Silly Pleb, the millionaires will pay someone else to camp out for them.

I would argue they have already show the rule of law to be an absolute joke.

When senior officials at the White House argues "the law does not require us to make a formal determination as to whether a coup took place." so they can ignore restrictions on aid to Egypt you know the law is a joke.

When the Treasury department rewrite bankruptcy law on the fly and over bond holder objections allows foreign investors to take a large stake in an American auto company because..jerbs.. you know the rule of law is a joke.

When banks rig overnight lending rates bilking investors, mortgage holders, and Municipalities out of billions and there are but a few wrist slap level civil judgements and no prosecutions of individuals you know the rule of law is a joke.

When NSA officers make disproven statements before congress under oath and nothing happens...

When clearly legally questionable activities are identified and courts duck the issue resorting to arguments, like "oh well you can't know your calls logged so you don't have standing"

Lets face it, its painful obvious the "rule of law" still gets a lot of lip service but is much closer to the old rules of "might makes right" than to the found principles of this nation. (Which is not say things were ever really any different). It boils down to what it always has; does someone bigger and badder than you want something you have or dislike what you are doing, better watch out!

Why do assume that because Obama is a two faced freckles asshole that Rand is?

Rand has essentially spent his entire life watching his fathers political career be pretty severely constrained by rigid adherence to principles. Keep in mind, Slashdot aside, the NSA generally does better in opinion polls than Snowden. Paul is seeking to win a national election.

Obama was running for office and said those things when the popular view was Iraq and all the stuff we were doing to fight terror were abusive acts by our cowboy president. Opinion has shifted with the rise of ISIS, a majority of the sheep have returned to the "whatever it takes" view that existed on 9/12/2001.

My point is that is not politically expedient for Paul to take this position really, its at best no especially harmful to his electoral hopes. I think maybe we ought to withhold some judgement until/if we some actual performance.

Wait a moment. For the most part that which isn't illegal, is legal. What we prosecute the NSA for exactly? Misappropriation of funds, they used to build an unauthorized massive surveillance apparatus? Acting under the color of law, when they were requesting the records? Conspiracy of some kind?

I am not really sure there is actually much to charge them with and what there is, although fairly serious, might be hard to prove.

IANAL but I look at it this way an activity isn't constitutional or unconstitutional, its legal or illegal; a law, order, process, or procedure could be unconstitutional. What the court said essentially is it does not consider the law Congress passed to authorize the activity.

We don't know if Congress can authorize such an activity.

So write your congress person. I think its important we express the view that perhaps outside the limited scope of defense; secret law making is an unacceptable practice that undermines democracy.

How can I express my wishes to you as a constituent if I can't know what is being discussed. Even if you take the view that as my representative after the election I am supposed to trust you to look out for my interests, how can evaluate you and decide if I should help re-elect you if I can't know what legislating you did until after the end of your term when it goes into effect.

I think as the public we need to send the message that unless there is a clear direct immediate relationship to the secrecy and national security our expectation is "Just vote no."

"We have to pass the bill to see what is in it" is just irresponsible in the context of our core value of government by the people for the people.

The could publish the entire text of the bill if that was the reason with blanks for country specific percentages. They could let congress persons make notes and just check that they have not noted the percentages before they leave.

The reason offered is 100% pure bull shit, but its not even quality bull shit, its the kind that leaves you to wonder what they fed the poor bull.

Its kind of grey area. Full disk encryption could itself be though of in those terms. I mean why are ciphering literally every block of information your store? Certainly it must be because you have something to hide right.

If you immediate start destroying the equipment when the cops show up that is a problems but in the case we have a device that has a normal operating behavior of putting itself into a secured state (by shutting down) whenever your wrist leave its proximity. Its not illegal (yet) to use a secure device. I would expect a good lawyer could spin this one to your favor.

The problem is the so call conservatives and their regulations. A libertarian would say you can put whatever you want in the ground on your property but if it leaks onto mine, I'll see you court.

A properly run court would arrange fair compensation for the loss of use. Stop passing laws that protect industrial polluters for liability and we would stop having these problems, stop having government recognize fictions legal entities so the real ownership escapes liability. The incentive to conceal problems with technology like injection wells would disappear because we all know it comes to light eventually if the problems are real you will be sued with the possibility of loosing far more than you ever made from the activity.

Yes but the spied on military and diplomatic communications, occasionally big industrial firms and very importantly foreign communications in most cases. The NSA is more or less spying on EVERY communication and domestic communications almost as frequently as foreign.

Its not the same.

Its a matter of perspective though. From my perspective as a voter you are correct. If you are Reince Priebus, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz than it is a "team sport." You job is to maintain the influence of you party, you do that by winning the most elections for the most powerful offices; the most trophies so to speak.

Looking at in those terms to do you spend most of resources practicing the beat the least funded teams in the league, lets call them the Green party, the Libertarians, who you will likely beat anyway or do spend your efforts to try and defeat the big rival? Additionally do you look at your problems in things you have some control over brands, marketing strategy etc; or do spend your effort on broad policy research and development only to have half your people go rogue once elected anyway?

