Are you convinced there's zero al-Qaeda supporters in the Syrian government?

That's besides my point though, which is that you can't persuasively support an opinion if your opinion is the same no matter the facts. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk, but if this group was filled with disciples of Chuck Norris, you and Ron Paul would still be against it, so what difference does it make?

Edit: I'll tell you what, if your hero is right and this destroys America, or even becomes equivalent to the Vietnam war, I'll buy you a coke. How much time should we give it? Maybe a year?

I think Kissinger is one of the most evil men to wield power in U.S. history. Maybe you don't know as much about me as you think.

It is possible for people to disagree with you and still have an honest opinion.

You are FAR more a blind supporter of Ron Paul than JPhillips is of Obama. It's a little different situation because one is in power and actually doing stuff, but ideologically, it's not even close.

Maybe because outside of major conflicts like WWII most of these wars are facades for similar reasons. The Chuck Norris rebels would probably be no more our friends than any other rebel group and would eventually either turn on us or sell our weapons to one of our enemies. And you might be right that Paul wouldn't have supported WWII, he probably would have had some problems with the nukes in Japan and carpet bombing Berlin civilians, but he did support Afghanistan so I am guessing Pearl Harbor probably would have convinced him to join WWII)

Not really. I am a pretty big (99%) supporter on non-interventionism which Paul is also and articulates better than I do but I don't toe the line on most of Paul's religious crap.

And I have spoke out against the endless war consistently. If Paul got elected and then started bombing shit I wouldn't excuse it I would call him a sell out. Phillips was all over Bush but now Obama probably isnt right but here's why he is so much smarter than Bush.

Did you find that when you played it backwards? Since I didn't say that, I'm curious how you know it to be true.

Interesting how the Syria proxy war is evolving ... Russia, Iran, Hezbollah vs US, Saudi, Jordan vs AQ and its variants

Saw Rubio on ABC today. I'm sure its from the GOP talking points but think he has a valid point/question ... would it have been better if we had intervened earlier and not given AQ a foothold or Assad an opp to recover?

Saudi Arabia wants missiles for Syrian rebels: report - FRANCE 24

On your coke bet... Would an Iraqlike war be a big enough clusterfuck or does it have to be 50000 dead?

I'd love for him to pinpoint when exactly that was. When did the noble, democratic rebels become AQ supporters?

When the surface to air missile takes down a Western civilian filled airline can we at least act like we knew it could be a possibility with an asinine idea like this?

Valid concern. You would think we would have developed weapons/missiles that would only be good for x time, some sort of planned obsolescence feature etc.

The rebels have already used SAMs to take down a few of Assad's warplanes and helicopters. So they have already had them prior to this latest announcement. In any event, most (if not all) Western airlines have stopped flying into Damascus.

Agree that is isn't going to happen during a war, I was thinking more of an Osama Bin Laden-like event (friend becomes foe not magnitude of 9-11) ten/twenty years down the road. Either in the Middle East or god forbid smuggled into the United States. One would think Saudi (American) weapons might be better than what they have though I will admit I was unaware the rebels had this technology.

So, we're about two scandals back, but looks like Issa was fabricating quotes that said the IRS targeting thing was linked to the White House.

Breaking: Full House committee transcripts shed new light on genesis of IRS targeting

Biden warns Congress on gun reform: ‘You will pay a price’ | The Ticket - Yahoo! News

So Biden says lawmakers will "pay a price" for standing against large percentage of Americans that want these gun control measures? What would be a large percentage? Maybe 70?

Support for gun control slips below 50 percent after Senate vote - The Hill's Blog Briefing Room

Oh, ok less than 50? Well lets visit another issue...

Poll: 70 percent say no arms to Syria - Katie Glueck - POLITICO.com

Obama steps up military aid to Syrian rebels - Yahoo! News


When the administration wants to give military grade weapons to groups with ties to terrorists then the will of the American people is an afterthought. LOL. The sad part is people actually believe and actively support these clowns?

Well at least gun control works!

Chicago sees deadliest weekend of 2013, with 6 dead, at least 40 hurt - Yahoo! News

New York's Summer of Gun Violence Is Off to a Chicago-Style Start - Alexander Abad-Santos - The Atlantic Wire

Before all the liberals get their panties in a wad... Here is the supposed opposition's next great thing. Even bigger clowns...

