And you have some reasonable basis to conclude that FISA warrants are difficult to get? What about the way-less-than-one-percent rejection rate was unclear to you? Do you think that someone at the NSA has carpal tunnel, and can't be bothered to actually write out all those warrants, as the law requires?
Never mind that all of this was beside the point. If the President wanted to wiretap in a way he was prohibited by law from doing, he should have gone to Congress and gotten a law passed. If Congress wouldn't pass the law, then tough fuckin' noogies for the President. Instead, he just ignored the law and pretended that he had the kingly power to do whatever he wanted. Can you honestly not see that "but I waaaaaanted to!" isn't a justification for making up your own laws? And that "brown men will come to kill you in the night if you don't make me King" isn't a cogent argument? Do you really think that we should be living in a monarchy?!
You're attacking a straw man. Do you really think there's some sort of exchange rate at work here? That if we send a certain amount of aid to starving orphans, it gives us the moral right to disappear and torture a certain number of citizens?
Also, you're conflating the citizens with their government. I can criticize my government without calling into question the worth of the people who live here. One must make a distinction between a nation's people and the people who, for the moment, are running it. If you're still unclear on this concept, I have a whole generation of Japanese, or Italians, or Russians here who would be more than happy to explain it to you.
Okay, so... disappearing people and torturing them isn't fascism. Vast unaccountable power accreted to a single individual isn't fascism. But calling you an idiot is fascism.
It takes a lot of balls for an armchair quarterback with no knowledge of the law to accuse our President and National Security leaders of committing treason.
I know he swore to obey and uphold the constitution. I know he ignores laws he finds inconvenient, and makes up new ones on his own. That's not a President, that's a King. Whether or not he dresses it up in a lot of pretty talk about the "unitary executive", it's still a gross violation of his oath of office.
And "National Security leaders"? Is this some shorthand way of telling us that if we question our leaders, we imperil our national security? Do you really believe that, given that these leaders have by the estimation of their own agencies, made us less secure?
The whole point is that the wiretaps are being done to conversations that at least one citizen is a part of. While it's nice to know that you're happy to run right over the rights of people who have the misfortune to live elsewhere, it's not really relevant to the question at hand.
Not to mention that they're being done with absolutely no oversight, no checks or balances. Without at least something like the FISA court, there's no way to know who's being wiretapped.
Which law is Bush upholding? The FISA statute which states that no foreign intelligence gathering can be done without their say-so? The Fourth Amendment? The constitution itself, which states that he's not above the law, and can't just start issuing kingly decrees when he disagrees with said law? Executive Order 13292, which prohibits the use of security classification to hide illegal acts? If he was so certain that the program was legal, why did he lie about it before the story came out, claiming that all wiretapping was done with a warrant?
And what "agenda" does the lower court have in this case?
We did have oversight; it was secret, but at least it was a separate branch of the government. It was the FISA court, but the current administration decided it would be far too much hassle to file all that paperwork, so they pretty much just started ignoring that court and the laws saying that all wiretaps of this nature had to go through them.
Firstly, do you have the same security clearance of the Senate Intelligence Comittee members or of the President? If not, you won't see the evidence for which you're looking for another 50 or so years.
Oh, please. We heard this same crap when the war drums were beating for Iraq. Sure, the evidence looks shaky at best, but you don't have the super duper convincing intelligence that the decision-makers do! Which turned out to be nothing, of course. You'll pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical when someone claims that if only I knew this information which I conveniently can't know for the next fifty years, everything would make sense to me.
Congress was informed and they deemed it OK. Only after it was revealed in an illegal leak of classified information and contorted by the Media did it become a probelm.
Congress deemed this okay? Since when? Congress was never asked for their okay. They were notified. What were they supposed to do about it, write secret notes to themselves expressing their disapproval?
What, precisely, did the media "contort"? If anything, they've been more than kind enough. Did you know that there's an executive order prohibiting the use of security classification in order to hide lawbreaking? You wouldn't know it, listening to the news.
While upper management was tried and convicted of war crimes, the man on the street who polished the gears of the great machine didn't get imprisoned. How could he? They'd have imprisoned millions of people who were just doing their jobs. Even though these jobs were part of a mass-murder machine.
German infantry troops and low-level officials were manifestly not held responsible for their part in what they did. War crimes tribunals were for the men at the top. (In a modern analogy, it'd be like trying Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the CEO of Halliburton. Colin Powell could play the part of Karl Dönitz.)
