Exactly. And now the government must be stoked that it will have a test case to bring to the Supreme Court so that the Supreme Court can twist out some "logic" to say parallel construction is OK. They say that bad facts make bad law, and Ubrecht is fairly unlikeable, what with the attempts to find a hit man. From a "destroy the 4th" perspective, this case is even better than Smith v. Maryland: http://www.google.com/url?q=ht... (*). The Feds must be creaming their pants in anticipation of having parallel construction deemed constitutional.

(*) This is the grandfather of our massive indiscriminate surveillance policy. The short summary is that the police were too lazy to get a search warrant that would surely have been granted, simply had the phone company set one up. And although it dealt with a single individual, with specific facts sufficient for a warrant, and covered a specific and short time period, the Third Party Doctrine took on a different character after that, being applied to all people, in the absence of any evidence, for all time.

"-- pushed forward with NSA surveillance of all Americans;"
vastly stripped down surveillance. BTW, that's their job.

Where do you get the idea it was vastly stripped down? Snowden waited to do his leaking because he was hopeful Obama would change things. It was when Obama changed nothing ...

Snowden said he thought about disclosing the program sooner but was hopeful the election of President Barack Obama would change things. But "[Obama] continued with the policies of his predecessor," Snowden said.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/th...

---

"-- seeks to make such surveillance inescapable;"
wanting to be ab; to execute legal warrants is no making surveillance inescapable.

Really, after everything we've learned in the last year about how utterly ignored the 4th amendment is, you think this about warrants?

"-- tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan over the previous "conservative" administration"
there wasn't enough troops to deal with the war. What would you have him do? All this shows ois the the previous administration underestimated needed capacity.

He could also have just left. NOTHING is going to fix that region EVER.

"-- redefined "collection" to mean "reading" in order to avoid following the 4th Amendment (would that work for filesharer's who didn't listen to downloaded music? Not a chance.)"
and?[Emphasis added]

I not you skipped the due process free execution thing, but anyway,with respect to the 4th Amendment: see STASI: http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/0...

Also, why do you hate the Constitution? It makes you seem very unAmerican when you publicly crap on the 4th Amendment.

"-- has killed thousands of innocent people with drone strikes in numerous countries."
which is far fewer if they used none drone weaponry. Civilian deaths is tragic, but historically it's a lot less now then any other war.

This is your defense of the Nobel Peace Prize winner causing thousands of deaths?? "well, he could have caused even more." Serial Killer Defense attorneys should take note -- "Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, it was only 52 victims he hacked up, imagine what he could have done if he was President!"

"-- destroyed the War Powers Act by engaging in war in Libya without Congressional Approval."
He has congressional approval. More specifically, the office of the presidency has authorization. YOU might want to ask yourself why the pubs scream about this, but don't actually talk about removing the power congress gave him?
too wit:
"That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

Last Sunday was the 90th day of bombing in Libya, but Mr. Obama â" armed with dubious legal opinions â" is refusing to stop Americaâ(TM)s military engagement there. His White House counsel, Robert F. Bauer, has declared that, despite the War Powers Act, the president can continue the Libya campaign indefinitely without legislative support. This conclusion lacks a solid legal foundation. And by adopting it, the White House has shattered the traditional legal process the executive branch has developed to sustain the rule of law over the past 75 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06...

----

"-- let every single bankster off the hook."
fasle. several are in jail, and most DID NOT VIOLATE THE LAW. Why is that hard to understand?

Citation please. Until then, recall that over 1000 Banksters did jail time in the S&L Bailout and that was something like 1/40th the size of the recent one. I think we'd see some news on a 1000 banksters doing time -- we don't because they aren't. Till then, consider William K. Black (he helped prosecute S&Lers including the Keating Five): Zero Prosecutions of Elite Banksters Is Too Many Prosecutions for the Wall Street Journal

"-- enacted Nixon's health care plan with the liberal parts stripped out."
So you don't remember what Obama originally wanted? What we have in a compromise. Do try to remember history.

What I remember is the news reports that Obama sold out to corp interests and continued to PRETEND he supported a public option:
NY Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill Public Option

"-- opposed an international treaty on banning cluster bombs."
Sigh. Did you just go to a web site and copy and paste? How about you find out why things are done, then be specific?

Why don't you tell me why Obama loves cluster bombs which tend to leave unexploded bombletes all over the place and then some random day, sometime years in the future, maim or kill various random people. Whatever the reason, it's a fact he opposed the treaty: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/1...

If you want to convince me Obama is secret liberal, good fucking luck. He's basically Nixon with a tan.

As counterpoint, there is nothing liberal about an administration that:

-- pushed forward with NSA surveillance of all Americans;
-- seeks to make such surveillance inescapable;
-- tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan over the previous "conservative" administration
-- redefined "imminent" to mean "maybe possible far in the future" and then used that as an excuse to deprive Americans of their life without due process of law.
-- redefined "collection" to mean "reading" in order to avoid following the 4th Amendment (would that work for filesharer's who didn't listen to downloaded music? Not a chance.)
-- has killed thousands of innocent people with drone strikes in numerous countries.
-- destroyed the War Powers Act by engaging in war in Libya without Congressional Approval.
-- let every single bankster off the hook.
-- enacted Nixon's health care plan with the liberal parts stripped out.
-- opposed an international treaty on banning cluster bombs.

Democrats: The New GOP.

