If by "this", you mean the wiretapping by the NSA, there is evidence. They need a warrant to wiretap. A warrant is recognition by the judiciary of an exceptional condition. Which is why a warrant cannot be issued for 120,000,000 people. This is, at the very least, abuse of discretion by a judge. But they got a "NO" to this warrant from 2 judges and only a 3rd one said yes. So, in this case, they knew the warrant could not be issued without breaking the law. Issuing a warrant for 120,000,000 people is equivalent to making a new law. Such an action subvert the prerogative of the legislative branch. Not only is this illegal, it may very well be treasonous (because it undermines the system of government without even a due process).
The bonds they buy expire. When they do, they money is unprinted or whatever that's called.
It's called paying of the principal. But if it's paid with the money that they just borrow from the FED again, the principal is never paid back. I stand by it. They borrow at 0% and never pay the principal.
Nice story, but you messed up from the start.[quote]Quantitative Easing: all the government bond which don't sell on the free market are bought by the Federal Reserve.[/quote]They're buying mortgage backed securities.
No, I didn't mess up. There are (presumably) two programs. "Quantitative easing" and "Operation Twist". The first is buying of treasury notes the 2nd is buying of medium and long maturity MBS'. They might mix the two up because they really don't have to have any kind of accounting.... They are not accountable to anyone. So they might keep bonds bought through both programs on the same books. But QE, at least when it started, was a way to prevent interest rates from rising because Treasury notes weren't getting bought. Without QE, the Treasury would have to pay higher interest on the notes it sold and would not be able to steal $1billion in stimulus money for 2 years in a row.... I mean give it out to prop up... aaah. who cares? Steal.
Fascism was the "compromise" between Communism and capitalism. But it was a compromise achieved by resting power away from private enterprise and giving more of it to the government. The process was never allowed to complete, but that just means that the power wasn't finished consolidating because the fascists lost the war. But it started as usurpation of power by socialist parties both in Italy and in Germany. Mussolini was the head of the Italian Socialist party, but at some point he branded his movement "fascism". The full name of the Nazi party translates as German Workers' National Socialist party. Just because the process is gradual doesn't mean, would shouldn't recognize when a large step in that direction has been accomplished.
There is a difference between holding an opinion and attempting to subvert a government. McCarthy largely feared secret attempts by Communists to subvert the system of government through disseminating of false information and attempting to skew perception in order to make people more receptive to a Communist dictatorship if such a dictatorship were to take hold. The very staple question of the hearings "are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?" should show that he was trying to expose a conspiracy of those who would take certain actions to undermine the system of government rather than expose people for their believes. This isn't like trying to influence elections. This is like trying to find people who would see as their long-term goal elimination of elections and the rule of law. The former is Ok in 99% of the cases (trying to elect someone who would subvert the government and eliminate the rule of law is the 1% exception). The latter is criminal if not treasonous. So attempting to expose it is within the mandate of the jurisprudence.
Let me make the 1% statement above more clear. All elected officials take an oath of office to protect The Constitution. Attempting to elect someone who would knowingly disregard that oath and who would disregard The Constitution (which really means disregarding all rule of law because all legal authority stems from The Constitution -- not from elections) is tantamount to attempting a coup d'etat. This is pretty much the limit of the free speech. You can't advocate overthrow of The Constitution as the source of legal authority any more than you can advocate murder. Both are advocacies of illegal behavior and as such are not protected under the 1st amendment.
Not even gonna check who the scientists in question are. This is going to be another disappointment. "Warmer air also allows storms such as Sandy to hold more moisture and dump more rainfall" is such a misleading argument that no one with even a modicum of understanding of science would make it. Warmer air in local vicinity of a specific hurricane can cause the stated effect. Warmer average temperature on the globe would not necessarily cause warmer temperature in the locality of Sandy. This argument is sooooo misleading. They are local vs global effect (temperature increase at particular locality vs average temperature on the planet) and they are mixing hypothetical vs observed effect (warmer air in SOME locality vs warmer air in the locality of the specific hurricane Sandy). Experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weren't talking about impossibility of any hurricane getting worse because of warmer air. They said Sandy. And so did Lamar Smith. Oh vey. Sometimes I just wish I understood less science. Joining pop science pitch forking seems to have become a litmus test for being "nice." Somehow "nice" doesn't include "sane" anymore.
