The audio from a reporter two feet in front of your face is a lot clearer then the audio on a recording. Moreover the fact he's talking about Muslims at all should be a clue that the reporter's not talking about illegal immigration. There are plenty of Latino illegal immigrants, but very few Muslim ones.
The follow-ups are also totally inappropriate for a question on illegal immigration. Why would you have a database of illegal immigrants if your policy is to deport them? Why would you register them anywhere, much less a religious institution which has numerous First Amendment rights to tell your registration agency to go away? You find them, you detain them at a detention center, you implement some sort of hearing to minimize the risk you're deporting legal immigrants, then you stick them on a plane back home. Why would NBC News go straight to the Nazi metaphor if they hadn't just asked a question that had absolutely nothing to do with illegal immigration? Granted they're mainstream, so they don't like him; but the simple fact is that thre MSM does not violate Godwin's Law because it's Tuesday. They do it because you've just answered a question about US Citizens by saying that all of them who follow a certain religion should be in a special database.
Either Trump's not smart enough to figure out that he is answering a totally different set of policy questions then the reporter is asking, in which case he should be pilloried in the media for not understanding the requirements of the job he is trying to get; or the media is right to pillory him for.
Which means that you're criticizing the media for criticizing Trump the wrong way.
Tell that to Captain Merryman of the Maryland State Militia.
The Commander-in-Chief has extreme powers to do almost anything he can justify in times of trouble, which are de facto defined as whenever Congress refuses to tell him to cut his tyranny the fuck out.
The plight of the Japanese is a pretty good example of why that happens in the real world, regardless of all theories about the Constitutions ability to protect freedom in the real world. Roosevelt's man on the scene had a not-totally-implausible line of bullshit, and had arrested the Japanese using his military powers rather then police powers. Since Habeas Corpus and other rights in the criminal system do not apply to military prisoners, the Civil Rights of the First Amendment are technically not violated if you are allowed to speak in a prison camp, the Second Amendment also does not apply to military prisoners, etc. pretty much the only way for the Courts to rule the Constitution was violated would be for them to rule Lt. Gen DeWitt was wrong in his military judgement.
Which did not happen despite the fact said judgement was both ridiculous bullshit, and incredibly racist.
He got asked a question about "American Muslims". He responded with a rant that could either be evil-Fascist-racism or a totally ridiculous non sequitur about illegal immigration.
And your problem with the coverage is that instead of criticizing Trump for being so fucking clueless he doesn't understand that an "American Muslim" is by definition not an illegal immigrant, and his immigration policies will have jack-squat to do with the American Muslim population, they are criticizing him for crypto-fascism.
How often do you talk to the working class in your current town? Because that actually sounds like pretty standard behavior from the working class.
I ended up in retail, and the number of 20-somethings I met who think a road trip to the state capital would be AMAZING because they've never left the County is far from non-zero. Especially since most of them have cars, and could easily schedule a four-day break. Road trips are simply not on their RADAR. Many others do a) family reunions (it's a black area, so these are mostly down in the Deep South, but occasionally they happen up here), b) Vegas, or c) a cruise. d) does not exist (altho if we were closer to the border, trips to Ontario where 18-year-olds can legally buy beer would probably not be uncommon). The culture towards travel is very different.
Racial/ethnic stuff is also much closer to the surface then when you're talking to the Middle Class. A guy actually walked up to me and said "You wanna know why Aspirin is white? Because it works."
What kind of property tax are you talking about? Property tax is levied on your house in the US. Other kinds exist (Missouri, for example, taxes the value of your car), but they're not what we mean when we talk about property taxes.
We use property taxes to pay for local school districts, and numerous other municipally-funded things (for example, lots of American cities do not have enough money to pay for police, which means people move out, which means that house prices go down, which means there's even less money for police, etc. This is what happened to Detroit). In extreme cases (such as the aforementioned Detroit) your annual property tax payment will be more then your house payment. But in other places (such as the deep South, where they are morally oppose to using taxation to pay for anything) it can be as low as $1 per $300 of a home's value.
Here's a CNN Story on it. The map can flip between dollar costs and costs as a percent of your house's value. In most places lots of people live it's 1.5-2.5%, but Cali is lower because of Proposition 13, which sets a maximum rate of 1% of your home's assessed value. It's a bit old (2011), but it should give an interested non-American some clue has to how the US Property tax system functions.
As you can imagine, the "assessed value" bit means that there's a lot of gamesmanship in when the City reassesses your home. If you can get it to happen during the bottom of a down market you do, and if they try to do it during an upswing you fight it. A second bit of Prop 13 actually made it very difficult for a City to reassess a home's value (and thus jack up the property tax bill) except when you sell or you build a new house on the lot. When it was passed the Silicon Valley property price boom was in full swing, and cities were notorious for pricing Senior citizens out of their homes by reassessing the property values, which brought the tax bill above what they could afford to pay.
If you think about it, utilities and monopolies are pretty much the method by which a government governs.
The utility of defense against foreign governments, for example, is provided by the monopoly of force of the local government. Security against crime/riots/etc. is both a public utility (it is useful to the public), and guaranteed by the above-mentions monopoly of force. Standard contract law and other civil procedures are in the same category.
Hell, you have a monopoly on your property enforced by the government.
1) Quebec is not America. Quebec is part of a country whose entire reason to exist is to restrict the import of American ideals. In particular, Canadian Constitutional law is based on two principles anathema to American thinkers: the usefulness of a hereditary monarchy, and the necessity of heavily restricting the free speech rights of English-speakers in Quebec.
2) Defense, "domestic tranquility," and Justice in the US are utilities and monopolies. The "general welfare" is a bit more nebulous, but most things justified by it are utilities, and typically government involvement either creates a government monopoly (private student loans, for example, are much rarer then public ones), or a government-regulated market that is a de facto monopoly (like the ObamaCarte exchanges). Liberty is not a monopoly, but it is a utility. A "more perfect union" refers to the Founders desire to increase the Congress's power to set up monopolies. Under the Articles of Confederation it had many capital-P-Powers, but they were all exercised by ordering the local state-level monopolies around, which meant the states could simnply ignore the Federal Monopoly in favor of their own local monopoly.
France is a bigger power then the US is Muslim countries due to it's continued political dominance of it's former colonies in North Africa. Those states have as many Muslims as the US-aligned bits of the Middle East, and while pro-American Middle Eastern dictators risk coups for being too pro-American, anti-French North African leaders have a long tradition of being exiled by their own militaries at France's request, and replaced with someone who understands that while his title may be the same as the French Presidents, he is still de facto a colonial governor.
Moreover, France actually has a pretty large Muslim population who feel extremely isolated from the French state. They (along with the UK) are one of the biggest sources of recruits for ISIS, and in 2005 they rioted.
So the shocking thing here isn't that a group of them were so pissed that they wanted to shoot up some shit, it's that a) the French security state didn't detect their cell earlier, b) they got Kalishnikovs into a country with much stricter gun control then us.
