Disgraceful Coverage by MSM of Saturday's DC Tea Party

[Christopher]

How big was the Saturday...(I cannot believe I am posting this!):

http://pajamasmedia....zar-377x600.jpg

http://jimtreacher.c...ves/002121.html

Adam

Didn't you say you were there in DC?

Perhaps these are your pictures... which means you sure spent a lot of shots on boob woman

[Selene]

How big was the Saturday...(I cannot believe I am posting this!):

http://pajamasmedia....zar-377x600.jpg

http://jimtreacher.c...ves/002121.html

Adam

Didn't you say you were there in DC?

Perhaps these are your pictures... which means you sure spent a lot of shots on boob woman

Lol...and I am not a "tit" man either. No, I coordinated several other states - been to too many of these over the decades.

Adam

[Chris Grieb]

Martin; Thanks for the reminder of George Bush's mistakes.

However Obama has made things worse.

[Robert Campbell]

I second Peter Reidy's recommendation of The Intellectual Activist. I rarely read this publication under its previous editors, but Robert Tracinski has really made something of it. Increasingly, too, his bigger pieces are getting picked up by Real Clear Politics.

Robert Campbell

[Philip Coates]

Subject: Context, Proportion, and NON-EXAGGERATION in Political Debate

> to establish a police state in this country [Martin]

1. Personal experience? Is there a difference between a police state for 300 million people and the aggressive pursuit of a thousand enemy combatants? Is having a supervisory court to supervise abuses in the latter (FISA)-- which has been backed up both by Congress and by other courts -- a symptom of a "police state"?

2. CONTEXT AND PROPORTION: If Bush moved us toward a police state in a major way (as opposed to violated some civil liberties in a minor way), you would see some evidence in your own experience:

Has anyone broken down your door?

Have your parents had their mail opened?

Was the opposition party (the Democrats under Bush) put out of business or had its bank accounts seized?

Have the newspapers been shut down or nationalized?

Have black helicopters been unloading SWAT teams throughout suburbia?

Do you have any friends who have been incarcerated for reading subversive materials?

Are people being asked to show 'their papers' when they move around?

Have concentration camps been showing up around the country?

Did Bush try to drive his liberal opponents out of business or investigate them all for tax evasion?

Other than terrorists, people plotting to blow up airplanes and spread poison gas, have millions of people had their civil liberties shredded?

Have there been political executions and a series of political show trials?

3. Martin, it is a **fundamental mistake** (as I posted with regard to counting the 'numbers' at a rally) to simply swallow uncritically all the charges of the liberal or left press as if they were true. That applies just as much when they lie or exaggerate or drop context in being anti-Bush as in being pro-Obama.

4. Here's a clue: Consider their claim that spying when you have terrorists coming in trying to blow up cities -- is wrong.

5. A LAUNDRY LIST IS NOT AN ARGUMENT: Many of your points are a "laundry list" of supposed 'abuses' without context or explanation. Anyone can make a long list sound impressive. But it has no cognitive weight, when you just list a name - it's like those people on this board you give a list of 'great literature' but tell you no detail, offer no proof.

5B. Many of your non-cryptic points are simply WRONG - calling the Iraq war 'aggression' as though it were initiating force to take down a dictatorship, especially one that is a threat to the oil supply we can't survive without - failing to grasp that 'enemy combatants' is a legitimate category, that in wartime you can't handle prisoners under the same rule as criminals.

Do you read Bidinotto or Tracinski .... or just the left-liberal media? Do you even -know- their arguments on these points?

6. Laundry list, continued: The 'Patriot Act'? Yeah, what about it? The whole thing? Certain provisions? Have you actually read it or are you just reading anti-Bush papers?

7. God, I hate it when someone exaggerates so much that I'm actually almost defending that incompetent idiot Bush...who isa **middle of the road idiot** from ludicrous charges that ha e is **crypto-totalitarian idiot**.

