At last, three key provisions of the Patriot Act failed to pass the vote for an extension. The provisions included FBI wiretaps, obtaining library and business records, and surveillance on "lone wolves." Even more surprising, however, is seeing Tea Partiers voting against the bill. Good riddance to this abusive measure.And now, The Melvins and Jello Biafra:
I added labels. That picture of Shrub is creepy. While the Tea Party has its faults, to put it mildly, they are closer to true conservatism than Bush ever was, so they will do some good things, like voting against intrusive government. My big question is where the f*ck were these people when Shrub was hacking away at our rights and running up the debt?
ReplyDeleteAh, labels. I knew I forgot something as my netbook's battery was running dry.
ReplyDeleteSadly, no.
ReplyDeletehttp://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/02/the_tea_party_didnt_kill_the_p.html
The Patriot Act was not just a Bush thing many people on the other side of the aisle were for it too. Was it an overreach sure it was. something bad happened and society does what it does best. One demands why it happened like it shouldn't have happened. Well for the past 10 years our abilities to prevent things like that have crippled. The 90's killed our national defense and intelligence organizations. We had barely any capability which you think we would have realized when in the middle of the 90's we had to OUTSOURCE government operations in Bosnia to private companies because we lacked the ability as a government to do those operations.
ReplyDeleteSo now society wants change so guess what happens we get radical and pass some really dumb laws. we go from being stripped down to now on steroids. Over reaction you see it all the time. Then people take anything and everything out of context as they fight about it.
Now the deficit as said in another article of yours isn't a big deal our debt to income ratio is still good however it's something to get people excited about to get out to vote for some person who is going to fix it all. The 90's were an interesting time the dotcom bubble which when burst did not really lead to a recession but a rapid change of investment to real estate do to relaxing banking laws from 97-03. Clinton had a vision everyone would own their own home great vision bad execution like so many other things this also began an economic slowdown because money was not longer moving but tied up in Real Estate and for an economy to thrive money has to move. We also had to rebuild our intel and military and hire people back that we fired in the 90's. We had to pay for two wars because our sources said and intel said we are going to be attacked again. So if someone said martians were going to attack it was deemed credible all intel was deemed credible and anything HUMINT (Human Intelligence)related was GOLD which turned out to be lead sprayed with gold paint. Which a more robust Foreign Intelligence Service or one from 1988 at least would have been able to discern the difference. However did the Patriot Act do any good in the end we will see in 25years when we can finally read all the information but I doubt it nothing that a little extra leg work couldn't have gotten by more legal means.