It is not possible to prove a negative. No matter what Iran does, there will always be "uncertainties" simply because logic dictates that it must be so.
That's a cop-out. The IAEA is not asking for anything that Iran could not easily provide. The IAEA has asked for things like interviews with Iranian scientists, access to sites for environmental testing, and access to some operating logs at nuclear facilities. Iran has been unwilling to cooperate with these requests, and consequently the IAEA has been unable to find that their nuclear program is peaceful.
Neither of which is required under the terms of the NPT. Iran did implement Additional protocol, for a time, until it became obvious that the US didn't care.
Close, but not quite. The NPT requires non-nuclear-weapon states to accept safeguards to verify that they are within the limitations of the treaty. These safeguards are negotiated directly between non-nuclear-weapons stats and the IAEA. The Additional Protocol is one such set of safeguards that Iran has agreed to, so their status as a signatory to the NPT requires that they implement it.
Rights to enrichment are explicitly guaranteed to all signatories of the NPT, and were in fact the major reason why the treaty was signed in the first place. By denying Iran its treaty rights, the US is invalidating the treaty.
The right to enrich uranium is explicitly guaranteed as long as it is within the negotiated safeguards. According to the IAEA, Iran is not providing all of the safeguards that they have agreed to. Therefore, the UN Security Council demanded in Resolution 1696 that Iran stop enriching uranium until it can provide these safeguards. This is all within the scope of the NPT.
Hardly. US lobbying caused the UN to pass that resolution. We really want to bomb them, but we need time to prepare, so diplomacy is being pursued as a delaying tactic, possibly leading to an excuse. This is the same thing that happened with Iraq and WMDs, but people have short memories.
Resolution 1696 was passed with a vote of 14-1. You can try to dismiss this if you want, but the fact is that 13 other members of the Security Council agreed that there are serious concerns about Iran's nuclear programs.
Then why is Israel allowed to produce HEU? Or India? Or any other country? The NPT guarantees to all signatories the right to enrichment, don't forget this! Without the NPT, no country would have any business telling other countries what to do at all.
Welcome to international law, where laws are only binding as far as nations agree to them. States like India, Pakistan, and Israel have exercised their rights as sovereign nations by not agreeing to the NPT. Consequently, they are under no obligation to abide by it. You don't like that? Well, there aint much that you can do about it aside from asking them to change their minds, or if you feel really strongly about it, surround them with your military until one side backs down.
Herein lies the fundamental flaw of the NPT. Signatories to the treaty are given the right to develop nuclear technologies (within the negotiated safeguards, of course) up to some invisible line that separates a peaceful nuclear program from a non-peaceful program. They can do this with the full support of the NPT and all of the benefits that it provides to its signatories, including technology sharing and protection guarantees from the nuclear-weapons states. But the treaty also gives the signatories the right to withdraw from the treaty at any time and without any recourse. There is absolutely nothing in the NPT that would prevent a nation like Iran from exploiting its membership in the treaty to develop nuclear technology for "peaceful" purposes, and then withdrawing from the treaty to complete a nuclear weapon.
Unfortunately, this flawed treaty is the best that we have got, so we have to make do with it.
Everything I quoted above was directly from the IAEA. I didn't say that Iran was producing highly enriched uranium, but the IAEA does have serious concerns about the dual use equipment that Iran has been collecting at PHRC, especially after some particles of highly enriched uranium were found there. So far, Iran has been unwilling to cooperate with the IAEA to resolve this.
Thats cute, but unfortunately it isn't based on any kind of reality. Iran has not been open about their nuclear programs. Read the latest report from the IAEA Board of Governors to get an idea of how much more Iran needs to do. Here is a sample:
Iran has not addressed the long outstanding verification issues or provided the necessary transparency to remove uncertainties associated with some of its activities. Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities; nor has Iran acted in accordance with the provisions of the Additional Protocol... The Agency remains unable to make further progress in its efforts to verify the correctness and completeness of Iran's declarations with a view to confirming the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear programme.
