in a mechanical clock, which does a lot more work, a AAA battery lasts years, and those don't recharge when the device is operating.
Incidentally, it might be interesting to attempt to power solid-state answering machines off the phone line voltage. For those who argue it wouldn't be saving power, using a small amount of already existing DC current is better than having a converter brick just for the machine. The problem would be playing the messages without the line off the hook.
Yes, it's irresponsible. But so is high spending and high taxes. At least this way, we don't cripple the economy while we're spending ourselves to death. Yes, it means greater liabilities later on: and I'd like to not have a crippled economy that can possibly DEAL with that, rather than one that can't, because otherwise our economy will shrink and we won't be able to pay for the welfare state we've created and the whole thing is going to come crashing down.
Yes, if you believe that higher taxes would shrink the economy, sure.
I, OTOH, look at our economy right now and suspect the problem isn't 'taxes'. The problem is going to be when China starts abusing the debt of ours they hold, and the dollar crashes.
That's because you don't include the fact that a huge portion of the outrage at the size of government has to do with government doing things it shouldn't be doing. And this is something most of us agreed should have been done.
Oh, really?
That's certainly interesting information, when in actuality what the Republicans have been complaining about are taxes and 'the budget'. I don't see 'on inappropriate things' in 'tax and spend liberals'.
Look at Minnesota, where they slashed frickin road works to pay for tax cuts. (Luckily, states cannot run deficits.)
You can claim there is some sort of grand master plan behind that, but Republicans have, for the last two decades, complained about spending and all taxes, at all levels of government. (Although the spending is only bad when Democrats do it.)
Yes, but many of that half are uninsured by choice. (And HOW INSANE is it that Hillary would REQUIRE everyone to have health insurance?! This is a TAX ON LIVING.)
Anytime insurance is required by law, it is not 'insurance'. It is, instead, a tax that private companies collect.
I've been screaming about that WRT mandatory car insurance for years now. If the government wishes that car owners pay extra money (On top of existing car taxes) to cover the costs of accidents we may be in, to compensate other people, that is a reasonable proposal. It is not reasonable to require we do so to private companies, that makes no sense.
Any time a politician proposes that people be required to purchase stuff from private industry, something is seriously wrong, and I suspect we both agree with that. If the government wants everyone to have something, the government should provide it to everyone and tax them to pay for it. (And this is even more true when we're talking about money.)
We are talking about the relative quality of the U.S. system, and I made the point that for those who HAVE care, we have the best health care around.
False. There are many more people included there. MANY do not have health insurance BY CHOICE. If I did not have a family and I was self-employed, I likely would not be insured, since it would be a waste of my money. I'd save a lot of money and use it when necessary. One of the largest sectors of uninsured people are the middle-class and upper-middle-class self-employed.
...um, duh. The middle-class and upper-middle-class are one of the largest sectors of people, period. And a good deal of the poor are on government insurance.
And wait a minute. You're asserting that many people without insurance choose to be without it. Logically, those choosing to be without insurance are mostly healthy, so logically, their being excluded from consideration would bring the average health care quality down, not up.
The only way that health care quality is higher for people with insurance than without is if people without insurance are, on average, sicker than people that have it. (Duh.)
But, OTOH, that makes no sense. Surely someone who is commonly sick, and has poor health care provided to them, would attempt to get and keep health insurance. If only makes sense if insurance companies are deliberately turning awa
Um. No. First, it's right there in the same sentence: "to pay the debts."
Yes, just like 'provide for the common defense' is right there. If you're asserting that only power in that sentence is 'To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises', and that everything after it isn't a power (Simply general things they can do.), you have to include paying the debts as well as providing for the common defense.
Second, there's the necessary and proper clause which would, by anyone's estimation, consider the payment of debts to be a necessary and proper power for the execution of any power creating a debt. There's two types of federal power: enumerated, and implied. That's where "necessary and proper" comes in.
And, likewise, it's hard to see how any of their powers at all could work if, for example, the nation was invaded, so surely they have the power to prevent that. (Two can play at that game.)
Only where "providing for the common defence" is defined in the following enumerated powers.
But, anyway, there are at least six specific congressional powers that seem to fit under the 'provide the common defence' umbrella. (Seven if you include the one about pirates.)
The president appears to have one listed. One that only exists if Congress actually bothers to create an army or navy.
Except, he is. Nothing foolish about it. "National security" is a broad term, first of all, which includes the military. But saying he is "in charge" of national security simply means, to most of us, that he is charged with actually executing the laws and powers used to provide that security. Which is, of course, true.
Yes, in charge of executing the laws. Without laws in this regard (Including laws creating a military.) he has no power there. He cannot act in violation of the law in the cause of national security. (Mukasey, the new AG nominee, disagrees with me.)
Again, for years now I've been skeptical of the claim that there is an inherent constitutional authority to wiretap. But Clinton claimed it, and so did many other Presidents down through history, in various ways (including the directly related claim of inherent power to inspect international mail), and it's been backed up by the rest of the system. So while I've always leaned strongly toward no constitutional authority, I am not willing to say it is clear. It's not, from where I sit.
Ah, but the thing about this hypothetical 'inherent' power is that it's only claimed to exist on foreign communications. Even if we accept it exists, that still means Congress can regulate it to the extent as to confirm it is not being done on domestic communications.
Just like, for an absurd example, Congress has the right to pass a law requiring court officials to make sure, before they accept a presidential pardon, that it is not pardoning someone who was impeached and serving time from that, as the president cannot do that. Just because the President has a power to do something doesn't mean Congress can't put in some sort of oversight to assure he is doing something he actually has the power to do, and not secretly something else that just happens to look like a power of his.
And I don't see this supposed power, either. The idea that we lose rights entering or exiting this country, or being outside of it, is absurd and unconstitutional. Rant time:
The courts like to invent that the constitution only applies to people in the US, or citizens, or whatever, which is where they got the first stupid idea that the government could spy on people outside of it freely. (I don't know how it became a 'power of the executive', though.)
In actuality the constitution almost always refers to the rights of 'people' or speaks about what 'the government' can't do. Like, look at the 4th amendment. Do you see 'citizen' or 'in the US' in there? I don't. (I know 'the people' means 'the people of the United States', but 'people' and 'person' does not, as evidence by the fact
Yes, but Reagan's budgets, if adopted, would have led to a balanced budget before he left office (assuming revenue remained as it was, of course).
The problem is, at some point Republicans appear to have decided that the best way to force less spending was to force taxes as low as possible, even if that didn't result in less spending.
It's playing a game of chicken with our grandchildren, and I don't approve. I don't think anyone, of any part, should spend more than we take in in revenue. If we want to spend more, we should take in more. If we want to spend less...well, eventually we should take in less, although with our debt, it could be a while.
The Republicans have learned how to play that game, asking Democrats how they're going to pay for things. The Democrats, sadly, do not seem to understand it works in both directions.
Well sure, but you can't fault him for that, since he can only know what the CIA tells him. He had the right idea, and it worked, even if it was overkill.
Almost all government spending has moderately good intentions.:)
But, no, having lived though the 80s, although not old enough to vote during them, I know what a threat the USSR was assumed to possess. Everyone assumed we could find ourselves in another Vietnam somewhere to hold them back. So I don't blame Reagan. (I do, OTOH, blame the people that blamed Clinton for reducing the size of it, especially as the same people apparently don't have a problem with Bush tearing it to tatters through overuse.)
I just find it annoying that military spending is just completely ignored when it come to shrinking the government. We spend something like 40% of our money on it, and all we do is run around the world helping and hurting others with it, instead of worrying about us first. We could defend this country with a tiny fraction of the resources we had when Bush came to power, and we could still defend it with what he's left us, so I'm hoping we don't insanely attempt to rebuild the military back to where it was in 2000. (See, one of Ron Paul's good ideas. We don't need a huge military if we're only defending our own borders.)
Most of them have insurance, and get care through it. By far, most people in this country -- which necessarily includes most non-wealthy people -- have health insurance, including most non-wealthy sick people. There is no truth to the claim that non-wealthy sick people are mostly uninsured. By far, most of them are insured.
Yeah, most people 'by far' have health insurance...when you include people on government insurance. The amount of people of people who are on private insurance is 66%, and half the rest are uninsured.
I am, of course, presuming you don't approve of existing government insurance. As many of those are elderly with preexisting conditions who can't get either employee-based insurance or private plans, others are disabled who also can't get either, and the rest are children who can only get insurance if their parent manages to find a job with it, let's assume that, without government plans, of the 16% on government insurance, only 25% of them could get private insurance, adding 4% and making it 70% insured.
I.e., three out of every ten people in this country are a car accident away from medical bills they can't ever pay, without existing government insurance. With it, it's one in six.
Oh please. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt: your words used implied ALL of them lost their insurance. I presumed you were using hyperbole, and so gave you "overwhelming majority." If you actually meant "large minority" (and what's large?) then you seriously screwed up what you actually wrote.
No, I implied that ALL of them wouldn't have insurance pay for their illness, which, yes, is hyperbole. It's probably more around 80%-90% that get screwed when the insurance they've been paying for years for does not actually pay for their care, with many various ways that
Yes, the collecting money is an enumerated power for "the common defence and general welfare" is an enumerated power. However, "the common defence and general welfare" is not broad, but specifically defined by the following powers. The phrase "the common defence and general welfare" is a preamble to what follows. So spending money on "the general welfare" is not an enumerated power: spending money on post roads is an enumerated power.
You realize that, by that logic, paying the debt isn't a power, although borrowing on the credit of the US to create a debt is. Makes me wonder how we'd have any credit if, legally, we couldn't pay back our debt. A rather surreal constitutional interpretation, rather akin to the people who claim the second amendment requires being in a 'well regulated militia'.
However, that doesn't actually change my point even if it were true. Providing for the common defence is the job of Congress, it literally says it right there, even if that is not an enumerated power. It is not the job of the executive, which demonstrates my original claim that people who say the president is in charge of 'national security' are fools. The only question you raised is if Congress is allowed to provide for it 'in general', or only allowed to do so via the powers following that.
Legislation like, oh, FISA.
Yes, and?
Alright, as long as we're in agreement that FISA is a constitutional law, that Congress can direct where and how wiretapping happens because there is no presidential power to wiretap. (Whether or not the 4th applies to wiretaps not being important here. If it does, obviously Congress's law must follow certain rules, if not, it doesn't matter.)
It was no mere assertion, it was fact. And it's beside the point. What he was talking about was the fact that the original program they infamously tried to get Ashcroft to sign off on is a different program than what was actually implemented and became news a couple of years ago.
No, there was one program pre-hospital that Comey and Ashcroft refused to renew. It had already operated a few years, it continued to operate illegally for a week or two, was shut down, was 'fixed' somehow, and came back. It has, indeed, been asserted that this is a different program than the wiretapping program.
If it is, the executive is in more trouble, as the gang of eight says they haven't heard of another other program at all the executive could be talking about.
To recap this as bluntly as I can: The gang of eight were informed about a wiretapping program. They have repeatedly said that is all they were informed about. There are only three options: 1) They are lying, 2) It wasn't a covert action, 3) the executive is lying to them and it is a covert action, but the eight were informed it was just wiretapping.
If 2) or 3) are true, the gang of eight allowed the executive branch to run roughshod over them by not reporting to the correct committees.
If 1) is correct, the hearing about it are absurd sham, a stupid little dance.
Those are the only two choices. A lying gang of eight, or a stupid gang of eight.
Now, what might be true is that there is a dual-part program, one part with wiretapping and one part as something that is legitimately a covert action. However, either a) these are two separate things, with the intelligence committees needing to be informed of the first, and the eight or the committees being informed of the later, or b) they are the same program, and the eight needed to be informed of all parts of the program. You can't only tell them half of what you're doing.
Neither of those things has happened. If there's another program, or a non-spying part of the same program, or however anyone wants to legally parse this secret program we don't know anything about...either no legislator has been informed of it, (Which is flatly illegal.) or the gang of eight is lying to people, and, what's more faking outrage and investigations. (Which is probably not illegal, but reprehensible.)
The question is not, to a small-government conservative, how big the military should be, because the question is obvious: as big as is necessary (and clearly, Reagan was correct on that). The question is about WHAT the government should be involved with in the first place.
You mean, like illegal arms trade to Iran? </cheap_shot>
Yes, but his budgets, if implemented as submitted, would have resulted in a balanced budget by the end of his term. It's Democrats who increased spending. Funny how Reagan critics like to ignore that little fact.
I'm fairly certain it was both parties that increased spending, as I pointed out. Military spending is, indeed, spending. And Republicans who cut taxes.
And Reagan was not even vaguely correct about the size of the military we needed, but that is because no one realized that the Soviet Union would shortly collapse.
You are conflating, and therefore incorrect. I was addressing your incorrect definition of "conservative," which is separate from the Republican party.
And you are quite wrong about the party, as well. You've apparently never heard of Barry Goldwater... ?
I know about Goldwater, that's what I was talking about. I was arguing that traditional conservative thought didn't show up until him, with it actually peaking in 64 with his Presidential run, and didn't really manage to control the GOP until Reagan. (Ironically right around the point Goldwater became so dissatisfied with the Republicans that he left for the Libertarians.)
