Back during the Iraq war, we were introduced to the mercenary private contractors who got paid several times what the same job description in the US military paid. These contracts, often offered without bids, were supposedly how free market people do government. Privatize what you can, cut everything else was how conservatism saw government. I think of this as strip mining the public fisc.

Apparently, this is what Mr. Snowden was part of. Today I read a report that 500,000 of these “contractors” have access to the wiretaps.

Now this is a bit of a problem for me.

I take our security seriously and I take our democratic institutions seriously. But the idea that there is a group of security 1%ers (if true) that can wiretap folks bothers me not because they’re part of the government (there has never been similar outrage about, say, Google and what it could do) but because they are just too many.

Out of a group that large, a significant number will use this not just for chasing terrorists, but for helping out our enemies and for personal reasons. To settle personal scores or win custody battles with their exes.

I don’t share the paranoid reaction to the government being able to get a warrant and look for certain information. That seems very much in line with our Constitution and laws, even if it ends up looking different than some people expect. But I don’t expect that the government can then distribute that information to whomever it pleases, and I don’t think that is reasonable either.

Of yesterday: who would you rather have deciding what’s kept secret? Some 29 year old Randroid hipster and his versions of freedom or our elected government? Maybe in some cases, we need whistleblowers, but you’d better be right. In this case, no illegal activity has been revealed. So, he broke the law on the authority of his own ideals. If an Islamist does the same thing, what would we think?

As for the whole “now the terrorists just won’t use e-mails” thing, I hope no one who says that ever locks their car doors, because some car thieves can break in anyway.

In some democracies, the elected representatives have supremacy. In the UK or Israel, there is no law that the parliament can’t enact. There’s no court that can strike down an act of parliament and no president that can veto it.

In our system, there are certain limits set forth in the Constitution that are determined by nine judges who are appointed by the elected president and confirmed by elected senators. Which system is better? I can’t really say.

There are no prophets in our system. No oracles. No divine decrees.

If a law is passed by the government and declared constitutional by the courts, however, there is still a further check: the ballot box. In fact, I would submit that most elections are determined by issues that don’t relate to unconstitutional acts by the government.

This is our system of laws.

But what to think about the latest surveillance scandals? So many people are claiming that their “rights” are being violated that it’s too hard to count them. Liberal columnists, after admitting that these programs are legal and unlikely to be interfered with by the courts, also lament that the public is not more outraged.

What do you call a form of government where a small elite gets to determine what is legal and what is not despite the will of the people or its elected officials? I don’t know, but, according to civil libertarians, it’s some kind of freedom.

It has apparently not occurred to these folks that the public’s lack of concern may be well founded. It’s not that the public is always right, but it’s wrong a lot less often than the pinheads at Slate think, and in many of the cases that it is wrong it’s wrong or rightness is irrelevant. You may hate people who watch The Real Housewives, but your whole mantra of rights is a disturbing hypocrisy if you don’t allow those people their own rights, including the right to have a “wrong” opinion.

Many people think Obamacare is unconstitutional. Some people think drug criminalization is too. But unless we want everyone to have their own private law (ie anarchy), someone has to make a determination. Lacking an interactive public God to answer our queries, we have people. And many if not most times these people do so according to their agendas and sometimes these agendas are overtly political and ideological themselves. They aren’t perfect.

My response to the imperfection in the system of judges is to make sure better people become judges. Better people become judges when better people are elected to appoint and confirm them.

Democracy is messy. It needs procedural safeguards to avoid mob rule. But that system is better than a bunch of thinktank elitists telling us what’s good for us.

Greenwald, who was a pro-Iraq war, Heritage Foundation hack before he decided he could become a kooler kid by attacking Bush, has always had a hard on for Obama.Every time Obama didn’t live up what the Internet expected of him, Greenwald was there to kick him.

Part of the reason I’m don’t think much of this “scandal” is because I’m not really all that surprised it’s going on. Another part of the reason is that, well, it’s legal. What Bush was doing was without warrants. It was illegal.

Having a judge look over a warrant is much more due process than is required of Presidents to launch a nuclear strike in this country, yet we act like 1984 is upon us. Meh. Most people think there are absolute limits to what our government can do and that everything else is unconstitutional. That’s simply incorrect both as a matter of law and practicality. But it is what people think. People think “freedom of speech” means Sarah Palin can slander people on TV and can’t be fired for it, and can’t even have her platform taken away. It doesn’t.

zzzzzz

Tiresome AP hack Ron Fournier, who has carried so much Republican water the fact alone that he now uses the Bush era to attack Obama says it all, claims we are in the “Bush-Obama” era with an “unprecedented” decline of civil liberties.

Unprecedented? Either this fool has a short memory or is ignorant of history. Most of these civil liberties only came to be in the 1960s in the first place, the era of the Supreme Court that Republicans have worked for decades to undermine. Remember, in the 1940s, we deported Japanese-Americans to concentration camps on the basis of their race.

Again, I’m not apologizing for what’s going on, but I find it hard to stomach this feeding frenzy at Obama’s expense when there’s so much more to it.

Saying anything is part of the Bush era implies that liberals are hypocrites to tolerate it now, or, that at least, we have to back track on our “worst president ever” refrain.

What made Bush the worst president ever wasn’t the Patriot Act. I can see that happening in almost any presidency after 9/11. What made him the worst was an illegal election, followed by failing to chase terrorists before 9/11, followed by leading the country into a fraudulent war, followed by being asleep while the financial system burned the whole country down.