Does that sound like full cooperation to you?
It is this subterfuge and lack of transparency that caused the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1696 back in July of this year. This action was taken by the Security Council after traces of highly enriched uranium were found in Iran, but the Iranian government refused to cooperate with the IAEA in the investigation (this is mentioned in paragraph 24 of the latest Board of Governor's report that I linked to above). If Iran's program truely is peaceful, then they have absolutely no business producing highly enriched uranium.
From the documentation on youtube.com, when users flag a video as being inappropriate, it is forwarded to youtube employees for review. Therefore, the fact that access to the video was indeed limited for a while indicates that the censorship did come from youtube- at least for a while until that decision was overturned.
Nothing stops USA and UK from withdrawing from the treaty and giving up nuclear weapons completely.
I think our desire to exist should stop us from doing something as stupid as that. The genie is out of the bottle- the world is nuclear, and there is nothing we can do about it now aside from maintaining our own arsenal and using it to promote peace instead of destruction.
Nothing stops any signatory from withdrawing and developing new weapons either.
Well, that's not true. Nothing in the NPT itself stops a signatory from withdrawing to develop weapons (which is one of the fundamental flaws of the treaty), but there is a lot that can be done outside of the treaty to stop a signatory from withdrawing (along the lines of imposing economic sanctions or pointing big guns at the country that is misbehaving).
You do realize that the United States' status in the Non-proliferation treaty as a nuclear power, coupled with UN Resolution 255, requires that we maintain a nuclear arsenal to defend non-nuclear states, right? The same goes for the UK.
You couldn't be more wrong. The first deployment of Patriot missiles in 1991 had limited success, but that was 15 years and several generations of the product ago. The latest version that was deployed in Iraq in 2003 had close to a 100% success rate with 11/11 Iraqi missiles being hit (8 of which have been independently verified).
No, I just ignore "facts" from right-wing websites with as much credibility as Baghdad Bob. Which is about all that turns up if you Google for "saddam hussein terrorism".
Interesting. Which of the following would you consider to be "right-wing" sources:
The UN Security Council ("Deploring threats made by Iraq during the recent conflict to make use of terrorism against targets outside Iraq" and "Requires Iraq to inform the Security Council that it will not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate within its territory")
President Clinton ("In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more the very kind of threat Iraq poses now- a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction ready to use them or provide them to terrorists")
President Clinton's State Department ("Iraq continued to plan and sponsor international terrorism in 1999").
The Council on Foreign Relations ("Saddam Hussein's dictatorship provided headquarters, operating bases, training camps, and other support to terrorist groups...")
President Jimmy Carter, who placed Iraq on the State Department list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in 1979
Vladimir Putin, who warned us in 2002 that Iraq was plotting terrorist attacks against the United States
Closing your eyes and declaring these to be right-wing lies does not make you look very rational.
I don't even know what happens to Linux when you don't close it off cleanly, it sure goes through a lot of activity during a shutdown operation. Windows is pretty much the same.
I work in hardware validation using Linux, and we do stuff many times a day that either hangs the system or otherwise doesn't cleanly shutdown (CF9 reset tests cycling all day, for example). As long as you use a journaling FS, the worst that happens is you are forced to fsck once a month or so.
I guess you think that warrantless wiretapping is reasonable, I certainly don't.
I believe that warrantless wiretapping that targets our sworn enemies that have openly declared war on us and has the congressional and judicial oversight that are provided in this bill is very reasonable. Nobody is arguing for a carte blanche Gestapo-style wiretapping program where the Executive Branch has free reign, and it is disingenuous to lump those together.
Actually, we can never validate one way or the other if these elections are valid because you can't do recounts in Diebold elections.
Sure you can do recounts. Collect the voter-verifiable receipts and count those over and over until your heart is content.
All I meant with my post was that polls show Republicans should get trounced this November.
