Obama got out in front of the NSA story by publicly joining Leahy and Wyden for hearings to "fix" the NSA/Patriot Act.

A friend asked, "If there were to be a new Church-like Committee to investigate this NSA mess, who would you like to see in charge?"

I responded by saying it would probably have to be Leahy, head of the Judiciary/seniority/etc. Yet many, including me, would love to see it be Wyden... he's earned it.

And another friend pipes up and says, "I'd love to see someone NOT in Congress... Someone TRULY independent..."

And then she says, "Isn't Russ Feingold still a lawyer?"

And... as I was attempting to say, "BRILLIANT !!!"

A couple of ice-cubes made it across the bar-top.

GLENN GREENWALD GIVES BRITISH GOVERNMENT A RIGHT JOLLY ROGERING, WILL PROBABLY NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT
by GARY LEGUM - Wonkette
8/20/13



<snip>







Link: http://wonkette.com/526063/glenn-greenwald-gives-british-government-a-right-jolly-rogering-will-probably-never-shut-up-about-it

So the innocent have nothing to fear?
After David Miranda we now know where this leadsThe destructive power of state snooping is on display for all to see. The press must not yield to this intimidation
Simon Jenkins - The Guardian
Tuesday 20 August 2013 15.30 EDT

<snip>

You've had your fun: now we want the stuff back. With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age. In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition. They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. Had the Guardian refused this ritual they said they would have obtained a search and destroy order from a compliant British court.

Two great forces are now in fierce but unresolved contention. The material revealed by Edward Snowden through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from WikiLeaks and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden's defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.

Last week in Washington, Congressional investigators discovered that the America's foreign intelligence surveillance court, a body set up specifically to oversee the NSA, had itself been defied by the agency "thousands of times". It was victim to "a culture of misinformation" as orders to destroy intercepts, emails and files were simply disregarded; an intelligence community that seems neither intelligent nor a community commanding a global empire that could suborn the world's largest corporations, draw up targets for drone assassination, blackmail US Muslims into becoming spies and haul passengers off planes.

Yet like all empires, this one has bred its own antibodies. The American (or Anglo-American?) surveillance industry has grown so big by exploiting laws to combat terrorism that it is as impossible to manage internally as it is to control externally. It cannot sustain its own security. Some two million people were reported to have had access to the WikiLeaks material disseminated by Bradley Manning from his Baghdad cell. Snowden himself was a mere employee of a subcontractor to the NSA, yet had full access to its data. The thousands, millions, billions of messages now being devoured daily by US data storage centres may be beyond the dreams of Space Odyssey's HAL 9000. But even HAL proved vulnerable to human morality. Manning and Snowden cannot have been the only US officials to have pondered blowing a whistle on data abuse. There must be hundreds more waiting in the wings – and always will be.

There is clearly a case for prior censorship of some matters of national security. A state secret once revealed cannot be later rectified by a mere denial. Yet the parliamentary and legal institutions for deciding these secrets are plainly no longer fit for purpose. They are treated by the services they supposedly supervise with falsehoods and contempt. In America, the constitution protects the press from pre-publication censorship, leaving those who reveal state secrets to the mercy of the courts and the judgment of public debate – hence the Putinesque treatment of Manning and Snowden. But at least Congress has put the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, under severe pressure. Even President Barack Obama has welcomed the debate and accepted that the Patriot Act may need revision.

In Britain, there has been no such response...

<snip>

More: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/innocent-fear-david-miranda

Next time someone tells you about the deadliness of cars, compared to guns...

Remind them...

That cars are regulated up the wahzoo, because cars CAN be deadly.

You have to be tested, licensed, registered, and insured.

We now have seat-belt, air-bags, and numerous other safetey features... ALL required BY LAW>

We have entire governmental departments assigned to the monitoring of cars... The DMV, the police, sheriffs, state police, Dept. of Transportation, etc...

We should do the same for guns.

Rate, AND... The Poverty Rate.

Hike it back up to 60 or 70 percent, and then tell... "THE JOB CREATORS"...