You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I know exactly what it means. The shoe fits. Any honest man must admit that the label does, too. Even their slogans are direct translations of from the Russian Communist slogans of 1917. Yes, direct translation.
Stop sounding like McCarthy if you're interested in being taken seriously.
McCarthy was validated after Soviet Union fell apart, you fool. Released Soviet archives showed that his accusations were accurate.. But even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't change anything in what is going on today. I am not accusing people of being secret Communists as McCarthy did. I am accusing this administration of supporting Communist policies in the open. There is no conspiracy here. Conspiracy requires a secret. These Communists are brazen and nonapologetic. They are not acting like they are plotting something. They are acting like they have already won.
Except the Democratic Party and the news have been completely incestuous with one another. News is a form of entertainment now. And in entertainment, the Republicans are mean the Communists are "the good guys."
Quantitative Easing: all the government bond which don't sell on the free market are bought by the Federal Reserve. This isn't a side effect of the QE. It is QE. As long as the Federal Reserve keeps buying excess debt, the interest rate is artificially low. This "debt" is then repaid with issuing more bonds and selling them to the FED through QE. This wouldn't be money printing if there was an interest on the debt. It would be a pyramid scheme, but not printing. BUT! Any interest paid to the FED is deposited in the Treasury as "profit". So FED buys Treasury bonds, Treasury repaid this debt with interest. Treasury gets back the interest from the FED as "FED's profit from interest on lending". End effect? Treasury borrows from the FED at 0%. What is called when you borrow money at 0%, never pay the principal and only pay the interest? It's not money printing? What is it, then?
Correct. Obama is merely continuing and expanding on Bush's policies
Bull shit!! Bull shit!!! Bull shiiiiit! Bush hired enough lawyers to make sure he walked just on the line between legal an illegal. He chose to stay within the law and to demand that laws change just so that the head of state of this nation would still be bound by the laws of this nation. Obama does not even pretend to be restricted by such frivolities as the law. The obsequious news media is what does it. No benevolent dictatorship stays benevolent for long.
Bull shit! Every time news 1/100th as damaging as these came out under Bush, there was an outcry. Wasn't because we hated Bush. The news controls the narrative. They beat the drums of panic under Bush and try to play the lullabies now that they got a Communist in the White House. It's not the people who apathetic. It's the story tellers who control the story.
Yeah, that was my initial reaction, too. I've seen it in many people. But once you learn how to use it, you almost never have use menus. The text entry field in the start menu is actually a search bar. It does partial searches as you type... As long as you know where in the control panel you want to end up, you can get there with just a few letters... Oh, and until you have used filtering on in explorer (yes, you can filter just by clicking on column headers in w explorer), you haven't lived. This is UI that's learning you so you don't have to learn UI. It's beautiful. Let me put it this way, the leap from win xp to win 7 feels like the leap from ksh to bash.
windows 7 is just plain awesome. It's actually quite ridiculous how good UI is. It lacks in the flexibility of the underlying system objects, but it's not what I want from my Desktop. I want to get me to where I need to be while using the desktop... not while typing. I have other tools for massive text processing and low-level data processing. The desktop has to to just do things and never break. Windows 7 is beautiful at it.
Well, even in software development hacking doesn't mean a clever solution, anymore. Most people writing software are not that clever. What they call a hack is usually a kludge... And cutting corners will often save 20 minutes and waste a month down the line. So, in all fairness, these "hacks" do more damage than the "crackers."
There is a difference between not living up to ones own standards and not having standards. Setting a good goal for yourself and telling others that this goal is good doesn't always preclude one from being weak and failing to live up to ones own expectations.