Which, incidentally, is almost what you said, also, except you said it reemerged with Reagan after having vanished for the previous 80 years. I say that Goldwater (And the Conservative coalition.) instead invented it while fighting the New Deal, and managed to popularize it within the party around 64, enough for him to run, and the party then somewhat subverted it to get Reagan elected. And that it's not comparable to the anti-progressive thought in the 1890s and before, it didn't exist at all until the New Deal 40 years later.
Calvin Coolidge is most remembered as being pro-business (which, of course, is the same as today's conservatives), but he was also what we would today call a "true conservative."
I didn't say that no one behaved as a conservative, I said that the theories and concept which, today, make up conservativism, entered mainstream Republican thought with Reagan. Although the theory itself goes back further, but not that far, only to opposite to the New Deal. In fact, that's where the words 'conservative' and 'liberal' got somewhat scrambled up in politics.
But I'll compromise with you. Let's date conservative thought to 1933, in opposition to the New Deal, and be done with it.:)
No, it's not.
The CIA may not be waterboarding people anymore, but it was in 2002. 'And current and former CIA officers tell ABC News there is a presidential finding, signed in 2002, by President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft approving the techniques, including water boarding.' And it was in February 2005, after the first fact came out and it had issued a memo at the end of 2004 saying there would be no more torture.
In theory, it's not waterboarding people now. In theory, it wasn't before 2004, either, until the fact it was came out. In theory, it wasn't between 2004 and 2007, until the next memo came out. The white house consistently publically declares it's not doing it, or will stop what it's doing, and then secretly issues memos that say that everything anyone is doing is within the law and they can keep doing it.
In the system you are talking about, there are insured people who are mostly well, and there are uninsured people who are mostly well, and they're
No, it's not. That is not a power of the federal government at all, it is a preamble of the enumerated powers to follow. So which actual power of Congress are you referring to?
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
That's not a 'preamble'. It's the first statement of the powers of Congress. They can collect money to spend on providing for the common defence and general welfare. That sentence continues with a bunch of repeated 'To's to state other powers. (Which is why the To is in uppercase, you are supposed to read all following statements as if they get spliced in there, with 'The Congress shall have Power' before it. That being a 'preamble', incidentally, would mean that it has no effect, so that section of the constitution would just be a bunch of unconnected 'To's that don't mean anything and our government would have almost no actual powers or abilities at all.)
I never implied he did. I simply stated the fact that he defends the country. He does it within, to some degree, the rules provided by the Congress. But the Congress is not doing the actual defense, and has no power to do so. They only have the power to provide for it in various enumerated and implied ways, and then the President has the power to actually do it.
Yes, he does. He directs all federal law enforcement, including the FBI, border patrol, ATF, and so on.
The president actually runs everything. Are you arguing that he has the right to operate the Post Office (Another Congressional power) however he wants because it's in the executive? That he has some magical 'postal power' that lets him override the laws of the United States when the mail needs to get through?
You see how absurd that is? The 'national security' claim is the same thing. He has nothing that could even vaguely be twisted into that power outside the military. (And I think you'd really have to ignore what 'commander in chief' actually means to claim he has that power WRT the military, but that is not the issue here, as the NSA is not part of the military.)
Any powers he has there have been granted him by legislation, and thus can be removed or restricted by more legislation.
Sure. I never said anything different.
Legislation like, oh, FISA.
Have you any example at all, other than the existence of liability waivers?
Here is the law granting immunity, and exceptions to immunity, under US tort law. Only 'Federal Agencies' and people working under them have immunity. This 'does not include any contractor with the United States.'. (See below)
Again, you are using the same terribly illogical example, comparing apples and oranges. Immunity extends to those actions specifically contracted for by the government, not everything else you do along the way. Same as for any elected official. Which is why, for example, a certain CA congressman went to jail for HOW he performed his duties, when he took bribes.
There is no 'immunity' that extends anywhere. There is simply government immunity, 'sovereign immunity'. You cannot sue the government unless it lets you. (In practice, at the Federal level, such immunity has been torn to shreds by various laws that do make the government liable for practically anything except policy decisions.)
There is additional immunity, by statute, that covers actual employees in performance of their jobs. (For all employees.) There are plenty of exceptions to these laws, too.
Sometimes a similar immunity has been granted to specific contractors, and the courts have once ruled that a 'contractor' was, for all purposes, actually an agency of the government, be
Not in whole, sure. No party is pure throughout. But the conservative part of the GOP dominated the party through the second half of the 80s and through the 90s, specifically repudiating the (relative) liberalism of Eisenhower and Nixon.
I knew eventually we'd get to Ronald Reagan. I agree with you completely, except WRT the Republican party from Reagan to Bush. You think they were 'small government', I do not. (And pretending the Republican party at the turn of the century has anything to do with the current one is silly. It's had at least three huge upheavals. You had fricking Hoover in there!)
Anyway, 'small-government' Reagan started a massive arms race with the Soviet Union. He quadrupled the debt. (Of course, as we all know, anytime there's a new social program, Republicans ask who's going to pay for it, but military spending is magically free.)
Um. I have no idea what definition of "conservative principles" you are using, but no, conservatism in this country since the 50s has been marked by precisely what I was referring to.
No, the theory of conservatives has been that since the 50s, although not as far as the Libertarians take it. (And they've completely abandoned the social half.)
The actual party didn't start the small government rhetoric until Reagan, and it almost instantly became just words, with Reagan and Bush I spending like there was no tomorrow.
The Republican party 100 years ago (Well, 110 years ago, really.) may have been mostly liberals as opposed to the progressives on the other side, and been against most spending, but classic liberalism, and anti-progressivism, isn't the same as conservativism or libertarianism.
Chester A. Arthur doesn't really count, he was trying to be independent, and under Benjamin Harrison, the Republicans were attacked for spending over a billion dollars by the Democrats! Hayes was maybe small government. Grant's administration was marred by insane scandals and nothing got done, and now we're reached the civil war. So I'm not entirely sure where you're getting the Republicans were 'small government' before the progressive realignment in the 00s.
You want to think it is about the war, but most of the Republicans/conservatives I've talked to who aren't voting favor the war. I've done doorbelling and phonebanking, and while I've had my share of people who say they won't vote Republican because of the war or whatever, for those who identify as Republican, the biggest reason for not voting for the GOP candidate was a lack of those conservative principles.
Put the word 'still' before 'identify' in 'those who identify as Republican' and I'll buy it.
Then what's the problem? It's not being done, if it is under the definition. So you have nothing to complain about. If it is being done, show where, and prosecute whoever has done it. Again, this is a bullshit issue.
It's being done by the CIA, on Bush's 'determination' that waterboarding somehow, suddenly, isn't torture, despite it being considered as such for 100 years, and despite it being given on the Senate floor as an example of things the MCA would outlaw. (And, remember, when interpreting laws, what is said about the law in Congress as it's being passed is rated pretty highly.)
And I can't prosecute anyone.
I am saying that for those of us who DO get the health care we want, our health care is better. And that's true. The trick is to bring everyone up to that level of care, not to drag everyone down, which is what socialization does, especially of the single-payer type.
Well, yes. In fact, we could get perfect health care by only having healthy people in the system, as insurance companies are working towards.
In the system you are talking about, there are insured people who are mostly well, and there are uninsured people who are mostly well, and they're both getting all the care they need. We provide their care, or, rather, their lack of care, fa
No, it's not. It's the job of the Executive. The Congress can set some rules for how that is done, but the Executive does that work.
Do I need to pull out the constitution? Providing for the 'common defence' is the job of the legislative branch.
The executive always does all the actual work, of everything, but it's not a power of the executive to 'defend the country'. It's a power of the legislature. The president doesn't get to override their laws in cases of 'national security', if anything, they get to override him.
You can argue that he has some special powers (like the right to collect military intelligence) that come with operating the military, but he has no 'national defense' powers at all outside of the military. (And the NSA is not part of the military.) I know people keep imagining they see them in the Constitution, but those powers simply do not exist. Any powers he has there have been granted him by legislation, and thus can be removed or restricted by more legislation.
In fact, the one 'national security' power listed, the suspension of habeas corpus, is granted to the legislature, although it's obviously something the executive would be actually using. (Yes, yes, the last time that was implemented the executive did that, but we're talking about the actual text.)
Contractors ARE employed by the government.
It's easy enough to say that, but there's plenty of caselaw that says the government asking you to do something doesn't absolve you from legal liability against third parties. Just ask the bounty hunters that have huge insurance premiums, and look at all the laws that shield contractors.
But, hey, I'll go along with your theory if it leads to the concept we shouldn't immunize telecoms for participating in wiretaps. (Although I must wonder why they want it.)
Shrug. My point is that there's no reason to hold the President responsible for it when Congress -- the only body charged with holding him responsible -- chooses not to. (Well, and the other point is that you clearly don't know enough to hold him responsible for it anyway, since you don't know much about the program.)
I do hold Congress responsible! That was my point! This whole mess should have been stopped when the gang of eight were informed about it, and they pointed out it wasn't a 'covert operation' and informed the correct committees, and those committees secretly debated it and shot it down. (I'm not entirely sure how that works, but I assume there is some process that, when they are informed of something secretly, they have a way to abort it.)
I'm way past attempting to hold Bush responsible for anything. Bush has become an inanimate force. Never attribute to malice or stupidity what can be explained by Bush being Bush. He just is, I expect nothing from him, so he cannot disappoint me, he's a random-number generator operating the executive branch. (I didn't actually realize I had started thinking this way until I started this paragraph. I used to feel anger at his actions, and now I just feel angry at the Democrats for not doing anything.)
What I do expect is for Congress, at least somewhat, to attempt to stop the gross oversteps he's taking.
That doesn't mean anyone's lied.
Yes it does, either that or wrongdoing. What it means we can't determine who is lying. Either the gang of eight is lying to the rest of Congress by pretending that what they were told about is solely a wiretapping program, or it means that the executive lied to them that it was (and they didn't both to inform the correct people, see above). Or it means that this program is solely for gathering intelligence and thus they shared it with people they thought would go along with them instead of whom they are legally required to.
However, this is almost completely irrelevant, and doesn't change my anger at Congress this one bit, as they know about it now and haven't done anything. I've seen the runaround t
And frankly, what most people think of as the "sane" Republicans are the biggest part of the problem. These are the liberal and moderate Republicans who pretend the Tenth Amendment doesn't exist, and who think compromising on fundamental principles on a regular basis is just fine thank you, and who cares about the conservative base if you can win the independent moderates? This is a recipe for destruction of any party.
The 'party' you're talking about is the libertarian wing, which is about 10% of the Republican party, and combined with the actual Libertarian Party, composes at most 15% of the active voters in this country, probably close to half that. That's not a recipe to just lose elections, that's a recipe to lose them so badly you lose ballot access!
Just FYI, that's not actually the traditional Republican party, or traditional conservative principles, anyway. I don't really care, it's not my party, but I do know something about the history of it. You're trying to steer the party a certain way, the party didn't 'abandon' that position, it never held it, although recently it's asserted it has to keep the 10% of itself happy. The whole 'states rights' thing didn't even show up until the 60s.
And, no, the biggest part of the problem is Bush, as evidenced by the fact that the GOP was going just fine until he showed up, even when the spending policies that didn't match the rhetoric and they didn't actually do any of the social conservative stuff they yammered about either.
I know what you mean, the failure to walk the walk was certainly harming the party's credibility, but that didn't seem to actually translate into less votes. The self-destruct didn't happen until Bush started driving the party at full speed off a cliff and a fourth of the party encouraged it and another fourth leaped off the crazy train, and the rest of the party has no idea what a useful move would be, whether they should defend Bush or push him away.
The torture thing is a bullshit issue. Who is in favor of torture? Barely anyone. The Dems are trying to make an issue where it isn't. Sens. McCain and Graham got together with Bush and the Democrats and passed the MCA last year. They all AGREED on torture: we won't do it. If there's a practice being done that you think is torture, fine, then have Congress categorize it as such. That's how it should work, and if the Dems felt so strongly about it, why aren't they trying to categorize more things as torture? Either because they know they aren't being done and so there'd be no opposition and they'd lose the issue, or because they actually believe the procedure isn't wrong and don't want it to be taken away.
We don't need to classify 'more things' as torture. We already have a perfectly good definition, and waterboarding it under it. Google 'Chinsaku Yuki'. We sentenced him to life in prison for the war crime of waterboarding. And 'Yukio Asano', 15 years hard labor. The American Major Edwin Glenn got 10 years for it at a court martial in 1901, which is pre-Third Geneva Convention which outlaws that sort of stuff.
If the president wants to legalize that, perhaps he should propose the laws be changed.
That's an illusion. We pay more out of pocket, yes, but that is with price controls and other restrictions on private business that hurts the economy, contributing to overall depression in wages and employment rates. Plus, as you likely know, Americans get a lot more and better health care for their health care dollars than almost all the other countries, so it's comparing apples and oranges.
What on earth are you talking about? By any health care metric, we're in last place to any other first world country. We're last in infant mortality, we're last in life expectancy, we're last in everything. (No, we're not ahead in prostate cancer treatment, despite what Giuliani thinks. We do put more emphasis on detecting it earlier, though.)
And I've never seen a single-payer plan that would de
This MTA behaviour is, like it or not, the correct behaviour at the MTA level. Postfix (my secure MTA choice for the past 9 years, and [IMO] a far superior one to Qmail) behaves identically regarding duplicates, as does every other MTA I've looked at. I wouldn't be surprised if this was written up in an RFC on SMTP as the correct behaviour.
