I guess that speaks volumes about trust.


As one of your liberal Pixies friends, I have to wonder if any of this would have been at all an issue. It seems 41 and 43 have had the ability to piss off extremist in the middle east like no other presidents have.

for myself...i'm not so sure franklin would have been in favor of the patriot act, but of course we'll never know...the dude's dead :D. i just wanna say that i (mis)quoted him, i did not mean to bring his views into it. i was only expressing my own by stealing his.


MHO:
our government is only in favor of protecting our privacy when it comes to other companies or people or governments. i think that they (our govn't) would prefer to have our personal data, and they'd like to reserve the ability, and the right, to access any part of it that suits them at any time it suits them.

i am not a conspiracy theorist but...:D

the problem is that once a line is drawn it is never completely erased. it might move around, but it never goes away. take income tax for example. it too was begun as a temporary act of govn’t…as a means of raising money to support a war-effort, but over a hundred years later, it remains and it’s spawned its own juggernaut that needs an entire industry of lawyers, accountants and software, not to mention the bureaucracy that is the irs.

the patriot act was also a temporary measure created during "war time", and created in fear - a bad time to make laws - as opposed to a need for money (as income taxes were). BUT, almost as soon as it was passed, the lobbying began for extending it and even making some parts of it indefinite.

if you are an upstanding, moral citizen, the removal of some basic rights granted by the act shouldn't bother you nor will it affect you, but who decides that? they have already begun arresting, questioning, and detaining people for just talking about their views and ideas (the peeps who wondered what would happen if they blew up the holland tunnel, for example). blowing up a tunnel is bad, i know, but they didn’t even have a real plan, money or materials, they were just wondering. i’ve wondered about shit like that. i’ve wondered about shit worse than that.

ever see the movie minority report? :eek:

There is enough for all:

39: Iran hostage crisis

40: Beirut Marine Barracks Bombing

42: World Trade Center bombing

Wasn't Ben a secret agent among other things.

Excellent points, jseal. The Middle East extremists are truly non-discriminatory when it comes to Democrats and Republicans...they hate Americans...all of us.

Never forget that.

I hate it when I have to take my shoes off at the airport because some piece of shit once tried to blow up his shoe. I hate it that we need wiretapping and Patriot Act and our troops overseas. But the world we live in demands such actions for us to be made safe.

I don't agree with Rummy on much but one thing he has right: If we do not fight them there, we will surely fight them here.

In a sense, yes...during the Revolution, he was in France as a diplomat, the true mission being to seduce the French into supporting our little cause...he also functioned as perhaps the first American spin doctor there...

wyndhy,

Yes Mam. Minority Report is good Science Fiction entertainment. Phillip K. Dick was a famous SF author.

The problem of getting the correct balance of liberty and security is intractable. Just how difficult it can be to balance liberties against security can be seen in a Senate bill, S.390, introduced in 1995 with the approval of the Clinton administration. Note that 3 of the 7 cosponsors are generally considered liberals: Sen. Feinstein, Sen. Kerrey, and Sen. Mikulski. The pressures for some apparent action by the government can be very powerful indeed.

The critical assessment of the effort - from the right then, from the left now – always sounds the same.

Laws can be written so that they are time limited. The 1798 Sedition Act had a sunset clause written into it, and was allowed to lapse. If a law does not have a sunset clause, like The Espionage Act Of 1917, it can be more difficult to get rid of. The act was subsequently repealed in 1921.

Of the two techniques, I prefer the first. It require periodic effort to keep it in force, rather than requiring the effort to repeal it. Once the perceived need for the law falls below some minimum, the votes to retain it will also.