Poor application doesn't come from lack of familiarity of poor training, however. It comes from tools which do not adequately expose functionality to the end users. Every time a tech argues "but technology X can do this you just need to learn how to do Y", he is dropping the ball. This argument was only appropriate when interfaces were limited by technological capacities (first due to being done in hardware such radio nobs and then due to lack computing power to do both interfaces and main application logic in software). Given the amount of computing power available today, inability to expose concepts to end users is 100% tech's fault. This goes not only for concepts exposed to consumers. This goes for tech produced for techs as well. Anyone who even thinks that a computer language should not be responsible for exposing hardware capacities in a way that does not tax anyone's attention span should be ashamed to even think about the subject and they should be much more ashamed of voicing their opinion on the subject. Dropping the ball on UX at every level of technology, given the capabilities of the modern technology, is why security features don't get properly used. They are not adequately exposed to the users. Cats can use ipads. Humans can use any technology if its interface is not designed by amateurs or hacks.
I'll do you one better. Get your hands on Scandal season 2, episode 3. It's a crappy show not worth watching. Except that it's inventing scandals which are mild in comparision to Obama's scandals. And because Kerry Washington is ultra leftist, those scandals break out under a Republican president on the show. The only problem is that the show is from almost a year ago. So the logic is simple: mild scandals about overreaching NSA under a fictional Republican president are scandals. But out-in-the-open scandals involving NSA spying on Americans, IRS targeting POLITICAL opposition, DOJ filing false affidavits in order to spy on reporters, Department of State being so abysmal at handling foreign policy as to not even be able to protect an embassy and then lying about it (and suspending the 1st amendment rights of a film maker to cover up their incompetence), a President going in front of the UN and openly threatening anyone who insults "the prophet"... Those are not scandals... because... you know... Bush... you know... Bush... and y'all just a bunch o' hicks anyway.
Calling someone a criminal in a public space in a way which might be damaging to their reputation is slander unless it is true or is done in jest. I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that had he wanted to, Bush would have no problems winning a slander case against you. Unless, of course, the last part of your comment was meant as a confession to a mental illness. If that is the case, please, accept my condolences and I hope you get the help that you need.
Yeah... except it is. 120,000,000 customers of Verizon. There is no such thing as a search warrant for 1/3 of the population. A warrant, as such, is a judicial recognition of an exceptional condition. The exception allows the government to be more intrusive than it can be under normal (non-exceptional) circumstances. Obtaining a warrant for 1/3 of the population is effectively changing the law. It is a collusion between judicial and executive branch to preempt the power of the legislative branch.
Bush authorized warrentless wiretapping
No one was ever indicted for it. Congress passed immunity for the phone company employees (which was appropriate because they were clearly pressured into compliance both by the perceived authority of the executive and by the perceived life-or-death sense of urgency), but not for any intelligence or government operatives in regard to this affair. Since no indictments were issued despite a very, very visceral scrutiny of the Bush administration in the last 2 years of Bush's 2nd term by the Democrats holding majority in both House and the Senate, it is implausible to assume that anyone in the executive branch broke any laws under Bush.
More importantly, however, is that the Bush administration complied with the spirit of the law here. They did not blankly wiretap. They wiretapped under extraordinary conditions and they did so very selectively. And warrants are meant to be issued as an exception to the regular restrictions on government activities.
What Bush administration did was leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth... But that bad taste was there because it was a harbinger of the force-feeding of the shit cake that was to be the Obama administration.
Yes, yes. Obama is shocked, shocked that there is gambling going here. He is, after all, only a corrupt public official. Aaahh... all you ever need to learn about life you can learn from Casablanca. The very name racist.
You are under the illusion that a left-wing party has to advocate pacifism. Left fundamentally advocates removing the carrot from the human conditioning. The inevitable result is that the only part of conditioning that is left is the stick. The leftist ideologies are more brutal by design -- not by mistake.