You describe an ideal world with ideal markets. Which would be really spiffy. However, ideal markets require certain things to function, like labor moving as easily as capital does, and perfect information on the part of the consumers. Consider your example of the FDA's review and safety process. You claim that it's unnecessary because consumers will inform themselves, and you handwave into existence a demand for an FDA... but a privatized one. Which demonstrably did not exist before 1906, and likely would not have, simply because private citizens didn't look into conditions in the meat packing industry.
As for your transmitter example... why? What motivation does the owner of a great big transmitter have to allow some pipsqueak startup to start a station? Consider the consolidation that deregulation of the airwaves has brought. (Clear Channel owns more and more stations.) By your lights, this should have resulted in an explosion of local news. But it hasn't. If a little deregulation leads to some consolidation, are you claiming that more deregulation won't lead to more consolidation?
What you're trying to get around is the fact that power accretes. Whether it accretes to a dictatorship, to a representative democracy or to a pack of bloodthirsty warlords doesn't change that fact. If you knock down a representative democracy, you won't get Galt's Gulch; something else will fill the vacuum, and chances are it won't be half as nice to you, all your kvetching and moaning about how oppressive your taxes are aside.
I take it you'll be moving to the sunny libertarian paradise of Somalia, then, where freedom runs unfettered by the heavy chains of government? I hear you can buy weapons as easily as you can buy food over there, which must make it the safest nation on earth.
Because even if these drugs were covered by taxpayer-funded insurance, I don't think he could afford the roughly hundred million bucks in postage to send thank-yous to the entire American workforce?
Because even if these drugs were covered by taxpayer-funded insurance, your share of that would be (back-of-the-envelope calculation here) roughly twenty cents a year, which, while mighty nice of you, doesn't quite warrant a thank-you note?
What are the other two factors in the US's violent crime? I'd guess the war on drugs is one, but I'd never seen a link shown between socialized medicine and lowered crime. (I'm not saying it doesn't exist; I'm just saying I can't imagine dying cancer patients jacking cars to pay the bills.)
I was the same sort of standardized-test whiz you mention, and I went through a libertarian phase in my teenage years, fueled by barely-sublimated elitism, when I could stomach Atlas Shrugs. But it was high-school angst, and I grew out of it! From what you've said, one of these women was at least twenty-three!
It's like economics, where you take an admittedly flawed model of a complex real-world system, then make predictions from that model. Where the model departs from reality, blame reality. It's a sort of Platonic-ideal thing. Maybe (just making a stab in the dark here) it's caused by being caught up in your head too much, by making a model of how the world does and should work, and never really testing it. Which would explain why shut-in dorks like myself do it.
And that sounds like a nifty psych experiment. Sometimes I wish I'd gone into research psychology, so that I could do that kind of experiment while quietly cackling to myself, "DANCE PUPPETS DANCE!!".
They have a vast collection of tremendously bright people. I think they've just reached the limits of how massive a monolithic system can be maintained, even given effectively infinite coding muscle. The UNIX model, on the other hand, doesn't run into this issue; the layers provide well-defined interfaces, and apart from that, remain blissfuly ignorant of each other. This design bothers a lot of people, but it does having the overwhelming advantage of scaling much better than the MS approach.
George H. W. Bush promised King Fahd that the troops would be removed after the Gulf War. They were not. Removing the troops wouldn't have been "giving into Bin Ladin's demands", it would have been keeping his damn promise.
The President is Good. If the President does it, then it is Good. If the President opposes it, then it is Bad. If it is embarrassing to the President, then it is Bad. If it disagrees with the President, it is Bad. Conversely, if it is Good, then it's at the very least aligned with the President. America is Good, ergo the President is America, ergo if you think the President is not Good, then you think America is not Good.
I think it explains wingnut reactions pretty well. How is it unpatriotic to muckrake and expose corruption? It's unpatriotic because it embarrasses the President. How is it unpatriotic to oppose torture? It's unpatriotic because the President is for it, therefore it must be Good.
I remember criticism of Clinton from both sides of the aisle; he was too centrist, he failed to carry through on healthcare, he fucked over labor with NAFTA, and so forth. But for this guy? It's like he can do no wrong. I want to get someone on record describing something the President can't do, something they'd disagree with. It's like asking then to prove 2+2=5; it's contradictory to the basic foundations of their axiom schema. It just doesn't compute.
otterpop81: Point. AC: Idiot. Counterpoint. otterpop81: How dare you call me an idiot? O, I am a shrinking violet, and have been so injured by this rank display of moonbattery that I must now retire to my fainting couch before someone calls me a Nazi.