I mean, if we have to play this game where every last thing that happened then has to be reversed then I guess we should get rid of the No Call List. Maybe the Germans can dig up their autobahns, too, right?

On the NSA/privacy issue. It’s just not in their DNA to be civil libertarians, which is why anyone who thinks Ron and Rand Paul will ever win a Republican primary is daft. (Also not in their DNA is letting Mexicans be treated as people, hence the immigration bill’s problems.)

But there’s a big difference between disagreeing with a policy and using it as a chance to attack the President, especially when the President is not uniquely responsible for it. Remember, in the past when things like this were tried, the Supreme Court would step in. We had checks and balances. And we got addicted to those checks, because it would let political branches overreach without consequences. How many states pass crazy laws knowing that the courts will strike them down?

Well, the Republican party spent decades pushing jurisprudence based on letting the police state have wide latitude in reaction to rulings like Miranda v. Arizona and other dirty hippie liberal excesses in the 60s which caused us to lose in Vietnam and let darky drink from the same water fountain.

Now they’ve got it. They also have a Congress that passes sweeping laws like the “Patriot Act” just days after an attack instead of waiting to see if it’s really needed. (So much for the cooling saucer of the senate!)

In short, the problem is systemic and pinning this just on Obama (who voted for the FISA revisions in 2007 for fuck sake) for not being the new Earl Warren just shows how badly liberals want to appear reasonable and willing to attack their own—which, they think, gives them credibility. But this is why they lose. Reagan said the 11th commandment is don’t attack another Republican, but for liberals it appears to be pick your spot and you shall criticize Democrats, even if it’s not helpful to whatever your supposedly liberal ideals are.

If I thought for one minute that wearing out the Democratic brand would lead to more liberalism, I would go there. All it’s going to do is allow President Christie or Rubio to appoint judges who will end Roe v. Wade and do much worse on privacy.

Did you see the Power Point about what Romney was going to do in his first 100 days for christ’s sake? That’s what you guys want just to sacrifice to your idol of “reasonableness.” Then fuck you.

This is just typical. In yet another attempt to Whitewater president Obama, this time from the civil libertarian left, we have this:

The fact that the Obama administration’s actions were authorized by Congress does not let it off the hook. The White House isn’t required to use the powers it was granted.

Huh? So, Lemieux admits that “The program revealed by the Verizon order, conversely, went forward after obtaining the warrant required by the modified FISA of 2007″ and that “Admittedly, if by “legal” we mean nothing more than a prediction about “how the current Supreme Court will rule,” it is vanishingly unlikely to be found illegal.”

And he admits that

“The potential legal and policy problems of this policy are not the same as those of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping, which went ahead without the approval of the special court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. These actions were illegal on their face and held to be illegal by a federal judge in 2010… It was also less intrusive, collecting data about calls but not listening on on them.”

In other words, the administration complied with the law. Period. Full stop. But, this rhetorical flourish: “”Better than the administration that employed John Yoo to offer legal guidance on counterterrorism policy,” however, is not the standard by which the Obama administration should properly be judged.”

In other words, they are properly judged by whatever Lemieux thinks the Fourth Amendment says. I may tend to agree with him, but what I don’t agree with doing is engaging in a Whitewatering of the President because he is obeying the law and allowing himself to get potentially impeached for failing to chase terrorists using the power at his disposal.

There is also a serious process issue with standards of what should be done being determined outside of the existing law. It lets the Supreme Court hacks who smashed the Fourth Amendment off the hook, it lets Congress who let fear trump freedom off the hook and puts the one branch of government actually responsible for doing something about it on the hook.

In other words: Obama wasn’t the civil liberties messiah that he never said he would be but that I was really hoping he would be in 2008, so I’m mad.

Fuck you. I wish you could live in a virtual reality where Michelle Bachman is president and Ted Cruz is on the Supreme Court alone and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

The Republican party is about to lose Texas for a generation, and all they have to do to stop this is completely stop being who they are: the white Christian nationalist party.

There are signs this week that the immigration reform bill is falling apart. It’s a shame because this is an important issue that only the federal government can address. But it’s not a surprise. People who see this as a vital issue to the Republican party aren’t necessarily being smarter than the Republicans, they are just looking at this through the eyes of general election voters and not donors, primary voters, and ideologues.

By now, Republicans have constructed enough counternarratives about why Romney lost to be in total denial about the electoral power of Latinos. They have decided again and again that they have a messaging problem, not a substantive policy problem.

Personally, I think they have a bigger problem than what people think about Republican positions on gays and Latinos. The fundamental Republican value of lower taxes and deregulation—something many of their voters are going for, while they only tolerate the ridiculous social nuttery. If people aren’t buying the low tax issue anymore, and most people still think taxes on the wealthy should go up, then selling their anti-gay, anti-woman positions are not happening anyway.

Couple that reality with the fact that since the early 2000s, the party has done nothing to stop its decline into a regional white Christian nationalist party—it hasn’t stopped a move to the extreme right on a single issue, let alone reversed one since then—there’s little reason to believe that a non-dominant narrative about why they lost an election with a candidate most of the party never loved will convince them to hold their noses on an issue so deeply held like Messicans.

These are the people who deny global warming, after all. They aren’t going to believe that allowing amnesty is going to give them the White House if they don’t want to. It will take a drubbing in 2014 and 2016 before they reverse themselves on much of anything.

Or, as you’d think the headline should read, Nobel prize winner versus two hacks who fucked up an Excel spreadsheet and were caught by a graduate student.

But since the former is shrill and the latter are for austerity, it’s an even match in the eyes of our liberal media.