No it doesn't, and no it isn't. If postfix is handed one message, it will only hand that message to a person once, no matter how many times they end up in the expanded aliases.
qmail, IIRC, will expand each alias and remove duplicates from each alias, but if you address it to multiple aliases and those aliases include duplicate addresses, it will not remove them between aliases.
I.e., if you have a admin@example.com and an users@example.com, and they both contain some repeated addresses, mail sent to one of them will be correct, everyone gets one copy. If you have an everyone@example.com that contains both admin and users, and someone sends mail to everyone@example.com and users@example.com, everyone in users gets two copies.
This is probably because qmail is 'secure', which apparently means 'broken up into tiny pieces that talk poorly to each other', so it's probably breaking the mail up at RCPT level and parsing the two 'messages' separately.
Now, between mail servers, this can happen anyway, as you have no way to ensure that two RCPTs for a single message are handed to the same server at once, instead of the message being broken in half. But normally within the same mail server that doesn't happen, except, apparently, with qmail.
I am saying A is legal because the President has the authority to do A, so anyone doing A on his behalf cannot be held liable for that. You are saying, that's wrong, because if A is legal and they are doing A, well... what if they also do B?!
There is an governmental concept that says the government cannot be sued, and that includes government employees who are doing their jobs.
There is also the fact that the executive branch cannot be barred from doing actual executive branch things. (Although I still completely dispute the concept that spying is one of those things at all, at least when done outside of the military, which is the NSA is. Spying on enemy troop positions during a war, sure, but defending the country in general is Congress' job, not the president, so that craziness about 'national security' doesn't fly here.)
You think the second is what means you can't sue the executive branch, but that's not correct. It's not executive that's immune to lawsuits, it's the government in general. You can't sue the executive, you can't sue the legislature, you can't sue the judical. Congress can't make any laws about liabilities for proper government actions for themselves or other branches, the courts can't find proper government actions of themselves or other branches are torts, and the executive branch isn't really involved in torts but couldn't be anyway WRT to itself. The government is completely immune from civil actions against itself.
There is no other sort of civil immunity. Proper and legal actions of the government cannot be torts, it doesn't matter who does them against who. (Of course, 'improper' actions are another kettle of fish, as are people who work for the government but are doing things without their authority, but those are neither here nor there.)
Hence, it's easy to show that any 'executive' immunity doesn't grant any sort of immunity on contractors, as government immunity in general doesn't do that, as evidenced by the fact that government contractors get sued all the time, sued so much they often are legally granted immunity to start with. (Like, for example, the telecoms were granted if they had a specific signed piece of paper.)
If you want government immunity for an action, you have to be employed by the government and that action has to be part of work for the government. Just one of those doesn't cut it. Or you can have statutory immunity where the law has granted it to you, like the law does for all wiretaps with warrants or the aforementioned signature.
That's a matter of interpretation, of course, since we don't know much about the program. So you can't claim with any real certainty that it doesn't apply.
Unless everyone's been lying to us, it isn't a matter of interpretation.
What's more, the Gang of Eight had the authority to then overrule the President and tell their respective committees if he didn't comply with their interpretation of the law, given the specifics of the program. Not a single one of them raised that objection at the time of the program (not even Rockefeller), nor when it was revealed in public, that I recall (and I listened to many of them explain their view on the matter).
I. Know. That.
That. Is. Why. I. Am. Angry. With. Them.
It's really hard to see how you can know enough about the program to make that judgment.
The definition of wiretapping is 'listening on conversations'. That's what wiretapping means. It's called the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program', and surveillance means 'watching someone to gain information'. And they've actually said, repeatedly, that it's to gain information about terrorists, often under oath. Even if that's not what it actually is, it appears that is actually what they told the Congressmen it was, so said Congressmen had a duty to inform the Intelligence Committees anyway. (And the DoD committees, and probably the judiciary committees
No, he is not. He is not, in any way at all, "left." There is no issue on which he is "left." (And no, anti-Iraq-war is not "left." Ask that socialist/communist Pat Buchanan.)
I know, that's why I used scare quotes.:) He's 'left' only in the delusional pro-war universe that the Republicans have redefined reality to be, where everyone concerned who is we're throwing good money after...more good money, not to mention American soldiers, away in a completely foolish and pointless war, is now, somehow, on the left. Where standing up against torture is some crazy liberal concept.
I don't know what happened to you guys and your party. I think you were relying on demagogues too long, you ceded too much power to Limbaughes and gratefully accepted anyone who showed up to 'fight the liberals', and then, when the head of the party turned to lunacy, those people went gleefully along, as all the sane Republicans stood around in shock and dropped out one by one. You gave lunatics a seat at the table as long as they voted correctly, and then you accidentally went in the wrong direction with Bush, and then somehow he gained control of the lunatics and kept going.
I honestly don't know if you're going to be able to get your party back.
Now granted, I fully accept -- indeed, it is a point I made in regard to Paul -- that people are not philosophically oppposed to universal health care, as they logically should be if they care about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the principles upon which they are based. But they will be, in an overwhelming majority, opposed to any actual plan that tries to offer it, for practical reasons (although what they don't realize is that the philosophical objections are based on the inevitable practical realities), which is why not even Hillary Clinton or John Edwards are proposing to do it.
Ah, now I see where you're coming from.
But I think you're wrong. Single-payer universal health care will work, and it will be cheaper than the existing system. (As evidenced by the fact that we pay more, per capita, than any country with it.)
So while the Republicans try to talk about the cost and whatnot, in reality, that's just desperate misdirection. There's enough money sucked out of the system by insurance companies, and by people simply not paying for their care, that everyone could be covered without costs rising for anyone who pays now.
There are people now who actually do freeload on the system, going to hospitals and not paying, even though they could, raising costs for everyone. If those people pay taxes, they couldn't freeload anymore. So, in a sense, those people will have their costs raised by some amount. And healthy people without insurance will obviously pay more. (They're playing a dangerous game right now, where one accident can ruin their life, although I'm sure you don't think it's acceptable to make them stop that.) Putting them and the freeloaders into the system, and cutting out the overhead, there would be no increase in costs for anyone else, and probably a decrease.
And the rich are likely to continue to pay for their own care outside the system, and would additionally now pay taxes for the medical care they aren't getting, so their costs would actually go up, but that's their own choice.
If Democrats wanted to assure people of this, they could always break it out on taxes, like social security. (I actually think that would be a good idea in general, after you do your taxes, you get an additional worksheet you can plug the number into and work out what percentage goes where, if you want. I bet you agree.)
Nope. McCain is a huge longshot, but Romney actually has the best chance of winning the nomination of anyone. This is an odd year, and Giuliani, despite being a big frontrunner, has little actual chance of winning: he is unlikely to win 50 percent of the delegates outright, and in convention, he would die because the social conservatives would rally again
And IF the President has the power to do them, then it's bullshit that anyone should be sued for helping the President exercise his legal authority. No dice.
Let's apply this example elsewhere. Everyone agrees that a state has the legal authority to detain criminals before trial. Everyone furthermore agrees that a state has the legal authority to ask a third party to do that for them, i.e., hire bounty hunters.
And let's presume the law says that, if you're in a car accident without a driver's license, you are liable for damages, even if you are not at fault.
Is a duly-authorized bounty hunter, if while attempting to legally apprehend someone, in a car accident without a license, is he liable for damages? Of course he is.
There is a general principle of US law (In fact, all western law) that you cannot sue the government without permission, thus there is magical blanket immunity to all actions of 'the government', except when the government decides to allow such suits. All actions of the government are done by government employees, of course, so they have immunity to civil lawsuits WRT them doing their duty. In practice, the government will actually allow many suits against it, but they do not have to. The government only has to concern itself with criminal law, not civil law, as the government is allowed to cause torts against people, and you can't sue them because they, for example, took and killed your valuable dog because it had no tags, when you could obviously sue anyone else for doing the same thing.
But it stops there, right at the edge of the government. Anything past the government, you need specific laws granting immunity. The telecoms not only were not given such a grant, damages were explicitly written into the law if they were operating at the request of the government and certain conditions were not met.
His oath of office includes respecting his oath of secrecy. There may be some cases where violating that oath of secrecy is warranted, but this is clearly not one of them, for multiple reasons: first because that oath of secrecy is much more important than this one issue, and second because he had other means at his disposal than violating that oath. He could have put a hold on it, he could have tried to stop funding, he could have done many things he chose to not do.
You realize at this point we're not disagreeing, right? Yes, he had plenty of options to fight this, and should have picked an actual option instead of writing a stupid letter.
Again, "apparent." He couldn't say it was illegal.
You don't go violating your oath and risking national security not just for today, but for the future by setting a terrible precedent, because you think something might be illegal. Anyone who thinks like you apparently do on this issue is unfit to have such security clearance. Thankfully, none of the top Democrats think like that.
Allowing the executive branch to invent areas of secrecy is a terrible precedent.
No, that's mistaken. See 50 USC 413b(c)(2).
That applies to covert actions:
50 USC 413b(e) "Covert action" defined
As used in this subchapter, the term "covert action" means an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly, but does not include--
(1) activities the primary purpose of which is to acquire intelligence, traditional counterintelligence activities, traditional activities to improve or maintain the operational security of United States Government programs, or administrative activities;
In other words, covert actions, at least in this section, are black-ops, not spying. I really like the fact there's no weasel words in that statute for people to pick over. Acquiring intelligence!=covert ops. And it's rather hard to argue that wiretapping
No. You did not say that. Indeed, and on the contrary, you said they would be in power, which directly implies they couldn't be stopped from implementing it. You may have MEANT that, but you didn't express it well, and I misunderstood it.
Sorry. I'm talking about Ron Paul getting elected. There might be some hypothetical future where Libertarians take over the entire government, but that is not 2008, or even 2012.
Paul as president means he could sabotage parts of the executive branches' enforcement mechanism, and veto some stuff he doesn't like, although it's possible that there would be a veto-proof Democratic majority in Congress. He couldn't do anything about social security or medicare or any of the social services at all.
Not among the Republican base -- which I am explicitly talking about -- no, it doesn't. Not in the slightest. You have it backward, in fact.
The Republican base isn't going to vote for a Democrat, period. They'll hold their noise and vote for Ron Paul if he win the nomination. Meanwhile, many of the Republican who left the GOP thanks to the war will be back if any Republican shows up who's anti-war and anti-general-Bush-stupidity.
Ron Paul is somehow in the 'center right' of the American people. He's not 'conservative' (At least, the rather delusional pro-torture, anti-Constitutional thing that's passing for conservative right now.) enough to win the primary, but he's far enough 'left' (If by left we mean 'anti-war') that the center (Which is entirely anti-war) would vote for him.
It truly is a surreal day in American politics.
That's not true. Only a tiny percentage of Republicans, and a significant minority -- yes, minority -- of everyone else wants universal health care. Oh sure, insipid polls that ask "if you could get something for free, or make sure others have something for free, would you take it?" have a majority saying yes. But when you ask them about specific plans, and do an actual cost-benefit analysis of how much it would cost to help how many people... the numbers drop significantly. Even moreso if you compare it to a market-based solution.
Republican consultant Tony Fabrizio took a poll (Sorry, PDF) in June this year. Look on Page 51. 51% think universal health care should be a guaranteed right, and only 43% think otherwise. (And 'it should be a guaranteed right' is a bit more extreme than simply saying 'It should exist right now.'.)
And notice that of the two large groups objecting to it, one of them, the 'Dennis Miller Republicans' is largely concerned with illegal aliens gaming the system, which is probably why they're opposed to health care, so their concerns about 'illegals' using it could be removed(1) and they'd be happy with it. The Free Marketers, aka, the Libertarians, loathe it but they only make up 8% of the party.
Also look at page 57 for a more generalized question. Conversely, look at 52.
I have _no_ idea why they didn't ask about leaving Iraq. They asked whether we should have gone in, but not if we should leave in, say, six months.
Not really, no. It's all about Paul turning people off. It has nothing to do with Nader, who didn't get very many of the independents at all. He got a huge number of the independent VOTE -- the number of votes that didn't go to the top two parties -- of course, but a tiny percentage of actual independents who voted.
I was just pointing out that the non-Democratics lefts got seriously burned in 2000, and are unlikely to vote non-Democrat to 'teach the Democrats not to ignore them' or out of a misguided concept that the two parties are the same. But, yes, they're going to be turned off by his policies anyway.
He would be less popular if his views were well known? Um, that's is in line with what I said, not the opposite of anything I said. I am saying he will lose a huge number of
That killer(KSH) is a killer of thousands of innocent people - Americans and other nationalities in the WTC, and bragged about it to his interrogators.
Um...you do know he was tortured into his confession, right? And that it more than likely is a complete fabrication?
Does your Christian duty prevent you from harming others in self defense or in defense of innocents?
Um, actually, yes. If someone strikes us we're supposed to turn the other cheek. (Man am I in a weird discussion, with a supposed Christian who's apparently never heard of Jesus.)
But, anyway, there's a difference between using force to physically stop someone from causing harm, using force to detain someone dangerous to society, and using force to hurt them until they do what you want them to. The Catholic church has been making exactly that distinction for quite some time, it's how a 'just war' is, in fact, supposed to operate.