Marco Rubio Admits That He Hasn't Read the Gun Control Bill That He Opposes

Rubio: If I were in charge, we would have armed the Syrian rebels much sooner « Hot Air

Rubio Suggests Secret Spying 'Just The Reality' | News with Tags

Rubio, Nelson support Patriot Act extension | Tampa Bay Times

I just did a lot of catching up and I could spend the afternoon making rebuttals to a lot of what you have posted as we don't usually see eye to eye in this thread.

But this post I love. :thumbsup:

SI

Yeah, the bold is what gets me about this. No, they aren't listening in on every phone call we make and everything we do- that's too manpower intensive and, frankly, too stupid.

In fact, right now, I'll give pretty good odds: not like even but like 3:1 that 99% of searches are done above board. Basically, I suspect what they are doing is collecting the metadata in one database and collecting the content in another. And then you look in the content database for "terrorism" and "bomb" and a few other choice words and backtrack to the metadata to find out who did that.

However, I really don't want anyone to have that power in their hands, no matter how well intentioned. It's really easy to put that in the wrong hands so they can change those search terms to "Tea Party" or "Occupy Wall Street" or all of the above to squelch whatever brand of dissent you don't like.

SI

Isn't that just an unavoidable risk if you're going to have any kind of government at all? If we give police the power to arrest people who have committed crimes, what's to stop them from arresting them for having an opinion they don't like? If we give the IRS the power to make determinations about an organization's status, what's to stop them from inappropriately targeting certain political viewpoints? Heck, if we give our military the power to maintain a nuclear aresenal, what's to stop them on dropping the bombs on a state filled with voters from the wrong party? Any power can be misused. Just like individual rights can be misused.

It has nothing to do with 'what if they abuse this power', this is power the Constitution clearly says 'you are not allowed to have without reasonable suspicion of a crime'.

There's no what-if scenario here. The abuse stems from them claiming the right to have this information in the first place - while asserting that privilege is legal thanks to 'secret' court rulings (which in itself leads to a violation of the 6th amendment).

No appellate court has held that yet, and recent opinions support the the government's position that this does not violate the 4th amendment, and that individuals do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the cell phone numbers they call not being placed in a database that can be accessed later upon further justification. (and we have one court opinion that says that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your location, as identified by your phone's GPS function.)

The 4th amendment doesn't clearly preclude this, either on its face or as interpreted by recent appellate opinions. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches, with just begs for court-made tests and case-by-case determinations, and none of those tests or determinations preclude this. You might think it's unreasonable, or that it constitutes a "search", but that doesn't make it unconstitutional at this moment. A lot of the rhetoric surrounding this presupposes that this is illegal, that the government knows it's illegal, and they just decided to break the law in secret, but that's all just opinion, and it hasn't been determined by any authority that actually matters. And certainly, the government isn't justifying this solely based on security, they do contend its constitutional.

How is the 6th amendment implicated in the absence of a actual criminal prosecution?

Whether it's legal is an open question subject to debate, but at this moment it's not clearly illegal. Whether the government should do it is a different question, and almost all of the arguments against it involve slippery slope arguments, which can be tricky to make when they involve government power. Pretty much anything the government does can slippery slope into abuse of power and disaster.

Including when they do nothing.

I should have added 'in my opinion' to that, I guess. I find it yet another example of the watering down of the 4th amendment, and a black and white situation. My experience, unfortunately has led me to believe our lords and masters will say otherwise.

As to part two, it would be as part of a criminal prosecution. With secret laws backed by secrets courts (which is where they are largely claiming they have the authority for most of those), you are denied your rights to see the evidence against you, and to face your accusers - rights guaranteed to you by the 6th.

Article from just yesterday -

Justice Department Fought to Conceal NSA's Role in Terror Case From Defense Lawyers | Threat Level | Wired.com

Most interesting/terrifying part:

Oh, in terror cases, I could see the 6th amendment arguments coming up, gotcha. I was thinking more like how people (at least on my facebook wall) seem to think the government is going to read an email about them smoking weed and then break down their doors and take them in. The way the government deals with terror suspects, especially if they try to charge them domestically, is a whole different thing. It can be a mess.