I think understanding politics and being effective no matter who your requires looking at it both ways, as purely competitive game, and a system of government.

Except that just like in Broad terms Hillary's tenure as Sec State IS a failure.

I am not talking about Benghazi specifically in scandal machine since that she should have anticipated and prevent the specific attack where our ambassador was killed. However in a more abstract sense its a fine example of Hillarys failure, we "went in to Libya" with a certain set of objectives and the outcome looks nothing like that, the security and human rights situations are both worse.

Ditto for her handling of the rest of the "Arab spring". Tunisia is about the only thing you could call a policy success that happened are her watch and we had a very limited role there.

I don't think there is any major foreign policy success she can point at, other than USAID handing out a money (Which isn't exactly difficult). Our security and influence certainly did improve on her watch. She does not have any major legislative successes either as a senator. The most we can charitably say is her service in these roles was "adequate."

Back to Benghazi she immediately tried to blame it on that stupid youTube movie "the innocence Islam" or whatever the title was, and proceeded to try and prosecute the person who made it. From a communications perspective which is it? Are Islam and its followers peaceful members of a global community we can live side by side with our are they violent lunatics who consider an insult on youTube a just pretext for warfare? Do we support freedom of expression or do with stand behind the idea that censorship is sometimes called for? A leader ought to have strong positions on things things, yet only a couple short years later her take on Charlie Hebdo is almost opposite.

This is a pattern with Hillary, sure I can agree her views on crime might have reasonably evolved since the 90's if she was to run away from her husbands era of "tough on crime" fine, but in lots of other areas she is doing an awful lots of evolving awful quick, so quick it starts to look more like responding to opinion polls to me.

Then we have her handling of the "e-mail" scandal I am not saying she did anything but her handling of it did more to make it look like a coverup, which gets back to the messaging and communications problems. She should have turned the operation of that server over to a trusted 3rd party immediately, she didn't. Its a lot like all of her memory and record keeping problems from the "White water" era.

Here again even if I set the whole scandal and legal aspects aside, we are left with someone who thought in 2009 that doing State Department business on her private mail server was a good idea. What sort of judgement is that? Next Bradly Manning happens and thought all that and the opsec questions it raised she never considers that her personal IT contractors might pose the sort of risk. Apparently the vetting and monitoring of active duty intelligence personnel (however junior) did not cut it, but Clintons' "guy" could be trusted?

Near as I can tell Hillary is where she is because she married Bill, who had the talent to get himself elected governor than president. Hillary got thrust into money/power/politics and has since not blown it so badly as to loose it, but never could have got where she is on her own. Which isn't to say Carly is any better a choice. Hillary's candidacy however would be a joke (like Carly's) but for the fact the rest of the national Democratic party lacks anyone with a decent brand. They are either unknown, older than igneous rock, or the special kinda of crazy that if allowed to speak more publicly risks making Ted Cruz sound normal.

The GOP is like the Red Skins, relatively few like the brand but the individual players all find their fans, the DNC is like the Starts & Stripes, more people have a favorable view of the team just don't ask them to try and name any players.

That is why there are two areas of study micro-economics and macro-economics. On the micro-scale, it usually is better to fire 10% of your staff. After all the people who are working hard and doing good work usually know it. If you give them a 10% pay cut they will be butt hurt about it, they won't work as hard, or do as good a work. You will most likely see a greater than 10% loss in productivity.

On the other hand hand if you fire 10% of workforce, those that "survive" will feel threatened and if anything the need to continually show how valuable they are. You probably see less than a 10% decrease in productivity, over the short term; inside the limited scope of your organization.

Now on the macro scale all the other firms out there do essentially the same thing. When hiring starts up again its done at the new wage level the market has valued the skill at. So the prevailing wage ends up just at the value supply and demand expect. Economics works you just have to be careful not to zoom in to much when applying maco-principles or zoom out to much when you try and use micro-principles.

How is it Apples fault your body contains a deposit of metallic pigments where there should be none?

Seems more like a defect in the wearer to me.

I consider myself a true Libertarian but I still support neutrality at least until such time this organizations are stripped of their rights-way across MY property and local, state, and federal governments surrender the right to use eminent domain to facilitate anything that will have private ownership.

Lift the restrictions on me from demanding a rent on pain of eviction from the cable co to use my property to host their wire, then they can use their wire however they like, once I am being fair compensated for the use of what is mine. Until then I think the I should have some say via representative government what they can do with.

Empower individual land owners, when the cable co wants to over charge and under deliver, I'll just respond that's fine raise your rates all you like, double dip if you want to I don't care, I'll just raise your rent. Sure dig up your wire and run around my property but my neighbors will probably do the same things to you so, just pay up. The problem will be fixed in a hurry. Mutual cooperation will ensure fairness.