I disapprove of known innocent people being imprisoned. But I am a realist enough to know that no system of deciding guilt or innocence is perfect, and therefore, if we are ever to imprison anyone, we are likely to end up imprisoning some innocents.
Um, duh. Which is why we have a court system deliberately set up to minimize such mistakes. A court system that Bush is not using, instead preferring to rely on one where lawyers often cannot speak to their clients and courts make determinations with merely the prosecution speaking and the defense not even informed until the decision is over. A court system they were forced to implement in the first place, instead of just detaining and torturing people forever without trial.
Nonsense on stilts. Just because they haven't been found guilty does not mean they aren't guilty.
YES. IT. DOES.
That's how 'innocent until proven guilt' works, that has been the legal premise for all of civilization dating back before this country was founded. You are innocent until you are found guilty.
You are using a particular legal system of a few countries to bolster an assertion about actual guilt.
No, you're using a legal term and pretending it means something else, but you're using it in the context of what we can and cannot legally do.
Do you mean that we shouldn't interrogate them unless we have judicially proven them guilty? Not even the police work that way.
The police, as human beings with freedom of speech, can ask whatever questions they want about anything whenever. What they cannot do is require anyone to answer them, or torture people until they do.
By the way, nobody at Gitmo has ever been tortured, and nobody there has even been waterboarded. For that matter, only 3 people have been waterboarded by the CIA, one the planner of 9-11, and he broke and provided intelligence that saved many lives.
Oh really?
Not only has there been verschärfte vernehmung, but it was approved from the top. (Sorry, I slipped into German there. 'Enhanced interrogations.') Considering that people have died there from hypothermia (In Cuba of all places) and stress positions, I wonder, exactly, what you think is going on there.
Now, you're correct in that we don't have any confirmed waterboarding at Gitmo, but considering that several dozen people there have never been allowed to speak with lawyers or anyone at all (And that's just the people we know about.), saying that 'nobody' there has been waterboarded is idiotic.
There's a little problem with your assertion. He did NOT see those abuses.
Well, why don't you actually come up with some actual lie he's made about that. Oh, right.
As for the "someone who actually tortures innocents" "not in the heat of battle" - you have a little problem there too. First, we are in battle.
You raise a numeric calculus in an attempt to prove moral relativism. So lets turn it around: are you willing to inflict 3 minutes of fear on one killer in order to save the lives of thousands of innocents?
Ah, you don't get to assert 'one killer', you've already said they were just suspects. And, no, because I'm a Christian, and, as such, is not supposed to cause harm to other people.
You assert that, apparently, you're Roman Catholic, although one that hasn't noticed that an ecumenical council and a Pope have said torture is 'intrinsece malum', an act that is incapable of being an ordered act and hence always sinful?
And here's Second Vatican Council, emphasis mine: Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator.
So it's not just torture. Catholics, expect for you apparently, disapprove of innocent people merely being imprisoned.
Is your world monochromatic - one is a moral relativist if one is not an absolute moral absolutist?
Are you high? An absolute absolutist?
I know of no case where an known innocent was "tortured" or even coercively interrogated. There are, like on all sides in all wars, a few who violate policy and commit crimes (such as those toads at Abu Ghraib). But there is no policy I know of to inflict harm intentionally and unnecessarily on innocents.
Um, all torture of people in Gitmo is harming innocent people, as none of them have been found guilty of anything, and until then they are innocent. That's how 'guilt' works in...I almost said 'every civilized country', but it actually works that way in uncivilized countries, too, they just find people guilty without a trial.
Frankly, I get really PO'd at those who accuse the US intentionally causing undue harm to innocents. It pissed me off during Vietnam, and it pissed me off now. It caused me to spend 2004 fighting John Kerry's campaign because he used such slander against all of us who participated in that war.
Yeah, good plan. Fight someone who spoke out against such abuses that he saw in the middle of a war, which put someone back in office who actually tortures innocents. (And not in the heat of battle, either.) Way to defend this country's image. It's like fighting crime by arresting people who report crime. That will cause crime to decrease!
Tell me - do you accept that we have enemies who represent a threat to kill many Americans, or is your head in the sand? How do you propose to deal with the likes of Al Qaeda and their millions of supporters?
What are we doing about al Qaeda right now? The Taliban has taken back Afganistan, and AQ is hiding in Pakistan, an ally, and supported by Saudi Arabia, another ally. Maybe we should, you know, actually do something about those things?
How about the whacko government of Iran, which until 9-11 was responsible for more American deaths by terrorism than anyone else?
Um, nooooo. Timothy McVeigh was.
I can't even imagine what acts of terrorism by Iran you're talking about except Iran hostage crisis, and that didn't result in the deaths of anyone at Iran's hands. (Although after a secret attack by the US was planned and then aborted, a helicopter accident killed eight servicemen, but that sort
To answer your question: Catholic. Not moral relativist (your stereotyping is turned on again) - perhaps more correct would be not being a moral absolutist in areas where interpretation is required.
So...you're willing to torture non-Americans to protect Americans...but you're not a moral relativist? What about torturing Canadians to protect Americans?
Is there a ratio? Can it go negative...would you torture a single citizen to save a thousand non-citizens? A million?
Does it depend on what type of non-citizen? Do Canadians count more? Does it depend on what type of citizen? (Do black people only count 3/5th of a citizen?)
And I know of a religion called 'Catholic', but it's a type of Christianity, and probably not what you're talking about. But 'catholic' just means 'universal', so possible you're talking about something else, a similarly named church.
You are familiar with the "just war" doctrine of the church?
I am, but, you, by mentioning it in the discussion, are indicating that perhaps you do not. The 'War on Terror' doesn't fit the criteria for a just war, although that is more a problem with the fact it's not actually a war than it being unjust.
However, several of the requirements is that innocent people are not harmed, or harmed as little as possible, and certainly not harmed deliberately. Like if you, I dunno, tortured them. That would appear to void the 'Just war' warranty.
But you are right, one can cherry pick the bible for all kinds of things - such as absolute pacifism or revenge (eye for an eye).
You're Jewish? Although one apparently unaware they don't do that 'eye for an eye' stuff anymore. (And that was less revenge than punishment.) That's just codifying the max punishment, anyway, that you could not, under any circumstances, harm someone more than they had harmed you, it wasn't actually what happened.
I'm part of a religion called 'Christianity', which started with, basically, Jewish thought, and they stopped taking revenge when Jesus said to. (Jesus being God in human form, there's more information online.)
And we did the whole torture thing, too, including waterboarding! Although that's one of our darker chapters called 'The Spanish Inquisition'. (Not to be confused with the Monty Python sketch.)
War is ugly. Horrible things happen to guilty and innocent people. There are situations that force difficult moral decisions (I gave the example of Churchill and Coventry).
Yes, people cannot control who they fall in hate with, but they can refrain from giving into their urges. We don't need to treat tortures like outcasts, with the love of Jesus they can change their heart and rebuke their evil, but until then they need help. Love the sinner, hate the sin.
But we can keep the government from helping them with their depravity by condoning it.
What if Congress passed a law saying that no one could help Bush commute Libby's sentence? Sure, Bush would not be breaking the law by asking them to... but any lawyer would be breaking the law by helping him write up the papers! That's patently ridiculous.
Um, actually, Congress has done exactly things like that, although usually attached to funding. Stating that the President can't use any government resources to do X.
Again, that's simply wrong. because of what I said above: if the Executive can do this wiretaps without Congressional approval (or against Congressional prohibition), then no company is prohibited from helping the Executive to that end. The law, in that context, is unconstitutional.
I see what you're arguing, and the point is reasonable, but it's not actually logically correct with regard to civil liability.
If we assume the president has the power to do these wiretaps, then, yes, he can ask companies to do them, and they couldn't be charged with anything.
However, that wouldn't remove any civil liability the companies incurred, thanks to laws. The law says you can sue them for a certain amount of damages if they wiretap without X's signature, and they wiretapped without X's signature, you can sue them. The fact that X is a member of the executive branch is not relevant, it could have been some guy in Boise that's supposed to sign off on it.
The president, and people in the executive branch, would have immunity to that in general, as you can't sue the government for stuff like that. But unless the telecoms have become part of the government when I wasn't looking (It's possible), they can be sued just fine, and are liable for huge damages assuming they did the data mining it's presumed they did.
(And, just so we're both clear, neither of actually thinks the president has constitutional authority to order wiretaps on American citizens, and thus not only does Congress has the power to insist on warrants for those, it also has the ability to implement some sort of oversight to make sure that supposed non-citizen wiretaps are actually on non-citizens, right? I.e, we're arguing inside of Bush's hypothetical universe wherever he can do whatever he wants, but we don't actually think that?)
Actually, no... amnesty properly means what you are describing.
Amnesty is correct if we were just talking about the criminal charges. But a government doesn't grant 'amnesty' against third parties suing you, that's not a good term for that. Historically, okay,it's the same thing as 'retroactively didn't happen', but modern amnesty rarely includes protection from lawsuits.
But under no circumstances could he have, or would we have, revealed it to a closed session of Congress, which would be an absolute violation of his oath to secrecy. It's not about punishment: he actually takes that oath seriously, knowing that reverernce for the oath itself is far more important than any one issue he may wish were not covered by it.
His oath of secrecy? WTF? How about his oath of office? He learned about apparent lawbreaking and possible unconstitutional behavior, done in secret, by the executive branch and he thought a useful solution to that was to write a letter?
Actually, forget 'apparent lawbreaking'. Stuff like that has to be brought before the Senate Intelligence Committee or that is illegal. Being shown stuff 'secretly' without the full committee knowing is, ipso facto, incorrect behavior, and should have been immediately brought up in the full committee. It doesn't matter what stupid agreement he signed, they all have security clearances.
No, they showed him exactly because they knew he'd do nothing about it. Then he demands an 'investigation' that, of course, turns up nothing because the White House is allowed to stonewall.
Yes, you are. You are presenting two arguments that are inconsistent with each other based on your own interpretation of the facts. You are arguing they are so unpopular they won't get into power, which necessarily implies they care more about their principles than being elected;
This is 100%, absolutely, totally correct, as I've repeatedly said.
and then you argue they would, if they got power, sacrifice those principles in order to be elected again.
I didn't say anything of the sort whatsoever.
I said they wouldn't be able to implement the changes they want, not that they wouldn't try. Everyone else would stop them, and even if they succeeded, the changes would be undone when they were unceremoniously voted out of office the next election. (For a more specific example, Ron Paul, as president, would have the ability to sabotage enforcement of the laws he doesn't like, but that obviously wouldn't outlast him.)
But I'm done explaining, and I'm sick of having to repeatedly assert that I believe the Libertarians will try to do exactly what they say they will, and you arguing, somehow, that I'm saying something else. I merely believe this attempt will end in failure, except where I otherwise stated. (And the parts that will fail are the useful parts, and the parts that will succeed will inch us closer to total corporate control.)
You wrote, "And that's all that would happen. If they were to touch social security, or welfare, or medicare, they'd be out on their asses next election, and those would come right back." So you are saying they have the power, but they will not do all those other things with that power. (That's what "that's all that would happen" means.)
You've misunderstood the word 'touch'. You don't touch a law by trying to change it, you touch it by actually changing it. If they were, somehow, able to do that, and it affected any people's benefits, they'd be quickly out. (Of course, the president can't really do anything about that anyway.)
And, oddly enough, I completely agree with all your premises below and disagree totally with your results.
Paul is somewhat popular now, but if he were the nominee, he would be absolutely buried. Many Republicans would refuse to vote because of his stance on the war,
'Many'? How many is many? I don't know what polls you're reading, but being pro-war seems to seriously damage people in the polls. Among the people who are still calling themselves 'Republicans' and running the party, maybe not, but we're talking if he's hypothetically already won the nomination.
, others because they are essentially big government Republicans.
About half of Republican voters favor universal health care, so I'll buy that.
And almost all of the non-libertarian independents would vote for the Democrat.
That's called 'learning your lesson with Nadar in 2000', he he.
Maybe it is because Paul's views are largely unknown. I don't know how little known they are.
I suspect it's exactly the opposite, that he would be less popular if his views were. But that's a silly worry in an election...he has a year to make his views known.
I only know people care a lot more about maintaining our welfare state than they do about the war, despite what they say to pollsters.
You are correct.
My conclusions:
Because Paul's views are not very well known (Or no one believes he would actually do them), if he got the primary, he could actually win, especially against a Democrat that Republicans despite, like Hillary. He'd suck back in all the disillusioned Republicans that because of Bush.
Anyone else as a Republican, the Democrats win, period, as the American people are sick and tired of the war. I.e., the election next year will be between anti-war people, or at least non-pro-war people. If the Republicans do not run one of those, they are not, in any useful sense, in the election. (Especially as the war is actually going to end about three months before the election when we run out of military.)
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No, you base it off the charge of the capacitor. It gets low enough, it trips a relay, power comes on for some amount of time.
However, this is idiotic. Instead of a capacitor, they should be using a rechargeable battery. Almost all 'sleeping' electronics should use rechargeable batteries. Monitors for detecting line voltage, TVs for IR sensing, microwaves for the clock, VCRs for the clock, etc. They shouldn't draw any voltage for the power lines until you start using them.
Microwaves don't actually need clocks, of course. The need a time counter that operates when the microwave is on, but not a 'clock'. Same thing with damn stoves. (Incidentally, I've owned a cheap microwave with a mechanical timer. A physical switch that released power to the rest of the device, and cut it off when it hit 0. Of course, mechanical timers that can go up to 45 minutes or so are not very accurate when measuring out a minute and a half, so that was annoying.)