Today it's terror suspects (and pedophiles - the two trump cards for any rights infringements). Though yes, people will take things to horrible illogical extremes, but the sentiment is close. There IS an element of truth to it - we've witnessed a constant erosion of rights and expansion of government authority in the past 200 years. Powers granted and powers taken don't go away - they go from 'only rarely in the most dire circumstances' to 'this is a vital everyday tool in protecting the people!'

The most horrid, vile, disgusting criminal who ever walked the earth should still have the same rights in this country as Jesus himself. We can't selectively apply the Constitution to people & crimes we don't like because they're "worse". It simply can't work like that.

It does, in increasing frequency.

It needs to end in short order.

It probably won't.

The terrorism thing has created an entirely different playing field and scope of debate, but otherwise, I think criminal rights of defendants have enhanced greatly in the last 50-100 years. There's hundreds of examples of that. Prosecutions and jury trials 75 years ago wouldn't even be recognizable today. It's amazing what they got away with by modern societal and legal standards about what defendants are entitled to.

Terrorism stuff isn't different because those guys are "really bad", it's different because of the military and national security and international components. And it's not different just because those things are "really important", there's actually practical considerations to whether it's even possible to apply domestic rules of evidence and U.S. constitutional rights to every person on the planet that we think is a terrorist. An obviously, our government and military wants to act in instances even where no U.S. law has been violated, or where there's no chance of conviction because of some procedural roadblock. Can the government and military still act in any of those instances? The idea that what our military does should be restrained by domestic criminal rules of evidence and criminal procedure is a very new idea that's still being sorted out.

I know your example is an actual domestic criminal charge, and the when the government pursues that route, of course, all the normal criminal procedures and rules of evidence have to apply. And that's what's happening. As in many criminal prosecutions, the parties have different opinions about what's constitutional, and what's admissible. As do the government agencies who aren't themselves parties in the case. I'm sure that 60-page government brief justifying their conduct didn't say, "this is illegal, sure, but terrorism is really bad and national security is really important." I'm sure it actually contains cognizable legal arguments.

Thanks, as JiMGa would say even a broken clock is right twice a day. Seriously though because of how poorly the finances of this country are handled people don't really ever consider the economic fallout of some of these decisions.

My wife and I are pretty good with our money, but she actually did get me to buy an alarm system for my house (IMO the sign is as much a deterrent as the $50 a month service but that's a whole other thread). Could I set up a more complex camera system? Sure. Could we hire a security guard? Yes but this would really cause us to go into debt. Would buying all of the surrounding property and building a giant wall make us even safer? Maybe but now we are just wasting money to feel safe and probably pissing off the neighbors. (Sound like the United States at all? :) ).

Have you caught anybody trying to kill you before or after you installed the alarm? If not, ya, probably a waste of money.

Wasnt really the angle i was going for but i guess i will play. No we didn't kill a bunch of our poorer neighbors and their children before upgrading the alarm system. And we also haven't recruited people to try and kill us to justify the large amounts of wasted money on our alarm system.

So are you saying the Republican Party is the naggy wife??

Can we file for divorce?

wrong thread

wrong thread

wrong thread

You can say that again.

Are you a truther?

No. I was talking about the number of terror attacks they have stopped. Seems like an awful lot of them are guys recruited by the FBI who are encouraged to set off a bomb and then the FBI takes credit for stopping the attack that never had anyone in danger but makes for a sensational headline. (Like the one in Portland, OR but from what I remember this makes up a large number of the thwarted plots)

This has to be one of the more fiscally efficient anti-terror tools that the U.S. government has employed. Rather than physically invading countries or maintaining massive physical presences, we're relying more of intelligence and information. And with regard to this program, the data doesn't even have to be analyzed, it only has to be logged and saved. When you get a phone number connected to a terror suspect, you can more cheaply acquire a lot of information about his activities. You don't necessarily need to bomb his entire village. It's all in the execution, which we don't know a ton about yet, but there's great potential there for a much smarter and more fiscally efficient national security policy. It's a fascinating balance though - more brute strength/use of force approaches will implicate privacy interests much less - I bet Obama didn't fully grasp that when he wanted to push a smarter/learner approach to terror, or at least, I'm sure he didn't think it would blow up on him like this. I'm sure he kicks back with a beer in weaker moments and yells to himself, "what the fuck to these people want?"

