I'm celebrating the only two Senators who voted against the "Freedom" Act [1] and supported net neutrality [2]. Both also voted against the "Patriot" Act in 2001, while they served in the House [3]:
Sanders won't win, but it will be nice to be able to vote for someone I don't hate for once. In an ideal world it would be Rand Paul/Bernie Sanders race. Two people who actually believe what they are saying.
Keep on dreaming. Libertarians are notoriously hostile towards former Democrats, when Mike Gravel (famous for reading the Pentagon Papers on the Senate floor) tried to switch from Democratic party to Libertarian for the presidential race in 2008, he was ridiculed for being "too socialist", but when Gary Johnson (former NM governor) ran for president on the Libertarian ticket 4 years later on the exact same platform, he got the full support of the party.
While they may coincide on a few issues, I don't see enough policy overlap between a right-libertarian who is at least as solidly the former as the latter, like Rand, and a democratic socialist, like Sanders. Maybe they both believe what they are saying, but they believe radically different things when it comes to the role and ideal policies of government.
While I really appreciate Rand Paul's efforts against the Patriot Act, I've also seen some crazy talk from him, like the claim that universal health care would lead to slavery. It's fine if you think it's a bad idea, but unhinged rhetoric like that severely undermines your credibility.
I realize that unhinged rhetoric is part of the toxic political culture in the US, and almost all US politicians are guilty of similar bizarre polemic, but from what I've seen, Bernie Sanders actually seems to be a rare exception to this. Might he actually be an honest politician? It's hard to believe one really exists, but he gives me hope.
I thought I heard earlier this week that Sanders voted to block Rand's motion to halt hearing on the bill (so it would expire). Now he voted against it?
That's exactly why that won't ever happen. These laws are named for a reason, the bigger part of which is simply to confuse the ignorant who have not taken the time to look beyond the name.
I actually thought the opposite when I first heard about this act in 2013. I thought it was like the Patriot Act, meaning that the name is actually the opposite of what the bill does.
I love that this keeps coming up now. I posted a potential solution in another story[0] which sounds like it won't work, but during the course of the thread I found out about the Single Subject Amendment PAC[1]. Their mission is to convene a Constitutional convention in order to limit bills in Congress to a single subject (eliminating riders, which is IMO more important than bill names) and, at least judging by the example they cite from Florida's state constitution[2] ensure that deceptive or meaningless rah-rah names cannot be used for bills.
As of January 2015, Florida was the first and only state so far to call for this amendment. Given that 41 state constitutions already have similar provisions in place and it takes only 37 to force a convention, it seems like the biggest stumbling block for national support may simply be a lack of public awareness that the solution's already got some momentum. Hence, this reply.
[2]"Art. III, Section 6 – Every law shall embrace but one subject and matter properly connected therewith, and the subject shall be briefly expressed in the title."
I can't say that I've heard those exact comments either, but in context, it's really hard to voice an opinion that criticizes something named "The Civil Rights Act" or "The Clean Air Act", because a lot of America takes their cue from the political rhetoric of their party.
Using neutral bill names, e.g., HR 625 or SB 1780 would be an upgrade from what we have now.
> Using neutral bill names, e.g., HR 625 or SB 1780 would be an upgrade from what we have now.
In theory, but the names catch on because they're easy to remember and use in conversation. People responded to Heartbleed because it was catchy and easy to remember. CVE-2014-0160 was not.
Asking people to remember what SB1780 is and whether they support it is about as likely to happen as them remembering the CNAME or A record corresponding to a DNS request[0].
Even if we forbade these names from bills, the media would invent them. "Obamacare" was not even the real name for the Affordable Care Act, and was originally a pejorative term, but the media started using it because it was much more distinctive and evocative. It became so widely used that it's now lost much of it's pejorative connotation (you'll even hear Democrats referring to it non-pejoratively).
[0] Remember that the same bill has multiple such numbers (one each for the House and Senate, plus a new one if it's reintroduced in subsequent years, etc., which is not uncommon for many pieces of legislation).
I think Obamacare is still mostly a pejorative in my community - to the point that the minority proponents have recently taken to referring to it as the Affordable Care Act in a sort of rebranding attempt.
The Patriot Act has similarly transformed into a negative, doublespeak term. I'm not surprised the lawmakers felt the need to create a new bumpersticker-named law rather than continuing to edit the old one.
I believe the Daily Show at some point asked people what they thought of Obamacare and what they thought of the Affordable Care Act, and while most people were negative about Obamacare, the very same people were very supportive of the Affordable Care Act.
absolutely not true, those sorts of names have caught on in the past, it's all about what people consider important, not the actual name itself.
you could call the next bill involving abortion "CVE-2014-0160" and I guarantee you people would know it. You'd most likely just hear "bill 0160" or the like, but the point is that it's the contents that make remember the bill, not the name. The name is marketing.
> you could call the next bill involving abortion "CVE-2014-0160" and I guarantee you people would know it
What about the next 50 controversial bills?
Would you remember which one is CVE20140160 and which one is CVE20150240?
It gets hard once there's 4 of them. If you have to deal with 10 of them at once, it's impossible to remember which is which unless you work in the field, at which point you're not the one phased by names like "patriot act", "freedom act" or "isn't it cool to hate on the french act".
Maybe if I say 09f91102 you'll know what that is. But I doubt you know what e83c5163 is.