The water will still be there, but it will be used to benefit people and the organisms we value. There is a finite volume (*) of life the earth can support -- what we're down to is how it ought to be divided and the choice we are making is that the only organisms worth anything, are people, cows, pigs, chickens, and corn. Our population problem is an extremely unpopular topic, but by ignoring it, we will eventually destroy all the interesting biodiversity we have in the world in exchange for a monocrop of people, along with the very few organisms people tend to value, and the diseases and parasites associated with those.

(*) by weight if you will(**), not individual count.
(**) differences in body composition make "weight" not exactly accurate as some things have greater density due to the use of different minerals (hard shells or bones as a percent of body mass for example). What can be said is that there is a finite amount of stuff on the earth that can be mixed up in different ways into a finite total amount of life. The question we should ask is, what is a smart or wise percentage of that total, that we humans and the plants/animals we value, should comprise.

Exactly. Don't forget the war on toiletries in baggage. Or how something is OK when the US Federal Govt does it, for example, the way waterboarding is called torture only when done by other governments.

So, not long ago, America's major newspapers basically decided that waterboarding was somehow okay. American waterboarding, that is! In the same time frame, the same newspapers made it clear that if any other country practiced waterboarding, it was torture.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

This sort of "Laugh at China" story is designed to make the US look smart, and the rest of the world stupid and to help people miss how stupid our own government is being. But if you look around, you'll find some great ways to spend those student loans:

"Purdue University Graduate Certificate Program in Veterinary Homeland Security"
http://vet.purdue.edu/biosecur...

Maybe graduates can work for the tax black hole that is Homeland Security: http://www.dhs.gov/food-agricu...
http://www.dhs.gov/reference-n...

"forget answer to security question" --- a security question is usually used in the context of retrieving or resetting a password. If Apple can retrieve the password (from the device, its servers, iTunes, whatever) or can remotely reset the password and somehow make your data available to you, then it isn't secure. Secure would mean that forgetting a password is effectively the same (at least for the next 5 or 10 years) as tossing the storage into a raging furnace.

Yeah, but how will they know if they get a good deal.

Arms Dealer: Here's your arsenal (hands over 12 AKs).
ISIS: Great, here's the oil (hands over oil tanker).

I used to live in a city with about 80,000 people. My choices were cruddy comcast service or slower DSL. Netflix was always buffering.

I moved into the countryside about 10 miles out of town. Comcast doesn't provide service here but there is a small regional cable company. As a result, my service 2-3x faster, and costs 60% of what I used to pay Comcast.

The real issue is that cable companies are not considered common carriers. In the UK they do the common carrier thing and there is massive competition, better service, cheaper prices: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Now, about that "US is so big" bullshit. The US is like half a dozen regional Japans or Frances or Sweedens. In the middle of nowhere WY -- yeah, you aren't going to have fiber. But what about the I-5 corridor from Portland to Seattle? That's densely populated. Or WA DC to NY City -- that's major density. No reason you couldn't have 10x the speed at 1/10th the cost in any of those types of places.

As someone who is presently drunk on slivotiz -- fuck those puritans! Without condoms. In the eye. On Sunday.

Seriously, slivovitz is awesome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Better than god. And the name is vaguely kinky.

You're right -- not much of a reason. Financing: credit union. Roadside assistance: my friends. My state doesn't do inspections so: irrelevant. Initial tuneups? It doesn't come properly configed from the factory?

Hopefully true, but have you ever looked through welding goggles? While they will protect your eyes, you'll have no way to see. I suppose the only way to make goggles work, would be with a camera connected to LCDs -- pretty expensive to outfit a few thousand protestors.

anonymous COWARD??!! Seriously?

We live in a country where it is almost a sin worse than murder to say that you blame all who participate in unjust wars -- to say that those who fight are, as beings with some level of intelligence, at least enough to drive and feed themselves, culpable for the choices they make. And you can't even attach your own name to your "support the troops" tripe? Talk about a coward.

I blame the soldiers and the leaders. They are both at fault. Unless the soldiers have an IQ of about 50, they are culpable for their acts.

You confuse an object with wide range of utility and a limited set of nefarious uses, a knife, with a system of technology and techniques with a limited range of utility and vast capability for misuse (mass surveillance). I suspect the annual proportion of illegitimate knife use to legitimate knife use is so low, it would look stupid to even write it out.

If we round up substantially, we get about 2000 knife murders per year in the US. http://www.economicpolicyjourn... There are roughly 300,000,000 people. Let's say each person uses a knife on average once per day (spreading butter, chopping veggies, cutting string, killing people). That's 109,500,000,000 knife uses per year. 2k/109,500,000k -- that works out to a proportion of 0.00000001826484 evil knife uses per legitimate knife use.

Note: there are more than 300m people in the US, there are actually fewer than 2000 knife murders per year, and most people probably use a knife more than once per day. There are of course other illegitimate knife uses than murder, but considering that the number up there is extremely generous to your argument, we could probably call it a wash.

Why is the parent post moderated flamebait?

The comment is statistically accurate if a bit understated. Lots of charts:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

There are countless articles anyone on /. should be competent to find on their own, such as this:

The punishment falls disproportionately on people of color. Blacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. Black kids are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white ones -- even though white kids are more likely to abuse drugs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

As for the "war on black people" comment, see the book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Once a person is convicted of a felony, like for having an ounce of pot or whatever, huge swaths of civil and privacy rights are just taken away for life, finding employment becomes very hard, and they end up never being financially capable of escaping the ghetto. This is just as effective as "whites only" laws.