After many years of travel and living in other countries, my political views shifted from right to left and I felt myself to a "liberal" democrat.
Aaah. There is your trouble there. Instead of all that travel, you should have done some reading. Human beings are the same specie we have always been. So our patterns of behavior haven't changed. Here's what happens with any benevolent dictatorship:
Stage 1: exhilaration
Stage 2: denial of reality and sipping of power to corrupt supporters who exercise it indiscriminately while hiding behind the good will created by the benevolent dictator.
Stage 3: disillusionment of the dictator in his hope to govern while remaining benevolent (at this point most of the power institutions are already taken over by the most corrupt because they are the most vicious and power hungry).
Stage 5: with the hopes of doing it differently from all other dictators crushed, the dictator turns cynical, drops any pretense of being benevolent and goes into full power-for-the-sake-of-power mode.
Stage 6: Now there is a cross road. If the dictator is competent and manages to consolidate power, he remains a brutal ruler watching institutions slowly decay around him due to reliance on impossible micromanagement (micromanagement is the reason for being a dictator in the 1st place). If he is less competent (and Obama is incredibly incompetent at governing), he does what poker players call "going on a tilt". He simply exercises power in the most destructive way possible simply to retain some semblance of relevance.
Stage 7: he is replace by an ingrained run-of-the-mill-no-pretense-about-what-is-going-on mundane dictator. This last one simply exercises power through brutality until the structure which (at this point) relies solely on micromanagement (because the intricate social fabric which formed social cohesion is gone). The initial illusion that a dictator can remain benevolent is gone gone at this point.
This has happened before. We just thought that it couldn't happen to us because we, the generation X, were the educated generation. We were different. Except no one ever is. No benevolent dictatorship stays benevolent for long.
Slashdot Mirror
If by "this", you mean the wiretapping by the NSA, there is evidence. They need a warrant to wiretap. A warrant is recognition by the judiciary of an exceptional condition. Which is why a warrant cannot be issued for 120,000,000 people. This is, at the very least, abuse of discretion by a judge. But they got a "NO" to this warrant from 2 judges and only a 3rd one said yes. So, in this case, they knew the warrant could not be issued without breaking the law. Issuing a warrant for 120,000,000 people is equivalent to making a new law. Such an action subvert the prerogative of the legislative branch. Not only is this illegal, it may very well be treasonous (because it undermines the system of government without even a due process).
The bonds they buy expire. When they do, they money is unprinted or whatever that's called.
It's called paying of the principal. But if it's paid with the money that they just borrow from the FED again, the principal is never paid back. I stand by it. They borrow at 0% and never pay the principal.
Nice story, but you messed up from the start.[quote]Quantitative Easing: all the government bond which don't sell on the free market are bought by the Federal Reserve.[/quote]They're buying mortgage backed securities.
No, I didn't mess up. There are (presumably) two programs. "Quantitative easing" and "Operation Twist". The first is buying of treasury notes the 2nd is buying of medium and long maturity MBS'. They might mix the two up because they really don't have to have any kind of accounting.... They are not accountable to anyone. So they might keep bonds bought through both programs on the same books. But QE, at least when it started, was a way to prevent interest rates from rising because Treasury notes weren't getting bought. Without QE, the Treasury would have to pay higher interest on the notes it sold and would not be able to steal $1billion in stimulus money for 2 years in a row.... I mean give it out to prop up... aaah. who cares? Steal.
Fascism was the "compromise" between Communism and capitalism. But it was a compromise achieved by resting power away from private enterprise and giving more of it to the government. The process was never allowed to complete, but that just means that the power wasn't finished consolidating because the fascists lost the war. But it started as usurpation of power by socialist parties both in Italy and in Germany. Mussolini was the head of the Italian Socialist party, but at some point he branded his movement "fascism". The full name of the Nazi party translates as German Workers' National Socialist party. Just because the process is gradual doesn't mean, would shouldn't recognize when a large step in that direction has been accomplished.
