In the US we don't have the birthrate to sustain our current population, so I really don't see why we should do anything to reduce that birthrate. If we want Social Security to survive we should actually probably be strongly encouraging a higher birth-rate. Most of the rest of the hemisphere is rapidly approaching that point. So immigration restrictions on Mexicans, Brazilians, Canadians, etc. aren't going to reduce the overall footprint of humanity on this half of the globe. Much of Asia and Europe is also losing population. Africa and India aren't, but both the continent and the subcontinent have declining birthrates. There is literally no reason to believe that the human population won't peak in the 2050s.
In other words don't worry. It won't be long before growth of all kinds stops.
As for sanctimony, the guy who asks for information, and then ignores the half of that information that disproves his argument really shouldn't be on a high horse about sanctimoniousness.
Dude, I've been fucking with you since you first posted. When the very first sentence of your entrance to the discussion is to insult the people you disagree with, nobody is going to give a damn about what you have to say. You came in riding that horse.
So you get proven wrong on a fairly trivial point, and your response is to claim you meant to be proven wrong the entire damn time?
Worse. They are synergistic. I think it's telling that you haven't considered the power of the NSA's records and surveillance capabilities in the hands of a Bull Connor, a Hitler, or a Pol Pot.
First off Godwin's Law. I believe I win.
Please stop being an idiot. This is a valid argument. Hitler was able to do things like take over a major world power, invade other countries, and kill lots of people because he had the power to do so. Something like the NSA records would give a similar dictator today the power to chase down people with dangerous opinions or associations and kill or imprison them.
You are the naive one if you think simply by protecting people's communications with each-other you could have prevented Hitler. Hitler ran a huge political party with branches all over the country. They knew who the prominent Jews were. They knew Communist activists because they'd been in street fights with Communist activists. They knew who wasn't a Nazi because they'd beaten non-Nazis in local elections. If God came down from heaven and said "No German government official can ever read anyone's mail," all it would have done is forced Hitler to let SA men (who were, at the time non-governmental militia-men) into the post offices to do it. If God came down again and stopped that Hitler had plenty of other ways to get information. You don't have to read a letter to find out what's in it, if one of the correspondents is already in your concentration camp because everyone could tell he was a Communist.
And if you bothered to think about these things, rather then simply blabbing freedom at the top of your lungs, you'd see that the NSA (while a problem that should be dealt with) just ain't a prelude to Hitler. If it was Hitler wouldn't be special.
Secondly just because a government has a capability that doesn't mean it will be abused. If it did disarming County Sheriffs would be neccesary every time the Sheriff was up for election.
Naive to the point of idiocy. If County Sheriffs did have the sort of power you imply, there would be such problems.
Where I come from the County Sheriff has a Glock. That means he has the physical power to pull it out and kill anyone he sees. By your argument he will inevitably do that, because he is a government employee and government employees always abuse their power.
I'm not saying the NSA should keep the databases it's got, but your blithe assumption that being on a government list inevitably leads to bad things is just as stupid as my blithe assumption that Sheriffs can't be trusted not to shoot their political opponents.
And again you demonstrate you don't understand how oppression works in America.
Now, you're going full blown stupid. Just how many IDs do you really think people lose? It's not going to be enough to throw an election. And I do think there is almost no one who couldn't find time during the week to get their ID problem fixed.
BTW, if there were actually hundreds of thousands of ineligible Democratic voters don't you think somebody would have noticed?
I sure do. I present Texas's voter ID law as proof that people did indeed notice.
Can you name one?
I'll admit a bunch of small-towners got themselves convinced it happens, and then used it to justify a ridiculous law, but unless you have examples of it actually happening you got jack.
Moreover you apparently failed to read either your own source, or my response.
I didn't say anything about the relative ability of the parties to come up with an ID. I said that Democrats live in places that actually enforce the laws all the time, but Republicans live in places where the cops let things slide. If you actually read your source you'll note that if your voter registration card says "George P Bush," but your ID just says "Geor
There are many nuclear reactor designs that are not usable for development of nuclear weapons. Plus the whole "thorium" thing cannot be used for nukes either.
That's possible. OTOH if you were actually serious about convincing people to adopt these proposals you wouldn't call it nuclear power, because people who don't follow the issue closely assume all nuclear reactors produce weapons-grade material. You'd call it Thorium-based Fission.
Moreover it doesn't get around problem one: namely that even with Japanese-quality safety engineers a really bad accident can ruin hundreds of square miles of your country.
If the country that helped defeat but the Nazis and the Soviets can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, why the fuck would we insist that all 54 African countries, everyone in Latin America, Asia, etc. has to build reactors capable of producing those weapons? Hell if the Japanese, who aren't known for inferior engineering, can't keep a non-weapons producing facility safe what are the odds that everyone else can pull that shit off?
Global warming is bad, but if it's a choice between moving all NYC residents to Detroit (we'd actually have room for a quarter of them within the Detroit city limits, the D' population has fallen that much since it's peak in '55), and giving all 192 countries in the world nuclear power then I'm gonna go with moving everyone to fucking Detroit.
1) Expense. nuclear power is incredibly expensive to do safely, because if bad things happen at a nuclear plant nobody can ever live in that County ever again. Just look at Fukishima and Chernobyl. If bad things happen at a coal or gas plant, OTOH, the worst consequence is that it blows and you need to buy a new one. You need lots of very smart people to monitor it 24/7, and sophisticated computerized systems and robots to make sure the people don't screw up, and even that won't save you forever.
2) If every democracy uses uses nuclear power everyone else will want it. And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program. Untrustworthy countries who probably shouldn't have the temptation of city-vaporizing weapons will want them. And it's kinda hard to convince an Iranian who thinks his country is perfectly trustworthy (to him it's those nasty Israelis you have to worry about) that everyone's life would be so much easier if his country didn't have the physical capability to finish the Holocaust. It's even harder to convince the Israelis, who (probably) currently have nuclear weapons, that everyone's lives would be so much simpler if they just switched to solar.
In other words if the choices are one or two more degrees of global warming, or letting every country in the world develop nuclear power, we're probably better off living with the warming.
The problem with Checks and Balances, a diverse economy, and a population that really engages in politics is that all big changes are nigh-impossible to enact. If Obama proposed a tax reform that conservative intellectuals loved, for example replacing the income tax with a national VAT, conservative Congressman would be unable to vote for it unless it also cut revenue. The engaged people who vote in GOP primaries are universally convinced ALL taxes are evil, and all taxes are equally evil, therefore any "tax reform" that makes the tax burden less painful without significantly cutting tax revenue is inherently evil. OTOH the Democrats couldn't vote for it unless it raised revenue. Their engaged people believe annoying the GOP's engaged people is the Highest Calling Available to Man. But Obama's a Democrat so he could probably bully some of them into at least considering it.
Then somebody who looks good on TV would claim the change will ruin them because they have a very carefully constructed life that allows them to dodge many income taxes, but the whole point of consumption taxes is you can't dodge them. You're actually seeing this with ObamaCare. Most of the people harmed by it, on TV, and from states with their own exchanges would find out that they'd get a better deal on insurance after ObamaCare. But they don't bother looking because they put like three whole hours into picking their current plan and nothing from the government could be cheaper.
And in the end it would die like Social Security reform did, or ObamaCare almost did, failing some important procedural vote nobody outside DC knew existed before it became the only story on CNN.
If we had the British system, PM Obama could replace the income tax with something new within six months. If the rank-and-file in either party managed to block him there'd be a new election, and either the blocking rank-and-file would become PM or they'd be voted out.
The stuff you mention still doesn't add up to much. Obama may have gotten a $Trillion in stimulus. If you add in Bush's TARP program it's possibly up to $2 Trillion. But most of TARP got repaid, so it'll only cost $24 Billion. Over 9 years of budgets even the higher number's chump change.
What I'm really interested in is what programs you'd cut if God came down from heaven and made you dictator for six months. I suspect you'd do the opposite of me.