Either respond to the point he made, or don't bother.
Edited? What edits? Any edits were made were not substantive, and the producers specifically stated that all edits were minor. It was aired intact as a big fat Clinton-bash, a $30 million RNC contribution just over a month before the election.
Slashdot Mirror
And you have some reasonable basis to conclude that FISA warrants are difficult to get? What about the way-less-than-one-percent rejection rate was unclear to you? Do you think that someone at the NSA has carpal tunnel, and can't be bothered to actually write out all those warrants, as the law requires?
Never mind that all of this was beside the point. If the President wanted to wiretap in a way he was prohibited by law from doing, he should have gone to Congress and gotten a law passed. If Congress wouldn't pass the law, then tough fuckin' noogies for the President. Instead, he just ignored the law and pretended that he had the kingly power to do whatever he wanted. Can you honestly not see that "but I waaaaaanted to!" isn't a justification for making up your own laws? And that "brown men will come to kill you in the night if you don't make me King" isn't a cogent argument? Do you really think that we should be living in a monarchy?!
You're attacking a straw man. Do you really think there's some sort of exchange rate at work here? That if we send a certain amount of aid to starving orphans, it gives us the moral right to disappear and torture a certain number of citizens?
Also, you're conflating the citizens with their government. I can criticize my government without calling into question the worth of the people who live here. One must make a distinction between a nation's people and the people who, for the moment, are running it. If you're still unclear on this concept, I have a whole generation of Japanese, or Italians, or Russians here who would be more than happy to explain it to you.
Okay, so... disappearing people and torturing them isn't fascism. Vast unaccountable power accreted to a single individual isn't fascism. But calling you an idiot is fascism.
Wow. You are an idiot.
And "National Security leaders"? Is this some shorthand way of telling us that if we question our leaders, we imperil our national security? Do you really believe that, given that these leaders have by the estimation of their own agencies, made us less secure?
The whole point is that the wiretaps are being done to conversations that at least one citizen is a part of. While it's nice to know that you're happy to run right over the rights of people who have the misfortune to live elsewhere, it's not really relevant to the question at hand.
Not to mention that they're being done with absolutely no oversight, no checks or balances. Without at least something like the FISA court, there's no way to know who's being wiretapped.
Which law is Bush upholding? The FISA statute which states that no foreign intelligence gathering can be done without their say-so? The Fourth Amendment? The constitution itself, which states that he's not above the law, and can't just start issuing kingly decrees when he disagrees with said law? Executive Order 13292, which prohibits the use of security classification to hide illegal acts? If he was so certain that the program was legal, why did he lie about it before the story came out, claiming that all wiretapping was done with a warrant?
And what "agenda" does the lower court have in this case?
We did have oversight; it was secret, but at least it was a separate branch of the government. It was the FISA court, but the current administration decided it would be far too much hassle to file all that paperwork, so they pretty much just started ignoring that court and the laws saying that all wiretaps of this nature had to go through them.
Congress deemed this okay? Since when? Congress was never asked for their okay. They were notified. What were they supposed to do about it, write secret notes to themselves expressing their disapproval?
What, precisely, did the media "contort"? If anything, they've been more than kind enough. Did you know that there's an executive order prohibiting the use of security classification in order to hide lawbreaking? You wouldn't know it, listening to the news.
And the funny thing is, the post kvetching about the moderation of its parent was modded higher than the original. It's a complete Slashdot inversion!
Awesome. Bookmarked!
(Yes, I know it's "Milano" in Italian.)
While upper management was tried and convicted of war crimes, the man on the street who polished the gears of the great machine didn't get imprisoned. How could he? They'd have imprisoned millions of people who were just doing their jobs. Even though these jobs were part of a mass-murder machine.
German infantry troops and low-level officials were manifestly not held responsible for their part in what they did. War crimes tribunals were for the men at the top. (In a modern analogy, it'd be like trying Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the CEO of Halliburton. Colin Powell could play the part of Karl Dönitz.)
You describe an ideal world with ideal markets. Which would be really spiffy. However, ideal markets require certain things to function, like labor moving as easily as capital does, and perfect information on the part of the consumers. Consider your example of the FDA's review and safety process. You claim that it's unnecessary because consumers will inform themselves, and you handwave into existence a demand for an FDA... but a privatized one. Which demonstrably did not exist before 1906, and likely would not have, simply because private citizens didn't look into conditions in the meat packing industry.