Why should Republicans get "trounced"? Most of the recent polls that I have seen show the Republicans maintaining a small majority in both the House and the Senate (see Election Projection, for example).
If they don't, and if exit polls are wrong for the 3RD election in a row, then our election system is officially rigged and we have no easy way to stop it.
That was my point. Many people seem to have already made up their minds about what the results of the election this November should be, and they are using this as a standard to judge if the system is rigged or not. But in reality, most polls show that the race is going to be very close, with Democrats picking up some seats and Governorships, but Republicans maintaining a majority in both the House and Senate. If the Republicans do keep their majority, it is not proof that the elections are rigged!
And the exit polls haven't been wrong for two elections in a row. Some exit polls in Ohio in 2004 were wrong, but the company that conducted the polls has admitted that they screwed up in this analysis that they published after the election. Its not some deep conspiracy- just plain incompetence.
If you could find a sitation where Democrats have attempted to systematically disenranchise voters, sure. Good luck with that.
Why don't you tell me a situation where you think Republicans have been systematically disenfranchising voters. Go ahead. This should be fun.
There will always be bad apples in any group, like those Democrats that slashed the tires of vans in Milwaukee that some Republicans had rented to drive poor people to the polls on election day in 2004. But I firmly believe that a vast and overwhelming majority of the citizens of this country want our elections to be safe and fair- regardless of party affiliation.
Well, first of all, I don't believe that there are "massive faults" with the entire election process. Do you care to elaborate what you think those faults are? Our system is certainly not perfect, but it works remarkably well.
There are some major problems with Diebold's electronic voting machines, of course, but lets not forget that there is no evidence that any voters have been disenfranchised by these problems or that voters are likely to be disenfranchised by them this November. Of course, any problems such as the weaknesses that have been found in Diebold's system need to be addressed, and NOW is the time to address them (before voters actually have been cheated). I believe this debate has already begun in the public for all of our benefit, so it is not being "ignored" like you claim.
Look, the overwhelming majority of Americans, including both Republicans, Democrats, and people like myself, want our elections to safe and free from corruption. You are doing a huge disservice trying to trivialize the matter based on partisan politics.
The part that I am waiting for is to see how this 2006 election plays out. If republicans keep their seats with 51-49 margins all over the country, we will know our democratic process no longer works and we have no control over who gets in office. It will all be decided covertly by the party who can write the best 'virus' to steal the no-recount elections.
Are you serious? If so, I find your post to be very disturbing. Please- please- realize that there are many people in this country that disagree with you. If the candidates that you support don't win the majority, that is not proof of a consipiracy. It is possible for people to disagree with you and for the democratic process to still "work"- in fact, thats the whole frickin point!
I would hope that you do not back yourself into a corner where you believe that the only way you could lose is if there is fraud. Now that is undemocratic!
It seems that the people that advance this quote often think that it is arguing that any trade-off between safety and libery is unacceptable, and that is not the case. There are two huge qualifiers given- essential liberty and temporary safety.
There will always be a trade-off between liberty and safety. We have already made countless of these trade-offs, ranging from traffic laws to property rights, and these are for the good of society. The trick is to find the right balance.
Then what's the point of proposing the bill at all? The only new surveillance programs it would possibly allow aren't constitutional, so it wouldn't allow them. But if it doesn't, then it doesn't do anything at all. Therefore, it's self-contradictory and meaningless!
If the conclusions you are reaching are nonsense, then maybe you need to challenge some of the assumptions that you have made to reach those conclusions...
Let me put this another way. According to this bill, the application made by the Attorney General to the FISA court must justify, among other things, that the program that he is proposing is consistent with the Constitution (in section 5 of the Senate bill, Sec. 703(a)(3) of the amended FISA text). Then, before the FISA court can approve the program that the Attorney General has applied for, it must find that it actually is consistent with the Constitution (in section 6 of the Senate bill, sec. 704(a)(2)).
So, given this information straight from the proposed Senate bill, what are you basing your assertion on that this amounts to unconstitutional surveillance? The only surveillance programs that this bill would allow are programs that the court has found to be constitutional!