Edited September 16, 2009 by Philip Coates

[Philip Coates]

Subject: CUTTING SHORT DEBATE PARTCIPATION -- A Lot More Arts for Me, A Lot Less Repetitive Politics

You know, I made a mistake entering this thread, this is not the kind of subject that most interests me.

And am going to try to bail on these endless political debates. My observation is that people who came to Oism from conservatism tend to read the right-wingers and newsmax or nro and buy all their 'facts' and people who came from the left or liberalism or anarcho-libertarianism tend to read the msm or the left or anti-war.com and buy all their 'facts'.

I was in one endless debate on Solo and elsewhere trying to rebut the extreme right wing Oists who wanted to nuke Tehran. No ones was open to a single fact I had to offer. Now I do not want to be sucked in to a debate with the left-libertarians who think allowing terrorists and fascists to run free, plant dirty bombs or actual nukes in American cities, take over Middle East oil does not require some of the measures of the Patriot Act or increased spying, etc.

(Or far, far worse, influenced by the mindless RaimondoRothbardoCatoist fallacies, they are confused PHILOSOPHICALLY as to who is initiating force and is the 'aggressor' and who is using defensive and protective force.)

I refer them to the intellectuals who have discussed these points in great detail, and who have demonstrated the need for and morality of a strong national defense against Islamofascist religious nuts and the weapons of mass destruction which they acquire.

My prediction is that they simply have not steadily read the four most intelligent thinkers on post-911 "defend America issues", namely Bidinotto or Tracinski or Victor Davis Hanson or Charles Krauthammer. Nor will they read them carefully.

-----

There is also the decades-long repetitiousness factor. I'd much rather spend my time, at least so far..and with no name-calling..if I'm going to stay on OL, on (just for example) the current Linguistics and Great Literature threads. Very interesting and innovative.

Look for me there - at least if it's possible to drag people away from gossip, sensationalism, lack of facts, "one liners", and food fights: Didn't Objectivism used to be a philosophy of reason, or was I misinformed?

Edited September 16, 2009 by Philip Coates

[anonrobt]

Subject: CUTTING SHORT DEBATE PARTCIPATION -- A Lot More Arts for Me, A Lot Less Repetitive Politics

You know, I made a mistake entering this thread, this is not the kind of subject that most interests me.

And am going to try to bail on these endless political debates. My observation is that people who came to Oism from conservatism tend to read the right-wingers and newsmax or nro and buy all their 'facts' and people who came from the left or liberalism or anarcho-libertarianism tend to read the msm or the left or anti-war.com and buy all their 'facts'.

I was in one endless debate on Solo and elsewhere trying to rebut the extreme right wing Oists who wanted to nuke Tehran. No ones was open to a single fact I had to offer. Now I do not want to be sucked in to a debate with the left-libertarians who think allowing terrorists and fascists to run free, plant dirty bombs or actual nukes in American cities, take over Middle East oil does not require some of the measures of the Patriot Act or increased spying, etc.

(Or far, far worse, influenced by the mindless RaimondoRothbardoCatoist fallacies, they are confused PHILOSOPHICALLY as to who is initiating force and is the 'aggressor' and who is using defensive and protective force.)

I refer them to the intellectuals who have discussed these points in great detail, and who have demonstrated the need for and morality of a strong national defense against Islamofascist religious nuts and the weapons of mass destruction which they acquire.

My prediction is that they simply have not steadily read the four most intelligent thinkers on post-911 "defend America issues", namely Bidinotto or Tracinski or Victor Davis Hanson or Charles Krauthammer. Nor will they read them carefully.

-----

There is also the decades-long repetitiousness factor. I'd much rather spend my time, at least so far..and with no name-calling..if I'm going to stay on OL, on (just for example) the current Linguistics and Great Literature threads. Very interesting and innovative.

Look for me there - at least if it's possible to drag people away from gossip, sensationalism, lack of facts, "one liners", and food fights: Didn't Objectivism used to be a philosophy of reason, or was I misinformed?

What is so odd is no one seems to remember that what comprised 'the Patriot Act' was already in place, law-wise, before the event - that merely put it together...

