US bars friends over Twitter joke

Eh, I'm not sure I'd call him "serious". He's definitely pretty good on some civil liberty issues. Rather less so if you happen to be female, non-white, or gay. Even if that wasn't the case, his understanding of economics is sufficiently loony as to exclude him from serious consideration, at least in my view.

In any case, a belief in civil liberties shouldn't even be a discrete political position; it should be the bedrock on which all political positions are founded. When one candidate defines themselves as "pro-liberty" -- as opposed to all those other guys -- the game is already lost. Should they win power, they'll need to claim extraordinary powers in order to reinstate "liberty" -- undermining democratic institutions in the process, and thus the actual mechanisms that guarantee liberty.

In fact this is more or less exactly what happened with both Bush and Obama, and I'm pretty sure that the same thing would happen with Paul. His message is: "I will give you liberty" -- not "I will ensure that the institutional checks and balances which act as guarantors of liberty are maintained and reinforced". In fact he rarely shows anything other than contempt for those institutions. Therefore I do not believe he would be a friend of liberty.

This story really shocked me. That's a tweet I could easily imagine myself sending. I would seriously think twice before making a trip to America now. And with the recent stories about the FBI developing software to monitor social media I can only imaging this getting worse.

I'm not quite sure what happened to the Bill of Rights, perhaps it's been confused with the bundle of toilet paper..

Another thought occurs to me, does this along with the signing of NDAA mean that you can be indefinitely detained for something that you tweet?

I don't think you get the point here. This story is not about US denying entry to two delayed teenagers wanting to get drunk on holiday. It's about US customs looking like idiots over what is obviously a joke.

You're talking about how it's perfectly fine for a country to ask you questions and make sure you don't intend to break any laws while you're visiting. And how US won't suffer from a lack of tourists and immigrants. I'm telling you that's not the problem here: the problem is we're more and more inclined to look at Americans as idiots by extension. I checked twice while reading the article that it's not on Onion - I did not expect the first comment here to be from somebody saying basically "we don't care about 'them foreigners, they shouldn't come if they don't like it".

Of course, we don't know all the facts. I'm inclined to guess that when the customs officials talked to them they found independent reasons to deny entry, but either they kept them confidential or simply they wouldn't make such a good story.

I apologize for using the word "idiot". It is not meant as a personal insult, but to express what this article makes non-americans feel about this kind of stories. I definitely do not mean to use it as an insult here, so please do not take it as such.