I'm unreserved in my support for Snowden getting a blanket pardon. He should literally get a medal. He's the American of the decade as far as I'm concerned.
Well, that one is easy: Bill Gates (Foundation). Literally saving millions of people's lives on your own initiative and out of your own pocket. Amazing.
Whenever I think about how to contribute to the world, nothing I can think of holds a candle to the effect I would have if I somehow improved the effectiveness of the Gates Foundation by like 1%.
That may be true, but there's a long tail to this too. Most of us can't help optimize the Gates Foundation's activities, but all of us doing our own little bit can still be a great force for societal improvement.
Easy: Dick Cheney. Despite extreme opposition - both domestic and international - only Cheney had the courage, the conviction... nay, the vision! - to usher humanity into a new age of security and freedom.
Californians need to unite to vote Dianne Feinstein out of office. We can't be the worlds technology leader and keep re-electing the biggest proponent of using that technology for government surveillance.
Without serious campaign finance reform, I'm not sure how likely that is. I'm all for it, just don't see it happening, sadly. The chances of someone on the right beating here are very low, but they're better than someone on the right. Sad state of affairs out here.
The barrier to entry for a non-incumbent candidate is so high because of the amount of money incumbents are able to raise. Therefore, a new candidate entering to pose a real challenge is pretty unlikely, and it shouldn't be.
That's how partisan politics works. You demonize the other party, its members and the message that it has chosen to exploit the fears of its constituents, and you paint your own side as crusaders, and the message that it has chosen to exploit the fears of its own constituents becomes the sacred word.
Now you have little freedom to constructively criticize your own side, because that unavoidably strengthens the other side. Blasphemy to accuse your own side of incompetence, intentional corruption or malevolence.
It's the last remaining area we have where we can respectably hate another human being.
> Great to see the Democrats out in front on this one!
This is one of the few issues where there is no "us vs. them" -- where right-wing libertarians and left-wing civil libertarians actually agree.
And if enough of us could learn to drop the snark, this issue might even inspire the most liberal Democrats and most conservative Republicans to work together for a change.
Did you watch the rally to restore sanity?
Did you watch Jon Stewart's appearance on the original Crossfire?
It's not one side or the other that's the problem, or even that all politicians are the problem. It's that we as a people cannot stop blaming each other long enough to get anything done. We need less snark, less blame, and more people working to build bridges. Dwelling on the partisanship doesn't change things.
You are making the assumption that the people involved actually want to work together to make the world a better place, rather than take what they can get from a situation.
When someone spends their life dissembling, having someone call them on it to their face on national television is a tiny step in the right direction.
IME he is pretty much worshipped by the libertarian crowd, but not taken seriously in the mainstream. His son Rand Paul seems to be taken more seriously, but libertarians seem to have extremely mixed opinions of him, since he is more of a pragmatist than his father (which they interpret as compromising on core values). Note: I am not a libertarian, but I have many friends who are deeply involved with the movement, so this is my rough view from afar.
Like I said, I have no bone in the fight, but your response pretty much illustrates my point.
Not to get too into the weeds, but it sounds like you would fall onto the side of the spectrum where Ron Paul is also seen as an "apologist" of sorts. I know several libertarians who also fall into this camp, and would view Ron Paul as "better-than-Rand-but-no-Rothbard" type.
For what it's worth I respect the libertarian point of view and find it fascinating, despite disagreeing with some of the basic premises (but that's where the fun debates are).
First, he's not as savvy at manipulating the media with soundbytes as people like John McCain and Newt Gingrich. He always has a provocative answer to questions, though, so he's a regular on some news shows.
Second, his supporters are extemely loyal, but he's not that influential in his own party. In Republican presidential primaries, he rarely rose above 10% of the vote. His supporters lean libertarian and haven't traditionally been able to elect their candidates like the social conservatives and business conservatives have. He's probably not in the top 20 most influential people in his own party. Just off the top of my head, he's behind Limbaugh, Hannity, McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, O'Reilly, Perry, Cruz, Rubio, Gingrich, Santorum, Jindal, Rand Paul (his son), and Cornyn. He's probably also less influential than folks most people have never heard of like John Thune, Jim Lankford, Roy Blunt, Jan Brewer, Reince Preibus, Rick Scott, Sam Brownback, and John Kasich.
Third, his newsletters from the 80's and 90's are pretty racist and nasty. (The newsletters called Martin Luther King Jr. a pedophile among other things.) He has said lately that he didn't write or review those newsletters and has disavowed them.
Presumably the files will be opened at some point. Is there anyone here willing to wager that they will give any indication that MLK was a pedophile? How young are we talking? How much will you wager?
Do I think MLK was? No. Do I think there are secrets in his files that would be embarrassing to him and his kin? Oh sure, there are no saints, and everyone has a couple of skeletons. The assertion in this thread what that he was a pervert - that does not inherently equal pedophile it likely means pervert by the standard of the time - which by todays standards would be merely kinky.