There is a difference between holding an opinion and attempting to subvert a government. McCarthy largely feared secret attempts by Communists to subvert the system of government through disseminating of false information and attempting to skew perception in order to make people more receptive to a Communist dictatorship if such a dictatorship were to take hold. The very staple question of the hearings "are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?" should show that he was trying to expose a conspiracy of those who would take certain actions to undermine the system of government rather than expose people for their believes. This isn't like trying to influence elections. This is like trying to find people who would see as their long-term goal elimination of elections and the rule of law. The former is Ok in 99% of the cases (trying to elect someone who would subvert the government and eliminate the rule of law is the 1% exception). The latter is criminal if not treasonous. So attempting to expose it is within the mandate of the jurisprudence.
Let me make the 1% statement above more clear. All elected officials take an oath of office to protect The Constitution. Attempting to elect someone who would knowingly disregard that oath and who would disregard The Constitution (which really means disregarding all rule of law because all legal authority stems from The Constitution -- not from elections) is tantamount to attempting a coup d'etat. This is pretty much the limit of the free speech. You can't advocate overthrow of The Constitution as the source of legal authority any more than you can advocate murder. Both are advocacies of illegal behavior and as such are not protected under the 1st amendment.
Not even gonna check who the scientists in question are. This is going to be another disappointment. "Warmer air also allows storms such as Sandy to hold more moisture and dump more rainfall" is such a misleading argument that no one with even a modicum of understanding of science would make it. Warmer air in local vicinity of a specific hurricane can cause the stated effect. Warmer average temperature on the globe would not necessarily cause warmer temperature in the locality of Sandy. This argument is sooooo misleading. They are local vs global effect (temperature increase at particular locality vs average temperature on the planet) and they are mixing hypothetical vs observed effect (warmer air in SOME locality vs warmer air in the locality of the specific hurricane Sandy). Experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weren't talking about impossibility of any hurricane getting worse because of warmer air. They said Sandy. And so did Lamar Smith. Oh vey. Sometimes I just wish I understood less science. Joining pop science pitch forking seems to have become a litmus test for being "nice." Somehow "nice" doesn't include "sane" anymore.
You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I know exactly what it means. The shoe fits. Any honest man must admit that the label does, too. Even their slogans are direct translations of from the Russian Communist slogans of 1917. Yes, direct translation.
Stop sounding like McCarthy if you're interested in being taken seriously.
McCarthy was validated after Soviet Union fell apart, you fool. Released Soviet archives showed that his accusations were accurate.. But even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't change anything in what is going on today. I am not accusing people of being secret Communists as McCarthy did. I am accusing this administration of supporting Communist policies in the open. There is no conspiracy here. Conspiracy requires a secret. These Communists are brazen and nonapologetic. They are not acting like they are plotting something. They are acting like they have already won.
Except the Democratic Party and the news have been completely incestuous with one another. News is a form of entertainment now. And in entertainment, the Republicans are mean the Communists are "the good guys."
Quantitative Easing: all the government bond which don't sell on the free market are bought by the Federal Reserve. This isn't a side effect of the QE. It is QE. As long as the Federal Reserve keeps buying excess debt, the interest rate is artificially low. This "debt" is then repaid with issuing more bonds and selling them to the FED through QE. This wouldn't be money printing if there was an interest on the debt. It would be a pyramid scheme, but not printing. BUT! Any interest paid to the FED is deposited in the Treasury as "profit". So FED buys Treasury bonds, Treasury repaid this debt with interest. Treasury gets back the interest from the FED as "FED's profit from interest on lending". End effect? Treasury borrows from the FED at 0%. What is called when you borrow money at 0%, never pay the principal and only pay the interest? It's not money printing? What is it, then?
