Well there are arguments both for and against it. You have put forth yours why it is bad and Chris has put forth ours why it is good. Both are grounded in facts and I choose the one I have as I feel it is the right course to protect this country.

Do you ever watch "The Shield"? I am going to guess that you view those cops as bad.

 

Feingold is not going anywhere. He is too radical on the left to even win the Democratic primary.

I agree that money being spent is way WAY out of control but you cannot land it squarely at the feet of this President or any others. It is all the earmarks for special (PORK) projects every Senator and Congressman attaches to every bill that goes across the Presidents desk. Not to mention all the entitlements that the government has to pay out every year and how much they increase. Government spending is a huge problem but it is one that is owned by both Democrats and Republicans and Socialists (Bernie Sanders I'm nodding at you ) alike. This is one reason I like the Line Item veto for a President...no matter what party you are from.

But this is another topic unto itself.

 

Huh???

 

I f'ing love that show :thumbup:

 

Me too! Pretty awesome stuff.

 

No I haven't seen the Shield, other than in previews. But I kind of know what it's about. Bad? It's a fine line. Having worked in emergency medicine in the field myself, I know that in the real world regulations get broken, and protocol isn't always followed. But is what they do illegal? Hell yes.

On TV, I'm sure they always get the criminal, who you know is guilty. But in the real world, things are much more ambiguous. The whole point of the Bill of Rights (and the goal of must Republican governments) is that it is better to let a guilty man go (hence the whole, innocent until proven guilty, "not guilty" verdicts instead of "innocent") than to let an innocent man be punished for their wrongs, limiting the power of the state over the people. What you (and the Shield) advocate is what totalitarian governments tend to go for, which is the power of the state over the people, the righteousness of the state, the acceptance of "collateral" damage to preserve the state.

I know you didn't explicitly say anything about it in the post I quoted, but I'm sure it's been mentioned in this thread, namely that if you have nothing to hide, why would you worry? In my experience, everybody has something to hide, everybody has a secret, it's just a matter of what it is. I know you're going to come back and say you don't, and I'm not going to argue with you since I don't know you. But from all the people I've dealt with in the field, everybody has something hide. And that's why I care about the US's ability to spy on its citizens; maybe what I do today isn't something they care about, but how about tomorrow, or 10 years from now, or 40 years from now?

 

I have plenty of secrets...but I am not worried about the government listening in on me as none of my secrets warrant listening in on. And I am not going to be talking to Al Qaeda anytime soon so I am really not that concerned.

 

Once again, how do we know that? There needs to be a process, and there needs to be oversight. Our government is built upon checks and balances, and this is simply unchecked power.

If there's something wrong with the old system then lets fix the system rather than abandoning it for blind trust in the executive branch.

 

There are seperation of powers between the three branches of government and this is one of those things I feel the Executive branch is free to do.

We know that because the President has been pretty clear what it was being used for and had been briefing certain, select & bi-partisan members of Congress on prior to the leak. A leak that has since posed a great danger to this country and is more serious that the leak of Valerie Plame. This warrantless eavesdropping is a very specific an targeted program for terrorists.

 

The threat today is Al Qaeda. How bout tomorrow? The threat is basically arbitrarily defined by the government. Whether your secrets are worth listening in on, well that depends a lot on what the government perceives as a threat.

Edit: Also as far as the separation of powers goes, that doesn't mean the executive branch operates independent of the other branches. The executive branch still has to comply with the laws made by the legislative branch and the rulings made by the judicial branch.