Live version of an unreleased song. St. Lucia is emerging as a somehow relevant 80’s sounding band.
-
Krugman and I… agree?
If Paul Krugman and I can agree on something, we’re probably right about whatever that thing is.
-
Christie and Booker
How can a conservative Chris Christie and a very liberal Cory Booker both be comfortably cruising to victory by a large margin in the same electorate in New Jersey? Does this show the power of charisma and that the public largely doesn’t care about policy as much as leaders that they trust and feel are accountable? Or does this simply show the power of independents who break largely for Christie and Booker?
-
Limited government
“I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” he said in a speech then. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.”
-President Obama in 2007
-
Limited government
If the executive branch is so vast that President Obama can’t be expected to know about all of these scandals, there’s an even bigger issue at stake here. The government is too big to be managed by the systems that we have in place. This transcends institutional incompetence and gets into a grand old American battle about the size of government, and in the wake of all of these scandals, it seems that big government’s advocates are the best case against it.
-
New York Times says Obama “lost all credibility”
This is a big deal. When the New York Times editorial board says that President Obama has “lost all credibility” on the issue of surveillance, he’s definitely not in good shape.
-
NSA sees all
So essentially the American public is subpoena’d all the time when they’re online according to the Washington Post. It’s really chilling that some companies are denying knowledge of this entire program and that lawmakers were oath-bound to not talk about PRISM when the law enabling it came up for review last year. This is very big brother-esque and just doesn’t seem right. If there are suspicious individuals out there, government can get a subpoena with probable cause and get information that way, but this entire program just assumes guilt and gives the government broad access to floods of information that simply make our right to privacy laughable.
Salutary Neglect 