Correct. Obama is merely continuing and expanding on Bush's policies
Bull shit!! Bull shit!!! Bull shiiiiit! Bush hired enough lawyers to make sure he walked just on the line between legal an illegal. He chose to stay within the law and to demand that laws change just so that the head of state of this nation would still be bound by the laws of this nation. Obama does not even pretend to be restricted by such frivolities as the law. The obsequious news media is what does it. No benevolent dictatorship stays benevolent for long.
The United States of Apathy.
Bull shit! Every time news 1/100th as damaging as these came out under Bush, there was an outcry. Wasn't because we hated Bush. The news controls the narrative. They beat the drums of panic under Bush and try to play the lullabies now that they got a Communist in the White House. It's not the people who apathetic. It's the story tellers who control the story.
I was also extremely "annoyed" with Control Panel
Yeah, that was my initial reaction, too. I've seen it in many people. But once you learn how to use it, you almost never have use menus. The text entry field in the start menu is actually a search bar. It does partial searches as you type... As long as you know where in the control panel you want to end up, you can get there with just a few letters... Oh, and until you have used filtering on in explorer (yes, you can filter just by clicking on column headers in w explorer), you haven't lived. This is UI that's learning you so you don't have to learn UI. It's beautiful. Let me put it this way, the leap from win xp to win 7 feels like the leap from ksh to bash.
windows 7 is just plain awesome. It's actually quite ridiculous how good UI is. It lacks in the flexibility of the underlying system objects, but it's not what I want from my Desktop. I want to get me to where I need to be while using the desktop... not while typing. I have other tools for massive text processing and low-level data processing. The desktop has to to just do things and never break. Windows 7 is beautiful at it.
Well, even in software development hacking doesn't mean a clever solution, anymore. Most people writing software are not that clever. What they call a hack is usually a kludge... And cutting corners will often save 20 minutes and waste a month down the line. So, in all fairness, these "hacks" do more damage than the "crackers."
There is a difference between not living up to ones own standards and not having standards. Setting a good goal for yourself and telling others that this goal is good doesn't always preclude one from being weak and failing to live up to ones own expectations.
Poor application doesn't come from lack of familiarity of poor training, however. It comes from tools which do not adequately expose functionality to the end users. Every time a tech argues "but technology X can do this you just need to learn how to do Y", he is dropping the ball. This argument was only appropriate when interfaces were limited by technological capacities (first due to being done in hardware such radio nobs and then due to lack computing power to do both interfaces and main application logic in software). Given the amount of computing power available today, inability to expose concepts to end users is 100% tech's fault. This goes not only for concepts exposed to consumers. This goes for tech produced for techs as well. Anyone who even thinks that a computer language should not be responsible for exposing hardware capacities in a way that does not tax anyone's attention span should be ashamed to even think about the subject and they should be much more ashamed of voicing their opinion on the subject. Dropping the ball on UX at every level of technology, given the capabilities of the modern technology, is why security features don't get properly used. They are not adequately exposed to the users. Cats can use ipads. Humans can use any technology if its interface is not designed by amateurs or hacks.
I'll do you one better. Get your hands on Scandal season 2, episode 3. It's a crappy show not worth watching. Except that it's inventing scandals which are mild in comparision to Obama's scandals. And because Kerry Washington is ultra leftist, those scandals break out under a Republican president on the show. The only problem is that the show is from almost a year ago. So the logic is simple: mild scandals about overreaching NSA under a fictional Republican president are scandals. But out-in-the-open scandals involving NSA spying on Americans, IRS targeting POLITICAL opposition, DOJ filing false affidavits in order to spy on reporters, Department of State being so abysmal at handling foreign policy as to not even be able to protect an embassy and then lying about it (and suspending the 1st amendment rights of a film maker to cover up their incompetence), a President going in front of the UN and openly threatening anyone who insults "the prophet"... Those are not scandals... because... you know... Bush... you know... Bush... and y'all just a bunch o' hicks anyway.
Calling someone a criminal in a public space in a way which might be damaging to their reputation is slander unless it is true or is done in jest. I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that had he wanted to, Bush would have no problems winning a slander case against you. Unless, of course, the last part of your comment was meant as a confession to a mental illness. If that is the case, please, accept my condolences and I hope you get the help that you need.