He isn't because he often raises issues which aren't "on the agenda". So he'll make statements for instance about returning to the gold standard, or getting rid of all overseas military bases. These are not only radical suggestions, but they're also not things being discussed in the "national debate". So he comes off as not only radical, but out of touch with what people find important.
There is generally a feeling that Congress should be addressing issues that the people are concerned about. How, do you determine what concerns the people? You look through the insane prism of the media.
PS: Full disclosure, I supported Ron Paul in both his runs for president.
He doesn't provide the offensive soundbytes that the media wants; his points tend to provoke actual thought, which is the like poison to the contemporary American voter.
"taken 50% seriously" might be the best way to describe Ron Paul, since for every thought-provoking thing he says, you have to ignore some quite silly (to most people) thing (Like completely defunding 5 cabinet departments, or his dislike of federal trampling of rights, but complete acceptance of state trampling of rights).
His fanbase is among some of the strangest.I kept on hearing variants of "I voted for Obama in 2008 but would love to vote Ron Paul 2012".
> "taken 50% seriously" might be the best way to describe Ron Paul, since for every thought-provoking thing he says, you have to ignore some quite silly (to most people) thing
That's his big problem. For example, on the problem of health care affordability, he had a very interesting suggestion. Change the income tax deduction for medical expenses to an income tax credit. This was a shockingly progressive/left-wing suggestion. It is essentially proposing that, at least for people with income tax, that the government pays for your health care up to the amount of your income tax. Most people would still need to buy insurance, but they could get by with a high deductible policy to cover catastrophic situations. For most of their health care, the tax credit would be enough.
And in the same speech to Congress where he tossed out that idea, he blamed the high costs of health care on our focus on science-based medicine. We need, according to Paul, to make it easier for homeopaths and other quacks to practice, so the competition can drive the cost down.
He doesn't like the federal government trampling _states_ rights. And I am unsure of what you mean by acceptance of states trampling rights? Could you elaborate?
The chipping away at state sovereignty happened because states kept using that sovereignty to oppress black people. The post-Civil War amendments were a huge smack down, because they set the stage for binding the states to the Bill of Rights, which had previously only applied to the federal government. That had a big impact not because states couldn't say violate the freedom of speech anymore. States already had similar clauses in their own Constitutions. No, the real significance of that was it elevated the federal courts to a position of supervising state compliance with federal rights.
From there, Supreme Court precedent told the states they couldn't keep blacks from voting, couldn't segregate them, couldn't ban interracial marriage, etc. Every time the states tried to oppress this or that group, they put their sovereignty on the line and the Supreme Court took some of it away. Consider when the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, took a stand against federal court ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama. President LBJ sent federal troops down to Alabama to enforce integration. From a state autonomy standpoint, it was a huge blow, as the federal government asserted its supremacy. The governor of Alabama was forced to step aside on the property of a state university as National Guardsmen escorted black students inside against his will and that of Alabama voters: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/race/061263race.... This continued through the 1960's and 1970's. The state courts were put in their place when the federal courts started aggressively supervising their procedures, to deal with their tendency to fail to give fair trials to black defendants.
Federalism is dead because the states pissed away all of their political capital trying to oppress people.
That's an very good interpretation of the 60s, and I get behind it 100%. Regrettably though, that in enforcing segregation -- for which segregation is of course is not-discretionary, because they're government institutions -- we also got the federal government's abuse of the interstate commerce clause in applying the same standards that go for government institutions to privately owned businesses.
Any thoughts on how effective Kansas' proposed "allowed discrimination of gays" for private business owners will hold up, if enacted? My thought is that, despite there being a ton of bad precedent regarding the Commerce Clause, private business owners should not be required to obey the 10th amendment, just as Facebook isn't obligated to respect my First amendment right, though I find it curious that they put the 10th up against the 1st, such that only those of a "sincerely held faith" may choose to discriminate, as I think it should be allowed for all private business owners.
A couple of the things he considers to be the federal government trampling states rights are actually the federal government stopping the states from trampling individual rights.
For instance, according to the Supreme Court, the states are bound by the part of the First Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religion.
Paul thinks that establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religion should be a state issue. He tried two or three times to introduce federal legislation that would have stripped the federal courts (including the Supreme Court) from hearing cases in this area, which would de facto make that part of the First Amendment no longer apply to state and local government.
He has a similar belief in regard to the privacy rights that the Supreme Court has found implicit in the Constitution. His bills that tried to gut the First also strip federal jurisdiction over any case involving a right of privacy.
If his bill had passed, it would have actually made it legal for states to establish or restrict religions, and it would have brought back into force sodomy laws, bans on birth control, and other such laws that were found Unconstitutional due to violating privacy rights.
Most states, I believe, have prohibitions against establishment of religions, or restrictions on the free exercise of religion, so the damage would be limited in that regard. The first state everyone thinks of is Utah, thinking it would establish Mormanism as the state religion, but Utah is one of the states whose Constitution has a clause similar to the First Amendment. Texas could be a problem. It has a provision in its Constitution that holders of political office must acknowledge the existence of a God, and so in theory an atheist would not be able to legally hold office in Texas if Paul had his way.