For every point of unemployment reduction, you, as a class, get 5 points off your tax rate.

I'd have experts figure out how to come up with some similar formula for the poverty rate so they have to start paying everybody a Living Wage.

C'mon "JOB CREATORS"... put you monies where your mouths are.

My sister, one of three, was kicked out of her boyfriend's Corvette because she was trying to break her relationship off.

He circled her twice saying, "I love you, baby."

And then ran his Corvette into the stadium wall at Sac City College... killing himself, right in front of her.

Two years later... same sister... was asked by a guy if she wanted to dance...

She politely said no, and thanked the guy.

30 minutes later... as she was walking to her VW, thinking her friends were right behind her...

This same guy tells her to open the car door and get in there with him.

She refuses (going against the advice of law enforcement) and he slices her arm with a swith-blade to show how serious he is. When he does that, she screams bloody murder. And then he stabs her three time in the back... puncturing her lung.

She survives still... and is one AWESOME and forgiving person.

The reason I tell these rather personal tales...

Is twofold.

1) Try to distinguish between the various forms of rape... in order to keep RAPE un-muddled as a crime.

And...

2) Remember... (not letting anybody off the hook here) but... many of us here at DU actually lived through the sexual revolution. And many did it with differing consequences.

But, as I remember, the challenge was, once you turned 18, you own your own body, and your own decisions.

I never took advantage of a sleeping woman because my philosophy is...

"I don't want to attend a party I ain't invited to."

And twice in my young sexual revolutionary life... I was in mid... well ... you know...

and as soon as I knew the rules had changed, I backed away,and put it all away, and hugged them, and exited as friends.

The Sexual Revolution WAS a lot about stuff like that. It was about learning new realities and social mores.

Don't know if this makes any sense, but... my 2 cents.

Now 2012 was not stolen, in part because thousands of people voted early, by mail, and those that did not, refused to budge from the lines they were in.

To me... the ONLY elections that can be stolen, are ones that are razor thin. But... because of increased awareness, because of 2000, 2004, and the obvious attempt to disenfranchise DEMOCRATS in several states this time around... people got pissed, came out in droves, and stood their ground.

AND... made it unstealable.

I really have no idea what the reality of the Rove/Anonymous story is. But I am enjoying the fallout never the less.



But for some posters who've just arrived, and are hectoring the rest of us...

We who survived Bev Harris, and Black Box Voting, and loved Andy Stephenson, and on, and on, and on...

It is more than a tad insulting to be told to shut up.

We discuss things on this here discussion board... and I for one do not normally care if my petty-coat is showing.

I have this nasty habit... I tend to think for myself.

And I leave symbols... to the symbol minded. (Thank you George Carlin!)

My old man was a journalist before WWII broke out...

He signed up and learned to fly with the Navy (using a stearman)...



Was assigned to the Marines as the Captain of a B-25...



Yet he never talked about it...

And it was only a couple of years ago... decades after his death...

That my mom, in her 80's, told the following story...

As Clint Eastwood's first movie about the Flag at Iwo Jima was about to be released, and there were commercials promoting the film... my mom off-handedly says half indignantly/half prideful...

"Joe Rosenthal... let me tell you something. Your father and Joe had had a few drinks in San Francisco, and decided it would be a good idea to drive to Sacramento and see the State Fair. They drove into a bridge abutment, and I had to go down and bail their asses out!"

And all I'm thinking is... "Dad knew Joe Rosenthal ???"







Point being...

Most of them did not talk much about it when they came home.

And...

The writers/journalists tended to hang out together.

My old man knew Rosenthal, Pierre Salinger (JFK's Press Secretary), The guy that wrote 'In Harms Way' (which is my favorite WWII movie, directed by Otto Preminger, and starring EVERYBODY), and many others including those serving IN THEATER from Hollywood.

And for all the crap and horror they must have witnessed...

they tended not to talk (or brag) about any of it.

And when they got back home, being lucky enough to have survived it in one piece...

They set about creating a better society.