Except for your house, pretty much the entire country is a gun free-free zone. You can own a gun and keep it at home, but you can only carry it to and from your Army training, courses by government-authorized firearms organizations, gun shows (which are also highly regulated), or to sell it.
You can't have your gun at a movie theater just in case James Holmes or a Jihadist appears.
And that doesn't apply to everydamn-body-else too? You'll note the only country on the list that pays Doctors more then us is the Dutch, and the Canadians could actually get a $59k raise simply by moving south of the border. With lawyers it's only a $23k raise.
But, of course, it's not actually that easy to switch countries if you're a lawyer or a Doctor. Why? Because Legal and Medical associations are quasi-governmental bodies who would not like it if Physicians from Ontario all started commuting to Detroit for $30k less then the local heart specialists. It is that easy if you're a programer, because nobody in DC thinks of programmers as a voting block to be courted, because there's no guy in DC telling them that programmers are such a thing.
BTW, the difficulties in out-sourcing medical care are pretty much identical to the difficulty out-sourcing database administration. In both cases you're sending info to India, and getting info back, and as long as the Nurse/tech guy is smarter then paste in theory you can out-source all the really expensive/hard shit to India. In practice it's very difficult to get that to work because if the smart guy isn;t sitting in the office looking at the problem with his own eyes it increases his error rate, and it also pisses off the people he has to work with.
So you acknowledge that my argument is that barring unknowable shit he would be punished by a perfectly fair trial, and yet you're claiming anyone who says that is politically biased because unknowable shit is theoretically possible.
As for my politics, has it ever occurred to your all-American Patriotic brain-washed mind that it is possible to think that the normal course of American Law would result in evil shit? I don;t know about you, but I live here. So I don't buy the hype.
Moreover, are you sure you like Snowden? You admit that it would take some totally unlikely, completely unknowable, and fairly ridiculous scenario for him to get off under current law. Yet rather then say "Gee, maybe we should fucking change current law so he's got a shot at not being convicted," you're all "but he's got a chance!"
Ever looked at international Doctor Salaries? Or lawyer salaries?
Part of the reason those are through the roof is that they have very good lobbying arms. The people who actually run the country (unlike the Dems claim, it isn't the 1%, it's more like the top 20-25% who make $100k. The basis of their power is they always vote, even in odd-year-Mayoral elections, the cheating bastards) distrust unions, so actual unions are quite restricted. But Doctors and lawyers are key components of the hundredthousandocracy, can quite clearly and cogently defend their interests, and arrange it so that even proposals designed largely to screw them (ie: anything that reduces health costs, any form of Tort Reform) don't do that shit.
There are 4 millionish IT Workers in the US. If a few hundred thousand organized themselves into an association, hired lobbyists in every state and in DC (or, more likely, hired some of their members to lobby), they would be quite powerful. They aren't a union, so the GOP won't go into crazy-kill-death mode. Unlike Zuckerberg or San Fran tech entrepreneurs, they look and act like the suburban white-collar types who dominate the country. They say "we want these contracts investigated because we think that the rules weren't followed," and no politician has the stones to get in the fucking way.
Real life is not like software. The cost of developing a totally new produce is not a couple million for some really smart engineers and the computers they use.
How much does it cost to set up a chip fab? Me memory from a late 90s factoid was it was the Billion$ range, and with the ever-shrinking nanometer processes they keep coming up with it can't have gotten cheaper.
When a major player goes bankrupt in a market like that it makes it much harder for anew guy to enter, because all the banker isn't stupid. If a company with decades of experience, existing fabs, etc. goes bankrupt, then the odds against our innovative new start-up have to be pretty bad, and a loan in that range has to be extremely fucking risky.
How about Cali, which is going on 20 years of Democrats, or Mass, which hasn't elected a Republican to a full Senate-term since a black guy in the 70s. Or NYC, whose local-level Republicans frequently switch parties to run for higher office, and when they don;t tend to get their butts handed them in primaries. Places with similar GOP-dominence in the South can become tech hubs, but only if the Feds build NASA there.
A for Roosevelt, I kinda thought that beating Hitler and ending the Depression were good things, and that the GOP of the time strongly opposed all measures associated with both on the basis of Rand Paul-style isolationism and Tea Party style economic conservatism.
This is America, not some Arab country that doesn't recognize Israel at all. He's probably talking about the West Bank, which the Israeli government has never officially claimed, but does insist it has the right to fill up with Jews. Particular the bits nearest Jerusalem.
Because the GOP's our opposition, therefore much as I hate those chintzy fuckers, opposing Obama is actually their entire fucking job.
OTOH in legal theory the internal politics of all nation-states are supposed to be totally irrelevant to the one another. People don't pay much attention to that shit, but it's still considered a big deal in terms of an international relationship if one country makes a guy who really hates the leadership of another country their fucking spokesman (non-spokesperson-type jobs are different -- nobody gives a shit whether the EPA Administrator thinks Justin Trudeau is the only Canadian stupider then Stephen Harper, but you can bet there's be some fucking angst if John Kerry or Jay Carnay said that shit).
This is magnified when the relationship we're talking about is Israel-US, because the US is pretty much the entire fucking reason that half the Israeli cabinet has not been banned from international travel over ethnic cleansing allegations. And it gets even more fraught now that the stupid fucking politicians involved are Obama and Netanyahu. They have had some extremely strong disagreements over issues such as the Iran deal, Netanyahu's stance on negotiations with the Palestinians, Netanyahu's inexplicable decision to make that speech in front of Congress detailing all that shit, his slightly more explicable decision to run as the don't-worry-I-won't-sign-a-peace-treaty candidate, etc.
Which basically means that by hiring this particular guy Netanyahu would be perceived as intentionally insulting the Obama Administration. Since Obama takes his campaign promises of 2008 way more seriously then he gets credit for, that's probably not a problem in the short term. But in the long-term it's ridiculously fucking stupid because Obama is term-limited, and there's roughly a 50% chance the next President won;t be nearly as pro-Israeli as he is. For example Bernie Sanders was angry enough at Netanyahu's behavior prior to that speech that he boycotted it. Hillary is probably the most pro-Israeli Democrat of any kind left, and she is architect of much of the Obama policy Bibi haters, her husband helped draw up the peace treaties Bibi is trying to work his way around, and if her position on this particular dispute is anything but "Fuck you too Bibi" she's gonna lose a lot of the black votes that make her more likely to be the nominee then Sanders.
You remember that episode of the Colbert Report where he had his brother on? The guy who drawn that famous Obama poster was being sued for copyright infringement, and Stephan's brother is a copyright lawyer. When asked flat-out which side is legally correct the brother went through a list of arguments both sides could use. Twice. He justified this by saying "Depends on which side's paying me," so Stephen said "Well I'm paying you, and I want to know which side is right."