[jeffrey smith]

Subject: CUTTING SHORT DEBATE PARTCIPATION -- A Lot More Arts for Me, A Lot Less Repetitive Politics

You know, I made a mistake entering this thread, this is not the kind of subject that most interests me.

And am going to try to bail on these endless political debates. My observation is that people who came to Oism from conservatism tend to read the right-wingers and newsmax or nro and buy all their 'facts' and people who came from the left or liberalism or anarcho-libertarianism tend to read the msm or the left or anti-war.com and buy all their 'facts'.

I was in one endless debate on Solo and elsewhere trying to rebut the extreme right wing Oists who wanted to nuke Tehran. No ones was open to a single fact I had to offer. Now I do not want to be sucked in to a debate with the left-libertarians who think allowing terrorists and fascists to run free, plant dirty bombs or actual nukes in American cities, take over Middle East oil does not require some of the measures of the Patriot Act or increased spying, etc.

(Or far, far worse, influenced by the mindless RaimondoRothbardoCatoist fallacies, they are confused PHILOSOPHICALLY as to who is initiating force and is the 'aggressor' and who is using defensive and protective force.)

I refer them to the intellectuals who have discussed these points in great detail, and who have demonstrated the need for and morality of a strong national defense against Islamofascist religious nuts and the weapons of mass destruction which they acquire.

My prediction is that they simply have not steadily read the four most intelligent thinkers on post-911 "defend America issues", namely Bidinotto or Tracinski or Victor Davis Hanson or Charles Krauthammer. Nor will they read them carefully.

-----

There is also the decades-long repetitiousness factor. I'd much rather spend my time, at least so far..and with no name-calling..if I'm going to stay on OL, on (just for example) the current Linguistics and Great Literature threads. Very interesting and innovative.

Look for me there - at least if it's possible to drag people away from gossip, sensationalism, lack of facts, "one liners", and food fights: Didn't Objectivism used to be a philosophy of reason, or was I misinformed?

I fully sympathize with you about Objectionists who insist that they understand Islam better than most Moslems do, and can't understand that the practical implication of their desire to extirpate Islam is to kill every one of the billions of Moslems now alive: I got frustrated enough to kick the dust of SOLO off my sandals for that precise reason. However, coming from a libertarian position, I do think that the CATO/Rothbard position is a good deal stronger than you give it credit for. The Bush administration openly advocated a theory of the Presidency that would legitimate the Fuhrerprinzip in American politics if followed to its logical conclusions: they argued that the Commander in Chief can ignore all laws and even the Constitution itself if national security justified it--and that only the Commander in Chief could decide if the justification existed. Bush didn't send political opponents to internment camps. But his presidency adopted the position that would allow him, or any future president, to do so.

As to Iraq--not only do I think that the invasion of Iraq was not justifiable on national security grounds, but I think that several practical matters would forbid us from doing so, even if it was. For one thing, if we wanted to provide Islam with a model of Islamic rights-respecting democracy, why not do it in Afghanistan, where we already were? (My own position is apparently close to Obama's publicly expressed positions--I say publicly expressed because a lot of people are skeptical of how much his private ideas on the matter match his politically calculated rhetoric.)

Nor do I think that the only alternative to the Bush approach would be "let the terrorists loose in the streets". There are intellectually sound positions in that matter which reject both extremes.

And may I add to the laundry list No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, which are not exactly pieces of legislation you might expect from a President and a political party opposed to the further socialization of education and health care.

Finally, if you haven't read Adam's latest post on the Education thread, I want to bring it to your attention.

(Here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7580&st=40--post number 40. Don't know how to link directly to the individual post itself.) It does give a little context.

[kiaer.ts]

Phil, look on the bright side. To adequately respond to the Riggenbach ("shove it up your ass")-Martin axis all you need to do is cut and paste your post 30 over and over. There arguments are neither based on the facts nor do they change, so your response, should you wish to post it, need never change either.