Go back and read the last part I bolded. The 4th Amendment specifies exactly what is required for a search to be reasonable, and this law does not fulfill those requirements!
Says who? You? Forgive me for not putting much stock into your legal analysis of the 4th amendment considering your posting history.
The 4th amendment requires that searches:
Are reasonable
have probable cause
Are supported by oath or affirmation
Describe the person or place to be searched
These requirements are more than covered in the application submitted by the Attorney General to the FISA court as defined by this bill. If the FISA court believes that the application does not meet these requirements, then they won't approve the application.
No, I haven't. The freedoms I'm talking about aren't trivial crap like your example; they're important!. They're the ones that the Constitution says "shall not be abridged." If you'll notice, that's an absolute statement -- there are no exceptions. And there shouldn't be any exceptions, either!
This "absolute statement" appears nowhere in the US Constitution. Why the hell did you put quotation marks around it? The closest to this phrase is in Amendments 15, 19, 24, and 26 -- all in relation to voting rights and irrelevant to this discussion. You're not really impressing me with your constitutional scholarship here.
Now, the 4th amendment does guarantee that the right against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, but the presence of the word "unreasonable" means that this is far from the absolute that you claim it is. The government does have the constitutional right to searches and seizures as long as it is reasonable. Even constitutional rights as basic as Habeas Corpus are not absolute, and can be suspended in the interest of public safety (Article I, Section 9, Clause 2).
So please enlighten me as to what absolute right an electronic wiretapping program would violate, preferably without inventing quotes and attributing them to the Constitution.
First, I never said it wasn't okay to wiretap phonecalls with known terrorists. Second, there's middle ground between not tapping phone calls at all and tapping phone calls at will. Third, the "freedom involved with this bill" is not the freedom to talk with terrorists!
Hang on there- I said the freedom involved with this bill was the freedom to talk with terrorists overseas without anybody listening in. You can always talk with anybody you want to.
Now, lets examine the details of this bill. This bill would allow the FISA court to approve a warrentless wiretapping program for a duration of it's choosing as long as the Attorney General's application satisfied all of about a dozen requirements. These requirements include authorization by the President, justification of the need of the program, that the program is to fight terrorism, a legal basis of how the program is consistent with the Constitution, and details about how the program will be minimized and what steps they will take to ensure that any communications that they intercept are involved with terrorists. The information gathered by the program is only for intelligence purposes to ensure public safety, and is inadmissible in any criminal prosecution. If the FISA court approves the program, Congress has oversight over the program and the Attorney General must regularly report to them about how the program is being used. This is hardly the blank check to tap phone calls at will like you have characterized it to be. There is due process and oversight.
The same could be said of a system with more than two parties.
Not really, and the reason is quite simple. With 2 main candidates, each party must try to field a candidate that will receive at least 50% of the vote if they want the best chance of winning. This eliminates candidates that advocate ideas that only 33% (or 25% or 20% or less) of the voters will support.
Take an issue like illegal immigration, for example, and think of the difference in the opinions of the most extreme 20% on all sides of the issue. If you had 4 or 5 main candidates, you would be about as likely to elect a candidate that wants to build a wall and lockdown the border as you are to elect a candidate that wants to open the borders and let everybody in, when in reality the majority wants something in the middle. The more parties that you have, the higher the chance that each candidate will be more extreme in their positions. It doesn't matter if you have a runoff election between the top candidates because these candidates are more extreme to begin with!
You mentioned the California Republican party. This is a great example of why the Republicans have done so poorly in California lately. They haven't been putting out candidates that the majority of Californians want to support, and as a result the Democrats dominate (with the exception of Governor Schwarzenegger, of course). But the weakness of the California Republican party has not caused the Democrats to move farther to the left. On the contrary, the Democrats have moved more to the center to pick up the centrist voters that the Republicans have alienated. This would not have happened if there were other strong parties because the parties become more entrenched in their positions to protect their core "base".