I'd put everyone in Medicare, increase the "maximum taxable earnings" in Social Security, reform the Higher Ed. system so that people can actually afford to pick the wrong school when they're 18, and seriously consider a new social program. It would give everyone $500 a month in income. It would be paid for mostly by new and increased taxes, but partly by reducing programs no longer needed (ie: Medicaid and ObamaCare are not necessary with universal Medicare, and Food Stamps don't make much sense when you're giving everyone $6k a year anyway).
As for getting our allies to pay for their militaries, in the long-term that would be a great idea. Trouble is in the short term the North Koreans might conquer the South. As is the only "ally" we have that bothers with a real warfighting military is Israel, and we can't really borrow their troops without pissing off the rest of our "allies" in that region.
In the Constitution itself, Article 1, Section 5, specifically allows Congress to decide actual Congressional debates "require secrecy."
Ah, so this really just a congressional rule. Basically you are the point of circular reasoning, enjoy your sanctimony.
Yes that one's just Congressional. But the other one I cited is used to classify stuff all the time.
As for sanctimony, the guy who asks for information, and then ignores the half of that information that disproves his argument really shouldn't be on a high horse about sanctimoniousness.
It's interesting that you equate surveillance with Bull Connor.
Worse. They are synergistic. I think it's telling that you haven't considered the power of the NSA's records and surveillance capabilities in the hands of a Bull Connor, a Hitler, or a Pol Pot.
First off Godwin's Law. I believe I win.
Secondly just because a government has a capability that doesn't mean it will be abused. If it did disarming County Sheriffs would be neccesary every time the Sheriff was up for election.
Hell, if you actually care about freedom the Fourth Amendment is small beans. Illegal searches don't kill people, they don't allow a minority to dominate the government. OTOH Voter ID could easily be used to keep Texas Republican for decades after most of it's residents have become Democrats. Stand your ground laws actually do kill people.
Dude, that is an incredibly stupid leap to make. This isn't a Fourth Amendment issue. If you say something in public the police are allowed to hear it, and can use it against your ass in Court.
OTOH, there are issues of entrapment, and excessive force.
As to your other two claims, let us note the actual restrictions of the Texas voter ID law:
Procedures for Voting
When a voter arrives at a polling location, the voter will be asked to present one of the seven (7) acceptable forms of photo ID. Election officials will now be required by State law to determine whether the voter's name on the identification provided matches the name on the official list of registered voters ("OLRV"). After a voter presents their ID, the election worker will compare it to the OLRV. If the name on the ID matches the name on the list of registered voters, the voter will follow the regular procedures for voting.
If the name does not match exactly but is "substantially similar" to the name on the OLRV, the voter will be permitted to vote as long as the voter signs an affidavit stating that the voter is the same person on the list of registered voters.
If a voter does not have proper identification, the voter will still be permitted to vote provisionally. The voter will have (six) 6 days to present proper identification to the county voter registrar, or the voterâ(TM)s ballot will be rejected.
What you won't see here is the supposed means by which Republicans will stay in power. For some reason, coming up with a photo ID is strongly discriminatory against Democrats? I think it's because a good portion of them can't actually legally vote.
And again you demonstrate you don't understand how oppression works in America.
What's gonna happen in every small town is that every married woman whose changed her name on her ID but not her voter registration is gonna be allowed to vote, because the clerk knows she's who she says she is. If the clerk insists on a provisional ballot the woman in question will complain to her friends, and since it's a small town those friends are probably people quite close to the Clerk; which means the clerk's Thanksgiving will consist of people awkwardly talking around the burning question of why City Clerk Auntie Jany disenfranchised cousin William's wife. People who have lost their IDs will also be allowed to vote in small towns at fairly high rates.
In the big cities, and their suburbs, that won't happen. Yeah a lot of the people who don't have the right ID on them in those cities will be able to make good by showing up at the clerk's office later in the week, but not everyone will. I actually couldn't do that without taking a vacation day, because my bus from work doesn't get back to Cleveland Heights until the clerk's office is closed. Even if you think that this arra
Killing people is also a crime, yet Texas does it all the time.
That's the thing you have to keep in mind about this. Government employees, obeying lawful orders from their government are not committing crimes when they do something that would be illegal for either of our white asses. Now if some German was paid to give the NSA info that helped in the hacks, and he knew that was what the NSA was gonna do with the info, he's pretty fucked. But only one CIA operation has ever resulted in convictions of the CIA agents of a crime, they probably are not gonna serve a day in jail, the crime wasn't something that you expect a government to do (it was an extraordinary rendition of an Italian Citizen to Egypt), and they did it while on Italian soil. OTOH spying is something governments do all the time, and these NSA guys were on US Soil when they did it.
There's a reason Pakistan can't protest our drone attacks by charging drone pilots with murder.
It's interesting that you equate surveillance with Bull Connor.
It's even more interesting that in a discussion of freedom the only case you bring up is surveillance. Surveillance is regulated by the Fourth Amendment. The Snowden leaks are (at best) the third-most important Fourth Amendment issue active right now.
Hell, if you actually care about freedom the Fourth Amendment is small beans. Illegal searches don't kill people, they don't allow a minority to dominate the government. OTOH Voter ID could easily be used to keep Texas Republican for decades after most of it's residents have become Democrats. Stand your ground laws actually do kill people.
In other words you're doing a really good job convincing me that geeks don't think non-white non-men's actual physical freedom to do what they want with their (actual physical) bodies, and their (actual physical) votes; is as important as a white man's freedom to keep (virtual) data off government hard drives.
Under the Constitution the government is allowed to classify data.
Yeah, and which clause is that?
It preceded the Constitution. Literally. Madison got the deliberations to decide the Constitution classified. It was illegal for anyone involved to talk about the debate.
In the Constitution itself, Article 1, Section 5, specifically allows Congress to decide actual Congressional debates "require secrecy." Section 8's last clause is a boiler-plate "every government power that governments really need but we forgot" clause, which allows Congress to allow the Executive to classify data of the kind that a typical late-18th century government would make secret. I have no clue if the Founders would have been pleased with the amount of Classified stuff we generate, but they clearly wanted us to have some secrets.
In practice given the existence of the First Amendment, the government can't have any real secrets. The New York Times can print damn near everything it can find out. But those particular protections don't apply to the people who (as part of their jobs) agree not to disclose secret data. Which is why Wyden couldn't act without Snowden's leaks.
But because of the way Snowden leaked Wyden can't really do much. Feinstein's stolen his thunder. She couldn't have done that if Wyden was the only one who knew the extent of Snowden's leaks. Moreover Snowden himself has no legal defense for his actions. The Courts aren't might buy his Constitutional moron defense for the leaks of surveillance on US Citizens, but they ain't gonna buy it for leaking that we tapped Merkel's phone.
So we gut farm subsidies, a couple programs that are rounding errors in the context of a budget that spends $1.25 Trillion on Medicare/Social Security, and the war on drugs. Combined that's probably $50 Billion a year. Our entire intelligence budget is about $80 Billion. We can't cut that to zero, but let's say we get it down to half. With our other cuts we're probably in the $100 Billion range. That sounds like a lot of money, but there are 310 million Americans so it works out to $300-$350 each. And that's like ten of your 12 points.
If you actually kill ObamaCare; you will be able to save a significant amount of money in the long-term. But that money isn't being spent in this years budget, so you don't reduce expenditure relative to 2013. After ObamaCare gets a few million users it will be as difficult to cut as Medicare is. We're still at rounding-error-level cuts.
If you add in a 50% cut to the DoD you're probably in the real money range. But what do you do if the South Koreans get invaded? Say "tough luck, enjoy working on a collective farm so Kim Jong-Un can build ski chalets?
My view is assume that the federal government is doing the worst it can with the power it has, and leave the onus of proof that they aren't to the government.
Ahh yes, the pretentious lazy school of US pro-freedom activists.
Pretentious because you imply nobody else understands freedom. Lazy because you do no work, and act really surprised when somebody points out that every evil thing the US Government has actually done has been done by state or local government. Generally even they don't do dirty work, they merely rule that they have nu right to stop white people from doing dirty work.