Please do ignore this BS and get back to posting on the Ling & Lit threads.

[John Day]

I have been to several marches on Washington. The crowd size was clearly under estimated. The National Parks Service [don't you just love the names of these governmental entities] has a policy not to give out crowd estimates. I wonder when that policy went into effect.

It was after the Million Man March in 1995. The NPS estimated an attendance of 400,000 while the organizers claimed it over one million and Louis Farrakhan threaten to sue. Congress prohibited the NPS from making attendance estimates in 1997.

[kiaer.ts]

Phil, look on the bright side. To adequately respond to the Riggenbach ("shove it up your ass")-Martin axis all you need to do is cut and paste your post 30 over and over. There arguments are neither based on the facts nor do they change, so your response, should you wish to post it, need never change either.

Please do ignore this BS and get back to posting on the Ling & Lit threads.

Sorry, that should be the Jeff "shove it up your ass" Riggenbach-Martin Radwin axis. Din't mean to be overly familiar.

[Martin Radwin]

Subject: Context, Proportion, and NON-EXAGGERATION in Political Debate

> to establish a police state in this country [Martin]

1. Personal experience? Is there a difference between a police state for 300 million people and the aggressive pursuit of a thousand enemy combatants? Is having a supervisory court to supervise abuses in the latter (FISA)-- which has been backed up both by Congress and by other courts -- a symptom of a "police state"?

Funny that you should bring up FISA. First of all, the FISA courts would routinely rubber stamp requests for warrants. Out of hundreds of requests, they only turned down about five, as I recall. Even this much of a restriction was too much for the Bush administration, which flagrantly violated the FISA law, insisting that it should have unlimited power to wiretap anyone it wished without a warrant.

As to the "enemy combatants", a bogus legal designation appropriate for a dictatorship, not for a free society, many of the Afghanis were turned over to the US by Afghan bounty hunters who were being paid a bounty for each person turned in, without any evidence of their participation in combat activities. They were locked up for years at Guantanamo, without any evidence of their being guilty of anything and without any habeus corpus rights. Most have since been released.

2. CONTEXT AND PROPORTION: If Bush moved us toward a police state in a major way (as opposed to violated some civil liberties in a minor way), you would see some evidence in your own experience:

Has anyone broken down your door?

Have your parents had their mail opened?

Was the opposition party (the Democrats under Bush) put out of business or had its bank accounts seized?

Have the newspapers been shut down or nationalized?

Have black helicopters been unloading SWAT teams throughout suburbia?

Do you have any friends who have been incarcerated for reading subversive materials?

Are people being asked to show 'their papers' when they move around?

Have concentration camps been showing up around the country?

Did Bush try to drive his liberal opponents out of business or investigate them all for tax evasion?

Other than terrorists, people plotting to blow up airplanes and spread poison gas, have millions of people had their civil liberties shredded?

Have there been political executions and a series of political show trials?

No, we are not yet living in a police state. I never claimed that we were. I stated quite clearly that Bush had moved us strongly in that direction, by his utter contempt for the rule of law and his gross expansion of the power of the unitary executive. The legal framework is now in place to turn the US into a dictatorship; the fact that this hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that the framework hasn't been established. In the event of a major civil disturbance, the president is now empowered to declare a national emergency, declare martial law, and commandeer the state national guards. No, this hasn't happened yet. I pray that it never does. But it could.

3. Martin, it is a **fundamental mistake** (as I posted with regard to counting the 'numbers' at a rally) to simply swallow uncritically all the charges of the liberal or left press as if they were true. That applies just as much when they lie or exaggerate or drop context in being anti-Bush as in being pro-Obama.

You're right, that would be a fundamental mistake. Of course, it has nothing whatever to do with me. I have not uncritically swallowed anything, especially from the "liberal" press. I am a libertarian. The arguments I am using are libertarian arguments, even though they have also been adopted by people concerned with civil liberties who are not libertarian. It's interesting that you think that demonstrating a passionate concern with civil liberties and strictly limited government are liberal or left positions. Some people actually believe that objectivism is a philosophy which advocates civil liberties and strictly limited government. Though most modern day objectivists tend to disprove this belief.