VCRs do need a clock, but, OTOH, do not need a stupid clock display running when the device is off.
A single AAA battery replaceable from the front panel would probably last the entire life of the device. Hell, in a mechanical clock, which does a lot more work, a AAA battery lasts years, and those don't recharge when the device is operating.
Incidentally, it might be interesting to attempt to power solid-state answering machines off the phone line voltage. For those who argue it wouldn't be saving power, using a small amount of already existing DC current is better than having a converter brick just for the machine. The problem would be playing the messages without the line off the hook.
Yes, it's irresponsible. But so is high spending and high taxes. At least this way, we don't cripple the economy while we're spending ourselves to death. Yes, it means greater liabilities later on: and I'd like to not have a crippled economy that can possibly DEAL with that, rather than one that can't, because otherwise our economy will shrink and we won't be able to pay for the welfare state we've created and the whole thing is going to come crashing down.
Yes, if you believe that higher taxes would shrink the economy, sure.
I, OTOH, look at our economy right now and suspect the problem isn't 'taxes'. The problem is going to be when China starts abusing the debt of ours they hold, and the dollar crashes.
That's because you don't include the fact that a huge portion of the outrage at the size of government has to do with government doing things it shouldn't be doing. And this is something most of us agreed should have been done.
Oh, really?
That's certainly interesting information, when in actuality what the Republicans have been complaining about are taxes and 'the budget'. I don't see 'on inappropriate things' in 'tax and spend liberals'.
Look at Minnesota, where they slashed frickin road works to pay for tax cuts. (Luckily, states cannot run deficits.)
You can claim there is some sort of grand master plan behind that, but Republicans have, for the last two decades, complained about spending and all taxes, at all levels of government. (Although the spending is only bad when Democrats do it.)
Yes, but many of that half are uninsured by choice. (And HOW INSANE is it that Hillary would REQUIRE everyone to have health insurance?! This is a TAX ON LIVING.)
Anytime insurance is required by law, it is not 'insurance'. It is, instead, a tax that private companies collect.
I've been screaming about that WRT mandatory car insurance for years now. If the government wishes that car owners pay extra money (On top of existing car taxes) to cover the costs of accidents we may be in, to compensate other people, that is a reasonable proposal. It is not reasonable to require we do so to private companies, that makes no sense.
Any time a politician proposes that people be required to purchase stuff from private industry, something is seriously wrong, and I suspect we both agree with that. If the government wants everyone to have something, the government should provide it to everyone and tax them to pay for it. (And this is even more true when we're talking about money.)
We are talking about the relative quality of the U.S. system, and I made the point that for those who HAVE care, we have the best health care around.
False. There are many more people included there. MANY do not have health insurance BY CHOICE. If I did not have a family and I was self-employed, I likely would not be insured, since it would be a waste of my money. I'd save a lot of money and use it when necessary. One of the largest sectors of uninsured people are the middle-class and upper-middle-class self-employed.
And wait a minute. You're asserting that many people without insurance choose to be without it. Logically, those choosing to be without insurance are mostly healthy, so logically, their being excluded from consideration would bring the average health care quality down, not up.
The only way that health care quality is higher for people with insurance than without is if people without insurance are, on average, sicker than people that have it. (Duh.)
But, OTOH, that makes no sense. Surely someone who is commonly sick, and has poor health care provided to them, would attempt to get and keep health insurance. If only makes sense if insurance companies are deliberately turning awa
Um. No. First, it's right there in the same sentence: "to pay the debts."
Yes, just like 'provide for the common defense' is right there. If you're asserting that only power in that sentence is 'To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises', and that everything after it isn't a power (Simply general things they can do.), you have to include paying the debts as well as providing for the common defense.
Second, there's the necessary and proper clause which would, by anyone's estimation, consider the payment of debts to be a necessary and proper power for the execution of any power creating a debt. There's two types of federal power: enumerated, and implied. That's where "necessary and proper" comes in.
And, likewise, it's hard to see how any of their powers at all could work if, for example, the nation was invaded, so surely they have the power to prevent that. (Two can play at that game.)
Only where "providing for the common defence" is defined in the following enumerated powers.
But, anyway, there are at least six specific congressional powers that seem to fit under the 'provide the common defence' umbrella. (Seven if you include the one about pirates.)
The president appears to have one listed. One that only exists if Congress actually bothers to create an army or navy.
Except, he is. Nothing foolish about it. "National security" is a broad term, first of all, which includes the military. But saying he is "in charge" of national security simply means, to most of us, that he is charged with actually executing the laws and powers used to provide that security. Which is, of course, true.
Yes, in charge of executing the laws. Without laws in this regard (Including laws creating a military.) he has no power there. He cannot act in violation of the law in the cause of national security. (Mukasey, the new AG nominee, disagrees with me.)
Again, for years now I've been skeptical of the claim that there is an inherent constitutional authority to wiretap. But Clinton claimed it, and so did many other Presidents down through history, in various ways (including the directly related claim of inherent power to inspect international mail), and it's been backed up by the rest of the system. So while I've always leaned strongly toward no constitutional authority, I am not willing to say it is clear. It's not, from where I sit.
Ah, but the thing about this hypothetical 'inherent' power is that it's only claimed to exist on foreign communications. Even if we accept it exists, that still means Congress can regulate it to the extent as to confirm it is not being done on domestic communications.
Just like, for an absurd example, Congress has the right to pass a law requiring court officials to make sure, before they accept a presidential pardon, that it is not pardoning someone who was impeached and serving time from that, as the president cannot do that. Just because the President has a power to do something doesn't mean Congress can't put in some sort of oversight to assure he is doing something he actually has the power to do, and not secretly something else that just happens to look like a power of his.
And I don't see this supposed power, either. The idea that we lose rights entering or exiting this country, or being outside of it, is absurd and unconstitutional. Rant time:
The courts like to invent that the constitution only applies to people in the US, or citizens, or whatever, which is where they got the first stupid idea that the government could spy on people outside of it freely. (I don't know how it became a 'power of the executive', though.)
In actuality the constitution almost always refers to the rights of 'people' or speaks about what 'the government' can't do. Like, look at the 4th amendment. Do you see 'citizen' or 'in the US' in there? I don't. (I know 'the people' means 'the people of the United States', but 'people' and 'person' does not, as evidence by the fact
Yes, but Reagan's budgets, if adopted, would have led to a balanced budget before he left office (assuming revenue remained as it was, of course).
The problem is, at some point Republicans appear to have decided that the best way to force less spending was to force taxes as low as possible, even if that didn't result in less spending.
It's playing a game of chicken with our grandchildren, and I don't approve. I don't think anyone, of any part, should spend more than we take in in revenue. If we want to spend more, we should take in more. If we want to spend less...well, eventually we should take in less, although with our debt, it could be a while.
The Republicans have learned how to play that game, asking Democrats how they're going to pay for things. The Democrats, sadly, do not seem to understand it works in both directions.
Well sure, but you can't fault him for that, since he can only know what the CIA tells him. He had the right idea, and it worked, even if it was overkill.
Almost all government spending has moderately good intentions. :)
But, no, having lived though the 80s, although not old enough to vote during them, I know what a threat the USSR was assumed to possess. Everyone assumed we could find ourselves in another Vietnam somewhere to hold them back. So I don't blame Reagan. (I do, OTOH, blame the people that blamed Clinton for reducing the size of it, especially as the same people apparently don't have a problem with Bush tearing it to tatters through overuse.)
I just find it annoying that military spending is just completely ignored when it come to shrinking the government. We spend something like 40% of our money on it, and all we do is run around the world helping and hurting others with it, instead of worrying about us first. We could defend this country with a tiny fraction of the resources we had when Bush came to power, and we could still defend it with what he's left us, so I'm hoping we don't insanely attempt to rebuild the military back to where it was in 2000. (See, one of Ron Paul's good ideas. We don't need a huge military if we're only defending our own borders.)
Most of them have insurance, and get care through it. By far, most people in this country -- which necessarily includes most non-wealthy people -- have health insurance, including most non-wealthy sick people. There is no truth to the claim that non-wealthy sick people are mostly uninsured. By far, most of them are insured.
Yeah, most people 'by far' have health insurance...when you include people on government insurance. The amount of people of people who are on private insurance is 66%, and half the rest are uninsured.
I am, of course, presuming you don't approve of existing government insurance. As many of those are elderly with preexisting conditions who can't get either employee-based insurance or private plans, others are disabled who also can't get either, and the rest are children who can only get insurance if their parent manages to find a job with it, let's assume that, without government plans, of the 16% on government insurance, only 25% of them could get private insurance, adding 4% and making it 70% insured.
I.e., three out of every ten people in this country are a car accident away from medical bills they can't ever pay, without existing government insurance. With it, it's one in six.
Oh please. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt: your words used implied ALL of them lost their insurance. I presumed you were using hyperbole, and so gave you "overwhelming majority." If you actually meant "large minority" (and what's large?) then you seriously screwed up what you actually wrote.
No, I implied that ALL of them wouldn't have insurance pay for their illness, which, yes, is hyperbole. It's probably more around 80%-90% that get screwed when the insurance they've been paying for years for does not actually pay for their care, with many various ways that
Yes, the collecting money is an enumerated power for "the common defence and general welfare" is an enumerated power. However, "the common defence and general welfare" is not broad, but specifically defined by the following powers. The phrase "the common defence and general welfare" is a preamble to what follows. So spending money on "the general welfare" is not an enumerated power: spending money on post roads is an enumerated power.
You realize that, by that logic, paying the debt isn't a power, although borrowing on the credit of the US to create a debt is. Makes me wonder how we'd have any credit if, legally, we couldn't pay back our debt. A rather surreal constitutional interpretation, rather akin to the people who claim the second amendment requires being in a 'well regulated militia'.
However, that doesn't actually change my point even if it were true. Providing for the common defence is the job of Congress, it literally says it right there, even if that is not an enumerated power. It is not the job of the executive, which demonstrates my original claim that people who say the president is in charge of 'national security' are fools. The only question you raised is if Congress is allowed to provide for it 'in general', or only allowed to do so via the powers following that.
Legislation like, oh, FISA.
Yes, and?
Alright, as long as we're in agreement that FISA is a constitutional law, that Congress can direct where and how wiretapping happens because there is no presidential power to wiretap. (Whether or not the 4th applies to wiretaps not being important here. If it does, obviously Congress's law must follow certain rules, if not, it doesn't matter.)
It was no mere assertion, it was fact. And it's beside the point. What he was talking about was the fact that the original program they infamously tried to get Ashcroft to sign off on is a different program than what was actually implemented and became news a couple of years ago.
No, there was one program pre-hospital that Comey and Ashcroft refused to renew. It had already operated a few years, it continued to operate illegally for a week or two, was shut down, was 'fixed' somehow, and came back. It has, indeed, been asserted that this is a different program than the wiretapping program.
If it is, the executive is in more trouble, as the gang of eight says they haven't heard of another other program at all the executive could be talking about.
To recap this as bluntly as I can: The gang of eight were informed about a wiretapping program. They have repeatedly said that is all they were informed about. There are only three options: 1) They are lying, 2) It wasn't a covert action, 3) the executive is lying to them and it is a covert action, but the eight were informed it was just wiretapping.
If 2) or 3) are true, the gang of eight allowed the executive branch to run roughshod over them by not reporting to the correct committees.
If 1) is correct, the hearing about it are absurd sham, a stupid little dance.
Those are the only two choices. A lying gang of eight, or a stupid gang of eight.
Now, what might be true is that there is a dual-part program, one part with wiretapping and one part as something that is legitimately a covert action. However, either a) these are two separate things, with the intelligence committees needing to be informed of the first, and the eight or the committees being informed of the later, or b) they are the same program, and the eight needed to be informed of all parts of the program. You can't only tell them half of what you're doing.
Neither of those things has happened. If there's another program, or a non-spying part of the same program, or however anyone wants to legally parse this secret program we don't know anything about...either no legislator has been informed of it, (Which is flatly illegal.) or the gang of eight is lying to people, and, what's more faking outrage and investigations. (Which is probably not illegal, but reprehensible.)
The question is not, to a small-government conservative, how big the military should be, because the question is obvious: as big as is necessary (and clearly, Reagan was correct on that). The question is about WHAT the government should be involved with in the first place.
You mean, like illegal arms trade to Iran? </cheap_shot>
Yes, but his budgets, if implemented as submitted, would have resulted in a balanced budget by the end of his term. It's Democrats who increased spending. Funny how Reagan critics like to ignore that little fact.
I'm fairly certain it was both parties that increased spending, as I pointed out. Military spending is, indeed, spending. And Republicans who cut taxes.
And Reagan was not even vaguely correct about the size of the military we needed, but that is because no one realized that the Soviet Union would shortly collapse.
You are conflating, and therefore incorrect. I was addressing your incorrect definition of "conservative," which is separate from the Republican party.
And you are quite wrong about the party, as well. You've apparently never heard of Barry Goldwater ... ?
I know about Goldwater, that's what I was talking about. I was arguing that traditional conservative thought didn't show up until him, with it actually peaking in 64 with his Presidential run, and didn't really manage to control the GOP until Reagan. (Ironically right around the point Goldwater became so dissatisfied with the Republicans that he left for the Libertarians.)
