Bad day for Democracy
 

After this wiretap "compromise", i am outraged. They should have to answer for their illegal wiretapping, and are not in any positions to make deals..

Outraged at the weak kneed Dems, esp. Pelosi. Who is she to say impeachment is off the table? A lot of people are outraged. Thanks to DK(Kucinich) for his relentless efforts on that.

Also, sad that on the heals of the above, the big oils are rigging up Iraq, with no bid contracts, to boot. They'll be mainipulating things for much longer and have more control on our oil dependancy, thwarting advancement of other energy sources et..

Sad, sad day, friends, for Democracy. :(

But why is today particularly sad for our constitutional federal republic?

Not to make too much of it, but if want to see democracy truly being fucked over, look at Zimbabwe.

if u are serious, read above again. :)

I don't see anything that specifies this taking place in one day. Do you have a news link?

I can see "sad time for democracy" or "sad month for democracy" but a day is a 24 hour period. Really I was expecting some news links instead of liberal moaning without them.

I guess i assumed if one responds to the thread they may know whats up...or want to know, which links would have been good for. A Bad day may not be a 24 hr period, per se. The wiretapping was today, and oil contracts should be any day now. So bad few days/week/period for Democracy. You have to be very specifc with conservatives, i guess, in general, or else they take things off point, esp. when in such states of denial.

You're calling me conservative because I wanted to know what you were referring to? Wow.

Well you know it was the main headline in the Wall Street Journal today.

I'll maintain what I've been saying, this Congress is being blackmailed by the neocons who have have negative information on them. Its the only explanation that makes sense. Its an old tactic to create a "honey pot", typically an attractive young person who seduces the representative, and then gets it all on tape. The more sordid scenario includes drugging the representative unconcscious, and then killing a prostitute and having the representative wake up and freak out, and then the neocon cleans up the situation, while keeping a film of it


It is shameful. If only the public would respond by demanding real encryption. But they won't - america has cooked their brains by unrelenting cell phone use.

i think it's time to call in the pharmacy for refills

Corruption in government is a constant everywhere, and Orwell's nightmare is a long time coming with the advent of wiretapping immunity.

Besides, people are in fact very pissed about it; it seems people still don't realize that the Bush administration could care less. What would you like us to do, blog about it? Picket the White House? I'm sure that would give congress something to think about.

Eh, is not like I didn't say this when it happened. Get over it hag.

I guess complaining about breeches of law is a liberal moan. Wow. Anyways, did u really write to moan about using a 24 hr period?

blah blah blah... i'm on a diet and your name is making me hungry.

u know? the u doesnt make u look very convincing. and u are arguing pointlessly about what the meaning of "day" is.

but anyway, i'm still reading all the discussion & commentary before i make some absolute pronouncement of the truth of the u-niverse. trying to understand what was gained & what was lost in this so-called "compromise".

Dont let u get ya down man.

I expected some snide remarks here and there about anything, anything not pertaining to the real story. but some of ya are just on the rag..somethin.

argue your case instead of getting bogged down in shitty little discussions is my point.

im trying to understand today's bill, and you're not helping.

Well, bringing up the short acronym u is hardly the discussion. oh man. Immunity man. Immunity to telecoms for illegal wiretapping, and therefore, no way to hold admin accountable. That's it.

My opinion is that a) unless you're actually doing something wrong, this will not affect Americans anymore than the average fucked-up scandal could, and b) it's not really something that we can fix by caring. One person can make a difference in a lot of things, but this isn't one of them. Not right now, at least.

Thank u acousticrock87. Thats a great handle, by the way. Indifference allows this stuff to go down tho.

but ultimately the government is the one responsible for this shit-- the telecoms take their marching orders from the government. barring some negligence or abuse, why should they be held accountable for cooperating with the commander guy?

it's a grey area at best-- i think the telecoms would be made scapegoats while the real culprits laugh their way to the bank.

I agree, but it's a pick-your-battles type thing. While America is still quite free, it's not really in a state of easy change. Partly due to the president, and partly due the corruption that's always been there. Voting works, freedom of speech doesn't always mean freedom to effect change. When they put it on the ballot, I'll vote for it (or against it; you know what I mean). But I feel pretty strongly that there's nothing we can do right now about this kind of thing. I dunno. Call me disillusioned, maybe.

They should have all been like Qwest and denied spying. Its their problem but ultimately the admins. By having the suits against the telephone companies it brings out the "well they, the admin, told us its ok response" and forces officials to answer for it. It wasn't ok, even during wartime, the most important time to follow all laws to prevent unnec. power grabs. And u know, ok, you know, that these guys first enemy is progressives. They are spying not only for terror. I don't beleive that for a second after Plame and everything else.

it pisses me off that they think they have the right to invade my privacy, but honestly i don't really give a rat's ass. the government has never done shit for me and it's not any better (more likely it's worse) anywhere else in the world.

and no, i'm not going to vote. i was, but then i thought about it for a bit and i don't really care.
to obama's credit he's much more personable than john mccain.

yeah i know that, that's what bugs me. it's all ran by a secret court.

but while this is a useful device to prosecute, i think it doesn't necessarily have a legal foundation of its own.

im trying to understand what the democrats got in return though, if anything, and what kind of fucking pussies they are.

unfortunately, work is interfering with my reading of the newspapers.

Here is a decent overview. Basically, the admin got there immunity, which was holding them up and allowed them to just revise the laws, and not revisit the initial illegal wiretapping. No acknowledgment or answer to why their fight on the war on terror means u can cite special laws to wiretap with no clearance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/wa...20fisacnd.html

did you mean representative democracy? because there is no such thing as democracy in the world, it is a myth.

You act like I find liberal moaning to be reprehensible. I don't. I do it often myself. Anyways when people say something like "bad day for whatever" they don't mean a bad day for them but like a bad day as in something happened. Just as I would it was a bad day for democracy when Bush was re-elected. I figured there was a specific even that you would like to share. Apparently there isn't. It's just a bad day FOR YOU, and a normal day in a democracy that has been have a bad DECADE.

try a bad two hundred and fifty years.

Now if you didn't hound this all to yourself like some kind of less-apathetic-than-thou twat, we could have gotten somewhere.

Hah!

This is nothing. Be glad you don't live in enlightened Swededn.


The law was passed. :(

No. No, I meant Democracy. Democracy is a system of government by which political sovereignty is retained by the people and either exercised directly by citizens,* or through their elected representatives*.

But if you mean a simple, every vote counts the same, and that is used as the sole baromoter, hell, we would be out of Iraq by now, and Bush out of office by now.

What are you talking about? There were specific events that made it a bad day for Democracy. You sound like a strange cat, hung up on the most irrelavant of things.

Well, like i said, i expected people to know about it. It was big news, really. But i guess its something that people that are more politically aware would only know instead. I think there's a lot of apathy towards Bush's trampling of the const. It happens so freq that he's giving the finger to laws in general, whether it by by witholding info, editing reports and the like, that it comes and goes w/o much notice.

People don't like people getting on a soapbox, or the appearance thereof, which i think is what's happening with this thread. That, and they don't like the message. So instead, they argue the semantics of a 24 hour day, and seek to minimize the travesty by comparing it to situations around the world that are worse, which only serves up more indifference.

But like i said, bad day for democracy.

so anyway apparently this law puts a leash on El Presidente in all areas except for wiretapping for a week.

so it's good in that it puts a leash on him but bad in that it gives him room to play with the lives of others.

that's a fucking weak tea.