You are doing precisely what Colbert's brother did. If you;re a lawyer you've seen weird cases that ended in ways that could not be predicted, and your job is actually to make those weird endings happen, so you simply refuse to comment on any cased until it has been played in front of a Judge. But the reality is that those of us who are not lawyers cannot base our lives on "well nobody knows until they see the arguments," we have to base them on the idea that generally following what the law says is statistically less likely to result in getting our asses handed to us in Court.
I'm not making the case that it is impossible to conceive of some miraculous claim that he could theoretically have that would save him. I'm not saying he couldn't get Jury Nullification. OJ got off, after all.
I'm saying that, if there's a fair trial, and the facts and arguments presented are the facts and arguments we can reasonably infer from what we know about the case, then Snowden is fucked in the sense that his odds of being convicted are extremely high.
And I'm concluding that this means that a) fears of Snowden's trial being unfair are inherently ridiculous (the government can't increase it's odds of winning by unfairness, but it can increase it's odds of having the case dismissed, it would be extremely stupid for them to do anything that isn't squarely within the legal norm), and b) Europe's ability to keep him from being deported (should he end in Europe) are much more restricted then his allies think.
There's no political agenda there. It's the law, as applied to real world behavior.
OTOH, most of the rest of the people on this thread have a very strong political agenda to keep him from being prosecuted, and have therefore convinced themselves that a) no fair trial could convict him, and b) Europe/Putin/flavoroftheweek will be so impressed by his inherent righteousness that it swoops in from on high and makes everything all better. One guy actually cited the whistleblower protection act (which has absolutely no use for a former employee, or a whistleblower whose gone through the media) as a potential hurdle for the government.
Won't actually work for anyone I know whose actually on food stamps, because if you're in a low-wage retail job you don;t have predictable hours and you can't say "ok, I'll spend an hour baking before work, then leave the mess until after work and clean up" because you have no fucking clue whether you'll be brought in at 6 AM or 10 PM. In the minds of rich people* you could just do that shit when you had time, because clearly working retail is not gonna take as much time as a "real job," but the day you run late because you thought you closed and then you realized you open, and it was bread-baking/sandwich-making day; is a day nobody in your family gets to eat. Unless you a) call off, which risks firing, and b) have a stash of crappy-ass, cheap, quickly made food sitting around.
But we've already posited that the family cannot actually afford to have that cache, so everyone's just gonna have to go hungry. Or you call off, and generally in retail they keep copious track of shit like call-offs.
This is even more true when you add kids in. They do not understand why mommy has to cook instead of playing, and are not going to take "we have to drink tap water because we're on food stamps" without tears. Particularly if the other little kids figure out the reason they don't have a juice box is that they're poor. And if you've got a kid, you really don't want to waste call-offs on "shit I forgot I opened at 6 AM this Tuesday" because something will come up real soon.
*As a retail drone, from my point of view is you have a set schedule every week, wages of more then $10 an hour, and actual benefits, you are filthy fucking rich. It's true that there are people above you who are so wealthy they don't understand your struggles, but it is also true that if you think that "baking bread" is actually an option for a single-parent family, on a retail schedule, you have no fucking clue how life works for working-class single parents on a retail salary.
1) So you haven't told your Congressman that you want him to do these things, none of your neighbors have told him, and you're surprised he has not gotten off his ass to do those things?
That kinda sums up the problem with both the geek community, and the American people on these issues. We have a government that is designed to be highly user unfriendly. It is designed to be a whole lot of fucking work. It is the command-line of governments. We have two houses that matter, an independent executive, hundreds of powerful and totally autonomous Congressman (Canadian MPs, for example, boast of their defiance of leadership if they vote against it 1% of the time), of course it's fucking complicated, complex, and stupidly inefficient.
Yet we want to sit on our asses, eating popcorn, throw some money at lawyers, and assume that there's some evil conspiracy when nothing we want to happen happens.
Hell let me put it to you this way: Obama is the President we will have until January of '17. He started the investigation of Snowden. What strategy is more likely to work: getting Obama to pardon Snowden, or getting Congress to change the law?
Neither would be easy short-term, but if somebody had spent $50k on an organizer to lobby for a change to the Espionage Act, instead of several times that on a lawyer to parse the Constitution before being thrown out due to a lack of standing, you;d probably have gotten a bill through committee by now.
At this point we're almost best off firing all the lawyers, and just showing up aty every Presidential candidates events and asking Snowden pardon questions until they're all on fucking record.
But, of course, to make sure everybody got hit you'd need an organization, which means you'd need an organizer. And Americans hate paying organizers.
2) I didn't say you couldn't use the Courts to fight bad laws, I said that isn't part of the trial process. And it isn't. It's allowed several places, but they are completely different steps in the process. Why? because the trial is what happens in front of the Jury, and the Jury is there to decide the Facts, Questions of Law are left to the Judge and not addressed at trial lest they influence the Jury.
This is the law. It is pedantic even by internet commentator standards. In this case the problem with your use of the term is that it's virtually impossible for him to not get convicted at a fair trial. Documents he seems to be the only person who could access leaked, he flew to honk Kong on very short notice, the media started talking about a leaker in Hong Kong, they later publicly identified Snowden as said leaker, etc. Fair trial means he can offer a bunch of alternative explanations, not that he can ask the Jury to nullify the law.
BTW, if the Judge thinks that his lawyer is offering a case that would encourage nullification, "Fair trial" actually means he has to fuck Snowden over. The Jury is not supposed to decide whether the law is good, so the Judge is supposed to order a mistrial due to defense misconduct if he thinks the Jury is getting a "this law is evil and you should let Ed off" message. Why? Because both sides have to be able to present their case to the Jury, and if the Defense's case is "this law is shit," then the Prosecution either has to be allowed to defend the law (which would probably mean a lot of witnesses saying "if only Ed hadn;t broken the law my buddy wouldn't be dead," which biases the Jury against Ed, so the mistrial is by far the more likely option), or the entire case has to be thrown out.
There's always a non-zero chance of nullification, but since nullification is indistinguishable from the Jury simply not believing the Prosecutions's case it's both virtually impossible to measure, and considered much more important by pop culture then it is in real life.
3) He coulda snitched to Wyden. then Wyden can ask questions about program
Please don't ever try and be a lawyer, your understanding of the law, and your insistence that you know it when you simply have no idea what path Snowden's lawyers would take is painful to watch.
You still don't even grasp the basic concepts of trials, let alone have any idea whatsoever what legal routes Snowden's lawyers could take.
You got a precedent to back that up?
Because, as I said, multiple people have been convicted in just the past few years of violating the same law Snowden's violating.
Either you're arguing their trials were inherently unfair, you're arguing those trials did not meet European standards of fairness; or you're using the term "fair trial" wrong.
To go to the dictionary definition of fair trial it's "the term given to a trial in the presence of an impartial judge and jury." The part of the legal algorithm that determines whether the law says what the government needs it to say to get a conviction is pre-trial, "Fair trial" only means that you have a right to challenge the facts under the rules set forth pre-trial.