Your automatic assumption that the Feds are bad is actually at the root of one of the most evil episodes in US history. And it's one you probably haven't heard of because integrating this into your simplistic word-view is not easy. In 1876 the Feds controlled most of the South. This allowed blacks to vote, and indeed the black majorities in several states allowed blacks control of Mississippi and South Carolina.Then someone said "Gee, should the Federal government really have the power to intervene in state affairs?" When the lynchings stopped all those state had driven off 40% or more of their black population. South Carolina will elect a black leader soon, but it's never gonna elect anyone who could get a majority of the black vote.
Unless the NSA had a super-secret econ division totally separate from their super-secret terrorism division, but the anti-terror division is the same as their general spook division with tougher security then said terror division, one would expect that their anti-AQ and general spooking (ie: Merkel's phone) surveillance tactics would be harder to get then their pro-Burger King surveillance tactics.
Here's an example of your cluelessness. The NSA is not US intelligence. There are numerous other bodies, particularly, the CIA and military intelligence which can perform economic and industrial espionage which would fall outside of Snowden's very limited domain.
I may be clueless, but at least I have reading comprehension abilities.
The OP said that Snowden's document dump was akin to a you finding out your friend friend was "stealing you, banging your wife, that was him the one that broke your windows not your son, poisoning your food, and plotting to make your boss fire you." There's nothing in the data dump about the CIA, DIA, or anybody but the NSA.
If you want to talk about the CIA doing something go right ahead. I'll probably respond. But you must acknowledge you are changing the subject from one guy's analogy about the NSA to your own fears about intelligence agencies that are not the NSA.
More importantly economic espionage is really easy to detect. Arbus knows the bid it put in, it knows the public records of the bid Boeing put in. It will be easy for them to tell something fishy happened. If Apple suddenly starts using cell phone technology Samsung developed, but Apple should not know exists, Samsung knows something fishy happened. You do this routinely and everyone starts to figure out something fishy is going on.
After the fact and it's not "easy to detect" by you who is completely out of the loop. And the business usually doesn't complain about it because a) they don't have evidence aside from a suspicious coincidence that industrial espionage happened, and b) they can lose business if they rock the boat.
Then how do we know the Chinese do it? The French?
Let's do math. Let's say your intelligence operation does this once a month. Let's say there's a ludicrously high 99% chance the business doesn't talk..99^69=49.98%. This means that after 69 months there's a 50.02% chance that somebody's snitched. If you go to a reasonable level, say 80% chance the business keeps quiet, odds are somebody's naming names once every three months. Given the size of the US business communit
The problem with your argument is that you're not actually making an argument. You have told us what you want in principle (less federal government), but have yet to tell us which major functions of government you want Obama to give up.
The ones that make the Feds dominate the economy (Social Security, Medicare, and the VA) don't actually take up much of his time. They are also clearly within his Constitutional powers because he has a 16tth Amendment right to the income tax, and he can spend it promoting the "general welfare." Defense and Foreign Affairs are the only ones you've unambiguously said he should keep, and they're the really complicated ones that are causing him all these NSA problems.
I find this is actually a fairly common problem when dealing with Conservatives. They really want to gut the size of government, but they're totally unwilling to tell you that they think Florida should do it;'s own damn hurricane forecasts. It's kinda like my food budget. I'd really like to spend less then $10 a day on food, but I don't have a pantry so I can't make my lunch, so I have to eat out, and I always end up spending $6.69 at Wendy's.
Read more carefully. "Used data for economic advantage," implies that somebody had to get an economic advantage. Since nobody seems to have gained $1 from the Petrobas op it doesn't count. You will find an op that does count if you look hard enough, but that one actually paints the NSA in a good light.
As for Tor, you do realize that having the ability to break into secure information networks is a core function of government? That's why the Fourth Amendment doesn't say "you can't read people's private papers," it says "you can only read people's private papers after convincing a Judge they people may be up to no good AND those papers will say why." In a modern context this means that you have to have the ability to crack the Tor network. You don't have to like that the government has the ability to access the Tor network with a proper warrant, but if you think that shit is an illegitimate use of government power you don't understand the legitimate uses of government power.
The same with PPD 20. We are the superpower. That means we are the ones who actually have to fight when shit goes down. If we aren't ready to fight a cyberwar and the Russians are Estonia is screwed, therefore we have to be ready or we have to cede Estonia to Putin. You don't have to trust us to fight the right wars. You don't have to trust that we'll fight the war honorably. Hell you don't have to believe we'll fight competently. But you do have to acknowledge that as a government it is the US's job to have these capabilities.
In other words you're basically arguing that when the US government does things that every government has a moral duty to do it's exactly like breaking somebody's actual physical property while poisoning his family.
Note that I have been very careful not to defend the NSA's indiscriminate data collection methods. I'm just saying this guy's analogy was extremely overheated.
And again the side whose entire case rests on reading the Constitution once demonstrates it doesn't understand how the Constitution works. Under the Constitution the government is allowed to classify data. If you find out that data through legal government channels (ie: the way Wyden did) you aren't legally allowed to do anything about it. If Wyden had told people far and wide about this program he probably would have been thrown off the intelligence committee. The debate wouldn't have been "Is PRISM a good idea," it would have been "Why is Ron Wyden an asshole releasing classified information?" Expulsion from the Senate would have been very much an option.
OTOH if Snowden leaks it to Wyden's office Wyden can do an awful lot of stuff. For one thing he can tell his staff that the programs are going on, he can ask pointed questions based on Snowden's data, he can call Clapper a liar in committee testimony, he can write bills. None of which was possible before he had Snowden's docs. And if Snowden had sent those docs to Wyden's office on a thumbdrive, or even a massive email from a throw-away account, he would not be in Russia today.
So, no, I am not going to cut the idiot who read the Constitution (but didn't understand it) slack for putting priceless intel info into Putin's hands just because he "started a debate," when he could have started the debate without doing any of that shit.
Be honest here, given what happened to Manning's data do you seriously think that anything good will come of Snowden's releases? He did it wrong, therefore what we'll get is an international agreement (that nobody obeys) banning spying on allies, a toothless bit flim-flammery from Flim-Flam Feinstein, extra NSA-funding because they need new attacks to replace the ones Snowden told the Russians and Chinese about, and six months from now nobody will care.
The US Senate was not modeled on the Lords. Houses modeled on the Lords are generally life-appointments. The US Congress was unicameral prior to the adoption of the Constitution (granted that was only 13 years), and it grew to be bicameral not because we wanted to be British, but because the small states insisted the new Congress have equal representation per state and the large ones wanted population-based representation. The only way to square the circle was have two houses.
In many ways I agree with you. It's very nice to have a person whose entire job is to be apolitical, and above-the-fray. But it'll never happen in the US.
That's actually how most Latin American experiments in democracy ended prior to the late 80s. Granted at the time the US typically eagerly assisted the anti-Democratic forces, but it's not like we would have tried to conquer Bolivia had 100% of Bolivians insisted that their President was anti-American. There's a reason there are very few political systems designed like ours that are as old as ours.
The british system works nicely to stop a dictator. At any point, the parliament can elect a new prime-minister, or in effect force a new election. And there is the nuclear option, where the queen can in theory sack a government.
Depends on how you define dictator.
In you use the classical definition of political leader who has extreme powers but still some Constitutional checks, then the PM is indeed a dictator. This is how America's founding fathers used the word, and it gets thrown at every President's this way. A British PM, for example, could decree the RAF should paint all their planes pink, and as long as a majority of Parliament decided that going along with that was better then having new elections the RAF would simply be pink.
If you define it as a guy who rules with no Constitutional checks the PM isn't one. The checks are minor, and mostly consist of rights that can only be violated if the law specifically says "this law amends the kaw protecting religious freedom;" and the customs relating to when a PM loses the job; then the PM isn;t a dictator. BTW, people also accuse presidents of being this kind of dictator all the time.