Ron Paul's idea, I believe, is to allow states to make the mistakes. Citizens can then "vote with their feet," moving from crappy states to better states. You end up with fifty laboratories experimenting with various policies.
The idea is that he gives few shits about what states do to their residents, so long as the Federal government does not trample on states.
The counterpoint is typically along the lines of "well since he is in the federal politics game, what he thinks about how states can treat people is irrelevant".
I don't know about that. IME Noam Chomsky is pretty much respected by anyone who knows who he is. Granted, that is a relatively small percentage of the public. The only people I have ever heard bash on Chomsky are philosophers who disagree with very specific philosophical views that he holds (innate grammatical knowledge comes to mind).
More seriously than he used to be. The tide changed a bit when he raised millions of dollars during the 2008 primary elections but election victories didn't quite follow.
No, but because he opposes a lot of things Americans have bipartisan consensus on. He rejects resl politik, the idea that America needs to intervene aggressively abroad to maintain its interests. Democrats will oppose particular interventions, like Iraq, but as Kosovo and Syria demonstrate, they don't really reject the basic idea of America as the world's police.
He had very different ideas about the division between federal and state power than the mainstream. Americans are more or less over the idea of federalism, as demonstrated by the popularity of Social Security, Medicare, highways, etc. On both sides, they mostly just want the federal government to tell states what to do. So when Ron Paul comes along opposing things like the Department of Education, he gets viewed as wildly out of the mainstream.
A (maybe) small but passionate segment of the population.
I doubt it's as small as you think. He won Iowa (although that wasn't made clear until after the elections). He did well in several of the caucuses.
Watching Ron run for president opened my eyes to the vote corruption that takes place in our country. Especially in the caucasus.
One example I recall is how Ron was clearly going to win a caucus and so the majority of the other republicans decided to group together so that votes could vote for a coalition instead of letting Ron win. That was strange. (This was in 2008, I forget the state).
Then, in Nevada, where Paul won the majority of the delegates, Romney supporters formed their own state party, called “Team Nevada”. The RNC then bypassed the official state party in order to organize for Romney and send all funds to Team Nevada.
In Maine, they cancelled the vote due to a snowstorm, when only 84% of the votes were counted and Romney was leading by 200 votes. Of course, they never counted Washington county, which was Paul's strongest in 2008.
The point is, the corruption is never ending. For that reason, you really have no idea how many people support Ron Paul (and the ideas of the constitution) if you are guessing from votes and media reports.
In straight-up primaries, Ron Paul did fairly poorly. In conventions and caucuses where his supporters could show up en masse and dominate the proceedings he tended to do better. For example, he came in fourth (~11% of the vote) in the Minnesota primary when all Republicans had to do was show up and vote. When it came time for the caucuses and conventions, his supporters showed up for multi-hour parliamentary stand-offs that resulted in him winning 91% of the delegates. There was plenty of bitterness all around after that.
> Of course Snowden has assisted al Qaeda. It's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
That's definitely the official party line but there's no reason to believe it's true. For a decade before his death there was a constant stream of news stories talking about how he and other top al Qaeda leaders used disposable phones, had trusted family members hand-courier messages, used code/slang to make messages harder to understand, changed locations frequently, etc. because they knew that the US had the ability to intercept their messages, as did anyone who had read a newspaper or watched a movie made in the last few decades.
The only news in the Snowden leaks was that these capabilities were being used on such a wide scale and that the NSA was willing to weaken everyone's security to make such large-scale wiretapping earlier. That came as a surprise to many in the tech industry because it was both risky and unnecessary for traditional targeted intercepts but it shouldn't have been for anyone who'd been paying attention in the 90s when things like the Clipper chip or other mandated government key access schemes.
The lengths that Osama Bin Ladin had gone to, completely avoiding electronic communication, speaks to how much is already known or presumed about the NSA's capabilities.
Snowden just told the everyman what the shadowy figures already knew.
But in all honesty, the whole "aiding terrorists" line of reasoning for national security™ is but a mere distraction for the general population used on state adversaries as they pop up in ad-hoc fashion, because when the state does it, the distracted population doesn't care:
"Supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have been getting U.S. military contracts, and American officials are citing “due process rights” as a reason not to cancel the agreements, according to an independent agency monitoring spending."[0]
If your cannabis was grown in Mexico or the California Redwood forests then it's very possible that the money you spent went to drug cartel terrorists. And yes, hanging corpses from overpasses sounds like terrorism to me.
If your cannabis was grown by a nice American farmer then you're good. Hard to know how you can know that, though.
What is Snowden's plan if he isn't granted clemency/pardon by the US and his asylum by Russia ins't renewed? Does he face the force of the US gov't, does he continue to run, or are other countries offering asylum (assuming he can safely travel there)?
While I support the stated idea, this petition seems weird because I can sign it with a throwaway email from guerilla mail- are we sure this isn't really just an email harvester in disguise?
Legally, yes. But it does demonstrate the will of the people. Next election I will vote for any candidate that will promise to pardon Snowden if elected. Somehow I am guessing my vote will be wasted, but so be it.