Which, incidentally, is almost what you said, also, except you said it reemerged with Reagan after having vanished for the previous 80 years. I say that Goldwater (And the Conservative coalition.) instead invented it while fighting the New Deal, and managed to popularize it within the party around 64, enough for him to run, and the party then somewhat subverted it to get Reagan elected. And that it's not comparable to the anti-progressive thought in the 1890s and before, it didn't exist at all until the New Deal 40 years later.
Calvin Coolidge is most remembered as being pro-business (which, of course, is the same as today's conservatives), but he was also what we would today call a "true conservative."
I didn't say that no one behaved as a conservative, I said that the theories and concept which, today, make up conservativism, entered mainstream Republican thought with Reagan. Although the theory itself goes back further, but not that far, only to opposite to the New Deal. In fact, that's where the words 'conservative' and 'liberal' got somewhat scrambled up in politics.
But I'll compromise with you. Let's date conservative thought to 1933, in opposition to the New Deal, and be done with it. :)
No, it's not.
The CIA may not be waterboarding people anymore, but it was in 2002. 'And current and former CIA officers tell ABC News there is a presidential finding, signed in 2002, by President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft approving the techniques, including water boarding.' And it was in February 2005, after the first fact came out and it had issued a memo at the end of 2004 saying there would be no more torture.
In theory, it's not waterboarding people now. In theory, it wasn't before 2004, either, until the fact it was came out. In theory, it wasn't between 2004 and 2007, until the next memo came out. The white house consistently publically declares it's not doing it, or will stop what it's doing, and then secretly issues memos that say that everything anyone is doing is within the law and they can keep doing it.
In the system you are talking about, there are insured people who are mostly well, and there are uninsured people who are mostly well, and they're
No, it's not. That is not a power of the federal government at all, it is a preamble of the enumerated powers to follow. So which actual power of Congress are you referring to?
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
That's not a 'preamble'. It's the first statement of the powers of Congress. They can collect money to spend on providing for the common defence and general welfare. That sentence continues with a bunch of repeated 'To's to state other powers. (Which is why the To is in uppercase, you are supposed to read all following statements as if they get spliced in there, with 'The Congress shall have Power' before it. That being a 'preamble', incidentally, would mean that it has no effect, so that section of the constitution would just be a bunch of unconnected 'To's that don't mean anything and our government would have almost no actual powers or abilities at all.)
I never implied he did. I simply stated the fact that he defends the country. He does it within, to some degree, the rules provided by the Congress. But the Congress is not doing the actual defense, and has no power to do so. They only have the power to provide for it in various enumerated and implied ways, and then the President has the power to actually do it.
Yes, he does. He directs all federal law enforcement, including the FBI, border patrol, ATF, and so on.
The president actually runs everything. Are you arguing that he has the right to operate the Post Office (Another Congressional power) however he wants because it's in the executive? That he has some magical 'postal power' that lets him override the laws of the United States when the mail needs to get through?
You see how absurd that is? The 'national security' claim is the same thing. He has nothing that could even vaguely be twisted into that power outside the military. (And I think you'd really have to ignore what 'commander in chief' actually means to claim he has that power WRT the military, but that is not the issue here, as the NSA is not part of the military.)
Any powers he has there have been granted him by legislation, and thus can be removed or restricted by more legislation.
Sure. I never said anything different.
Legislation like, oh, FISA.
Have you any example at all, other than the existence of liability waivers?
Here is the law granting immunity, and exceptions to immunity, under US tort law. Only 'Federal Agencies' and people working under them have immunity. This 'does not include any contractor with the United States.'. (See below)
Again, you are using the same terribly illogical example, comparing apples and oranges. Immunity extends to those actions specifically contracted for by the government, not everything else you do along the way. Same as for any elected official. Which is why, for example, a certain CA congressman went to jail for HOW he performed his duties, when he took bribes.
There is no 'immunity' that extends anywhere. There is simply government immunity, 'sovereign immunity'. You cannot sue the government unless it lets you. (In practice, at the Federal level, such immunity has been torn to shreds by various laws that do make the government liable for practically anything except policy decisions.)
There is additional immunity, by statute, that covers actual employees in performance of their jobs. (For all employees.) There are plenty of exceptions to these laws, too.
Sometimes a similar immunity has been granted to specific contractors, and the courts have once ruled that a 'contractor' was, for all purposes, actually an agency of the government, be
I said it wasn't humility, not that it was good or bad.
Jeez, do people not actually read posts anymore before responding to them?
Not in whole, sure. No party is pure throughout. But the conservative part of the GOP dominated the party through the second half of the 80s and through the 90s, specifically repudiating the (relative) liberalism of Eisenhower and Nixon.
I knew eventually we'd get to Ronald Reagan. I agree with you completely, except WRT the Republican party from Reagan to Bush. You think they were 'small government', I do not. (And pretending the Republican party at the turn of the century has anything to do with the current one is silly. It's had at least three huge upheavals. You had fricking Hoover in there!)
Anyway, 'small-government' Reagan started a massive arms race with the Soviet Union. He quadrupled the debt. (Of course, as we all know, anytime there's a new social program, Republicans ask who's going to pay for it, but military spending is magically free.)
Um. I have no idea what definition of "conservative principles" you are using, but no, conservatism in this country since the 50s has been marked by precisely what I was referring to.
No, the theory of conservatives has been that since the 50s, although not as far as the Libertarians take it. (And they've completely abandoned the social half.)
The actual party didn't start the small government rhetoric until Reagan, and it almost instantly became just words, with Reagan and Bush I spending like there was no tomorrow.
The Republican party 100 years ago (Well, 110 years ago, really.) may have been mostly liberals as opposed to the progressives on the other side, and been against most spending, but classic liberalism, and anti-progressivism, isn't the same as conservativism or libertarianism.
Chester A. Arthur doesn't really count, he was trying to be independent, and under Benjamin Harrison, the Republicans were attacked for spending over a billion dollars by the Democrats! Hayes was maybe small government. Grant's administration was marred by insane scandals and nothing got done, and now we're reached the civil war. So I'm not entirely sure where you're getting the Republicans were 'small government' before the progressive realignment in the 00s.
You want to think it is about the war, but most of the Republicans/conservatives I've talked to who aren't voting favor the war. I've done doorbelling and phonebanking, and while I've had my share of people who say they won't vote Republican because of the war or whatever, for those who identify as Republican, the biggest reason for not voting for the GOP candidate was a lack of those conservative principles.
Put the word 'still' before 'identify' in 'those who identify as Republican' and I'll buy it.
Then what's the problem? It's not being done, if it is under the definition. So you have nothing to complain about. If it is being done, show where, and prosecute whoever has done it. Again, this is a bullshit issue.
It's being done by the CIA, on Bush's 'determination' that waterboarding somehow, suddenly, isn't torture, despite it being considered as such for 100 years, and despite it being given on the Senate floor as an example of things the MCA would outlaw. (And, remember, when interpreting laws, what is said about the law in Congress as it's being passed is rated pretty highly.)
And I can't prosecute anyone.
I am saying that for those of us who DO get the health care we want, our health care is better. And that's true. The trick is to bring everyone up to that level of care, not to drag everyone down, which is what socialization does, especially of the single-payer type.
Well, yes. In fact, we could get perfect health care by only having healthy people in the system, as insurance companies are working towards.
In the system you are talking about, there are insured people who are mostly well, and there are uninsured people who are mostly well, and they're both getting all the care they need. We provide their care, or, rather, their lack of care, fa
No, it's not. It's the job of the Executive. The Congress can set some rules for how that is done, but the Executive does that work.
Do I need to pull out the constitution? Providing for the 'common defence' is the job of the legislative branch.
The executive always does all the actual work, of everything, but it's not a power of the executive to 'defend the country'. It's a power of the legislature. The president doesn't get to override their laws in cases of 'national security', if anything, they get to override him.
You can argue that he has some special powers (like the right to collect military intelligence) that come with operating the military, but he has no 'national defense' powers at all outside of the military. (And the NSA is not part of the military.) I know people keep imagining they see them in the Constitution, but those powers simply do not exist. Any powers he has there have been granted him by legislation, and thus can be removed or restricted by more legislation.
In fact, the one 'national security' power listed, the suspension of habeas corpus, is granted to the legislature, although it's obviously something the executive would be actually using. (Yes, yes, the last time that was implemented the executive did that, but we're talking about the actual text.)
Contractors ARE employed by the government.
It's easy enough to say that, but there's plenty of caselaw that says the government asking you to do something doesn't absolve you from legal liability against third parties. Just ask the bounty hunters that have huge insurance premiums, and look at all the laws that shield contractors.
But, hey, I'll go along with your theory if it leads to the concept we shouldn't immunize telecoms for participating in wiretaps. (Although I must wonder why they want it.)
Shrug. My point is that there's no reason to hold the President responsible for it when Congress -- the only body charged with holding him responsible -- chooses not to. (Well, and the other point is that you clearly don't know enough to hold him responsible for it anyway, since you don't know much about the program.)
I do hold Congress responsible! That was my point! This whole mess should have been stopped when the gang of eight were informed about it, and they pointed out it wasn't a 'covert operation' and informed the correct committees, and those committees secretly debated it and shot it down. (I'm not entirely sure how that works, but I assume there is some process that, when they are informed of something secretly, they have a way to abort it.)
I'm way past attempting to hold Bush responsible for anything. Bush has become an inanimate force. Never attribute to malice or stupidity what can be explained by Bush being Bush. He just is, I expect nothing from him, so he cannot disappoint me, he's a random-number generator operating the executive branch. (I didn't actually realize I had started thinking this way until I started this paragraph. I used to feel anger at his actions, and now I just feel angry at the Democrats for not doing anything.)
What I do expect is for Congress, at least somewhat, to attempt to stop the gross oversteps he's taking.
That doesn't mean anyone's lied.
Yes it does, either that or wrongdoing. What it means we can't determine who is lying. Either the gang of eight is lying to the rest of Congress by pretending that what they were told about is solely a wiretapping program, or it means that the executive lied to them that it was (and they didn't both to inform the correct people, see above). Or it means that this program is solely for gathering intelligence and thus they shared it with people they thought would go along with them instead of whom they are legally required to.
However, this is almost completely irrelevant, and doesn't change my anger at Congress this one bit, as they know about it now and haven't done anything. I've seen the runaround t
And frankly, what most people think of as the "sane" Republicans are the biggest part of the problem. These are the liberal and moderate Republicans who pretend the Tenth Amendment doesn't exist, and who think compromising on fundamental principles on a regular basis is just fine thank you, and who cares about the conservative base if you can win the independent moderates? This is a recipe for destruction of any party.
The 'party' you're talking about is the libertarian wing, which is about 10% of the Republican party, and combined with the actual Libertarian Party, composes at most 15% of the active voters in this country, probably close to half that. That's not a recipe to just lose elections, that's a recipe to lose them so badly you lose ballot access!
Just FYI, that's not actually the traditional Republican party, or traditional conservative principles, anyway. I don't really care, it's not my party, but I do know something about the history of it. You're trying to steer the party a certain way, the party didn't 'abandon' that position, it never held it, although recently it's asserted it has to keep the 10% of itself happy. The whole 'states rights' thing didn't even show up until the 60s.
And, no, the biggest part of the problem is Bush, as evidenced by the fact that the GOP was going just fine until he showed up, even when the spending policies that didn't match the rhetoric and they didn't actually do any of the social conservative stuff they yammered about either.
I know what you mean, the failure to walk the walk was certainly harming the party's credibility, but that didn't seem to actually translate into less votes. The self-destruct didn't happen until Bush started driving the party at full speed off a cliff and a fourth of the party encouraged it and another fourth leaped off the crazy train, and the rest of the party has no idea what a useful move would be, whether they should defend Bush or push him away.
The torture thing is a bullshit issue. Who is in favor of torture? Barely anyone. The Dems are trying to make an issue where it isn't. Sens. McCain and Graham got together with Bush and the Democrats and passed the MCA last year. They all AGREED on torture: we won't do it. If there's a practice being done that you think is torture, fine, then have Congress categorize it as such. That's how it should work, and if the Dems felt so strongly about it, why aren't they trying to categorize more things as torture? Either because they know they aren't being done and so there'd be no opposition and they'd lose the issue, or because they actually believe the procedure isn't wrong and don't want it to be taken away.
We don't need to classify 'more things' as torture. We already have a perfectly good definition, and waterboarding it under it. Google 'Chinsaku Yuki'. We sentenced him to life in prison for the war crime of waterboarding. And 'Yukio Asano', 15 years hard labor. The American Major Edwin Glenn got 10 years for it at a court martial in 1901, which is pre-Third Geneva Convention which outlaws that sort of stuff.
If the president wants to legalize that, perhaps he should propose the laws be changed.
That's an illusion. We pay more out of pocket, yes, but that is with price controls and other restrictions on private business that hurts the economy, contributing to overall depression in wages and employment rates. Plus, as you likely know, Americans get a lot more and better health care for their health care dollars than almost all the other countries, so it's comparing apples and oranges.
What on earth are you talking about? By any health care metric, we're in last place to any other first world country. We're last in infant mortality, we're last in life expectancy, we're last in everything. (No, we're not ahead in prostate cancer treatment, despite what Giuliani thinks. We do put more emphasis on detecting it earlier, though.)