Just because you have a treaty of alliance that doesn't mean you're always nice to each-other. New Zealand, for example, is so anti-nuclear-weapon that they refuse to let any vessel that could have nuclear weapons dock in their country. Since most US vessels could carry those weapons, and the US refuses to tell people which ones have those weapons, it is illegal for the US Navy to dock in New Zealand. In other words the people who actually swore an oath to die to keep the Chinese outside of New Zealand's territory in the US Navy aren't allowed into NZ territory. OTOH the Chinese, who would probably be the ones killing US Sailors, simply lie about whether they have nukes. I don;t know if I'd call this "evil," but it's clearly self-righteous BS. And yet if we so much as tapped the NZ PM's phone to get good info on fixing that situation you would consider us evil.
Pakistan is our ally. It's a Major Non-NATO Ally, so it has the same deal with us as we do with NZ and Australia. If we don't spy on them their Inter-Services Intelligence is likely to send guns to the Afghan Taliban, which will be used to kill our soldiers. Whether we spy on them or not they'll likely supply weapons to Kashmiri Seperatists who will use those weapons to kill people in a third country, which is not technically our ally, but fits the definition of enemy a lot less closely then Pakistan does: India. Yet you just said it's by definition evil to spy on the Pakistanis.
The Israelis are another Major Non-NATO ally. Their policy is based on the widespread perception that a) they are physically capable of almost any operation, and b) they engage in such operations after very little provocation. This is their way of dealing with being a very small country surrounded by several large countries who don't particularly like it and don't have many scruples when it comes to supporting terrorists. If those large countries don't know that we have inside info (aka: spy data) on whether the Israelis will respond to a given action with one of their patented crazy-man raids and/or a minor invasion of Lebanon they can't really leave the Israelis alone. By the same token if the Israelis don't have inside info (aka: spys) that we aren't about to trade them to the Saudis for a sack of beads they can't act like our ally. Yet you're arguing that the very spying which allows us to be Israel's friend is by definition evil because we are Israel's friend.
Hell look at Germany. And American economist left of Milton Friedman, including Milton Friedman, would tell the proper response to the Euro crises in Italy/Spain/etc. was increased deficit-spending to get their economies growing again. In the long-run this would cause inflation, but I'd rather be at 3% inflation and 8% unemployment then at 12% unemployment and no inflation. The best-case scenario for austerity was that in a few years the misery level would reach sustainability, as it has in Ireland. Basically the Germans ensured that they would always be the dominant economy in Europe, that nobody else could ever grow, and they managed to do it in way that sounds good on TV by conflating everyonewho lives in a poor Euro-zone country with the bastards who screwed Greece. Why is it inherently evil for us to spy on our ally Angela Merkel to help our other allies in Italy/Spain/etc.?
The US hasn't used this data to physically harm anyone.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
That's true in formal logic. But formal logic is renowned for being useless in real-world situations because it only works if you have perfect knowledge of a) which facts are relevant to which case, and b) you have perfect knowledge of what those facts are. Formal logic is particularly useless in judging policy because policy-makers are allowed to deceive each-other.
In this case we can only judge the evidence we have, and there's several very good indications that the US isn't sending out FBI agents to beat the shit out of everyone (or otherwise physically harming) they surveil:
1) Most people are being surveilled, and most people have not had the shit beaten out of them (or been otherwise physicaly harmed).
2) Reigns of terror aren;t terribly useful unless everyone knows bout them, therefore it would be foolish for the US to start a reign of terror and not tell everyone about it.
3) Snowden had evidence of damn near everything, and there was never a powerpoint slide that said "This is how we tell the FBI who they should beat up."
Keep in mind I don't actually have to prove the universal negative to prove the analogy is flawed. The OP specifically said his NSA-stand-in "friend" was poisoning his entire family, banging his wife, and broke his window. I just have to prove that the NSA hasn't started banging every wife in the world, done tens of billions in property damage (breaking the window), and started poisoning several billion people.
I will agree the NSA should stop it's data-collection, but the entire reason Feinstein is able to get away with a BS band-aid over this problem is that all the people who would complain about are claiming that having their personal data in a file is exactly as bad as being cuckolded by an asshole who tries to murder your family. A country that thinks giving Facebook access to every-damn-thing they've ever done as long as they can still play FarmVille just is not gonna freak out that much about their privacy, and they are gonna react to you freaking out that much about your privacy by concluding that a) you are fucking crazy and b) it's really good their government has your emails because you might do something really crazy otherwise.
There are plenty of allegations that the US used the data for economic advantage, but no examples of specific operations that did so. And if such operations existed Snowden would have exposed them.
Because? Even though the extent of Snowden's revelations are astounding, it's still incredibly foolish to expect a single contractor sys admin to have access to all US intelligence operations.
Two points:
What didn't he have access to? Unless the NSA had a super-secret econ division totally separate from their super-secret terrorism division, but the anti-terror division is the same as their general spook division with tougher security then said terror division, one would expect that their anti-AQ and general spooking (ie: Merkel's phone) surveillance tactics would be harder to get then their pro-Burger King surveillance tactics. He got the anti-Al Qaeda stuff. More importantly it would be stupid to separate the divisions that way. If your spooks find out that some Saudi dude is getting a $700 million bribe to buy Airbus aircraft in your general spook division they have to know which guy to call so Boeing doesn't get screwed by a bribe.
More importantly economic espionage is really easy to detect. Arbus knows the bid it put in, it knows the public records of the bid Boeing put in. It will be easy for them to tell something fishy happened. If Apple suddenly starts using cell phone technology Samsung developed, but Apple should not know exists, Samsung knows something fishy happened. You do this routinely and everyone starts to figure out something fishy is going on.
This is how France and China became known as hotbeds of economic espionage.
There's all kinds of potential compromises Pelosi would offer you for substantial military cuts. Put some of the money into tax cuts, the rest into food stamps. Or hell, use some of the money for tax cuts, some to cut the deficit, and declare that's enough to justify abolishing the damn debt ceiling.
The problem is when Pelosi comes back with an offer the GOP is gonna be like "I wonder how much sweeter this offer will get if we are mega-dicks on this issue?" and the media is gonna be like "Whose winning this compromise?" And the Democratic base is gonna be like "Maybe if we're mega-dicks we'll get it ALL for food stamps." The problem is there are no moderates to go on TV and talk up the compromise, but Amash and Grayson exist. That actually represents the American people pretty well. We have a lot of trivial differences we feel very strongly about.
As for the Senate, you would not necessarily need to get rid of it. The Canadians have a Senate. It does very little, but it exists. Since Senators tend to be a lot more moderate then House members it could even retain most of it's power and work with an opposite-party PM. You'd get rid of a lot of gridlock, and if the Senate and PM disagreed strongly enough the PM could force an election at which 1/3 of the Senators and all the House members were replaced. If the PM won he'd probably gain seats in the Senate which would make it more agreeable. If he lost the new PM would have the Senate on his side.
I'd agree the filibuster isn't technically part of checks and balances. But it is something that makes collaboration in US Government much more important then anyone outside DC thinks.
The Czars are both more and less then people make of them. They are less in that the President technically doesn't give them any powers, he simply says "obey this guy as you would me" to a huge department. OTOH in a lot of ways that's what a Cabinet Secretary is. They're basically a relatively recent shot in the power-struggle between the Legislature and the Executive.
As for forgetting how to compromise, the problem is that there's no actual moderates left. Everybody's on a side. Which means that getting nothing (but not being on the losing side) is better then getting a third of a loaf for your side. This isn't a DC problem, it's happening at every level. It seems like the American people don't want compromise. And since our government is us, and it only works when everyone compromises, this is a huge problem.
My favored solution would be to adopt something like the Canadian or British system, where there's only one real House of the Legislature that also supplies the entire Cabinet. This means there're no checks and balances. If PM Obama has a majority of the House he stays PM and his program passes. If Boehner convinces most of the House to vote against Obama Boehner becomes PM. Ifr the House can;t decide there're no elections and a new house.
It's very nice in that it makes it easy for people to follow politics, as interesting things happen on the floor of the House, and that you don't get stupid levels of gridlock. It does make one guy basically dictator, but since he's dictator he can;t very well blame some asshole in Congress for his problems and declare martial law.
