Skip to main content

Glenn Greenwald nails the hypocrisy of Barack Obama and the disgusting politics of Diane Feinstein ...

... but does anybody really care?

Greenwald points out that President Obama has (a) repeatedly violated his own promises with respect to warrantless wiretapping, and (b) depends for its renewal on the very hardline conservative GOP politicians he routinely attacks, while ...

Feinstein is channeling her inner Dick Cheney by accusing anybody who wants to even debate transparency of furthering the ends of terrorism (and, yes, kavips, I DO think she wants to run for President in 2016).

If Americans actually understood that part of what the administration demanded in the power to keep even court rulings and specific laws secret, then Democrats would be thinking about drafting Senator Ron Wyden for the nomination.  Senator Wyden had the best quote of the day:
"secret law is inconsistent with democratic governance"
But the reality is that most Americans have become so numbed to the loss of civil liberties and constitutional guarantees that it doesn't really matter any more.

Comments

delacrat said…
"... but does anybody really care?"

Steve,

Last year, the NDAA went down around this time. The speculation was the ruling castes thought it best to slip it in while the "citizens" were preoccupied with Xmas spending, traveling and such. So maybe our rulers believe we care.

Anyway...Happy New Year.
December 29, 2012 at 8:08 PM
kavips said…
I concur. You don't sneak things through when you think no one cares. You sneak things through to be sneaky...

Oops... too late... got to wait 5 years now.

The main press dropped this big time. People want their internet to be free. CISPA and ACTA both were sneaked through, but got caught, and those pushing it got hung out to dry.... Remember every time you clicked onto Google it had your congressman's phone number and you were told to call him...

In 2007 it was acknowledged in court that the US was recording every transaction and every phone call made in the US. That is a lot of info and the enormous size alone protects our privacy. The idea was that once someone popped up as a potential suspect, one could go back probably to 2005 and sift through everything they've done. Had an affair? They'd use the threat of exposing it to solicit untrue information.... and have you incriminate another...

Hopefully none here on this blog has anything they need to keep secret.. because if anyone looks, it is there...

So, yes. People care... I was disheartened that the Saturday papers all slanted it as listening to foreign calls on foreign soils... That is not the turth of this bill at all. In fact the amendment to disclose how many Americans were caught up in this, came close, but was defeated....

The problem is most Americans (look at the outrage when Facebook loosens their privacy settings) don't even know it is happening .. I wouldn't if I hadn't been looking into it during the last passage of it in 2008... I'm so mad at myself. I wish I had remembered that is was supposed to expire.....

I don't have access to the links right now, but it would be wise to remember the case just this year, where an ex marine was arrested, (he thought it was a tv stunt at first) held without access to an attorney three states away in a military brig, for.... what turned out, was the lines of a rap song he'd been trying to sing in person, but had forgotten, and so, he typed them on facebook and sent them over.... In that exchange, AP got information and published that over 10,000 were being incarcerated without trial..

So. the answer is yes, I think every one cares... it is just that they know nothing about it... Our world is simply too big right now...

This is where... I say Happy New Year.
December 30, 2012 at 3:00 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...
27 comments
Read more