Like I said before, I don't claim that the 2-party system is perfect, but it does to a very good job at what it was designed to do.
You're missing the point. You're trying to paint the "popularity" of the winning candidate in a 2 party system versus a multi-party system as a good thing, when in fact, it's just an artifact of the limited set of choices available to the electorate.
No. By it's nature, this limited set of choices will elevate the candidates and ideas that have the broadest support and are the most "mainstream". We are not chosing between two random people- we are chosing between the people that the political parties have advanced because they think have the best chance of winning.
Let this post bear witness that I am willing to accept being a victim of terrorism, if the alternative is losing my Freedom. Maybe you're a coward, but I'm not!
You have set up a false dichotomy. The choice here is not between losing your "freedom" or getting killed by terrorists. There will always a trade-off between freedoms and security. For example, I have gladly given up my freedom to drive through a red light at an intersection in exchange for the security that the traffic signals provide. The key is to find the right balance between freedom and security.
Is the right to talk on the phone with known terrorist overseas without anybody listening in (which is the freedom involved with this Senate bill) an important freedom? Or is this something we can give up in exchange for the added security it will provide?
To me, the only thing controversial about this bill is how we define the known terrorists overseas. I'm a little concerned about the current wording of the bill, and that will doubtlessly be debated and refined going forward. Otherwise this is a no-brainer.
NO, THE WAR IN IRAQ HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE WAR ON TERROR. NOTHING How many hijackers were from Iraq? Zero. How much did Saddam have to do with Al Qaeda or their attacks? Zero. How much of a threat was Saddam to the United States? Zero. Calling Iraq "part of the war on terror" is a lie.
This is a very intellectually dishonest argument. Iraq supported dozens of terrorist organizations for over 20 years. This is a documented fact that you haven't even attempted to refute. Iraq had also tried on multiple occasions to direct terrorist attacks against the United States. Again, documented fact that you have not contradicted. To me, these facts combine to prove that Iraq did pose a threat to the United States, and the war in Iraq is an essential part of the war against terrorism.
Claiming that Iraq posed no terrorist threat because they weren't involved with the September 11th attacks is analogous to refusing to call a career criminal a thief because he didn't participate in a specific bank robbery. It's an absurd argument, and the fact that you are making it tells me that you have lost the ability to look at the facts objectively.
If you want to argue that the threat that Saddam's regime posed was not sufficient to justify our 2003 invasion, that's fine. I disagree with that position, but at least that is an honest argument.
Thats a ridiculous assertion. A 2-party system exerts a moderating force on the outcome of elections. A 1 party system does not. A 2-party system gives the electorate a choice between candidates. A 1 party system does not. In a 2-party system, the candidate with the most support in the electorate wins. The will of the "electorate" is irrelevant in a 1 party system.
Okay- I see what you are saying now, and there is some validity to your point. I will revise my statement then to say that a 2 party system favors moderate candidates, but does not guarantee that moderates will win. The 2005 Iranian election certainly isn't an example of a 2-party system, but it is an example of a majority of voters chosing a more extreme candidate, and obviously that could happen in a true 2-party election also. I still believe that a 2 party system does a better job than most others to moderate the results, and I see this as a strength of our political system in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Close, but not quite. The NPT requires non-nuclear-weapon states to accept safeguards to verify that they are within the limitations of the treaty. These safeguards are negotiated directly between non-nuclear-weapons stats and the IAEA. The Additional Protocol is one such set of safeguards that Iran has agreed to, so their status as a signatory to the NPT requires that they implement it.
The right to enrich uranium is explicitly guaranteed as long as it is within the negotiated safeguards. According to the IAEA, Iran is not providing all of the safeguards that they have agreed to. Therefore, the UN Security Council demanded in Resolution 1696 that Iran stop enriching uranium until it can provide these safeguards. This is all within the scope of the NPT.