I thought keeping the Cold War cold was the silver lining. Unless, we all of a sudden think that peace is bad thing?
But it's not illegal.
Yeah... except it is. 120,000,000 customers of Verizon. There is no such thing as a search warrant for 1/3 of the population. A warrant, as such, is a judicial recognition of an exceptional condition. The exception allows the government to be more intrusive than it can be under normal (non-exceptional) circumstances. Obtaining a warrant for 1/3 of the population is effectively changing the law. It is a collusion between judicial and executive branch to preempt the power of the legislative branch.
Bush authorized warrentless wiretapping
No one was ever indicted for it. Congress passed immunity for the phone company employees (which was appropriate because they were clearly pressured into compliance both by the perceived authority of the executive and by the perceived life-or-death sense of urgency), but not for any intelligence or government operatives in regard to this affair. Since no indictments were issued despite a very, very visceral scrutiny of the Bush administration in the last 2 years of Bush's 2nd term by the Democrats holding majority in both House and the Senate, it is implausible to assume that anyone in the executive branch broke any laws under Bush.
More importantly, however, is that the Bush administration complied with the spirit of the law here. They did not blankly wiretap. They wiretapped under extraordinary conditions and they did so very selectively. And warrants are meant to be issued as an exception to the regular restrictions on government activities.
What Bush administration did was leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth... But that bad taste was there because it was a harbinger of the force-feeding of the shit cake that was to be the Obama administration.
Yes, yes. Obama is shocked, shocked that there is gambling going here. He is, after all, only a corrupt public official. Aaahh... all you ever need to learn about life you can learn from Casablanca. The very name racist.
You are under the illusion that a left-wing party has to advocate pacifism. Left fundamentally advocates removing the carrot from the human conditioning. The inevitable result is that the only part of conditioning that is left is the stick. The leftist ideologies are more brutal by design -- not by mistake.
After many years of travel and living in other countries, my political views shifted from right to left and I felt myself to a "liberal" democrat.
Aaah. There is your trouble there. Instead of all that travel, you should have done some reading. Human beings are the same specie we have always been. So our patterns of behavior haven't changed. Here's what happens with any benevolent dictatorship:
Stage 1: exhilaration
Stage 2: denial of reality and sipping of power to corrupt supporters who exercise it indiscriminately while hiding behind the good will created by the benevolent dictator.
Stage 3: disillusionment of the dictator in his hope to govern while remaining benevolent (at this point most of the power institutions are already taken over by the most corrupt because they are the most vicious and power hungry).
Stage 5: with the hopes of doing it differently from all other dictators crushed, the dictator turns cynical, drops any pretense of being benevolent and goes into full power-for-the-sake-of-power mode.
Stage 6: Now there is a cross road. If the dictator is competent and manages to consolidate power, he remains a brutal ruler watching institutions slowly decay around him due to reliance on impossible micromanagement (micromanagement is the reason for being a dictator in the 1st place). If he is less competent (and Obama is incredibly incompetent at governing), he does what poker players call "going on a tilt". He simply exercises power in the most destructive way possible simply to retain some semblance of relevance.
Stage 7: he is replace by an ingrained run-of-the-mill-no-pretense-about-what-is-going-on mundane dictator. This last one simply exercises power through brutality until the structure which (at this point) relies solely on micromanagement (because the intricate social fabric which formed social cohesion is gone). The initial illusion that a dictator can remain benevolent is gone gone at this point.
This has happened before. We just thought that it couldn't happen to us because we, the generation X, were the educated generation. We were different. Except no one ever is. No benevolent dictatorship stays benevolent for long.
Well, it is Obama's NSA. This administration takes pride in its incompetence. They can manage to make even NSA ineffective.
But Bush did it within the law. Obama is breaking laws so fast he needed to pass some big new ones just to have more to break.