For example, in this case if Snowden could prove that there was a reasonable case to be made someone not named Ed Snowden leaked those documents he could win. But that's really hard to make, because the only person with access to the documents, who flew to Hong Kong to meet with Poitras and Greenwald, and then admitted that he leaked the documents in numerous interviews, all of which are admissible because the US Government wasn't coercing him, is Ed Snowden. So he'd have to convince a Jury that, while he was in Honolulu, the Chinese forced him to flee to hong Kong and then either a) Poitras and Greenwald conspired to make him look like the leaker, or b) the Chinese forced him to pretend he was the leaker.
To be fair the Judge has to give him the right to make that case. But the fact that he has the right to make that case, does not mean his chance of getting off under that scenario is 10%, or even rounds up to 10%. I suspect his chance is roughly equivalent to the chance of Jury Nullification.
You're just an internet commentator commenting way above your knowledge and intelligence level on the topic. It's embarrassing.
Your letter is not quite what I meant. You're talking pardon. I'm talking amend the law so that what he did is no longer illegal.
Seriously, Snowden is fucked under current law because he can;t tell a Jury "let me off if you think me leaking this was a good idea." That's an illegal defense. That could be fairly easily changed by Congress, but it doesn't happen because everyone is focused on shit that would be much harder to get (ie: a pardon). I recommend a second letter.
As for "fair trial," you're misunderstanding my objection to your use of the term. A "Fair Trial" is necessarily a "Trial." That is a very specific phase in the legal process that determines whether a suspect goes to prison, and during the actual trial process no law is ever challenged on Constitutional grounds. That happens at Pre-Trial Hearings, or after the Trial and Sentencing are over on Appeal. "Fair Trial," in particular has a very specific meaning, and a fair trial can be completely un-fair if Congress has written the law to fuck you over and the Founders neglected to include a clause protecting your ass. Snowden's fucked because Congress fucked him over in the law, and the Founders didn't have the foresight to bail him out. So, regardless of whether his conviction is fair in principle, his trial will be a "Fair Trial" by definition.
The media love to trumpet the results of the Pentagon papers trial. But it's ridiculous to claim they have any help for Snowden. They show Greenwald and Poitras can't be charged for disseminating the info, but they only relate to Snowden if you squint real hard.
Chelsea Manning and roughly a half-dozen others have been charged under this law by Obama, and only one has gotten off. The Supremes didn't even bother hearing any Constitutional arguments they made.
As for going straight to Congress, how could that have been less safe then fleeing to Cuba via Russia? Particularly since the worst his job could do to him was fire him, and he clearly didn't want to keep said job. Hell, send a flash drive to Wyden. It'd be mighty tricky to track down the guy who sent that.
I mean really. You are so stuck in this. Dredd Scott got a fair trial. Since the law of the day was inherently unfair, he lost his fair trial and died a slave. The same thing will happen to Ed Snowden, because he actually did the shit he will be tried for. Yes, the Jury will presume him innocent. Yes, the Judge will treat him as innocent. But we know the evidence they will present. We know the defenses available to both sides. And Snowden's case is nonexistant.
And you've actually confirmed this. We have a saying in the US Legal Community: if you have the facts, pound on the fact, if you don't have the facts, pound on the law, if you don't have the law, pound on the table. You know the case, you know what the trial would be about, and yet instead of talking about the facts that would make Snowden Not Guilty, or the Legal nuance he could use to avoid sentencing; you're pounding on the table.
As for the ECHR, the Death Penalty is not on the table. Complex arguments about the nature of US Punishment are not likely to work, because the US can simply agree not to put him in whatever ridiculous scenario his lawyers dream up. In fact, to my knowledge, the only time the ECHR has stopped a case because of those punishments it was one of those interesting "you're a sex offender whose sentence is up, but you pissed off the psychologist so he says you're a threat, and you'll stay locked up" cases. the more general case you;re making would result in all extraditions to the US stopping, because everyone sent to prison in the US would face the same conditions as Snowden.
If Snowden ends up in Europe, his case will focus on the nature of the Espionage statute. He simply doesn't have a case otherwise.
BTW, I wouldn't be pounding on this particular point if it wouldn't be trivial for Snowden's friends on the internet to solve most of his problems simply by getting Congress to change the fucking law to allow the fucking defense that has them convinced any trial without that defense is inherently unfair.
Seriously, a Public Interest defense to the Espionage statute is a good idea. Obama like goo-goo good government stuff, and this would eliminate a pain in his ass. The House GOP likes calling Obama a tyrant. This could happen. It would actually help Ed Snowden a whole lot.
But if his internet buddies are too legally illiterate to acknowledge that under current fucked-up rules, he'd be convicted in a fair trial; then it won't. Because the use is a small-c-conservative political system and somebody really needs to push for any-damn-thing to happen.
In practice it's virtually impossible to get a libertarian to admit that his ideas would require an increase in the amount of lawyering, as the people who currently go to the Federal government to (for example) regulate carbon monoxide would instead need some sort of tort against polluters.
Even if you live self-sufficiently off the land in your remote cabin somewhere, society provided an army and legal system to protect you. In exchange for this, you are required to pay taxes. As I said before, you want to opt out then you need to get out.
Get out to where? There's no free land left where you can plant a flag and declare your own independent nation, not even in Somalia. And in any foreign country you wouldn't even be a citizen, if they'll even permit you to come. Surely the strongest claim is to your birthplace and homestead. Let's face it, every country has a strong hypocrisy when it comes to its own existence. The US seceded from the British Empire. The US refused to let the Confederation secede from the union. The only way you "get out" is with enough military force to stop those trying to keep you in. Or to use a classic analogy, it's two wolves and a sheep where the sheep wants to declare independence and create its own laws to protect it from becoming dinner. But the wolves have democratically decided the sheep can't secede. It's the tyranny of the majority, where the majority has also decided who gets to be counted.
You got an alternative?
A Libertarian Utopia is untenable in the long term, because with no government to enforce contracts businesses have very little idea what they've agreed to do, employees have very little idea what their employer has agreed to provide for them, etc. And if somebody is screwing someone else there's virtually no recourse.
Especially if the screwer is wealthy (say, your cable company), because they can just pay a couple goons to beat the shit out of the screwee (say: you) until you stop whining about the bill. Now you can band together with your friends to beat up the Cable Company goons, but you've just recreated the tyranny of the majority.
And soon enough you'll have a real welfare state, as the majority does not like it when Grandma starves while the Cable Company heirs eat Dodo eggs from the flock they spent $157,000,000 recreating with advanced genetic engineering techniques.
You ever heard that old entomologist joke that Communism is the perfect system for ants? Libertarianism would also be great. For domestic cats.
For us big, hairless, empathetic apes the options are pretty much a) Democracy with some sort of Mixed Market economy and b) Dystopian hellscape. Any option c) will turn into a) or b).