And I've never seen a single-payer plan that would de
Hey, lunatic, not trusting other people is not humility. It is often the opposite of humility, in that you are convinced you can do better than them.
Postfix and amavisd together do just fine.
I'm better that a lot of those sendmail installs aren't doing anything, either.
Everyone who actually cares moved to postfix or exim a long time ago.
This MTA behaviour is, like it or not, the correct behaviour at the MTA level. Postfix (my secure MTA choice for the past 9 years, and [IMO] a far superior one to Qmail) behaves identically regarding duplicates, as does every other MTA I've looked at. I wouldn't be surprised if this was written up in an RFC on SMTP as the correct behaviour.
No it doesn't, and no it isn't. If postfix is handed one message, it will only hand that message to a person once, no matter how many times they end up in the expanded aliases.
qmail, IIRC, will expand each alias and remove duplicates from each alias, but if you address it to multiple aliases and those aliases include duplicate addresses, it will not remove them between aliases.
I.e., if you have a admin@example.com and an users@example.com, and they both contain some repeated addresses, mail sent to one of them will be correct, everyone gets one copy. If you have an everyone@example.com that contains both admin and users, and someone sends mail to everyone@example.com and users@example.com, everyone in users gets two copies.
This is probably because qmail is 'secure', which apparently means 'broken up into tiny pieces that talk poorly to each other', so it's probably breaking the mail up at RCPT level and parsing the two 'messages' separately.
Now, between mail servers, this can happen anyway, as you have no way to ensure that two RCPTs for a single message are handed to the same server at once, instead of the message being broken in half. But normally within the same mail server that doesn't happen, except, apparently, with qmail.
I am saying A is legal because the President has the authority to do A, so anyone doing A on his behalf cannot be held liable for that. You are saying, that's wrong, because if A is legal and they are doing A, well ... what if they also do B?!
There is an governmental concept that says the government cannot be sued, and that includes government employees who are doing their jobs.
There is also the fact that the executive branch cannot be barred from doing actual executive branch things. (Although I still completely dispute the concept that spying is one of those things at all, at least when done outside of the military, which is the NSA is. Spying on enemy troop positions during a war, sure, but defending the country in general is Congress' job, not the president, so that craziness about 'national security' doesn't fly here.)
You think the second is what means you can't sue the executive branch, but that's not correct. It's not executive that's immune to lawsuits, it's the government in general. You can't sue the executive, you can't sue the legislature, you can't sue the judical. Congress can't make any laws about liabilities for proper government actions for themselves or other branches, the courts can't find proper government actions of themselves or other branches are torts, and the executive branch isn't really involved in torts but couldn't be anyway WRT to itself. The government is completely immune from civil actions against itself.
There is no other sort of civil immunity. Proper and legal actions of the government cannot be torts, it doesn't matter who does them against who. (Of course, 'improper' actions are another kettle of fish, as are people who work for the government but are doing things without their authority, but those are neither here nor there.)
Hence, it's easy to show that any 'executive' immunity doesn't grant any sort of immunity on contractors, as government immunity in general doesn't do that, as evidenced by the fact that government contractors get sued all the time, sued so much they often are legally granted immunity to start with. (Like, for example, the telecoms were granted if they had a specific signed piece of paper.)
If you want government immunity for an action, you have to be employed by the government and that action has to be part of work for the government. Just one of those doesn't cut it. Or you can have statutory immunity where the law has granted it to you, like the law does for all wiretaps with warrants or the aforementioned signature.
That's a matter of interpretation, of course, since we don't know much about the program. So you can't claim with any real certainty that it doesn't apply.
Unless everyone's been lying to us, it isn't a matter of interpretation.
What's more, the Gang of Eight had the authority to then overrule the President and tell their respective committees if he didn't comply with their interpretation of the law, given the specifics of the program. Not a single one of them raised that objection at the time of the program (not even Rockefeller), nor when it was revealed in public, that I recall (and I listened to many of them explain their view on the matter).
I. Know. That.
That. Is. Why. I. Am. Angry. With. Them.
It's really hard to see how you can know enough about the program to make that judgment.
The definition of wiretapping is 'listening on conversations'. That's what wiretapping means. It's called the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program', and surveillance means 'watching someone to gain information'. And they've actually said, repeatedly, that it's to gain information about terrorists, often under oath. Even if that's not what it actually is, it appears that is actually what they told the Congressmen it was, so said Congressmen had a duty to inform the Intelligence Committees anyway. (And the DoD committees, and probably the judiciary committees
No, he is not. He is not, in any way at all, "left." There is no issue on which he is "left." (And no, anti-Iraq-war is not "left." Ask that socialist/communist Pat Buchanan.)
I know, that's why I used scare quotes. :) He's 'left' only in the delusional pro-war universe that the Republicans have redefined reality to be, where everyone concerned who is we're throwing good money after...more good money, not to mention American soldiers, away in a completely foolish and pointless war, is now, somehow, on the left. Where standing up against torture is some crazy liberal concept.
I don't know what happened to you guys and your party. I think you were relying on demagogues too long, you ceded too much power to Limbaughes and gratefully accepted anyone who showed up to 'fight the liberals', and then, when the head of the party turned to lunacy, those people went gleefully along, as all the sane Republicans stood around in shock and dropped out one by one. You gave lunatics a seat at the table as long as they voted correctly, and then you accidentally went in the wrong direction with Bush, and then somehow he gained control of the lunatics and kept going.
I honestly don't know if you're going to be able to get your party back.
Now granted, I fully accept -- indeed, it is a point I made in regard to Paul -- that people are not philosophically oppposed to universal health care, as they logically should be if they care about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the principles upon which they are based. But they will be, in an overwhelming majority, opposed to any actual plan that tries to offer it, for practical reasons (although what they don't realize is that the philosophical objections are based on the inevitable practical realities), which is why not even Hillary Clinton or John Edwards are proposing to do it.
Ah, now I see where you're coming from.
But I think you're wrong. Single-payer universal health care will work, and it will be cheaper than the existing system. (As evidenced by the fact that we pay more, per capita, than any country with it.)
So while the Republicans try to talk about the cost and whatnot, in reality, that's just desperate misdirection. There's enough money sucked out of the system by insurance companies, and by people simply not paying for their care, that everyone could be covered without costs rising for anyone who pays now.
There are people now who actually do freeload on the system, going to hospitals and not paying, even though they could, raising costs for everyone. If those people pay taxes, they couldn't freeload anymore. So, in a sense, those people will have their costs raised by some amount. And healthy people without insurance will obviously pay more. (They're playing a dangerous game right now, where one accident can ruin their life, although I'm sure you don't think it's acceptable to make them stop that.) Putting them and the freeloaders into the system, and cutting out the overhead, there would be no increase in costs for anyone else, and probably a decrease.
And the rich are likely to continue to pay for their own care outside the system, and would additionally now pay taxes for the medical care they aren't getting, so their costs would actually go up, but that's their own choice.
If Democrats wanted to assure people of this, they could always break it out on taxes, like social security. (I actually think that would be a good idea in general, after you do your taxes, you get an additional worksheet you can plug the number into and work out what percentage goes where, if you want. I bet you agree.)
Nope. McCain is a huge longshot, but Romney actually has the best chance of winning the nomination of anyone. This is an odd year, and Giuliani, despite being a big frontrunner, has little actual chance of winning: he is unlikely to win 50 percent of the delegates outright, and in convention, he would die because the social conservatives would rally again
And IF the President has the power to do them, then it's bullshit that anyone should be sued for helping the President exercise his legal authority. No dice.
Let's apply this example elsewhere. Everyone agrees that a state has the legal authority to detain criminals before trial. Everyone furthermore agrees that a state has the legal authority to ask a third party to do that for them, i.e., hire bounty hunters.
And let's presume the law says that, if you're in a car accident without a driver's license, you are liable for damages, even if you are not at fault.
Is a duly-authorized bounty hunter, if while attempting to legally apprehend someone, in a car accident without a license, is he liable for damages? Of course he is.
There is a general principle of US law (In fact, all western law) that you cannot sue the government without permission, thus there is magical blanket immunity to all actions of 'the government', except when the government decides to allow such suits. All actions of the government are done by government employees, of course, so they have immunity to civil lawsuits WRT them doing their duty. In practice, the government will actually allow many suits against it, but they do not have to. The government only has to concern itself with criminal law, not civil law, as the government is allowed to cause torts against people, and you can't sue them because they, for example, took and killed your valuable dog because it had no tags, when you could obviously sue anyone else for doing the same thing.
But it stops there, right at the edge of the government. Anything past the government, you need specific laws granting immunity. The telecoms not only were not given such a grant, damages were explicitly written into the law if they were operating at the request of the government and certain conditions were not met.
His oath of office includes respecting his oath of secrecy. There may be some cases where violating that oath of secrecy is warranted, but this is clearly not one of them, for multiple reasons: first because that oath of secrecy is much more important than this one issue, and second because he had other means at his disposal than violating that oath. He could have put a hold on it, he could have tried to stop funding, he could have done many things he chose to not do.
You realize at this point we're not disagreeing, right? Yes, he had plenty of options to fight this, and should have picked an actual option instead of writing a stupid letter.
Again, "apparent." He couldn't say it was illegal.
You don't go violating your oath and risking national security not just for today, but for the future by setting a terrible precedent, because you think something might be illegal. Anyone who thinks like you apparently do on this issue is unfit to have such security clearance. Thankfully, none of the top Democrats think like that.
Allowing the executive branch to invent areas of secrecy is a terrible precedent.
No, that's mistaken. See 50 USC 413b(c)(2).
That applies to covert actions:
50 USC 413b(e) "Covert action" defined
As used in this subchapter, the term "covert action" means an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly, but does not include--
(1) activities the primary purpose of which is to acquire intelligence, traditional counterintelligence activities, traditional activities to improve or maintain the operational security of United States Government programs, or administrative activities;
In other words, covert actions, at least in this section, are black-ops, not spying. I really like the fact there's no weasel words in that statute for people to pick over. Acquiring intelligence!=covert ops. And it's rather hard to argue that wiretapping
No. You did not say that. Indeed, and on the contrary, you said they would be in power, which directly implies they couldn't be stopped from implementing it. You may have MEANT that, but you didn't express it well, and I misunderstood it.
Sorry. I'm talking about Ron Paul getting elected. There might be some hypothetical future where Libertarians take over the entire government, but that is not 2008, or even 2012.
Paul as president means he could sabotage parts of the executive branches' enforcement mechanism, and veto some stuff he doesn't like, although it's possible that there would be a veto-proof Democratic majority in Congress. He couldn't do anything about social security or medicare or any of the social services at all.
Not among the Republican base -- which I am explicitly talking about -- no, it doesn't. Not in the slightest. You have it backward, in fact.
The Republican base isn't going to vote for a Democrat, period. They'll hold their noise and vote for Ron Paul if he win the nomination. Meanwhile, many of the Republican who left the GOP thanks to the war will be back if any Republican shows up who's anti-war and anti-general-Bush-stupidity.
Ron Paul is somehow in the 'center right' of the American people. He's not 'conservative' (At least, the rather delusional pro-torture, anti-Constitutional thing that's passing for conservative right now.) enough to win the primary, but he's far enough 'left' (If by left we mean 'anti-war') that the center (Which is entirely anti-war) would vote for him.
It truly is a surreal day in American politics.
That's not true. Only a tiny percentage of Republicans, and a significant minority -- yes, minority -- of everyone else wants universal health care. Oh sure, insipid polls that ask "if you could get something for free, or make sure others have something for free, would you take it?" have a majority saying yes. But when you ask them about specific plans, and do an actual cost-benefit analysis of how much it would cost to help how many people ... the numbers drop significantly. Even moreso if you compare it to a market-based solution.
Republican consultant Tony Fabrizio took a poll (Sorry, PDF) in June this year. Look on Page 51. 51% think universal health care should be a guaranteed right, and only 43% think otherwise. (And 'it should be a guaranteed right' is a bit more extreme than simply saying 'It should exist right now.'.)
And notice that of the two large groups objecting to it, one of them, the 'Dennis Miller Republicans' is largely concerned with illegal aliens gaming the system, which is probably why they're opposed to health care, so their concerns about 'illegals' using it could be removed(1) and they'd be happy with it. The Free Marketers, aka, the Libertarians, loathe it but they only make up 8% of the party.
Also look at page 57 for a more generalized question. Conversely, look at 52.
I have _no_ idea why they didn't ask about leaving Iraq. They asked whether we should have gone in, but not if we should leave in, say, six months.
Not really, no. It's all about Paul turning people off. It has nothing to do with Nader, who didn't get very many of the independents at all. He got a huge number of the independent VOTE -- the number of votes that didn't go to the top two parties -- of course, but a tiny percentage of actual independents who voted.
I was just pointing out that the non-Democratics lefts got seriously burned in 2000, and are unlikely to vote non-Democrat to 'teach the Democrats not to ignore them' or out of a misguided concept that the two parties are the same. But, yes, they're going to be turned off by his policies anyway.
He would be less popular if his views were well known? Um, that's is in line with what I said, not the opposite of anything I said. I am saying he will lose a huge number of
That killer(KSH) is a killer of thousands of innocent people - Americans and other nationalities in the WTC, and bragged about it to his interrogators.
Um...you do know he was tortured into his confession, right? And that it more than likely is a complete fabrication?