Resolution 1696 was passed with a vote of 14-1. You can try to dismiss this if you want, but the fact is that 13 other members of the Security Council agreed that there are serious concerns about Iran's nuclear programs.
Welcome to international law, where laws are only binding as far as nations agree to them. States like India, Pakistan, and Israel have exercised their rights as sovereign nations by not agreeing to the NPT. Consequently, they are under no obligation to abide by it. You don't like that? Well, there aint much that you can do about it aside from asking them to change their minds, or if you feel really strongly about it, surround them with your military until one side backs down.
Herein lies the fundamental flaw of the NPT. Signatories to the treaty are given the right to develop nuclear technologies (within the negotiated safeguards, of course) up to some invisible line that separates a peaceful nuclear program from a non-peaceful program. They can do this with the full support of the NPT and all of the benefits that it provides to its signatories, including technology sharing and protection guarantees from the nuclear-weapons states. But the treaty also gives the signatories the right to withdraw from the treaty at any time and without any recourse. There is absolutely nothing in the NPT that would prevent a nation like Iran from exploiting its membership in the treaty to develop nuclear technology for "peaceful" purposes, and then withdrawing from the treaty to complete a nuclear weapon.
Unfortunately, this flawed treaty is the best that we have got, so we have to make do with it.
Everything I quoted above was directly from the IAEA. I didn't say that Iran was producing highly enriched uranium, but the IAEA does have serious concerns about the dual use equipment that Iran has been collecting at PHRC, especially after some particles of highly enriched uranium were found there. So far, Iran has been unwilling to cooperate with the IAEA to resolve this.
See also:
GOV/2006/27 paragraphs 24-25
GOV/2006/38 paragraph 17
GOV/2006/53 paragraphs 24-25
It is this subterfuge and lack of transparency that caused the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1696 back in July of this year. This action was taken by the Security Council after traces of highly enriched uranium were found in Iran, but the Iranian government refused to cooperate with the IAEA in the investigation (this is mentioned in paragraph 24 of the latest Board of Governor's report that I linked to above). If Iran's program truely is peaceful, then they have absolutely no business producing highly enriched uranium.
From the documentation on youtube.com, when users flag a video as being inappropriate, it is forwarded to youtube employees for review. Therefore, the fact that access to the video was indeed limited for a while indicates that the censorship did come from youtube- at least for a while until that decision was overturned.
Well, that's not true. Nothing in the NPT itself stops a signatory from withdrawing to develop weapons (which is one of the fundamental flaws of the treaty), but there is a lot that can be done outside of the treaty to stop a signatory from withdrawing (along the lines of imposing economic sanctions or pointing big guns at the country that is misbehaving).
You do realize that the United States' status in the Non-proliferation treaty as a nuclear power, coupled with UN Resolution 255, requires that we maintain a nuclear arsenal to defend non-nuclear states, right? The same goes for the UK.
You couldn't be more wrong. The first deployment of Patriot missiles in 1991 had limited success, but that was 15 years and several generations of the product ago. The latest version that was deployed in Iraq in 2003 had close to a 100% success rate with 11/11 Iraqi missiles being hit (8 of which have been independently verified).
- The UN Security Council ("Deploring threats made by Iraq during the recent conflict to make use of terrorism against targets outside Iraq" and "Requires Iraq to inform the Security Council that it will not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate within its territory")
- President Clinton ("In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more the very kind of threat Iraq poses now- a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction ready to use them or provide them to terrorists")
- President Clinton's State Department ("Iraq continued to plan and sponsor international terrorism in 1999").
- The Council on Foreign Relations ("Saddam Hussein's dictatorship provided headquarters, operating bases, training camps, and other support to terrorist groups...")
- President Jimmy Carter, who placed Iraq on the State Department list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in 1979
- Vladimir Putin, who warned us in 2002 that Iraq was plotting terrorist attacks against the United States
Closing your eyes and declaring these to be right-wing lies does not make you look very rational.Why should Republicans get "trounced"? Most of the recent polls that I have seen show the Republicans maintaining a small majority in both the House and the Senate (see Election Projection, for example).
