Yep... Democrats Are Worse Than Republicans
Get a load of this shit, folks, via the latest Pew
polling data:
A majority of Americans – 56% – say the National Security
Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans
is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a
substantial minority – 41% – say it is unacceptable.
Anyone wanna hazard a guess as to what percentage of
respondents could correctly answer the question "What does NSA stand
for?"
(*SNORT*)
Currently 62% say it is more important for the federal
government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal
privacy. Just 34% say it is more important for the government not to intrude on
personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible
terrorist threats.
See, folks... this is what I was getting at
(sarcastically) up above with the "what does NSA stand for" quip.
My guess... the average respondent is concentrating on
the word "terrorist" and not the word "millions." In other
words, it's how the questions are phrased and where the emphasis is placed. This
applies particularly to the words "warrant" and "judge" and
"court" in the sense that (once again... my guess) when the average
respondent hears these words within the context of the larger question,
automatically he's thinking an INDIVIDUAL warrant... he's thinking a judge
considering whether the case against an INDIVIDUAL merits a warrant for further
investigation.
Do you see where I'm coming from? In other words, my
contention is that the average respondent is relying upon everything he
"thinks" he knows about how warrants work and how civil liberties of
INDIVIDUALS are protected, and thus the respondent isn't truly grasping the
scope of the snooping... isn't truly grasping that these "warrants"
are MASS rather than INDIVIDUAL in nature and that basically they're little
more than rubber stamping of extra-onstitutional executive branch orders
"authorized" by a Congress that has no actual right to change the
Constitution (to lessen our Constitutional Rights) absent Constitutional
Amendment.
These opinions have changed little since an ABC
News/Washington Post survey in January 2006. Currently, there are only modest
partisan differences in these opinions: 69% of Democrats say it is more
important for the government to investigate terrorist threats, even at the
expense of personal privacy, as do 62% of Republicans and 59% of independents.
So while Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all
seem fairly eager to see our Constitution ever further trashed as time goes by,
the Democrats seem to be shouting "Full Speed Ahead!" at the highest
volume.
(*SIGH*)
Oh... but it gets worse, folks! Read on!
Democrats now view the NSA’s phone surveillance as
acceptable by 64% to 34%. In January 2006, by a similar margin (61% to 36%),
Democrats said it was unacceptable for the NSA to scrutinize phone calls and
emails of suspected terrorists.
Geezus... ya can't make this shit up, folks! Total
friggin' hypocrites! Absolute fake, phony, frauds!
In January 2006, fully 75% of Republicans said it was
acceptable for the NSA to investigate suspected terrorists by listing in on
phone calls and reading emails without court approval. Today, only about half
of Republicans (52%) say it is acceptable for the NSA to obtain court orders to
track phone call records of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.
Yep... a fair amount of hypocrisy on the part of
Republicans too it seems... however... carefully re-read the above paragraph.
Carefully note the differences in phrasing. Note: "Investigate suspected
terrorists" vs. "track phone call records of millions of Americans to
investigate terrorism."
Nope. I'm not saying that this somehow
"absolves" Republicans of charges of rank hypocrisy. I'm simply again
raising the point of how the questions are asked in the context of how they're
answered. (But, also... note... even if we treat both switches between 2006
opinion and today's opinion as evidence of hypocrisy and double standards...
umm... look at how much worse the Democrats come off as compared to
Republicans. Yes, a third of Republicans turned on a dime... BUT... the views
of the Democrats literally reversed themselves totally!
Unfriggin'believable...
(*SNICKER*)
The public is divided over the government’s monitoring of
internet activity in order to prevent possible terrorism: 45% say the government
should be able to “monitor everyone’s email and other online activities if
officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks.” About as many (52%)
say the government should not able to do this.
So... 45% of those polled are...
(*SHRUG*)
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Seriously... what am I to think? Should I focus on
"to prevent possible terrorism" and think "happy thoughts"...