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The audio from a reporter two feet in front of your face is a lot clearer then the audio on a recording. Moreover the fact he's talking about Muslims at all should be a clue that the reporter's not talking about illegal immigration. There are plenty of Latino illegal immigrants, but very few Muslim ones.
The follow-ups are also totally inappropriate for a question on illegal immigration. Why would you have a database of illegal immigrants if your policy is to deport them? Why would you register them anywhere, much less a religious institution which has numerous First Amendment rights to tell your registration agency to go away? You find them, you detain them at a detention center, you implement some sort of hearing to minimize the risk you're deporting legal immigrants, then you stick them on a plane back home. Why would NBC News go straight to the Nazi metaphor if they hadn't just asked a question that had absolutely nothing to do with illegal immigration? Granted they're mainstream, so they don't like him; but the simple fact is that thre MSM does not violate Godwin's Law because it's Tuesday. They do it because you've just answered a question about US Citizens by saying that all of them who follow a certain religion should be in a special database.
Either Trump's not smart enough to figure out that he is answering a totally different set of policy questions then the reporter is asking, in which case he should be pilloried in the media for not understanding the requirements of the job he is trying to get; or the media is right to pillory him for.
Which means that you're criticizing the media for criticizing Trump the wrong way.
Tell that to Captain Merryman of the Maryland State Militia.
The Commander-in-Chief has extreme powers to do almost anything he can justify in times of trouble, which are de facto defined as whenever Congress refuses to tell him to cut his tyranny the fuck out.
The plight of the Japanese is a pretty good example of why that happens in the real world, regardless of all theories about the Constitutions ability to protect freedom in the real world. Roosevelt's man on the scene had a not-totally-implausible line of bullshit, and had arrested the Japanese using his military powers rather then police powers. Since Habeas Corpus and other rights in the criminal system do not apply to military prisoners, the Civil Rights of the First Amendment are technically not violated if you are allowed to speak in a prison camp, the Second Amendment also does not apply to military prisoners, etc. pretty much the only way for the Courts to rule the Constitution was violated would be for them to rule Lt. Gen DeWitt was wrong in his military judgement.
Which did not happen despite the fact said judgement was both ridiculous bullshit, and incredibly racist.
Interesting.
He got asked a question about "American Muslims". He responded with a rant that could either be evil-Fascist-racism or a totally ridiculous non sequitur about illegal immigration.
And your problem with the coverage is that instead of criticizing Trump for being so fucking clueless he doesn't understand that an "American Muslim" is by definition not an illegal immigrant, and his immigration policies will have jack-squat to do with the American Muslim population, they are criticizing him for crypto-fascism.
Okey dokey smokey.
How often do you talk to the working class in your current town? Because that actually sounds like pretty standard behavior from the working class.
I ended up in retail, and the number of 20-somethings I met who think a road trip to the state capital would be AMAZING because they've never left the County is far from non-zero. Especially since most of them have cars, and could easily schedule a four-day break. Road trips are simply not on their RADAR. Many others do a) family reunions (it's a black area, so these are mostly down in the Deep South, but occasionally they happen up here), b) Vegas, or c) a cruise. d) does not exist (altho if we were closer to the border, trips to Ontario where 18-year-olds can legally buy beer would probably not be uncommon). The culture towards travel is very different.
Racial/ethnic stuff is also much closer to the surface then when you're talking to the Middle Class. A guy actually walked up to me and said "You wanna know why Aspirin is white? Because it works."
What kind of property tax are you talking about? Property tax is levied on your house in the US. Other kinds exist (Missouri, for example, taxes the value of your car), but they're not what we mean when we talk about property taxes.
We use property taxes to pay for local school districts, and numerous other municipally-funded things (for example, lots of American cities do not have enough money to pay for police, which means people move out, which means that house prices go down, which means there's even less money for police, etc. This is what happened to Detroit). In extreme cases (such as the aforementioned Detroit) your annual property tax payment will be more then your house payment. But in other places (such as the deep South, where they are morally oppose to using taxation to pay for anything) it can be as low as $1 per $300 of a home's value.
Here's a CNN Story on it. The map can flip between dollar costs and costs as a percent of your house's value. In most places lots of people live it's 1.5-2.5%, but Cali is lower because of Proposition 13, which sets a maximum rate of 1% of your home's assessed value. It's a bit old (2011), but it should give an interested non-American some clue has to how the US Property tax system functions.
As you can imagine, the "assessed value" bit means that there's a lot of gamesmanship in when the City reassesses your home. If you can get it to happen during the bottom of a down market you do, and if they try to do it during an upswing you fight it. A second bit of Prop 13 actually made it very difficult for a City to reassess a home's value (and thus jack up the property tax bill) except when you sell or you build a new house on the lot. When it was passed the Silicon Valley property price boom was in full swing, and cities were notorious for pricing Senior citizens out of their homes by reassessing the property values, which brought the tax bill above what they could afford to pay.
If you think about it, utilities and monopolies are pretty much the method by which a government governs.
The utility of defense against foreign governments, for example, is provided by the monopoly of force of the local government. Security against crime/riots/etc. is both a public utility (it is useful to the public), and guaranteed by the above-mentions monopoly of force. Standard contract law and other civil procedures are in the same category.
Hell, you have a monopoly on your property enforced by the government.
1) Quebec is not America. Quebec is part of a country whose entire reason to exist is to restrict the import of American ideals. In particular, Canadian Constitutional law is based on two principles anathema to American thinkers: the usefulness of a hereditary monarchy, and the necessity of heavily restricting the free speech rights of English-speakers in Quebec.
2) Defense, "domestic tranquility," and Justice in the US are utilities and monopolies. The "general welfare" is a bit more nebulous, but most things justified by it are utilities, and typically government involvement either creates a government monopoly (private student loans, for example, are much rarer then public ones), or a government-regulated market that is a de facto monopoly (like the ObamaCarte exchanges). Liberty is not a monopoly, but it is a utility. A "more perfect union" refers to the Founders desire to increase the Congress's power to set up monopolies. Under the Articles of Confederation it had many capital-P-Powers, but they were all exercised by ordering the local state-level monopolies around, which meant the states could simnply ignore the Federal Monopoly in favor of their own local monopoly.
France is a bigger power then the US is Muslim countries due to it's continued political dominance of it's former colonies in North Africa. Those states have as many Muslims as the US-aligned bits of the Middle East, and while pro-American Middle Eastern dictators risk coups for being too pro-American, anti-French North African leaders have a long tradition of being exiled by their own militaries at France's request, and replaced with someone who understands that while his title may be the same as the French Presidents, he is still de facto a colonial governor.
Moreover, France actually has a pretty large Muslim population who feel extremely isolated from the French state. They (along with the UK) are one of the biggest sources of recruits for ISIS, and in 2005 they rioted.
So the shocking thing here isn't that a group of them were so pissed that they wanted to shoot up some shit, it's that a) the French security state didn't detect their cell earlier, b) they got Kalishnikovs into a country with much stricter gun control then us.