4. Here's a clue: Consider their claim that spying when you have terrorists coming in trying to blow up cities -- is wrong.

That kind of depends of the nature and scope of the spying. The Bush administration, and now the Obama administration, believe that they have the right to spy on anyone at any time for any reason, without providing any evidence that the people being spied on are terrorists. Please refer to Benjamin Franklin for a pithy quotation about the tradeoffs between liberty and the illusion of safety.

5. A LAUNDRY LIST IS NOT AN ARGUMENT: Many of your points are a "laundry list" of supposed 'abuses' without context or explanation. Anyone can make a long list sound impressive. But it has no cognitive weight, when you just list a name - it's like those people on this board you give a list of 'great literature' but tell you no detail, offer no proof.

I wonder why you don't follow your own advice. The post that you made, to which I was responding, was specifically a "laundry list" of reasons why the Obama administration was much worse than the Bush administration. You gave less justification for your laundry list than I did for mine. I am making an internet forum posting, not writing a scholarly journal article. If I were to elaborate in detail about each one of my points, my post could end up being ten pages. I don't think that you or anyone else would want to read a ten page post.

5B. Many of your non-cryptic points are simply WRONG - calling the Iraq war 'aggression' as though it were initiating force to take down a dictatorship, especially one that is a threat to the oil supply we can't survive without - failing to grasp that 'enemy combatants' is a legitimate category, that in wartime you can't handle prisoners under the same rule as criminals.

Do you read Bidinotto or Tracinski .... or just the left-liberal media? Do you even -know- their arguments on these points?

Any war initiated against another country not in self-defense is a war of aggression. Trying to pretend that this is somehow self-defense because Iraq threatened our oil supply is ridiculous. Here's a revelation for you. The oil is not ours. It does not belong to us. Our survival was never threatened by Iraqi control of its oil reserves. There are multiple suppliers of oil. And Iraq was happy to sell oil to the US. It was only the wars launched by the US against Iraq and the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure that shut down the very oil supply that we supposedly depend upon to survive. The argument that any relatively free society such as ours has the right to invade any dictatorship at any time, an argument made by Ayn Rand, was always a ridiculous argument, and it has not improved with age. Invading Iraq did not just involve deposing a dictator. It led to destruction and death on a massive scale. The fact that Iraqis were living under a dictatorship did not give the US the right to launch a war that killed several hundred thousand of them and turned millions of others into refugees by bombing their neighborhoods and creating massive ethnic cleaning. Iraq has been destroyed by this war. And it's still living under a dictatorship. That you attempt to justify this is truly pathetic.

I've read enough of Bidinotto to know the kinds of arguments that he uses. I am not impressed.

Have you ever read Ivan Eland? Or Arthur Silber? Or Chris Floyd? Or Robert Higgs? Or James Bovard?

6. Laundry list, continued: The 'Patriot Act'? Yeah, what about it? The whole thing? Certain provisions? Have you actually read it or are you just reading anti-Bush papers?

No, I have not actually read the Patriot Act. Neither did any of the members of the US congress who voted for it, without a clue as to what was actually inside it. Such pieces of legislation are generally hundreds of pages long and simply unbearable to read. I have read summaries of the salient points of all of these pieces of legislation, however, enough to know just how abusive they are to human rights.

How about you? Have you studied the Patriot Act, or Patriot Act 2, or the Military Commissions Act? Do you know what's inside these pieces of legislation, or just what powers they give to the federal government?

Here's a passage from James Bovard, from his book "Terrorism and Tyranny", page 164, describing some of the provisions of Patriot 2:

"Section 201 would make it easier for the federal government to carry out secret mass arrests. The provision, entitled "Prohibition of Disclosure of Terrorism Investigation Detainee Information", notes: "Although existing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions ... permit the government to protect information relating to detainees, defending this interpretation through litigation requires extensive Department of Justice resources, which would be better spent detecting and incapacitate [sic] terrorists." In other words, to save the Justice Department the bother of having to defend secret roundups, the Bush administration seeks to amend the federal statute book to imitate repressive dictatorships around the globe.