(*PURSED LIPS*)
6 comments:
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/hillary_sorry_state_of_affairs_YVapkHqM3mz6CVjehZOh7K
A State Department whistleblower has accused high-ranking staff of a massive cover-up — including keeping a lid on findings that members of then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s security detail and the Belgian ambassador solicited prostitutes.
* INCLUDING UNDERAGE PROSTITUTES... (IN OTHER WORDS.. CHILD SEX WORKERS.)
A chief investigator for the agency’s inspector general wrote a memo outlining eight cases that were derailed by senior officials, including one instance of interference by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.
* AH... EIGHT CASES... AND FINALLY... ONE NAME!
Any mention of the cases was removed from an IG report about problems within the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), which provides protection and investigates crimes involving any State Department workers overseas.
* NICE... (*SMIRK*)
“It’s a coverup,” declared Cary Schulman, a lawyer representing the whistleblower, former State Department IG senior investigator Aurelia Fedenisn.“The whole agency is impaired. “Undue influence . . . is coming from political appointees. It’s coming from above the criminal- investigation unit,” added Schulman, whose client provided the document with the revelations.
Some of the revelations were first reported by CBS News:
A DS agent was called off a case against U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman over claims that he solicited prostitutes, including minors.
* INCLUDING M*I*N*O*R*S...
“The agent began his investigation and had determined that the ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” says the memo. “The ambassador’s protective detail and the embassy’s surveillance detection team . . . were well aware of the behavior.”
(*SIGH*)
Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy ordered the investigation ceased, and the ambassador remains in place...
* AH, YES... PATRICK KENNEDY...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
At least seven agents in Clinton’s security detail hired prostitutes while traveling with her in various countries, including Russia and Colombia. Investigators called the use of prostitutes by Clinton’s security agents “endemic.”
* WE COVERED THIS YESTERDAY... BUT IT BEARS REPEATING. (THIS WOMAN IS TOTALLY INCOMPETENT! BIG THINGS... LITTLE THINGS... TOTALLY INCOMPETENT!)
The liaisons with prostitutes allegedly occurred in the same hotel where Clinton slept, according to sources familiar with the incident. But the agents involved got little more than a wrist-slap. Three were removed from the security detail, given one-day suspensions and reassigned.
* GEEZUS...
“No further investigations have occurred regarding the remaining four, despite the possibility of counterintelligence issues,” says the memo.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
According to the memo, members of the Special Investigations Division (SID) approached the agent who was probing “and reportedly told him to shut down the four investigations.”
(The incident in Colombia occurred prior to the scandal involving President Obama’s Secret Service detail in Cartagena, Colombia, but the State Department’s misconduct did not come to light until now.)
The memo references a “rumor” that after the Secret Service hooker scandal broke, Clinton asked the agent-in-charge of her security detail whether any “similar activities” had happened. “The response was: ‘No,’ ” according to the memo. The case in which Clinton enforcer Mills allegedly intervened centered upon Brett McGurk, Obama’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Iraq. McGurk’s expected nomination fell apart after a computer hack exposed his racy e-mails and an extramarital affair with Wall Street Journal reporter Gina Chon.
* FOLKS... LIKE I SAY... IT'S AN OLIGARCHY. THERE ARE THE INSIDERS... AND THERE ARE THE REST OF US. THE FOLKS WHO RUN THE WSJ ARE THE SAME IN MANY WAYS AS THE FOLKS WHO RUN THE NYT... AND THE STATE DEPARTMENT FOR THAT MATTER.
According to the memo, the SID “never interviewed McGurk, allegedly because Cheryl Mills from the Secretary’s office interceded.” “Without that interview, SID has been unable to close the case,” the memo concludes.
* NICE...