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In the US we don't have the birthrate to sustain our current population, so I really don't see why we should do anything to reduce that birthrate. If we want Social Security to survive we should actually probably be strongly encouraging a higher birth-rate. Most of the rest of the hemisphere is rapidly approaching that point. So immigration restrictions on Mexicans, Brazilians, Canadians, etc. aren't going to reduce the overall footprint of humanity on this half of the globe. Much of Asia and Europe is also losing population. Africa and India aren't, but both the continent and the subcontinent have declining birthrates. There is literally no reason to believe that the human population won't peak in the 2050s.
In other words don't worry. It won't be long before growth of all kinds stops.
As for sanctimony, the guy who asks for information, and then ignores the half of that information that disproves his argument really shouldn't be on a high horse about sanctimoniousness.
Dude, I've been fucking with you since you first posted. When the very first sentence of your entrance to the discussion is to insult the people you disagree with, nobody is going to give a damn about what you have to say. You came in riding that horse.
So you get proven wrong on a fairly trivial point, and your response is to claim you meant to be proven wrong the entire damn time?
Are you drunk, or are you 12?
Worse. They are synergistic. I think it's telling that you haven't considered the power of the NSA's records and surveillance capabilities in the hands of a Bull Connor, a Hitler, or a Pol Pot.
First off Godwin's Law. I believe I win.
Please stop being an idiot. This is a valid argument. Hitler was able to do things like take over a major world power, invade other countries, and kill lots of people because he had the power to do so. Something like the NSA records would give a similar dictator today the power to chase down people with dangerous opinions or associations and kill or imprison them.
You are the naive one if you think simply by protecting people's communications with each-other you could have prevented Hitler. Hitler ran a huge political party with branches all over the country. They knew who the prominent Jews were. They knew Communist activists because they'd been in street fights with Communist activists. They knew who wasn't a Nazi because they'd beaten non-Nazis in local elections. If God came down from heaven and said "No German government official can ever read anyone's mail," all it would have done is forced Hitler to let SA men (who were, at the time non-governmental militia-men) into the post offices to do it. If God came down again and stopped that Hitler had plenty of other ways to get information. You don't have to read a letter to find out what's in it, if one of the correspondents is already in your concentration camp because everyone could tell he was a Communist.
And if you bothered to think about these things, rather then simply blabbing freedom at the top of your lungs, you'd see that the NSA (while a problem that should be dealt with) just ain't a prelude to Hitler. If it was Hitler wouldn't be special.
Secondly just because a government has a capability that doesn't mean it will be abused. If it did disarming County Sheriffs would be neccesary every time the Sheriff was up for election.
Naive to the point of idiocy. If County Sheriffs did have the sort of power you imply, there would be such problems.
Where I come from the County Sheriff has a Glock. That means he has the physical power to pull it out and kill anyone he sees. By your argument he will inevitably do that, because he is a government employee and government employees always abuse their power.
I'm not saying the NSA should keep the databases it's got, but your blithe assumption that being on a government list inevitably leads to bad things is just as stupid as my blithe assumption that Sheriffs can't be trusted not to shoot their political opponents.
And again you demonstrate you don't understand how oppression works in America.
Now, you're going full blown stupid. Just how many IDs do you really think people lose? It's not going to be enough to throw an election. And I do think there is almost no one who couldn't find time during the week to get their ID problem fixed.
BTW, if there were actually hundreds of thousands of ineligible Democratic voters don't you think somebody would have noticed?
I sure do. I present Texas's voter ID law as proof that people did indeed notice.
Can you name one?
I'll admit a bunch of small-towners got themselves convinced it happens, and then used it to justify a ridiculous law, but unless you have examples of it actually happening you got jack.
Moreover you apparently failed to read either your own source, or my response.
I didn't say anything about the relative ability of the parties to come up with an ID. I said that Democrats live in places that actually enforce the laws all the time, but Republicans live in places where the cops let things slide. If you actually read your source you'll note that if your voter registration card says "George P Bush," but your ID just says "Geor
There are many nuclear reactor designs that are not usable for development of nuclear weapons. Plus the whole "thorium" thing cannot be used for nukes either.
That's possible. OTOH if you were actually serious about convincing people to adopt these proposals you wouldn't call it nuclear power, because people who don't follow the issue closely assume all nuclear reactors produce weapons-grade material. You'd call it Thorium-based Fission.
Moreover it doesn't get around problem one: namely that even with Japanese-quality safety engineers a really bad accident can ruin hundreds of square miles of your country.
That's kind of my point.
If the country that helped defeat but the Nazis and the Soviets can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, why the fuck would we insist that all 54 African countries, everyone in Latin America, Asia, etc. has to build reactors capable of producing those weapons? Hell if the Japanese, who aren't known for inferior engineering, can't keep a non-weapons producing facility safe what are the odds that everyone else can pull that shit off?
Global warming is bad, but if it's a choice between moving all NYC residents to Detroit (we'd actually have room for a quarter of them within the Detroit city limits, the D' population has fallen that much since it's peak in '55), and giving all 192 countries in the world nuclear power then I'm gonna go with moving everyone to fucking Detroit.
This's one of the dumbest proposals ever.
1) Expense. nuclear power is incredibly expensive to do safely, because if bad things happen at a nuclear plant nobody can ever live in that County ever again. Just look at Fukishima and Chernobyl. If bad things happen at a coal or gas plant, OTOH, the worst consequence is that it blows and you need to buy a new one. You need lots of very smart people to monitor it 24/7, and sophisticated computerized systems and robots to make sure the people don't screw up, and even that won't save you forever.
2) If every democracy uses uses nuclear power everyone else will want it. And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program. Untrustworthy countries who probably shouldn't have the temptation of city-vaporizing weapons will want them. And it's kinda hard to convince an Iranian who thinks his country is perfectly trustworthy (to him it's those nasty Israelis you have to worry about) that everyone's life would be so much easier if his country didn't have the physical capability to finish the Holocaust. It's even harder to convince the Israelis, who (probably) currently have nuclear weapons, that everyone's lives would be so much simpler if they just switched to solar.
In other words if the choices are one or two more degrees of global warming, or letting every country in the world develop nuclear power, we're probably better off living with the warming.
The problem with Checks and Balances, a diverse economy, and a population that really engages in politics is that all big changes are nigh-impossible to enact. If Obama proposed a tax reform that conservative intellectuals loved, for example replacing the income tax with a national VAT, conservative Congressman would be unable to vote for it unless it also cut revenue. The engaged people who vote in GOP primaries are universally convinced ALL taxes are evil, and all taxes are equally evil, therefore any "tax reform" that makes the tax burden less painful without significantly cutting tax revenue is inherently evil. OTOH the Democrats couldn't vote for it unless it raised revenue. Their engaged people believe annoying the GOP's engaged people is the Highest Calling Available to Man. But Obama's a Democrat so he could probably bully some of them into at least considering it.
Then somebody who looks good on TV would claim the change will ruin them because they have a very carefully constructed life that allows them to dodge many income taxes, but the whole point of consumption taxes is you can't dodge them. You're actually seeing this with ObamaCare. Most of the people harmed by it, on TV, and from states with their own exchanges would find out that they'd get a better deal on insurance after ObamaCare. But they don't bother looking because they put like three whole hours into picking their current plan and nothing from the government could be cheaper.
And in the end it would die like Social Security reform did, or ObamaCare almost did, failing some important procedural vote nobody outside DC knew existed before it became the only story on CNN.
If we had the British system, PM Obama could replace the income tax with something new within six months. If the rank-and-file in either party managed to block him there'd be a new election, and either the blocking rank-and-file would become PM or they'd be voted out.
The stuff you mention still doesn't add up to much. Obama may have gotten a $Trillion in stimulus. If you add in Bush's TARP program it's possibly up to $2 Trillion. But most of TARP got repaid, so it'll only cost $24 Billion. Over 9 years of budgets even the higher number's chump change.
What I'm really interested in is what programs you'd cut if God came down from heaven and made you dictator for six months. I suspect you'd do the opposite of me.