Does your Christian duty prevent you from harming others in self defense or in defense of innocents?
Um, actually, yes. If someone strikes us we're supposed to turn the other cheek. (Man am I in a weird discussion, with a supposed Christian who's apparently never heard of Jesus.)
But, anyway, there's a difference between using force to physically stop someone from causing harm, using force to detain someone dangerous to society, and using force to hurt them until they do what you want them to. The Catholic church has been making exactly that distinction for quite some time, it's how a 'just war' is, in fact, supposed to operate.
I disapprove of known innocent people being imprisoned. But I am a realist enough to know that no system of deciding guilt or innocence is perfect, and therefore, if we are ever to imprison anyone, we are likely to end up imprisoning some innocents.
Um, duh. Which is why we have a court system deliberately set up to minimize such mistakes. A court system that Bush is not using, instead preferring to rely on one where lawyers often cannot speak to their clients and courts make determinations with merely the prosecution speaking and the defense not even informed until the decision is over. A court system they were forced to implement in the first place, instead of just detaining and torturing people forever without trial.
Nonsense on stilts. Just because they haven't been found guilty does not mean they aren't guilty.
YES. IT. DOES.
That's how 'innocent until proven guilt' works, that has been the legal premise for all of civilization dating back before this country was founded. You are innocent until you are found guilty.
You are using a particular legal system of a few countries to bolster an assertion about actual guilt.
No, you're using a legal term and pretending it means something else, but you're using it in the context of what we can and cannot legally do.
Do you mean that we shouldn't interrogate them unless we have judicially proven them guilty? Not even the police work that way.
The police, as human beings with freedom of speech, can ask whatever questions they want about anything whenever. What they cannot do is require anyone to answer them, or torture people until they do.
By the way, nobody at Gitmo has ever been tortured, and nobody there has even been waterboarded. For that matter, only 3 people have been waterboarded by the CIA, one the planner of 9-11, and he broke and provided intelligence that saved many lives. Oh really?
Not only has there been verschärfte vernehmung, but it was approved from the top. (Sorry, I slipped into German there. 'Enhanced interrogations.') Considering that people have died there from hypothermia (In Cuba of all places) and stress positions, I wonder, exactly, what you think is going on there.
Now, you're correct in that we don't have any confirmed waterboarding at Gitmo, but considering that several dozen people there have never been allowed to speak with lawyers or anyone at all (And that's just the people we know about.), saying that 'nobody' there has been waterboarded is idiotic.
There's a little problem with your assertion. He did NOT see those abuses.
Well, why don't you actually come up with some actual lie he's made about that. Oh, right.
As for the "someone who actually tortures innocents" "not in the heat of battle" - you have a little problem there too. First, we are in battle.
We're not in
You raise a numeric calculus in an attempt to prove moral relativism. So lets turn it around: are you willing to inflict 3 minutes of fear on one killer in order to save the lives of thousands of innocents?
Ah, you don't get to assert 'one killer', you've already said they were just suspects. And, no, because I'm a Christian, and, as such, is not supposed to cause harm to other people.
You assert that, apparently, you're Roman Catholic, although one that hasn't noticed that an ecumenical council and a Pope have said torture is 'intrinsece malum', an act that is incapable of being an ordered act and hence always sinful?
And here's Second Vatican Council, emphasis mine: Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator.
So it's not just torture. Catholics, expect for you apparently, disapprove of innocent people merely being imprisoned.
Is your world monochromatic - one is a moral relativist if one is not an absolute moral absolutist?
Are you high? An absolute absolutist?
I know of no case where an known innocent was "tortured" or even coercively interrogated. There are, like on all sides in all wars, a few who violate policy and commit crimes (such as those toads at Abu Ghraib). But there is no policy I know of to inflict harm intentionally and unnecessarily on innocents.
Um, all torture of people in Gitmo is harming innocent people, as none of them have been found guilty of anything, and until then they are innocent. That's how 'guilt' works in...I almost said 'every civilized country', but it actually works that way in uncivilized countries, too, they just find people guilty without a trial.
Frankly, I get really PO'd at those who accuse the US intentionally causing undue harm to innocents. It pissed me off during Vietnam, and it pissed me off now. It caused me to spend 2004 fighting John Kerry's campaign because he used such slander against all of us who participated in that war.
Yeah, good plan. Fight someone who spoke out against such abuses that he saw in the middle of a war, which put someone back in office who actually tortures innocents. (And not in the heat of battle, either.) Way to defend this country's image. It's like fighting crime by arresting people who report crime. That will cause crime to decrease!
Tell me - do you accept that we have enemies who represent a threat to kill many Americans, or is your head in the sand? How do you propose to deal with the likes of Al Qaeda and their millions of supporters?
What are we doing about al Qaeda right now? The Taliban has taken back Afganistan, and AQ is hiding in Pakistan, an ally, and supported by Saudi Arabia, another ally. Maybe we should, you know, actually do something about those things?
How about the whacko government of Iran, which until 9-11 was responsible for more American deaths by terrorism than anyone else?
Um, nooooo. Timothy McVeigh was.
I can't even imagine what acts of terrorism by Iran you're talking about except Iran hostage crisis, and that didn't result in the deaths of anyone at Iran's hands. (Although after a secret attack by the US was planned and then aborted, a helicopter accident killed eight servicemen, but that sort
To answer your question: Catholic. Not moral relativist (your stereotyping is turned on again) - perhaps more correct would be not being a moral absolutist in areas where interpretation is required.
So...you're willing to torture non-Americans to protect Americans...but you're not a moral relativist? What about torturing Canadians to protect Americans?
Is there a ratio? Can it go negative...would you torture a single citizen to save a thousand non-citizens? A million?
Does it depend on what type of non-citizen? Do Canadians count more? Does it depend on what type of citizen? (Do black people only count 3/5th of a citizen?)
And I know of a religion called 'Catholic', but it's a type of Christianity, and probably not what you're talking about. But 'catholic' just means 'universal', so possible you're talking about something else, a similarly named church.
You are familiar with the "just war" doctrine of the church?
I am, but, you, by mentioning it in the discussion, are indicating that perhaps you do not. The 'War on Terror' doesn't fit the criteria for a just war, although that is more a problem with the fact it's not actually a war than it being unjust.
However, several of the requirements is that innocent people are not harmed, or harmed as little as possible, and certainly not harmed deliberately. Like if you, I dunno, tortured them. That would appear to void the 'Just war' warranty.
But you are right, one can cherry pick the bible for all kinds of things - such as absolute pacifism or revenge (eye for an eye).
You're Jewish? Although one apparently unaware they don't do that 'eye for an eye' stuff anymore. (And that was less revenge than punishment.) That's just codifying the max punishment, anyway, that you could not, under any circumstances, harm someone more than they had harmed you, it wasn't actually what happened.
I'm part of a religion called 'Christianity', which started with, basically, Jewish thought, and they stopped taking revenge when Jesus said to. (Jesus being God in human form, there's more information online.)
And we did the whole torture thing, too, including waterboarding! Although that's one of our darker chapters called 'The Spanish Inquisition'. (Not to be confused with the Monty Python sketch.)
War is ugly. Horrible things happen to guilty and innocent people. There are situations that force difficult moral decisions (I gave the example of Churchill and Coventry).
Yes, people cannot control who they fall in hate with, but they can refrain from giving into their urges. We don't need to treat tortures like outcasts, with the love of Jesus they can change their heart and rebuke their evil, but until then they need help. Love the sinner, hate the sin.
But we can keep the government from helping them with their depravity by condoning it.
What if Congress passed a law saying that no one could help Bush commute Libby's sentence? Sure, Bush would not be breaking the law by asking them to ... but any lawyer would be breaking the law by helping him write up the papers! That's patently ridiculous.
Um, actually, Congress has done exactly things like that, although usually attached to funding. Stating that the President can't use any government resources to do X.
Again, that's simply wrong. because of what I said above: if the Executive can do this wiretaps without Congressional approval (or against Congressional prohibition), then no company is prohibited from helping the Executive to that end. The law, in that context, is unconstitutional.
I see what you're arguing, and the point is reasonable, but it's not actually logically correct with regard to civil liability.
If we assume the president has the power to do these wiretaps, then, yes, he can ask companies to do them, and they couldn't be charged with anything.
However, that wouldn't remove any civil liability the companies incurred, thanks to laws. The law says you can sue them for a certain amount of damages if they wiretap without X's signature, and they wiretapped without X's signature, you can sue them. The fact that X is a member of the executive branch is not relevant, it could have been some guy in Boise that's supposed to sign off on it.
The president, and people in the executive branch, would have immunity to that in general, as you can't sue the government for stuff like that. But unless the telecoms have become part of the government when I wasn't looking (It's possible), they can be sued just fine, and are liable for huge damages assuming they did the data mining it's presumed they did.
(And, just so we're both clear, neither of actually thinks the president has constitutional authority to order wiretaps on American citizens, and thus not only does Congress has the power to insist on warrants for those, it also has the ability to implement some sort of oversight to make sure that supposed non-citizen wiretaps are actually on non-citizens, right? I.e, we're arguing inside of Bush's hypothetical universe wherever he can do whatever he wants, but we don't actually think that?)
Actually, no ... amnesty properly means what you are describing.
Amnesty is correct if we were just talking about the criminal charges. But a government doesn't grant 'amnesty' against third parties suing you, that's not a good term for that. Historically, okay,it's the same thing as 'retroactively didn't happen', but modern amnesty rarely includes protection from lawsuits.
But under no circumstances could he have, or would we have, revealed it to a closed session of Congress, which would be an absolute violation of his oath to secrecy. It's not about punishment: he actually takes that oath seriously, knowing that reverernce for the oath itself is far more important than any one issue he may wish were not covered by it.
His oath of secrecy? WTF? How about his oath of office? He learned about apparent lawbreaking and possible unconstitutional behavior, done in secret, by the executive branch and he thought a useful solution to that was to write a letter?
Actually, forget 'apparent lawbreaking'. Stuff like that has to be brought before the Senate Intelligence Committee or that is illegal. Being shown stuff 'secretly' without the full committee knowing is, ipso facto, incorrect behavior, and should have been immediately brought up in the full committee. It doesn't matter what stupid agreement he signed, they all have security clearances.
No, they showed him exactly because they knew he'd do nothing about it. Then he demands an 'investigation' that, of course, turns up nothing because the White House is allowed to stonewall.
Yes, you are. You are presenting two arguments that are inconsistent with each other based on your own interpretation of the facts. You are arguing they are so unpopular they won't get into power, which necessarily implies they care more about their principles than being elected;
This is 100%, absolutely, totally correct, as I've repeatedly said.
and then you argue they would, if they got power, sacrifice those principles in order to be elected again.
I didn't say anything of the sort whatsoever.
I said they wouldn't be able to implement the changes they want, not that they wouldn't try. Everyone else would stop them, and even if they succeeded, the changes would be undone when they were unceremoniously voted out of office the next election. (For a more specific example, Ron Paul, as president, would have the ability to sabotage enforcement of the laws he doesn't like, but that obviously wouldn't outlast him.)
But I'm done explaining, and I'm sick of having to repeatedly assert that I believe the Libertarians will try to do exactly what they say they will, and you arguing, somehow, that I'm saying something else. I merely believe this attempt will end in failure, except where I otherwise stated. (And the parts that will fail are the useful parts, and the parts that will succeed will inch us closer to total corporate control.)
You wrote, "And that's all that would happen. If they were to touch social security, or welfare, or medicare, they'd be out on their asses next election, and those would come right back." So you are saying they have the power, but they will not do all those other things with that power. (That's what "that's all that would happen" means.)
You've misunderstood the word 'touch'. You don't touch a law by trying to change it, you touch it by actually changing it. If they were, somehow, able to do that, and it affected any people's benefits, they'd be quickly out. (Of course, the president can't really do anything about that anyway.)
And, oddly enough, I completely agree with all your premises below and disagree totally with your results.
Paul is somewhat popular now, but if he were the nominee, he would be absolutely buried. Many Republicans would refuse to vote because of his stance on the war,
'Many'? How many is many? I don't know what polls you're reading, but being pro-war seems to seriously damage people in the polls. Among the people who are still calling themselves 'Republicans' and running the party, maybe not, but we're talking if he's hypothetically already won the nomination.
, others because they are essentially big government Republicans.
About half of Republican voters favor universal health care, so I'll buy that.
And almost all of the non-libertarian independents would vote for the Democrat.
That's called 'learning your lesson with Nadar in 2000', he he.
Maybe it is because Paul's views are largely unknown. I don't know how little known they are.
I suspect it's exactly the opposite, that he would be less popular if his views were. But that's a silly worry in an election...he has a year to make his views known.
I only know people care a lot more about maintaining our welfare state than they do about the war, despite what they say to pollsters.
You are correct.
My conclusions:
Because Paul's views are not very well known (Or no one believes he would actually do them), if he got the primary, he could actually win, especially against a Democrat that Republicans despite, like Hillary. He'd suck back in all the disillusioned Republicans that because of Bush.
Anyone else as a Republican, the Democrats win, period, as the American people are sick and tired of the war. I.e., the election next year will be between anti-war people, or at least non-pro-war people. If the Republicans do not run one of those, they are not, in any useful sense, in the election. (Especially as the war is actually going to end about three months before the election when we run out of military.)