The memo cites an e-mail from Mills showing her agreeing to a course of action, “but then reneging and advising McGurk to withdraw his name from consideration for the ambassadorship.” McGurk withdrew right before consideration by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Fedenisn’s lawyer, Schulman, said that his client came forward after a long career as a State Department special agent and IG investigator because she was “thrust into this.” “She did it because it was the right thing to do,” he said. “Aurelia courageously has come forward with nothing to gain at all . . . Nobody gives you a prize for this.”
He said that Fedenisn, who retired in December, has been threatened by State Department officials with criminal charges. “She wants to go back to her life,” said Schulman. “She’s not looking for fame.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578537720921466776.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
* BY SENATOR RAND PAUL
How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. These activities violate the Fourth Amendment, which says warrants must be specific — "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
And what is the government doing with these records?
The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?
No one objects to balancing security against liberty. No one objects to seeking warrants for targeted monitoring based on probable cause. We've always done this. What is objectionable is a system in which government has unlimited and privileged access to the details of our private affairs, and citizens are simply supposed to trust that there won't be any abuse of power.
* LISTEN... LET IDIOTS SIGN WAIVERS ALLOWING THE GOVERNMENT TO SNOOP ON THEM WITHOUT SPECIFIC WARRANTS! BUT LEAVE ME OUT OF IT! YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO WAIVE YOUR RIGHTS; WHAT YOU DON'T HAVE IS A RIGHT TO WAIVE MY RIGHTS!
Americans should trust the National Security Agency as much as they do the IRS and Justice Department.
* YEP.
Monitoring the records of as many as a billion phone calls, as some news reports have suggested, is no modest invasion of privacy. It is an extraordinary invasion of privacy. We fought a revolution over issues like generalized warrants, where soldiers would go from house to house, searching anything they liked. Our lives are now so digitized that the government going from computer to computer or phone to phone is the modern equivalent of the same type of tyranny that our Founders rebelled against.
* YEP!
I also believe that trolling through millions of phone records hampers the legitimate protection of our security. The government sifts through mountains of data yet still didn't notice, or did not notice enough, that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was traveling to Chechnya.
* YEP...!!!
Perhaps instead of treating every American as a potential terror suspect the government should concentrate on more targeted analysis.
(*NOD*)
To protect against the invasion of Americans' privacy, I have introduced the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act. I introduced similar Fourth Amendment protections in December and again just last month. Both measures would have prevented the data-mining we're now seeing, but both bills were rejected by the Senate.
* THE TRUTH IS THAT BOTH A MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND AN EVEN LARGER MAJORITY OF ELECTED OFFICIALS REJECT THE CONSTITUTION.
We will see if this time my colleagues will vote to support the Constitution that they all took an oath to uphold.
* A HANDFUL AT MOST.
I am also looking into a class-action lawsuit to overturn the decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that allowed for this to happen. I will take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. My office has already heard much enthusiasm for this action.
The administration has responded to the public uproar by simply claiming that it is allowed to have unlimited access to all Americans' private information. This response is a clear indication that the president views our Constitutional "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" as null and void.
* EXACTLY.
If this is the new normal in America, then Big Brother certainly is watching and it's not hyperbolic or extreme to say so. Nor is it unreasonable to fear which parts of the Constitution this government will next consider negotiable or negligible.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350699/clappers-lie-charles-c-w-cooke
By dint of a widespread preference for politeness, human beings tend to trip over themselves to find euphemisms for the word “lying.”
* YOURS TRULY BEING AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE... AS TO SO MANY OTHERS...
(*SMILE*)
The questionable among our public servants are charged with “misleading,” “hedging,” and “evading”; they are accused of disseminating “falsehoods,” and they are presumed guilty of “ambiguity” or of being “slippery” and “smooth.” For some reason, however, the L-word is off the table.
During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 12 of this year, Ron Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper a simple question: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
“No, sir,” Clapper shot back without a pause. “There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.” Why so? Because “in the case of NSA and CIA, there are strictures against tracking American citizens in the United States for foreign intelligence purposes — and that’s what those agencies are set up to do.”