I'd put everyone in Medicare, increase the "maximum taxable earnings" in Social Security, reform the Higher Ed. system so that people can actually afford to pick the wrong school when they're 18, and seriously consider a new social program. It would give everyone $500 a month in income. It would be paid for mostly by new and increased taxes, but partly by reducing programs no longer needed (ie: Medicaid and ObamaCare are not necessary with universal Medicare, and Food Stamps don't make much sense when you're giving everyone $6k a year anyway).
As for getting our allies to pay for their militaries, in the long-term that would be a great idea. Trouble is in the short term the North Koreans might conquer the South. As is the only "ally" we have that bothers with a real warfighting military is Israel, and we can't really borrow their troops without pissing off the rest of our "allies" in that region.
In the Constitution itself, Article 1, Section 5, specifically allows Congress to decide actual Congressional debates "require secrecy."
Ah, so this really just a congressional rule. Basically you are the point of circular reasoning, enjoy your sanctimony.
Yes that one's just Congressional. But the other one I cited is used to classify stuff all the time.
As for sanctimony, the guy who asks for information, and then ignores the half of that information that disproves his argument really shouldn't be on a high horse about sanctimoniousness.
It's interesting that you equate surveillance with Bull Connor.
Worse. They are synergistic. I think it's telling that you haven't considered the power of the NSA's records and surveillance capabilities in the hands of a Bull Connor, a Hitler, or a Pol Pot.
First off Godwin's Law. I believe I win.
Secondly just because a government has a capability that doesn't mean it will be abused. If it did disarming County Sheriffs would be neccesary every time the Sheriff was up for election.
Hell, if you actually care about freedom the Fourth Amendment is small beans. Illegal searches don't kill people, they don't allow a minority to dominate the government. OTOH Voter ID could easily be used to keep Texas Republican for decades after most of it's residents have become Democrats. Stand your ground laws actually do kill people.
Illegal searches do kill people.
Dude, that is an incredibly stupid leap to make. This isn't a Fourth Amendment issue. If you say something in public the police are allowed to hear it, and can use it against your ass in Court.
OTOH, there are issues of entrapment, and excessive force.
As to your other two claims, let us note the actual restrictions of the Texas voter ID law:
Procedures for Voting
When a voter arrives at a polling location, the voter will be asked to present one of the seven (7) acceptable forms of photo ID. Election officials will now be required by State law to determine whether the voter's name on the identification provided matches the name on the official list of registered voters ("OLRV"). After a voter presents their ID, the election worker will compare it to the OLRV. If the name on the ID matches the name on the list of registered voters, the voter will follow the regular procedures for voting.
If the name does not match exactly but is "substantially similar" to the name on the OLRV, the voter will be permitted to vote as long as the voter signs an affidavit stating that the voter is the same person on the list of registered voters.
If a voter does not have proper identification, the voter will still be permitted to vote provisionally. The voter will have (six) 6 days to present proper identification to the county voter registrar, or the voterâ(TM)s ballot will be rejected.
What you won't see here is the supposed means by which Republicans will stay in power. For some reason, coming up with a photo ID is strongly discriminatory against Democrats? I think it's because a good portion of them can't actually legally vote.
And again you demonstrate you don't understand how oppression works in America.
What's gonna happen in every small town is that every married woman whose changed her name on her ID but not her voter registration is gonna be allowed to vote, because the clerk knows she's who she says she is. If the clerk insists on a provisional ballot the woman in question will complain to her friends, and since it's a small town those friends are probably people quite close to the Clerk; which means the clerk's Thanksgiving will consist of people awkwardly talking around the burning question of why City Clerk Auntie Jany disenfranchised cousin William's wife. People who have lost their IDs will also be allowed to vote in small towns at fairly high rates.
In the big cities, and their suburbs, that won't happen. Yeah a lot of the people who don't have the right ID on them in those cities will be able to make good by showing up at the clerk's office later in the week, but not everyone will. I actually couldn't do that without taking a vacation day, because my bus from work doesn't get back to Cleveland Heights until the clerk's office is closed.
Even if you think that this arra
Killing people is also a crime, yet Texas does it all the time.
That's the thing you have to keep in mind about this. Government employees, obeying lawful orders from their government are not committing crimes when they do something that would be illegal for either of our white asses. Now if some German was paid to give the NSA info that helped in the hacks, and he knew that was what the NSA was gonna do with the info, he's pretty fucked. But only one CIA operation has ever resulted in convictions of the CIA agents of a crime, they probably are not gonna serve a day in jail, the crime wasn't something that you expect a government to do (it was an extraordinary rendition of an Italian Citizen to Egypt), and they did it while on Italian soil. OTOH spying is something governments do all the time, and these NSA guys were on US Soil when they did it.
There's a reason Pakistan can't protest our drone attacks by charging drone pilots with murder.
It's interesting that you equate surveillance with Bull Connor.
It's even more interesting that in a discussion of freedom the only case you bring up is surveillance. Surveillance is regulated by the Fourth Amendment. The Snowden leaks are (at best) the third-most important Fourth Amendment issue active right now.
Hell, if you actually care about freedom the Fourth Amendment is small beans. Illegal searches don't kill people, they don't allow a minority to dominate the government. OTOH Voter ID could easily be used to keep Texas Republican for decades after most of it's residents have become Democrats. Stand your ground laws actually do kill people.
In other words you're doing a really good job convincing me that geeks don't think non-white non-men's actual physical freedom to do what they want with their (actual physical) bodies, and their (actual physical) votes; is as important as a white man's freedom to keep (virtual) data off government hard drives.
Under the Constitution the government is allowed to classify data.
Yeah, and which clause is that?
It preceded the Constitution. Literally. Madison got the deliberations to decide the Constitution classified. It was illegal for anyone involved to talk about the debate.
In the Constitution itself, Article 1, Section 5, specifically allows Congress to decide actual Congressional debates "require secrecy." Section 8's last clause is a boiler-plate "every government power that governments really need but we forgot" clause, which allows Congress to allow the Executive to classify data of the kind that a typical late-18th century government would make secret. I have no clue if the Founders would have been pleased with the amount of Classified stuff we generate, but they clearly wanted us to have some secrets.
In practice given the existence of the First Amendment, the government can't have any real secrets. The New York Times can print damn near everything it can find out. But those particular protections don't apply to the people who (as part of their jobs) agree not to disclose secret data. Which is why Wyden couldn't act without Snowden's leaks.
But because of the way Snowden leaked Wyden can't really do much. Feinstein's stolen his thunder. She couldn't have done that if Wyden was the only one who knew the extent of Snowden's leaks. Moreover Snowden himself has no legal defense for his actions. The Courts aren't might buy his Constitutional moron defense for the leaks of surveillance on US Citizens, but they ain't gonna buy it for leaking that we tapped Merkel's phone.
So we gut farm subsidies, a couple programs that are rounding errors in the context of a budget that spends $1.25 Trillion on Medicare/Social Security, and the war on drugs. Combined that's probably $50 Billion a year. Our entire intelligence budget is about $80 Billion. We can't cut that to zero, but let's say we get it down to half. With our other cuts we're probably in the $100 Billion range. That sounds like a lot of money, but there are 310 million Americans so it works out to $300-$350 each. And that's like ten of your 12 points.
If you actually kill ObamaCare; you will be able to save a significant amount of money in the long-term. But that money isn't being spent in this years budget, so you don't reduce expenditure relative to 2013. After ObamaCare gets a few million users it will be as difficult to cut as Medicare is. We're still at rounding-error-level cuts.
If you add in a 50% cut to the DoD you're probably in the real money range. But what do you do if the South Koreans get invaded? Say "tough luck, enjoy working on a collective farm so Kim Jong-Un can build ski chalets?
My view is assume that the federal government is doing the worst it can with the power it has, and leave the onus of proof that they aren't to the government.
Ahh yes, the pretentious lazy school of US pro-freedom activists.
Pretentious because you imply nobody else understands freedom. Lazy because you do no work, and act really surprised when somebody points out that every evil thing the US Government has actually done has been done by state or local government. Generally even they don't do dirty work, they merely rule that they have nu right to stop white people from doing dirty work.