That was my point. Many people seem to have already made up their minds about what the results of the election this November should be, and they are using this as a standard to judge if the system is rigged or not. But in reality, most polls show that the race is going to be very close, with Democrats picking up some seats and Governorships, but Republicans maintaining a majority in both the House and Senate. If the Republicans do keep their majority, it is not proof that the elections are rigged!
And the exit polls haven't been wrong for two elections in a row. Some exit polls in Ohio in 2004 were wrong, but the company that conducted the polls has admitted that they screwed up in this analysis that they published after the election. Its not some deep conspiracy- just plain incompetence.
There will always be bad apples in any group, like those Democrats that slashed the tires of vans in Milwaukee that some Republicans had rented to drive poor people to the polls on election day in 2004. But I firmly believe that a vast and overwhelming majority of the citizens of this country want our elections to be safe and fair- regardless of party affiliation.
Well, first of all, I don't believe that there are "massive faults" with the entire election process. Do you care to elaborate what you think those faults are? Our system is certainly not perfect, but it works remarkably well.
There are some major problems with Diebold's electronic voting machines, of course, but lets not forget that there is no evidence that any voters have been disenfranchised by these problems or that voters are likely to be disenfranchised by them this November. Of course, any problems such as the weaknesses that have been found in Diebold's system need to be addressed, and NOW is the time to address them (before voters actually have been cheated). I believe this debate has already begun in the public for all of our benefit, so it is not being "ignored" like you claim.
Look, the overwhelming majority of Americans, including both Republicans, Democrats, and people like myself, want our elections to safe and free from corruption. You are doing a huge disservice trying to trivialize the matter based on partisan politics.
Are you serious? If so, I find your post to be very disturbing. Please- please- realize that there are many people in this country that disagree with you. If the candidates that you support don't win the majority, that is not proof of a consipiracy. It is possible for people to disagree with you and for the democratic process to still "work"- in fact, thats the whole frickin point!
I would hope that you do not back yourself into a corner where you believe that the only way you could lose is if there is fraud. Now that is undemocratic!
It seems that the people that advance this quote often think that it is arguing that any trade-off between safety and libery is unacceptable, and that is not the case. There are two huge qualifiers given- essential liberty and temporary safety.
There will always be a trade-off between liberty and safety. We have already made countless of these trade-offs, ranging from traffic laws to property rights, and these are for the good of society. The trick is to find the right balance.
Let me put this another way. According to this bill, the application made by the Attorney General to the FISA court must justify, among other things, that the program that he is proposing is consistent with the Constitution (in section 5 of the Senate bill, Sec. 703(a)(3) of the amended FISA text). Then, before the FISA court can approve the program that the Attorney General has applied for, it must find that it actually is consistent with the Constitution (in section 6 of the Senate bill, sec. 704(a)(2)).
So, given this information straight from the proposed Senate bill, what are you basing your assertion on that this amounts to unconstitutional surveillance? The only surveillance programs that this bill would allow are programs that the court has found to be constitutional!
The 4th amendment requires that searches:
- Are reasonable
- have probable cause
- Are supported by oath or affirmation
- Describe the person or place to be searched
These requirements are more than covered in the application submitted by the Attorney General to the FISA court as defined by this bill. If the FISA court believes that the application does not meet these requirements, then they won't approve the application.Now, the 4th amendment does guarantee that the right against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, but the presence of the word "unreasonable" means that this is far from the absolute that you claim it is. The government does have the constitutional right to searches and seizures as long as it is reasonable. Even constitutional rights as basic as Habeas Corpus are not absolute, and can be suspended in the interest of public safety (Article I, Section 9, Clause 2).
So please enlighten me as to what absolute right an electronic wiretapping program would violate, preferably without inventing quotes and attributing them to the Constitution.
Hang on there- I said the freedom involved with this bill was the freedom to talk with terrorists overseas without anybody listening in. You can always talk with anybody you want to.