This message, an explanation to Congress of what the executive branch was up to, was crystal clear: Don’t worry, the NSA is not allowed to track Americans — and it’s not going to.
The primary problem with this, as the revelations of last week have demonstrated, is that it was not true.
* CLAPPER LIED. UNDER OATH.
Defenders of Clapper’s performance point out that he said these things before the NSA obtained the warrant that enabled it to collect metadata from Verizon. But given Clapper’s blunt assertion that the government simply does not do what it turns out that the government very much does do, it is difficult to see how the timing is relevant. Because the NSA is set up as a foreign agency, Clapper added, “they do not engage in” domestic surveillance. Unless we are to believe that between the hearing and the approval of the NSA’s request three weeks later the director of national intelligence presided over a dramatic change in procedure, Clapper was lying.
(*SHRUG*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
There is a caveat here, of course, and one that Clapper’s apologists insist is crucial: While the primary role of outfits such as the CIA and the NSA is to investigate foreign threats, they are permitted to conduct surveillance within the United States if a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court approves the operation. Because the NSA got such approval, the argument goes, there was no untoward behavior. But this is not a particularly convincing defense.
* AND HERE'S WHY...
First, FISA approvals are intended to accommodate agencies’ need to track suspected foreign spies who are operating in the United States; they are not supposed to enable the NSA’s doing whatever it wishes within America’s borders.
Second, the notion that the courts provide oversight is truly risible. As Mother Jones points out: “The FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33 years” — a rate of 0.03%. The sad truth is that FISA has become little more than a rubber stamp, effectively affording the NSA and CIA carte blanche.
(*NOD*)
The request at hand, made and approved just three weeks after Clapper’s denial, was to collect metadata on all cellphones running on the Verizon network.
* FOLKS... THINK ABOUT WHAT THAT MEANS...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Even given the most generous interpretation, does this really tally with what Clapper claimed or with the rules by which the NSA is ostensibly governed? (I think not.)
Look, a defensive Clapper told National Journal last week, “what I said was, ‘the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails.’ I stand by that.”
* AND THE SECRET SERVICE DOESN'T ENGAGE HOOKERS - SOMETIMES ASSAULTING THEM...
* AND OUR AMBASSADORS DON'T ENGAGE CHILD PROSTITUTES...
* AND "WE NEVER LEAVE A MAN BEHIND"...
(*PURSED LIPS*)
It’s good to be told that the NSA isn’t reading our e-mails. But actually, that wasn’t what Clapper “said” at all. This is Wyden’s full question:
Last summer the NSA director was at a conference and he was asked a question about the NSA surveillance of Americans. He replied, and I quote here, “ . . . the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false.” The reason I’m asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I don’t really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
In response, remember, Clapper said, “No, sir.”
(Again, Wyden’s question stipulated “Any type of data at all.” He did not ask, “Does the NSA wiretap or read e-mails?”)
Words matter. As Ben Wittes at The New Republic notes: "The government was using a particular section of FISA — known as Section 215 — as a way of accessing not just specific items about specific persons on a case-by-case basis, but also as a means to create giant datasets of telephony metadata that might later be queried on a case-by-case basis."
In other words, it was doing exactly what Ron Wyden implied that it was doing.
* SO IT WOULD SEEM...
Either Clapper was lying — responding in what he described disastrously to Andrea Mitchell on Sunday as the “least untruthful manner” available — or he is so out of touch and incompetent that he genuinely has no idea what is going on around him.
Neither is comforting.
For all his power, the director of national intelligence remains subordinate to the civilian power; that he saw fit to lie so casually in front of its representative body is devastating.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2013/jun/11/sen-tim-kaine-speaks-spanish-senate-floor/
Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, delivered a speech on the Senate floor in Spanish on Tuesday as he made his push for the chamber to pass his immigration bill.
* SEE, FOLKS? THIS IS THE MENTALITY OF THESE PANDERING BASTARDS!
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