Section 312, entitled "Appropriate Remedies with Respect to Law Enforcement Surveillance Activities", would nullify almost all federal, state, and local court "consent decrees" restricting the power of local and state police to spy on Americans. The Bush administration complains that such consent decrees result in police lacking "the ability to use the full range of investigative techniques that are lawful under the Constitution, and that are available to the FBI." But, in almost every case, such consent decrees were imposed after stark abuses of citizens' rights by the police. The Bush administration draft bill declares: "All surviving decrees would have to be necessary to correct a current and ongoing violation of the Federal right, and be narrowly drawn and the least intrusive means to correct the violation." Historically, Supreme Court First Amendment jurisprudence has required the federal government to use the "least intrusive means" necessary to achieve some policy, in order to prevent any unnecessary restriction of freedom of speech. The Bush administration now demands the "least intrusive" restrictions on government intrusions.

Section 402 would permit U.S. attorneys to prosecute Americans for aiding terrorist organizations -- even if they made donations to organizations that the U.S. government did not publicly designate as terrorist groups. With the proposed revision, "there would be no requirement to show that the defendants actually had such an intent" to advance terrorist causes before convicting them of being terrorist supporters, according to the Justice Department explanatory text. Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute warns that, with this provision, the feds "can categorize the most innocent action" -- such as "signing a petition" -- as an act of terrorism."

Do you feel safer now?

Martin

[Selene]

Martin:

I will have to take a look at some of the authors you mentioned because I am not familiar with them.

You raise interesting questions.

I am somewhat familiar with the primary Patriot Act.

Concerning the F.I.S.A. Court - do you have a specific source for this statement:

"...insisting that it should have unlimited power to wiretap anyone it wished without a warrant."

Adam

[DavidMcK]

Martin, very concise summing up of everything that the Bush administration did. The only thing I would add is that they delegated the capture of Taliban/bin Laden to the Northern Alliance (who weren't particularly interested in capturing them), and allowed the Al Qaeda to escape into a 95% Moslem country. If you watched a recent re-run of a 60 minutes program, the CIA guy in charge of capturing bin Laden was mystified when he was told not to cut them off at the pass. Not only that but many of the same members of the Bush team were with Reagan, and allowed Pakistan to acquire nukes, which fit their anti-soviet agenda (and they trained our future enemies in Afghanistan also). The Reagan/Bush/Bush administrations were like a tsunami whose effects keep rolling over (and we ain't through yet).

[Philip Coates]

Subject: OL seems to go up and down more often than a Las Vegas hooker when conventions are in town

Has anyone else besides me been unable to get onto OL much of this week?

I've never seen this with other websites I go to, such a repeated inability to close the door on a hacker or get one's ISP to do its job...if that's what it is

[Robert Campbell]

Phil,

Starting on Tuesday, I haven't been able to access this site for long periods of time.

When OL is down, all that comes up in the browser is a one-line "syntax error" message.

Robert Campbell

[Selene]

OK it's official - we are racists.

From Tracinski:

"Within days of Saturday's giant "tea party" rally in Washington, Obama's supporters in the press began denouncing the protesters as racists. That's what Jimmy Carter says, and Time's Joe Klein, and The American Prospect's Paul Waldman, and Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd at the New York Times, among others.

What is their evidence? Well, they don't have any—just over-active imaginations. Krugman opines that the "driving force" behind the tea party movement is "probably…cultural and racial anxiety," while Dowd says that when Joe Wilson told Obama he was lying, "what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!... Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it." Those are the journalistic standards at the Times nowadays: it's OK to libel half the population based on what you imagine they are "probably" thinking and on words they didn't say.