If you take a look at various discussion forums, where Democrats and Republicans play it out, you'd be surprised.
But note that the argument was not that people will explicitly say "it has Patriot in its name and therefore this law is patriotic", but that it creates a mental image and uses the positive association with the word to frame it as such.
(A similar argument against this kind of naming can of course be found in 1984, with the "Ministry of Peace" etc).
Right choice of words is a common propaganda device. Read Orwell's 1984 for instance, it's enlightening. An other good one: US department of war became US department of "defense".
c'mon, be fair, it's just defending the interests of those really influential in US (sadly, president doesn't seem to be part of that group). and we all know best defense is an attack, right?
> One good step would be to prohibit laws to be named with nice words and acronyms ("Freedom", "Patriot", etc).
Agreed. It's propaganda, and we should question the motives of the legislators. Who are they spinning this for? Shouldn't the bills speak for themselves, and their consituents make up their own minds?
At least some laws used to be named for their sponsors, e.g., the "Nunn–Lugar Act".
Laws named after victims are often pretty bad as well. I assume that anything named (e.g.) "Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel's Law" is probably a bad law until otherwise proven, and for much the same reason. It's an appeal to emotion, not rationality, and the usual tactic is painting any opponent as being pro-terrorism or pro-(whatever genuinely terrible thing happened to Tarquin).
It's from a comedy sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. The bit was giving fictional elections returns wherein candidates representing the Silly Party all had ridiculous names. If I recall correctly, the aforementioned Tarquin was representing the Very Silly Party, whereas Kevin Phillips-BONNGGGG! represented the Slightly Silly Party.
And now for something not completely different.
A more recent and more American equivalent can be found in Key and Peele's East-West Bowl sketches, wherein the collegiate all-star football players reveal names such as "Jammie Jammie-Jammie", "Quiznatodd Bidness", and "Fudge".
> We’ve gone from just killing bad bills to passing bills that protect people’s rights.
By people, do they mean "american people"? I may be wrong but my understanding from Snowden revelations is that the NSA is listening and recording without restriction all conversations from non-US citizen (whereas it was restricted to meta-data for US citizens). I don't know if the freedom act is an improvement for the rest of the world, but I doubt so. It would be nice for our american friends to understand that we value our privacy too.
It's more important that a government can't spy on its own people. Without equal transparency between people and state, there's no way that the people can change the government. Mass surveillance invokes fear in the people to have and share ideas the government doesn't like. I think anything that protects freedom of speech for the American people is still a win for international folk as well.
Disclaimer: I am American and don't believe we will ever have an Internet where we aren't vulnerable to being watched by 'someone.'
yeah, it would be nice, but then they can close their surveillance agencies for good. a bit of hyperbole but let me try here - most american don't give a damn about rest of the world, do they (now this assumption is begging to be proven wrong)
>It would be nice for our american friends to understand that we value our privacy too.
I love how everyone pretends that only the US has spies. Or they say "oh but my country sucks at it so it doesn't matter". The entire West shares intel and double checks each other by espionage. Of course you don't want to condemn the entire West, that would be stupid.
> I love how everyone pretends that only the US has spies.
We're not talking about spies here but about mass surveillance. And if that can reassure you, I wouldn't be any less upset knowing that Norway or Japan openly record all my conversations and stores them until the end of times.
But the thing I find insulting and scary here is that there are no consideration at all in this debate for non-US citizens. Basically, the message there is "sorry guys, what we did was wrong... except when it's about everybody else in the world".
And in the end, everybody suffers from that. What Snowden said in Citizenfour is that the NSA uses the British surveillance system because it has less restriction than
their own concerning americans.
I follow this issue and read a lot about it, and I'm still not sure what powers the NSA has, other federal and state agencies have, under what laws, and which have been restricted.
It would be a valuable public service -- more than all the newspaper articles and press releases -- if someone who knows all that could make a simple table: Agency | Power | Limits | Legal authority
What if your a cup half empty person who looks as this as a failure as now all the people on the fence will have reason to ignore this issue for the next few years baring some kind of new revelations.
Seriously, who in congress is going to be supporting a bill in the next 3 years to cut more powers from the spying apparatus when they can just say "We just did that, it's time to talk about X instead".
I think there's a real difference in emotional impact between finding out your actions at work have been monitored (pretty much expected) and that your calls and emails to friends, family, and donors can be dredged up at will. I think we're starting to see a reaction to the second.
There is a reason that there are a lot more 'spooks' than there are political campaigns right now. There is also a reason there are a lot more mothers who were 'spooks' than there are political campaigns right now.
We've been fighting this fight for 20 years. The lack of progress is unacceptable. The NSA and the government in general have only gotten more and more out of control, more and more aggressive in violating rights.
That the result of Snowden is this pathetic attempt would convince me that government was useless in this current form and that it has totally failed- if I weren't already convinced of that seeing the past 20 years of legislation. (I've been watching more than 20 years, but the gloves really began to come off during the Clinton administration when he banned gay marriage for no good reason (he could have simply pocket vetoed the bill.) )
My how our standards are low, and that makes this country increasingly a joke- a parody of itself, commonly summed up with the phrase "MERICA". It's not funny, it's tragedy.
Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) & Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
[1] http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c...
[2] http://www.baldwin.senate.gov/press-releases/us-senator-tamm... & http://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/to-protect-...
[3] http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2001/roll398.xml