Except for your house, pretty much the entire country is a gun free-free zone. You can own a gun and keep it at home, but you can only carry it to and from your Army training, courses by government-authorized firearms organizations, gun shows (which are also highly regulated), or to sell it.
You can't have your gun at a movie theater just in case James Holmes or a Jihadist appears.
Keyword in News: New.
And that doesn't apply to everydamn-body-else too? You'll note the only country on the list that pays Doctors more then us is the Dutch, and the Canadians could actually get a $59k raise simply by moving south of the border. With lawyers it's only a $23k raise.
But, of course, it's not actually that easy to switch countries if you're a lawyer or a Doctor. Why? Because Legal and Medical associations are quasi-governmental bodies who would not like it if Physicians from Ontario all started commuting to Detroit for $30k less then the local heart specialists. It is that easy if you're a programer, because nobody in DC thinks of programmers as a voting block to be courted, because there's no guy in DC telling them that programmers are such a thing.
BTW, the difficulties in out-sourcing medical care are pretty much identical to the difficulty out-sourcing database administration. In both cases you're sending info to India, and getting info back, and as long as the Nurse/tech guy is smarter then paste in theory you can out-source all the really expensive/hard shit to India. In practice it's very difficult to get that to work because if the smart guy isn;t sitting in the office looking at the problem with his own eyes it increases his error rate, and it also pisses off the people he has to work with.
So you acknowledge that my argument is that barring unknowable shit he would be punished by a perfectly fair trial, and yet you're claiming anyone who says that is politically biased because unknowable shit is theoretically possible.
As for my politics, has it ever occurred to your all-American Patriotic brain-washed mind that it is possible to think that the normal course of American Law would result in evil shit? I don;t know about you, but I live here. So I don't buy the hype.
Moreover, are you sure you like Snowden? You admit that it would take some totally unlikely, completely unknowable, and fairly ridiculous scenario for him to get off under current law. Yet rather then say "Gee, maybe we should fucking change current law so he's got a shot at not being convicted," you're all "but he's got a chance!"
Ever looked at international Doctor Salaries? Or lawyer salaries?
Part of the reason those are through the roof is that they have very good lobbying arms. The people who actually run the country (unlike the Dems claim, it isn't the 1%, it's more like the top 20-25% who make $100k. The basis of their power is they always vote, even in odd-year-Mayoral elections, the cheating bastards) distrust unions, so actual unions are quite restricted. But Doctors and lawyers are key components of the hundredthousandocracy, can quite clearly and cogently defend their interests, and arrange it so that even proposals designed largely to screw them (ie: anything that reduces health costs, any form of Tort Reform) don't do that shit.
There are 4 millionish IT Workers in the US. If a few hundred thousand organized themselves into an association, hired lobbyists in every state and in DC (or, more likely, hired some of their members to lobby), they would be quite powerful. They aren't a union, so the GOP won't go into crazy-kill-death mode. Unlike Zuckerberg or San Fran tech entrepreneurs, they look and act like the suburban white-collar types who dominate the country. They say "we want these contracts investigated because we think that the rules weren't followed," and no politician has the stones to get in the fucking way.
Real life is not like software. The cost of developing a totally new produce is not a couple million for some really smart engineers and the computers they use.
How much does it cost to set up a chip fab? Me memory from a late 90s factoid was it was the Billion$ range, and with the ever-shrinking nanometer processes they keep coming up with it can't have gotten cheaper.
When a major player goes bankrupt in a market like that it makes it much harder for anew guy to enter, because all the banker isn't stupid. If a company with decades of experience, existing fabs, etc. goes bankrupt, then the odds against our innovative new start-up have to be pretty bad, and a loan in that range has to be extremely fucking risky.
How about Cali, which is going on 20 years of Democrats, or Mass, which hasn't elected a Republican to a full Senate-term since a black guy in the 70s. Or NYC, whose local-level Republicans frequently switch parties to run for higher office, and when they don;t tend to get their butts handed them in primaries. Places with similar GOP-dominence in the South can become tech hubs, but only if the Feds build NASA there.
A for Roosevelt, I kinda thought that beating Hitler and ending the Depression were good things, and that the GOP of the time strongly opposed all measures associated with both on the basis of Rand Paul-style isolationism and Tea Party style economic conservatism.
This is America, not some Arab country that doesn't recognize Israel at all. He's probably talking about the West Bank, which the Israeli government has never officially claimed, but does insist it has the right to fill up with Jews. Particular the bits nearest Jerusalem.
Because the GOP's our opposition, therefore much as I hate those chintzy fuckers, opposing Obama is actually their entire fucking job.
OTOH in legal theory the internal politics of all nation-states are supposed to be totally irrelevant to the one another. People don't pay much attention to that shit, but it's still considered a big deal in terms of an international relationship if one country makes a guy who really hates the leadership of another country their fucking spokesman (non-spokesperson-type jobs are different -- nobody gives a shit whether the EPA Administrator thinks Justin Trudeau is the only Canadian stupider then Stephen Harper, but you can bet there's be some fucking angst if John Kerry or Jay Carnay said that shit).
This is magnified when the relationship we're talking about is Israel-US, because the US is pretty much the entire fucking reason that half the Israeli cabinet has not been banned from international travel over ethnic cleansing allegations. And it gets even more fraught now that the stupid fucking politicians involved are Obama and Netanyahu. They have had some extremely strong disagreements over issues such as the Iran deal, Netanyahu's stance on negotiations with the Palestinians, Netanyahu's inexplicable decision to make that speech in front of Congress detailing all that shit, his slightly more explicable decision to run as the don't-worry-I-won't-sign-a-peace-treaty candidate, etc.
Which basically means that by hiring this particular guy Netanyahu would be perceived as intentionally insulting the Obama Administration. Since Obama takes his campaign promises of 2008 way more seriously then he gets credit for, that's probably not a problem in the short term. But in the long-term it's ridiculously fucking stupid because Obama is term-limited, and there's roughly a 50% chance the next President won;t be nearly as pro-Israeli as he is. For example Bernie Sanders was angry enough at Netanyahu's behavior prior to that speech that he boycotted it. Hillary is probably the most pro-Israeli Democrat of any kind left, and she is architect of much of the Obama policy Bibi haters, her husband helped draw up the peace treaties Bibi is trying to work his way around, and if her position on this particular dispute is anything but "Fuck you too Bibi" she's gonna lose a lot of the black votes that make her more likely to be the nominee then Sanders.
You remember that episode of the Colbert Report where he had his brother on? The guy who drawn that famous Obama poster was being sued for copyright infringement, and Stephan's brother is a copyright lawyer. When asked flat-out which side is legally correct the brother went through a list of arguments both sides could use. Twice. He justified this by saying "Depends on which side's paying me," so Stephen said "Well I'm paying you, and I want to know which side is right."