Your automatic assumption that the Feds are bad is actually at the root of one of the most evil episodes in US history. And it's one you probably haven't heard of because integrating this into your simplistic word-view is not easy. In 1876 the Feds controlled most of the South. This allowed blacks to vote, and indeed the black majorities in several states allowed blacks control of Mississippi and South Carolina.Then someone said "Gee, should the Federal government really have the power to intervene in state affairs?" When the lynchings stopped all those state had driven off 40% or more of their black population. South Carolina will elect a black leader soon, but it's never gonna elect anyone who could get a majority of the black vote.
Unless the NSA had a super-secret econ division totally separate from their super-secret terrorism division, but the anti-terror division is the same as their general spook division with tougher security then said terror division, one would expect that their anti-AQ and general spooking (ie: Merkel's phone) surveillance tactics would be harder to get then their pro-Burger King surveillance tactics.
Here's an example of your cluelessness. The NSA is not US intelligence. There are numerous other bodies, particularly, the CIA and military intelligence which can perform economic and industrial espionage which would fall outside of Snowden's very limited domain.
I may be clueless, but at least I have reading comprehension abilities.
The OP said that Snowden's document dump was akin to a you finding out your friend friend was "stealing you, banging your wife, that was him the one that broke your windows not your son, poisoning your food, and plotting to make your boss fire you." There's nothing in the data dump about the CIA, DIA, or anybody but the NSA.
If you want to talk about the CIA doing something go right ahead. I'll probably respond. But you must acknowledge you are changing the subject from one guy's analogy about the NSA to your own fears about intelligence agencies that are not the NSA.
More importantly economic espionage is really easy to detect. Arbus knows the bid it put in, it knows the public records of the bid Boeing put in. It will be easy for them to tell something fishy happened. If Apple suddenly starts using cell phone technology Samsung developed, but Apple should not know exists, Samsung knows something fishy happened. You do this routinely and everyone starts to figure out something fishy is going on.
After the fact and it's not "easy to detect" by you who is completely out of the loop. And the business usually doesn't complain about it because a) they don't have evidence aside from a suspicious coincidence that industrial espionage happened, and b) they can lose business if they rock the boat.
Then how do we know the Chinese do it? The French?
Let's do math. Let's say your intelligence operation does this once a month. Let's say there's a ludicrously high 99% chance the business doesn't talk. .99^69=49.98%. This means that after 69 months there's a 50.02% chance that somebody's snitched. If you go to a reasonable level, say 80% chance the business keeps quiet, odds are somebody's naming names once every three months. Given the size of the US business communit
The problem with your argument is that you're not actually making an argument. You have told us what you want in principle (less federal government), but have yet to tell us which major functions of government you want Obama to give up.
The ones that make the Feds dominate the economy (Social Security, Medicare, and the VA) don't actually take up much of his time. They are also clearly within his Constitutional powers because he has a 16tth Amendment right to the income tax, and he can spend it promoting the "general welfare." Defense and Foreign Affairs are the only ones you've unambiguously said he should keep, and they're the really complicated ones that are causing him all these NSA problems.
I find this is actually a fairly common problem when dealing with Conservatives. They really want to gut the size of government, but they're totally unwilling to tell you that they think Florida should do it;'s own damn hurricane forecasts. It's kinda like my food budget. I'd really like to spend less then $10 a day on food, but I don't have a pantry so I can't make my lunch, so I have to eat out, and I always end up spending $6.69 at Wendy's.
Read more carefully. "Used data for economic advantage," implies that somebody had to get an economic advantage. Since nobody seems to have gained $1 from the Petrobas op it doesn't count. You will find an op that does count if you look hard enough, but that one actually paints the NSA in a good light.
As for Tor, you do realize that having the ability to break into secure information networks is a core function of government? That's why the Fourth Amendment doesn't say "you can't read people's private papers," it says "you can only read people's private papers after convincing a Judge they people may be up to no good AND those papers will say why." In a modern context this means that you have to have the ability to crack the Tor network. You don't have to like that the government has the ability to access the Tor network with a proper warrant, but if you think that shit is an illegitimate use of government power you don't understand the legitimate uses of government power.
The same with PPD 20. We are the superpower. That means we are the ones who actually have to fight when shit goes down. If we aren't ready to fight a cyberwar and the Russians are Estonia is screwed, therefore we have to be ready or we have to cede Estonia to Putin. You don't have to trust us to fight the right wars. You don't have to trust that we'll fight the war honorably. Hell you don't have to believe we'll fight competently. But you do have to acknowledge that as a government it is the US's job to have these capabilities.
In other words you're basically arguing that when the US government does things that every government has a moral duty to do it's exactly like breaking somebody's actual physical property while poisoning his family.
Note that I have been very careful not to defend the NSA's indiscriminate data collection methods. I'm just saying this guy's analogy was extremely overheated.
And again the side whose entire case rests on reading the Constitution once demonstrates it doesn't understand how the Constitution works. Under the Constitution the government is allowed to classify data. If you find out that data through legal government channels (ie: the way Wyden did) you aren't legally allowed to do anything about it. If Wyden had told people far and wide about this program he probably would have been thrown off the intelligence committee. The debate wouldn't have been "Is PRISM a good idea," it would have been "Why is Ron Wyden an asshole releasing classified information?" Expulsion from the Senate would have been very much an option.
OTOH if Snowden leaks it to Wyden's office Wyden can do an awful lot of stuff. For one thing he can tell his staff that the programs are going on, he can ask pointed questions based on Snowden's data, he can call Clapper a liar in committee testimony, he can write bills. None of which was possible before he had Snowden's docs. And if Snowden had sent those docs to Wyden's office on a thumbdrive, or even a massive email from a throw-away account, he would not be in Russia today.
So, no, I am not going to cut the idiot who read the Constitution (but didn't understand it) slack for putting priceless intel info into Putin's hands just because he "started a debate," when he could have started the debate without doing any of that shit.
Be honest here, given what happened to Manning's data do you seriously think that anything good will come of Snowden's releases? He did it wrong, therefore what we'll get is an international agreement (that nobody obeys) banning spying on allies, a toothless bit flim-flammery from Flim-Flam Feinstein, extra NSA-funding because they need new attacks to replace the ones Snowden told the Russians and Chinese about, and six months from now nobody will care.
The US Senate was not modeled on the Lords. Houses modeled on the Lords are generally life-appointments. The US Congress was unicameral prior to the adoption of the Constitution (granted that was only 13 years), and it grew to be bicameral not because we wanted to be British, but because the small states insisted the new Congress have equal representation per state and the large ones wanted population-based representation. The only way to square the circle was have two houses.
In many ways I agree with you. It's very nice to have a person whose entire job is to be apolitical, and above-the-fray. But it'll never happen in the US.
That's actually how most Latin American experiments in democracy ended prior to the late 80s. Granted at the time the US typically eagerly assisted the anti-Democratic forces, but it's not like we would have tried to conquer Bolivia had 100% of Bolivians insisted that their President was anti-American. There's a reason there are very few political systems designed like ours that are as old as ours.
The british system works nicely to stop a dictator. At any point, the parliament can elect a new prime-minister, or in effect force a new election. And there is the nuclear option, where the queen can in theory sack a government.
Depends on how you define dictator.
In you use the classical definition of political leader who has extreme powers but still some Constitutional checks, then the PM is indeed a dictator. This is how America's founding fathers used the word, and it gets thrown at every President's this way. A British PM, for example, could decree the RAF should paint all their planes pink, and as long as a majority of Parliament decided that going along with that was better then having new elections the RAF would simply be pink.
If you define it as a guy who rules with no Constitutional checks the PM isn't one. The checks are minor, and mostly consist of rights that can only be violated if the law specifically says "this law amends the kaw protecting religious freedom;" and the customs relating to when a PM loses the job; then the PM isn;t a dictator. BTW, people also accuse presidents of being this kind of dictator all the time.
And why is spying on allies by definition evil?