And that's what I was getting at with the ron paul/panerd lack of real analysis - it doesn't matter what the approach is, it doesn't matter if more efficient solutions are explored - if it's the government, its bad, and that's the end of it. You can't have a reasonable debate/discussion or analysis of issues where that's the initial position. The Boston Marathon thing was something of a turning point of how I think about this stuff - where the government was criticized for not knowing about these guys beforehand, not catching them fast enough after it happened, AND for sending too many people to go find them. It's so easy to go strongly on one side when you have no power and responsibility for the outcome, but if you're going to all extreme in one direction, at least recognize the cons and limitations of that approach.

:confused:

I think your use of "guys recruited by the FBI" is disingenuous at best. What you should be saying is "double agents turned (maybe - we hope?) by the FBI."

So you get some low-level non terror cell connected doofus who is not capable of pulling any sort of terror attack off himself and isn't a member of any terrorist organization. You convince him that he has a truck full of explosives and then celebrate when you stop him. Seems like a lesson in fear mongering and not policing to me.

The FBI again thwarts its own Terror plot - Salon.com

EDIT: And if it is just a policing technique Molson why the fanfare and reporting to major news agencies? Sorry if I call bullshit on the purpose of these operations.

No I am talking about the FBI actually going to mosques and recruiting potential terrors suspects who hate America. Listen I have no love loss for somebody who thinks they are going to blow up a bomb and kill people but the level of danger they represent is not equal to the amount of news coverage and/or money spent. Here's another where occupy people thought they were blowing stuff up...

Ohio Terrorists Were Recruited And Supplied With Bombs By FBI

At some point it becomes a thought crime doesn't it?

Data and information based intelligence seems a lot more fiscally responsible that the leg-work that goes along with chasing guys around the world, feigning terror plots, etc, even if that is a valid police technique. But you oppose all of the above on spending grounds, so I'm not sure what difference it makes.

Oh come on. I love how thinking trillions of dollars of debt and a huge bloated military budget that is larger than the rest of the world by ions all of a sudden makes me anti road and anti spending any money on foiling terrorism. My point was they use these terror plots to justify the huge amounts of money they spend and I am guessing an operation like the one in the links I provided aint cheap.

What types of national security programs would you support then? What should the government spend money on? I actually haven't heard you make a case for anything.

Your rhetoric goes way beyond being against bloated military budgets. I'm probably the #3 or #4 libertarian/small government type guy on this board and I wonder sometimes if you are the guy in town who protests the building of every new road as a waste of money (we actually do have a lot of those people in Idaho, that does exist. last month we had people pissed off about the boise police department putting breast cancer awareness decals on police cars. ) I think you have some good points but I think you'd be more persuasive if you could identify something, anything, you think the government does well, or a positive direction they should continue to go in, or some actions that you think they should undertake. Instead it's just opposition to everything that ever happens always. Which makes it seem like the policy and the execution doesn't really matter to you and Ron Paul, it's just the concept of government itself that's offensive. That's why extreme viewpoints aren't very persuasive. Because they're fueled more by raw ideology and anger at systems instead of practical problem solving.

I liken it to a MLB thread. We all agree Miggy is good, Carlos Marmol sucks, and Hamilton is having a shitty year by his standards. Do I have any clue on the specifics of training to be a baseball player or what Marmol could do to right the ship? Absolutely not. Do I know all the specifics of a good GM or bad one? No. I can tell you however who is good, who is in over their heads, and who sucks. I think our country's mindset on civil liberties and policing the world suck. Only in the political thread do any of us think that we are actually qualified to offer up a good solution. We spend a lot of money, a lot more than the rest of the world, and it is leading to all sorts of unforeseen economic issues. Am i qualified to fix it? No. But in my opinion neither is this current congress or current administration.

Really hope that this is a sign of heavy reform of the farm subsidies. I saw a lot of things while working at the USDA that irritated me to no end, mostly related to subsidies. Would love to see some changes, but I'm not holding my breath.

House defeats farm bill amid bipartisan opposition | Fox News

Nope. This was all about gutting food stamps.

Which I'm fine with that as well. No reason food stamps should be in a farm bill. Very little reason to have them at all IMO.

Yeah, fuck people that can't afford food.

Grow a garden, losers.

It was in a farm bill because for a while that was the quid pro quo, the R's get farm subsidies, the D's get food stamps

This is exactly why they aren't taken seriously. They want a world that is black and white, when reality is shades of gray.