As for your transmitter example... why? What motivation does the owner of a great big transmitter have to allow some pipsqueak startup to start a station? Consider the consolidation that deregulation of the airwaves has brought. (Clear Channel owns more and more stations.) By your lights, this should have resulted in an explosion of local news. But it hasn't. If a little deregulation leads to some consolidation, are you claiming that more deregulation won't lead to more consolidation?
What you're trying to get around is the fact that power accretes. Whether it accretes to a dictatorship, to a representative democracy or to a pack of bloodthirsty warlords doesn't change that fact. If you knock down a representative democracy, you won't get Galt's Gulch; something else will fill the vacuum, and chances are it won't be half as nice to you, all your kvetching and moaning about how oppressive your taxes are aside.
I take it you'll be moving to the sunny libertarian paradise of Somalia, then, where freedom runs unfettered by the heavy chains of government? I hear you can buy weapons as easily as you can buy food over there, which must make it the safest nation on earth.
Because he has private insurance?
Because even if these drugs were covered by taxpayer-funded insurance, I don't think he could afford the roughly hundred million bucks in postage to send thank-yous to the entire American workforce?
Because even if these drugs were covered by taxpayer-funded insurance, your share of that would be (back-of-the-envelope calculation here) roughly twenty cents a year, which, while mighty nice of you, doesn't quite warrant a thank-you note?
What are the other two factors in the US's violent crime? I'd guess the war on drugs is one, but I'd never seen a link shown between socialized medicine and lowered crime. (I'm not saying it doesn't exist; I'm just saying I can't imagine dying cancer patients jacking cars to pay the bills.)
But we can still tell him he's being a twit. I don't think anyone's going to go into his house and steal his Hard-Earned Cash Money to give to RAW.
I was the same sort of standardized-test whiz you mention, and I went through a libertarian phase in my teenage years, fueled by barely-sublimated elitism, when I could stomach Atlas Shrugs. But it was high-school angst, and I grew out of it! From what you've said, one of these women was at least twenty-three!
It's like economics, where you take an admittedly flawed model of a complex real-world system, then make predictions from that model. Where the model departs from reality, blame reality. It's a sort of Platonic-ideal thing. Maybe (just making a stab in the dark here) it's caused by being caught up in your head too much, by making a model of how the world does and should work, and never really testing it. Which would explain why shut-in dorks like myself do it.
And that sounds like a nifty psych experiment. Sometimes I wish I'd gone into research psychology, so that I could do that kind of experiment while quietly cackling to myself, "DANCE PUPPETS DANCE!!".
They have a vast collection of tremendously bright people. I think they've just reached the limits of how massive a monolithic system can be maintained, even given effectively infinite coding muscle. The UNIX model, on the other hand, doesn't run into this issue; the layers provide well-defined interfaces, and apart from that, remain blissfuly ignorant of each other. This design bothers a lot of people, but it does having the overwhelming advantage of scaling much better than the MS approach.
I'd like to think that he was gnashing his teeth at the folks who wrote that original quote.
Or maybe he was being stupid. But I read it as a reply to the sanctimonious pricks who make a living enabling the Russian Mafia' spamming activities.
George H. W. Bush promised King Fahd that the troops would be removed after the Gulf War. They were not. Removing the troops wouldn't have been "giving into Bin Ladin's demands", it would have been keeping his damn promise.
Pilot ep of the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, where some terrorists hijack a jetliner and try to fly it into the WTC?
I'm not kidding. Check it out.
Imagine the following worldview:
The President is Good. If the President does it, then it is Good. If the President opposes it, then it is Bad. If it is embarrassing to the President, then it is Bad. If it disagrees with the President, it is Bad. Conversely, if it is Good, then it's at the very least aligned with the President. America is Good, ergo the President is America, ergo if you think the President is not Good, then you think America is not Good.
I think it explains wingnut reactions pretty well. How is it unpatriotic to muckrake and expose corruption? It's unpatriotic because it embarrasses the President. How is it unpatriotic to oppose torture? It's unpatriotic because the President is for it, therefore it must be Good.
I remember criticism of Clinton from both sides of the aisle; he was too centrist, he failed to carry through on healthcare, he fucked over labor with NAFTA, and so forth. But for this guy? It's like he can do no wrong. I want to get someone on record describing something the President can't do, something they'd disagree with. It's like asking then to prove 2+2=5; it's contradictory to the basic foundations of their axiom schema. It just doesn't compute.
Depressing, isn't it?
Edited? What edits? Any edits were made were not substantive, and the producers specifically stated that all edits were minor. It was aired intact as a big fat Clinton-bash, a $30 million RNC contribution just over a month before the election.