Along the same lines, Klein attributes opposition to Obama to "implicit" racism, while "social psychologist" Thomas Pettigrew makes explicit what this charge of "implicit racism" means: "The general idea is that people who don't recognize it in themselves look for legitimate means to carry out their subtle beliefs, sometimes even without awareness on their part that they're doing it." That's how a "social psychologist" gets to project onto you his own preconceptions about your character and motives—without actually needing to talk to you and ask you what you think.

Whew, now I feel better.

I like this post racial atmosphere that has resulted by electing the marxist.

Adam

[Martin Radwin]

Martin:

I will have to take a look at some of the authors you mentioned because I am not familiar with them.

You raise interesting questions.

I am somewhat familiar with the primary Patriot Act.

Concerning the F.I.S.A. Court - do you have a specific source for this statement:

"...insisting that it should have unlimited power to wiretap anyone it wished without a warrant."

Adam

Adam,

Here is a detailed description of the Bush administration and its efforts at evasion of the FISA law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy

"The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy concerns surveillance of persons within the United States incident to the collection of foreign intelligence by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the war on terror. Under this program, referred to by the Bush administration as the "terrorist surveillance program",[1] part of the broader President's Surveillance Program, the NSA is authorized by executive order to monitor, without warrants, phone calls, e-mails, Internet activity, and text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lies within the U.S.

The exact scope of the program is not known, but the NSA is or was provided total, unsupervised access to all fiber-optic communications going between some of the nation's major telecommunication companies' major interconnect locations, including phone conversations, email, web browsing, and corporate private network traffic.

Shortly before Congress passed a new law in August 2007 that legalized warrantless surveillance, the Protect America Act of 2007, critics stated that such "domestic" intercepts required FISC authorization under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.[2] The Bush administration maintained that the authorized intercepts are not domestic but rather foreign intelligence integral to the conduct of war and that the warrant requirements of FISA were implicitly superseded by the subsequent passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).[3] FISA makes it illegal to intentionally engage in electronic surveillance under appearance of an official act or to disclose or use information obtained by electronic surveillance under appearance of an official act knowing that it was not authorized by statute; this is punishable with a fine of up to $10,000 or up to five years in prison, or both.[4] In addition, the Wiretap Act prohibits any person from illegally intercepting, disclosing, using or divulging phone calls or electronic communications; this is punishable with a fine or up to five years in prison, or both. [5]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confirmed the existence of the program, first reported in a December 16, 2005 article in The New York Times.[6][7] The Times had posted the exclusive story on their website the night before, after learning that the Bush administration was considering seeking a Pentagon-Papers-style court injunction to block its publication.[8] Critics of The Times have openly alleged that executive editor Bill Keller had knowingly withheld the story from publication since before the 2004 Presidential election, and that the story that was ultimately first published by The Times was essentially the same one that reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau had first submitted at that time.[9] In a December 2008 interview with Newsweek, former Justice Department employee Thomas Tamm revealed himself to be the initial whistle-blower to The Times.[10]

Gonzales stated that the program authorizes warrantless intercepts where the government "has a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda." and that one party to the conversation is "outside of the United States".[11] The revelation raised immediate concern among elected officials, civil right activists, legal scholars and the public at large about the legality and constitutionality of the program and the potential for abuse. Since then, the controversy[12] has expanded to include the press's role in exposing a classified program, the role and responsibility of Congress in its executive oversight function and the scope and extent of Presidential powers under Article II of the Constitution."

Martin

[Christopher]

Martin,

You have been posting some really nice stuff on this thread.

Adam,

Here's an interesting question. Taking a two-party system as the background, what is the stronger force: mud-slingers who make the other side look bad (Glenn Beck and the liberals above on racism) or the mud-slingers who make their own side look bad (Glenn Beck and the liberals above on racism)? In other words, does the mud make the thrower or the target more dirty in your opinion?

Chris

[Selene]

Martin,

You have been posting some really nice stuff on this thread.

