A Nation Represented by Sheep
Aug 6th, 2007 at 12:05 pm by Susie
Some highlights from Scarecrow at FDL:
Under just some of the revisions, NSA can spy on any call you make to or receive from another country (or a place the AG reasonable believes is to/from another country), without a warrant, as long as Alberto Gonzales and the Director NSA claim they reasonably believe it involves “foreign intelligence.” There doesn’t have to be any connection with a foreign power with whom we are war or terrorist group. Just you and your foreign friends is enough. The FISA court may examine the overall process in some undefined, rubberstamp way, but it cannot consider the reasonableness of your individual case. Any pretense that the 4th Amendment applies is gone.
So you can be involved in totally innocent calls or e-mails with a friend or your cousin in London, and the government can spy on your communications without a warrant, without your knowledge and without the knowledge or approval of the FISA court. You can’t get access to what they learned or what they did with that information. All you’ll know is that you or your friend/cousin/kid/colleague can’t get on a plane. Or someone disappears. Oh, and as a result of the 6th Circuit Court overturning a District Court’s ruling that the original TSP was unconstitutional, you don’t have standing to challenge this wholesale eviseration of the 4th Amendment. No court review; just Alberto and Rove.
I mean, dear God. Even the Washington Post gets it:
THE DEMOCRATIC-led Congress, more concerned with protecting its political backside than with safeguarding the privacy of American citizens, left town early yesterday after caving in to administration demands that it allow warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens, with scant judicial supervision and no reporting to Congress about how many communications are being intercepted. To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law — or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.
Okay, we now know what they’re made of.
Time for a third party…
It’s been time for a third party for a long time but the R’s and D’s have stacked the deck against that happening. Just take here in Pennsylvania as an example a 3rd party candidate needs something like 50 times the number of signatures on nomination petitions as an R or D to get on the ballot.
I totally agree. The only way to change the system is to vote people in that owe the system nothing. The typical citizen cannot run for public office anymore. The attitude of our elected officials turns off the voter to the extent that participation in the process has been in steady decline.
Sure, those of us that follow the political scene will always be there, but to Joe Sixpack, voting is considered a waste of time.