You are doing precisely what Colbert's brother did. If you;re a lawyer you've seen weird cases that ended in ways that could not be predicted, and your job is actually to make those weird endings happen, so you simply refuse to comment on any cased until it has been played in front of a Judge. But the reality is that those of us who are not lawyers cannot base our lives on "well nobody knows until they see the arguments," we have to base them on the idea that generally following what the law says is statistically less likely to result in getting our asses handed to us in Court.
I'm not making the case that it is impossible to conceive of some miraculous claim that he could theoretically have that would save him. I'm not saying he couldn't get Jury Nullification. OJ got off, after all.
I'm saying that, if there's a fair trial, and the facts and arguments presented are the facts and arguments we can reasonably infer from what we know about the case, then Snowden is fucked in the sense that his odds of being convicted are extremely high.
And I'm concluding that this means that a) fears of Snowden's trial being unfair are inherently ridiculous (the government can't increase it's odds of winning by unfairness, but it can increase it's odds of having the case dismissed, it would be extremely stupid for them to do anything that isn't squarely within the legal norm), and b) Europe's ability to keep him from being deported (should he end in Europe) are much more restricted then his allies think.
There's no political agenda there. It's the law, as applied to real world behavior.
OTOH, most of the rest of the people on this thread have a very strong political agenda to keep him from being prosecuted, and have therefore convinced themselves that a) no fair trial could convict him, and b) Europe/Putin/flavoroftheweek will be so impressed by his inherent righteousness that it swoops in from on high and makes everything all better. One guy actually cited the whistleblower protection act (which has absolutely no use for a former employee, or a whistleblower whose gone through the media) as a potential hurdle for the government.
Interesting strategy.
Won't actually work for anyone I know whose actually on food stamps, because if you're in a low-wage retail job you don;t have predictable hours and you can't say "ok, I'll spend an hour baking before work, then leave the mess until after work and clean up" because you have no fucking clue whether you'll be brought in at 6 AM or 10 PM. In the minds of rich people* you could just do that shit when you had time, because clearly working retail is not gonna take as much time as a "real job," but the day you run late because you thought you closed and then you realized you open, and it was bread-baking/sandwich-making day; is a day nobody in your family gets to eat. Unless you a) call off, which risks firing, and b) have a stash of crappy-ass, cheap, quickly made food sitting around.
But we've already posited that the family cannot actually afford to have that cache, so everyone's just gonna have to go hungry. Or you call off, and generally in retail they keep copious track of shit like call-offs.
This is even more true when you add kids in. They do not understand why mommy has to cook instead of playing, and are not going to take "we have to drink tap water because we're on food stamps" without tears. Particularly if the other little kids figure out the reason they don't have a juice box is that they're poor. And if you've got a kid, you really don't want to waste call-offs on "shit I forgot I opened at 6 AM this Tuesday" because something will come up real soon.
*As a retail drone, from my point of view is you have a set schedule every week, wages of more then $10 an hour, and actual benefits, you are filthy fucking rich. It's true that there are people above you who are so wealthy they don't understand your struggles, but it is also true that if you think that "baking bread" is actually an option for a single-parent family, on a retail schedule, you have no fucking clue how life works for working-class single parents on a retail salary.
1) So you haven't told your Congressman that you want him to do these things, none of your neighbors have told him, and you're surprised he has not gotten off his ass to do those things?
That kinda sums up the problem with both the geek community, and the American people on these issues. We have a government that is designed to be highly user unfriendly. It is designed to be a whole lot of fucking work. It is the command-line of governments. We have two houses that matter, an independent executive, hundreds of powerful and totally autonomous Congressman (Canadian MPs, for example, boast of their defiance of leadership if they vote against it 1% of the time), of course it's fucking complicated, complex, and stupidly inefficient.
Yet we want to sit on our asses, eating popcorn, throw some money at lawyers, and assume that there's some evil conspiracy when nothing we want to happen happens.
Hell let me put it to you this way:
Obama is the President we will have until January of '17. He started the investigation of Snowden. What strategy is more likely to work: getting Obama to pardon Snowden, or getting Congress to change the law?
Neither would be easy short-term, but if somebody had spent $50k on an organizer to lobby for a change to the Espionage Act, instead of several times that on a lawyer to parse the Constitution before being thrown out due to a lack of standing, you;d probably have gotten a bill through committee by now.
At this point we're almost best off firing all the lawyers, and just showing up aty every Presidential candidates events and asking Snowden pardon questions until they're all on fucking record.
But, of course, to make sure everybody got hit you'd need an organization, which means you'd need an organizer. And Americans hate paying organizers.
2) I didn't say you couldn't use the Courts to fight bad laws, I said that isn't part of the trial process. And it isn't. It's allowed several places, but they are completely different steps in the process. Why? because the trial is what happens in front of the Jury, and the Jury is there to decide the Facts, Questions of Law are left to the Judge and not addressed at trial lest they influence the Jury.
This is the law. It is pedantic even by internet commentator standards. In this case the problem with your use of the term is that it's virtually impossible for him to not get convicted at a fair trial. Documents he seems to be the only person who could access leaked, he flew to honk Kong on very short notice, the media started talking about a leaker in Hong Kong, they later publicly identified Snowden as said leaker, etc. Fair trial means he can offer a bunch of alternative explanations, not that he can ask the Jury to nullify the law.
BTW, if the Judge thinks that his lawyer is offering a case that would encourage nullification, "Fair trial" actually means he has to fuck Snowden over. The Jury is not supposed to decide whether the law is good, so the Judge is supposed to order a mistrial due to defense misconduct if he thinks the Jury is getting a "this law is evil and you should let Ed off" message. Why? Because both sides have to be able to present their case to the Jury, and if the Defense's case is "this law is shit," then the Prosecution either has to be allowed to defend the law (which would probably mean a lot of witnesses saying "if only Ed hadn;t broken the law my buddy wouldn't be dead," which biases the Jury against Ed, so the mistrial is by far the more likely option), or the entire case has to be thrown out.
There's always a non-zero chance of nullification, but since nullification is indistinguishable from the Jury simply not believing the Prosecutions's case it's both virtually impossible to measure, and considered much more important by pop culture then it is in real life.
3) He coulda snitched to Wyden. then Wyden can ask questions about program
Please don't ever try and be a lawyer, your understanding of the law, and your insistence that you know it when you simply have no idea what path Snowden's lawyers would take is painful to watch.
You still don't even grasp the basic concepts of trials, let alone have any idea whatsoever what legal routes Snowden's lawyers could take.
You got a precedent to back that up?
Because, as I said, multiple people have been convicted in just the past few years of violating the same law Snowden's violating.
Either you're arguing their trials were inherently unfair, you're arguing those trials did not meet European standards of fairness; or you're using the term "fair trial" wrong.
To go to the dictionary definition of fair trial it's "the term given to a trial in the presence of an impartial judge and jury." The part of the legal algorithm that determines whether the law says what the government needs it to say to get a conviction is pre-trial, "Fair trial" only means that you have a right to challenge the facts under the rules set forth pre-trial.