Adam,

Here's an interesting question. Taking a two-party system as the background, what is the stronger force: mud-slingers who make the other side look bad (Glenn Beck and the liberals above on racism) or the mud-slingers who make their own side look bad (Glenn Beck and the liberals above on racism)? In other words, does the mud make the thrower or the target more dirty in your opinion?

Chris

I am confused Chris? Have you either read or listened to Glenn, I do not particularly have the time for his TV show? Are we making a moral equivalence argument between Glenn Beck and the marxists that you mentioned above?

I will not cede the word liberal to this murderous marxist movement that they shill for.

Adam

[Christopher]

Hey Adam,

I was referring to Beck's statment that Obama was a racist. Anyway, the groups are irrelevant. I just noticed that when I hear one side accuse another side of being racist such as in your earlier post, I tend to judge the accuser more than the accused. I wonder whether this is unique among average American persons. Probably not, eh. I think part of my judgment stems from the concern that accusations are intentionally deceptive manipulations, and hollow accusations wouldn't be as bad if they failed to work on the average American individual.

[Selene]

Hey Adam,

I was referring to Beck's statment that Obama was a racist. Anyway, the groups are irrelevant. I just noticed that when I hear one side accuse another side of being racist such as in your earlier post, I tend to judge the accuser more than the accused. I wonder whether this is unique among average American persons. Probably not, eh. I think part of my judgment stems from the concern that accusations are intentionally deceptive manipulations, and hollow accusations wouldn't be as bad if they failed to work on the average American individual.

Ah, now I understand. I agree with you. The word racist is meaningless today. I know for a fact, since I have worked with and had a few friends who were black nationalists, black Muslims, five percenters and one or two black panthers in the late 60's that they play on white guilt. It is almost a game which they shared with me is quite amusing to the person playing that card.

The racism that is expressed in those groups is overt and clear as a bell. The white man is either:

1) the devil;

2) the slave master;

3) the responsible party for the enslavement of blacks with a racist capitalist system of repression; or

4) the color that you hate because it is easy to blame that external force than oneself.

When I have been called a racist, my reaction is first to laugh in the persons face and then, if I decide to have a discussion with them, I ask them to define

discrimination, prejudice, bigotry, discernment and racism.

You would be amazed at how many people [upwards of 80%] cannot define the words, nor place them in any relation to the other words and if you keep your tone humorous, but engaging, you can actually persuade them to re look at the buzz word racism.

Adam

[Christopher]

Nothing wrong with being a devilish slave driver who hoists capitalistic colors in my book.

That idea of humorous and engaging dialogue is really really intelligent for communicating with others, and I always admire the approach. Sometimes it's hard to control impulses of disgust, but I always know that such impulses don't further my goals.

[Selene]

Nothing wrong with being a devilish slave driver who hoists capitalistic colors in my book.

That idea of humorous and engaging dialogue is really really intelligent for communicating with others, and I always admire the approach. Sometimes it's hard to control impulses of disgust, but I always know that such impulses don't further my goals.

I would highly recommend the Sandler Sales System to pick from because you can actually have fun with a sales event and have the qualified prospect close the sale for you. It is not easy because it always looks like a Colombo episode.

http://www.sandler.com/

• Don't spill your candy in the lobby.
• Money DOES grow on trees.
• People buy in spite of the hard sell, not because of it.
• Work smart, not hard

And let me tell you, it works really well. You just need steel balls and a engaging smile. Can you even envision, for example, going into a major sales event with the decision maker and coming in without a presentation and borrowing a pen and piece of paper from the person behind the desk to start the event?

Adam

[Martin Radwin]

Martin,

You have been posting some really nice stuff on this thread.

Chris

Chris,

Thanks for the complement. I'm sure that there are more than a few posters here on Objectivist Living who would strongly disagree with you!

By the way, I noticed in your profile that you live in Sausalito. I live rather close to you, in Cupertino. We were actually thinking of going to this year's recently held Sausalito Art Festival, but we unfortunately missed it. But I've been there twice in past years. Sausalito is a really charming little town. You're very fortunate to live there.

Martin