Now, lets examine the details of this bill. This bill would allow the FISA court to approve a warrentless wiretapping program for a duration of it's choosing as long as the Attorney General's application satisfied all of about a dozen requirements. These requirements include authorization by the President, justification of the need of the program, that the program is to fight terrorism, a legal basis of how the program is consistent with the Constitution, and details about how the program will be minimized and what steps they will take to ensure that any communications that they intercept are involved with terrorists. The information gathered by the program is only for intelligence purposes to ensure public safety, and is inadmissible in any criminal prosecution. If the FISA court approves the program, Congress has oversight over the program and the Attorney General must regularly report to them about how the program is being used. This is hardly the blank check to tap phone calls at will like you have characterized it to be. There is due process and oversight.
Take an issue like illegal immigration, for example, and think of the difference in the opinions of the most extreme 20% on all sides of the issue. If you had 4 or 5 main candidates, you would be about as likely to elect a candidate that wants to build a wall and lockdown the border as you are to elect a candidate that wants to open the borders and let everybody in, when in reality the majority wants something in the middle. The more parties that you have, the higher the chance that each candidate will be more extreme in their positions. It doesn't matter if you have a runoff election between the top candidates because these candidates are more extreme to begin with!
You mentioned the California Republican party. This is a great example of why the Republicans have done so poorly in California lately. They haven't been putting out candidates that the majority of Californians want to support, and as a result the Democrats dominate (with the exception of Governor Schwarzenegger, of course). But the weakness of the California Republican party has not caused the Democrats to move farther to the left. On the contrary, the Democrats have moved more to the center to pick up the centrist voters that the Republicans have alienated. This would not have happened if there were other strong parties because the parties become more entrenched in their positions to protect their core "base".
Like I said before, I don't claim that the 2-party system is perfect, but it does to a very good job at what it was designed to do.
No. By it's nature, this limited set of choices will elevate the candidates and ideas that have the broadest support and are the most "mainstream". We are not chosing between two random people- we are chosing between the people that the political parties have advanced because they think have the best chance of winning.
You have set up a false dichotomy. The choice here is not between losing your "freedom" or getting killed by terrorists. There will always a trade-off between freedoms and security. For example, I have gladly given up my freedom to drive through a red light at an intersection in exchange for the security that the traffic signals provide. The key is to find the right balance between freedom and security.
Is the right to talk on the phone with known terrorist overseas without anybody listening in (which is the freedom involved with this Senate bill) an important freedom? Or is this something we can give up in exchange for the added security it will provide?
To me, the only thing controversial about this bill is how we define the known terrorists overseas. I'm a little concerned about the current wording of the bill, and that will doubtlessly be debated and refined going forward. Otherwise this is a no-brainer.
Claiming that Iraq posed no terrorist threat because they weren't involved with the September 11th attacks is analogous to refusing to call a career criminal a thief because he didn't participate in a specific bank robbery. It's an absurd argument, and the fact that you are making it tells me that you have lost the ability to look at the facts objectively.
If you want to argue that the threat that Saddam's regime posed was not sufficient to justify our 2003 invasion, that's fine. I disagree with that position, but at least that is an honest argument.
Thats a ridiculous assertion. A 2-party system exerts a moderating force on the outcome of elections. A 1 party system does not. A 2-party system gives the electorate a choice between candidates. A 1 party system does not. In a 2-party system, the candidate with the most support in the electorate wins. The will of the "electorate" is irrelevant in a 1 party system.
This is pretty basic stuff.
Okay- I see what you are saying now, and there is some validity to your point. I will revise my statement then to say that a 2 party system favors moderate candidates, but does not guarantee that moderates will win. The 2005 Iranian election certainly isn't an example of a 2-party system, but it is an example of a majority of voters chosing a more extreme candidate, and obviously that could happen in a true 2-party election also. I still believe that a 2 party system does a better job than most others to moderate the results, and I see this as a strength of our political system in the US.