Just because you have a treaty of alliance that doesn't mean you're always nice to each-other. New Zealand, for example, is so anti-nuclear-weapon that they refuse to let any vessel that could have nuclear weapons dock in their country. Since most US vessels could carry those weapons, and the US refuses to tell people which ones have those weapons, it is illegal for the US Navy to dock in New Zealand. In other words the people who actually swore an oath to die to keep the Chinese outside of New Zealand's territory in the US Navy aren't allowed into NZ territory. OTOH the Chinese, who would probably be the ones killing US Sailors, simply lie about whether they have nukes. I don;t know if I'd call this "evil," but it's clearly self-righteous BS. And yet if we so much as tapped the NZ PM's phone to get good info on fixing that situation you would consider us evil.
Pakistan is our ally. It's a Major Non-NATO Ally, so it has the same deal with us as we do with NZ and Australia. If we don't spy on them their Inter-Services Intelligence is likely to send guns to the Afghan Taliban, which will be used to kill our soldiers. Whether we spy on them or not they'll likely supply weapons to Kashmiri Seperatists who will use those weapons to kill people in a third country, which is not technically our ally, but fits the definition of enemy a lot less closely then Pakistan does: India. Yet you just said it's by definition evil to spy on the Pakistanis.
The Israelis are another Major Non-NATO ally. Their policy is based on the widespread perception that a) they are physically capable of almost any operation, and b) they engage in such operations after very little provocation. This is their way of dealing with being a very small country surrounded by several large countries who don't particularly like it and don't have many scruples when it comes to supporting terrorists. If those large countries don't know that we have inside info (aka: spy data) on whether the Israelis will respond to a given action with one of their patented crazy-man raids and/or a minor invasion of Lebanon they can't really leave the Israelis alone. By the same token if the Israelis don't have inside info (aka: spys) that we aren't about to trade them to the Saudis for a sack of beads they can't act like our ally. Yet you're arguing that the very spying which allows us to be Israel's friend is by definition evil because we are Israel's friend.
Hell look at Germany. And American economist left of Milton Friedman, including Milton Friedman, would tell the proper response to the Euro crises in Italy/Spain/etc. was increased deficit-spending to get their economies growing again. In the long-run this would cause inflation, but I'd rather be at 3% inflation and 8% unemployment then at 12% unemployment and no inflation. The best-case scenario for austerity was that in a few years the misery level would reach sustainability, as it has in Ireland. Basically the Germans ensured that they would always be the dominant economy in Europe, that nobody else could ever grow, and they managed to do it in way that sounds good on TV by conflating everyonewho lives in a poor Euro-zone country with the bastards who screwed Greece. Why is it inherently evil for us to spy on our ally Angela Merkel to help our other allies in Italy/Spain/etc.?
The US hasn't used this data to physically harm anyone.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
That's true in formal logic. But formal logic is renowned for being useless in real-world situations because it only works if you have perfect knowledge of a) which facts are relevant to which case, and b) you have perfect knowledge of what those facts are. Formal logic is particularly useless in judging policy because policy-makers are allowed to deceive each-other.
In this case we can only judge the evidence we have, and there's several very good indications that the US isn't sending out FBI agents to beat the shit out of everyone (or otherwise physically harming) they surveil:
1) Most people are being surveilled, and most people have not had the shit beaten out of them (or been otherwise physicaly harmed).
2) Reigns of terror aren;t terribly useful unless everyone knows bout them, therefore it would be foolish for the US to start a reign of terror and not tell everyone about it.
3) Snowden had evidence of damn near everything, and there was never a powerpoint slide that said "This is how we tell the FBI who they should beat up."
Keep in mind I don't actually have to prove the universal negative to prove the analogy is flawed. The OP specifically said his NSA-stand-in "friend" was poisoning his entire family, banging his wife, and broke his window. I just have to prove that the NSA hasn't started banging every wife in the world, done tens of billions in property damage (breaking the window), and started poisoning several billion people.
I will agree the NSA should stop it's data-collection, but the entire reason Feinstein is able to get away with a BS band-aid over this problem is that all the people who would complain about are claiming that having their personal data in a file is exactly as bad as being cuckolded by an asshole who tries to murder your family. A country that thinks giving Facebook access to every-damn-thing they've ever done as long as they can still play FarmVille just is not gonna freak out that much about their privacy, and they are gonna react to you freaking out that much about your privacy by concluding that a) you are fucking crazy and b) it's really good their government has your emails because you might do something really crazy otherwise.
There are plenty of allegations that the US used the data for economic advantage, but no examples of specific operations that did so. And if such operations existed Snowden would have exposed them.
Because? Even though the extent of Snowden's revelations are astounding, it's still incredibly foolish to expect a single contractor sys admin to have access to all US intelligence operations.
Two points:
What didn't he have access to? Unless the NSA had a super-secret econ division totally separate from their super-secret terrorism division, but the anti-terror division is the same as their general spook division with tougher security then said terror division, one would expect that their anti-AQ and general spooking (ie: Merkel's phone) surveillance tactics would be harder to get then their pro-Burger King surveillance tactics. He got the anti-Al Qaeda stuff. More importantly it would be stupid to separate the divisions that way. If your spooks find out that some Saudi dude is getting a $700 million bribe to buy Airbus aircraft in your general spook division they have to know which guy to call so Boeing doesn't get screwed by a bribe.
More importantly economic espionage is really easy to detect. Arbus knows the bid it put in, it knows the public records of the bid Boeing put in. It will be easy for them to tell something fishy happened. If Apple suddenly starts using cell phone technology Samsung developed, but Apple should not know exists, Samsung knows something fishy happened. You do this routinely and everyone starts to figure out something fishy is going on.
This is how France and China became known as hotbeds of economic espionage.
There's all kinds of potential compromises Pelosi would offer you for substantial military cuts. Put some of the money into tax cuts, the rest into food stamps. Or hell, use some of the money for tax cuts, some to cut the deficit, and declare that's enough to justify abolishing the damn debt ceiling.
The problem is when Pelosi comes back with an offer the GOP is gonna be like "I wonder how much sweeter this offer will get if we are mega-dicks on this issue?" and the media is gonna be like "Whose winning this compromise?" And the Democratic base is gonna be like "Maybe if we're mega-dicks we'll get it ALL for food stamps." The problem is there are no moderates to go on TV and talk up the compromise, but Amash and Grayson exist. That actually represents the American people pretty well. We have a lot of trivial differences we feel very strongly about.
As for the Senate, you would not necessarily need to get rid of it. The Canadians have a Senate. It does very little, but it exists. Since Senators tend to be a lot more moderate then House members it could even retain most of it's power and work with an opposite-party PM. You'd get rid of a lot of gridlock, and if the Senate and PM disagreed strongly enough the PM could force an election at which 1/3 of the Senators and all the House members were replaced. If the PM won he'd probably gain seats in the Senate which would make it more agreeable. If he lost the new PM would have the Senate on his side.
I'd agree the filibuster isn't technically part of checks and balances. But it is something that makes collaboration in US Government much more important then anyone outside DC thinks.
The Czars are both more and less then people make of them. They are less in that the President technically doesn't give them any powers, he simply says "obey this guy as you would me" to a huge department. OTOH in a lot of ways that's what a Cabinet Secretary is. They're basically a relatively recent shot in the power-struggle between the Legislature and the Executive.
As for forgetting how to compromise, the problem is that there's no actual moderates left. Everybody's on a side. Which means that getting nothing (but not being on the losing side) is better then getting a third of a loaf for your side. This isn't a DC problem, it's happening at every level. It seems like the American people don't want compromise. And since our government is us, and it only works when everyone compromises, this is a huge problem.
My favored solution would be to adopt something like the Canadian or British system, where there's only one real House of the Legislature that also supplies the entire Cabinet. This means there're no checks and balances. If PM Obama has a majority of the House he stays PM and his program passes. If Boehner convinces most of the House to vote against Obama Boehner becomes PM. Ifr the House can;t decide there're no elections and a new house.
It's very nice in that it makes it easy for people to follow politics, as interesting things happen on the floor of the House, and that you don't get stupid levels of gridlock. It does make one guy basically dictator, but since he's dictator he can;t very well blame some asshole in Congress for his problems and declare martial law.
But that shit ain't happening.