For example, in this case if Snowden could prove that there was a reasonable case to be made someone not named Ed Snowden leaked those documents he could win. But that's really hard to make, because the only person with access to the documents, who flew to Hong Kong to meet with Poitras and Greenwald, and then admitted that he leaked the documents in numerous interviews, all of which are admissible because the US Government wasn't coercing him, is Ed Snowden. So he'd have to convince a Jury that, while he was in Honolulu, the Chinese forced him to flee to hong Kong and then either a) Poitras and Greenwald conspired to make him look like the leaker, or b) the Chinese forced him to pretend he was the leaker.
To be fair the Judge has to give him the right to make that case. But the fact that he has the right to make that case, does not mean his chance of getting off under that scenario is 10%, or even rounds up to 10%. I suspect his chance is roughly equivalent to the chance of Jury Nullification.
You're just an internet commentator commenting way above your knowledge and intelligence level on the topic. It's embarrassing.
Pot meet kettle.
Your letter is not quite what I meant. You're talking pardon. I'm talking amend the law so that what he did is no longer illegal.
Seriously, Snowden is fucked under current law because he can;t tell a Jury "let me off if you think me leaking this was a good idea." That's an illegal defense. That could be fairly easily changed by Congress, but it doesn't happen because everyone is focused on shit that would be much harder to get (ie: a pardon). I recommend a second letter.
As for "fair trial," you're misunderstanding my objection to your use of the term. A "Fair Trial" is necessarily a "Trial." That is a very specific phase in the legal process that determines whether a suspect goes to prison, and during the actual trial process no law is ever challenged on Constitutional grounds. That happens at Pre-Trial Hearings, or after the Trial and Sentencing are over on Appeal. "Fair Trial," in particular has a very specific meaning, and a fair trial can be completely un-fair if Congress has written the law to fuck you over and the Founders neglected to include a clause protecting your ass. Snowden's fucked because Congress fucked him over in the law, and the Founders didn't have the foresight to bail him out. So, regardless of whether his conviction is fair in principle, his trial will be a "Fair Trial" by definition.
The media love to trumpet the results of the Pentagon papers trial. But it's ridiculous to claim they have any help for Snowden. They show Greenwald and Poitras can't be charged for disseminating the info, but they only relate to Snowden if you squint real hard.
Chelsea Manning and roughly a half-dozen others have been charged under this law by Obama, and only one has gotten off. The Supremes didn't even bother hearing any Constitutional arguments they made.
As for going straight to Congress, how could that have been less safe then fleeing to Cuba via Russia? Particularly since the worst his job could do to him was fire him, and he clearly didn't want to keep said job. Hell, send a flash drive to Wyden. It'd be mighty tricky to track down the guy who sent that.
Dude,
You really don't know what the phrase means.
I mean really. You are so stuck in this. Dredd Scott got a fair trial. Since the law of the day was inherently unfair, he lost his fair trial and died a slave. The same thing will happen to Ed Snowden, because he actually did the shit he will be tried for. Yes, the Jury will presume him innocent. Yes, the Judge will treat him as innocent. But we know the evidence they will present. We know the defenses available to both sides. And Snowden's case is nonexistant.
And you've actually confirmed this. We have a saying in the US Legal Community: if you have the facts, pound on the fact, if you don't have the facts, pound on the law, if you don't have the law, pound on the table. You know the case, you know what the trial would be about, and yet instead of talking about the facts that would make Snowden Not Guilty, or the Legal nuance he could use to avoid sentencing; you're pounding on the table.
As for the ECHR, the Death Penalty is not on the table. Complex arguments about the nature of US Punishment are not likely to work, because the US can simply agree not to put him in whatever ridiculous scenario his lawyers dream up. In fact, to my knowledge, the only time the ECHR has stopped a case because of those punishments it was one of those interesting "you're a sex offender whose sentence is up, but you pissed off the psychologist so he says you're a threat, and you'll stay locked up" cases. the more general case you;re making would result in all extraditions to the US stopping, because everyone sent to prison in the US would face the same conditions as Snowden.
If Snowden ends up in Europe, his case will focus on the nature of the Espionage statute. He simply doesn't have a case otherwise.
BTW, I wouldn't be pounding on this particular point if it wouldn't be trivial for Snowden's friends on the internet to solve most of his problems simply by getting Congress to change the fucking law to allow the fucking defense that has them convinced any trial without that defense is inherently unfair.
Seriously, a Public Interest defense to the Espionage statute is a good idea. Obama like goo-goo good government stuff, and this would eliminate a pain in his ass. The House GOP likes calling Obama a tyrant. This could happen. It would actually help Ed Snowden a whole lot.
But if his internet buddies are too legally illiterate to acknowledge that under current fucked-up rules, he'd be convicted in a fair trial; then it won't. Because the use is a small-c-conservative political system and somebody really needs to push for any-damn-thing to happen.
In theory, yes.
In practice it's virtually impossible to get a libertarian to admit that his ideas would require an increase in the amount of lawyering, as the people who currently go to the Federal government to (for example) regulate carbon monoxide would instead need some sort of tort against polluters.
Even if you live self-sufficiently off the land in your remote cabin somewhere, society provided an army and legal system to protect you. In exchange for this, you are required to pay taxes. As I said before, you want to opt out then you need to get out.
Get out to where? There's no free land left where you can plant a flag and declare your own independent nation, not even in Somalia. And in any foreign country you wouldn't even be a citizen, if they'll even permit you to come. Surely the strongest claim is to your birthplace and homestead. Let's face it, every country has a strong hypocrisy when it comes to its own existence. The US seceded from the British Empire. The US refused to let the Confederation secede from the union. The only way you "get out" is with enough military force to stop those trying to keep you in. Or to use a classic analogy, it's two wolves and a sheep where the sheep wants to declare independence and create its own laws to protect it from becoming dinner. But the wolves have democratically decided the sheep can't secede. It's the tyranny of the majority, where the majority has also decided who gets to be counted.
You got an alternative?
A Libertarian Utopia is untenable in the long term, because with no government to enforce contracts businesses have very little idea what they've agreed to do, employees have very little idea what their employer has agreed to provide for them, etc. And if somebody is screwing someone else there's virtually no recourse.
Especially if the screwer is wealthy (say, your cable company), because they can just pay a couple goons to beat the shit out of the screwee (say: you) until you stop whining about the bill. Now you can band together with your friends to beat up the Cable Company goons, but you've just recreated the tyranny of the majority.
And soon enough you'll have a real welfare state, as the majority does not like it when Grandma starves while the Cable Company heirs eat Dodo eggs from the flock they spent $157,000,000 recreating with advanced genetic engineering techniques.
You ever heard that old entomologist joke that Communism is the perfect system for ants? Libertarianism would also be great. For domestic cats.
For us big, hairless, empathetic apes the options are pretty much a) Democracy with some sort of Mixed Market economy and b) Dystopian hellscape. Any option c) will turn into a) or b).