Isn't there a site that tracks politicians' promises and what has been done while in the office? It'd be a great tool to weed out the fraud.
Words get easily forgotten in a couple of years. This would make them count.
Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
191–200 of 321 posts
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#192Well, technically, if it's cellphones, then Obama is using Warrantless Wirelesstaps... so he's all good!
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they made what they thought was the best choice among the only two viable choices. The biggest problem in the US, maybe the world, is that we don't have instant run-off voting to allow competition in federal gov't. We're trapped by this one oversight of the Founding Fathers.
Or they made what they thought was the best choice among the only two viable choices. This is a wrong methodology. If you don't accept them - don't make such choice at all. There were other alternatives, but the current voting system prevents anything from competing with the two dominant parties.
Logic dictates making the best choice over not choosing.
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy , such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person a…
It could still be regarded as a failure even if it is not a breach (and I hold no position on whether it is or isn't a breach). Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (understandably) but they were clearly trying trying to impose limits on the power of the state and I think the idea that the government should be allowed to track all of everyone'…
> Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
But they did have communications and publications, yet they didn't put anything in the Constitution suggesting you have a right to privacy with regards to those things. And it's not like bank records, insurance records, etc, didn't exist back then. In the founder's day, the police could have asked a barkeep for his records to see when you came and went. Why is it suddenly so "abhorrent" when the government asks AT&T for the same sort of information (i.e. not your information, but information AT&T keeps about you)?
The issue here is that all of these data sources are third parties.
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
But just voting to vote is useless. People seem to have the mentality that you pick the lesser of two evils, which is BS. I'm not going to vote for somebody if I don't feel like they are completely up for the job. I'm not going to vote for a 3rd party just so they can get funding because guess what, this years candidate may be great but the funding would be for the next round and who knows who they will have then.
What does not voting accomplish?
Nothing, by itself. Hopefully angry non-voting citizens will reach out politically by other means.
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#196What does any of this have to do with "hacker news"?
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#197I dont understand why more United States citizens aren't voting for the underdogs. In the last election, it was possible for the greens to "win" . If you want to protest, instead of not voting, vote for the least likely to win. It makes a statistical analysis of the "protest votes" possible.. Under some (eg, normal curves) statistical models, you assume that the non-sampled closely resemble the sampled (with some level of confidence). By not voting you're basically saying "dont worry, I am very much like the 'norm'" . By voting for the underdog you're helping to elucidate the fact that you are not represented by the main parties.
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#198At some level this has to bring up the issue of voting age into the fold. I'm sorry but I know few 18 year olds who could be trusted to run their lives, much less make sensible, informed and intelligent voting decisions. They simply don't have enough education and life experience to understand what they are voting for. Is there an argument for producing better vote quality by raising the minimum voting age to somewhe…
And I know lots of older people who vote for what I consider stupid reasons, they vote for who there church tells them to, or because they are being lied to or can't understand how taxes work.
But certainly the most enthusiastic voters to me are the young ones. They are the ones who would actually protest, and put themselves in danger for what they really believe in.
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#199Chhi... Compare it with the words and deeds of Abraham Lincoln 250 years ago: "If slavery isn't wrong, then nothing is wrong." [1][2] There is a stark change in quality of leaders available today. There is so little correlation between words spoken and execution. [1] http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trt027.html [2] http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/ltoh1.jpg
Actually Lincoln was a pragmatist and had to deal with prioritizing things accordingly. On August 22, 1862, just a few weeks before signing the Proclamation and after he had already discussed a draft of it with his cabinet in July, he wrote a letter in response to an editorial by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune which had urged complete abolition. Lincoln differentiates between "my view of official duty"—that i…
That's a very open statement, and I wish modern politicians were as accomodating to questions like that.
Re: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
George Carlin is (was) a right fool. The whole problem is that people don't have enough control over the government. Not voting only allows those who would have control over you to have more power. Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote.
Is it the case that people don't have enough control over the government? As far as I can tell, we have exactly the government we want, or at least exactly the government you might expect to get in a compromise between rural middle America, suburbanites, christian conservatives, and urban yuppies. The people who strongly oppose the security measures taken after 9/11 are in the minority. They were part of Obama's coal…
What I like is that people don't know what surveillance means. it's a french word, and being french myself, I happen to know that it means to oversee, to control, as in work, or to monitor, as in a medical patient. I think people think of surveillance as simply passive, but in French, it has an active component, to rectify wrong events. To me, NSA surveillance means NSA monitoring for the purpose of control.