Currently gracing the front page of HA, Darryl highlights a recent poll that shows Darcy Burner trailing Dave Reichert by six points, Lee accuses Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress of being “pretty pathetic” on protecting our Fourth Amendment rights, and Will shows some love to King County Councilman Larry Phillips, a local Democratic politician who I have nothing particularly against, but quite honestly, have nothing particularly for… especially in a potential face-off against Executive Ron Sims, a man I openly admire (if often disagree with.)
But then, that’s the sort of ideologically rigid, uncompromisingly partisan amen blogging you’ve come to expect from HA. I suppose you can just write it off as one three of those “rare occasions” when we dare to stray from party orthodoxy.
Lee, Goldy
I think we all will need t learn a lot oas Obama assumes the role of President.
As a long tme supporter, I respect BHO because he is not doctrinaire. I do not know how he made his decision in re FISA, but one guess may be that the court hnever did actually do its job. The FISA curt was, imho, a tattered liberal pretense. If the Bushies were nto such idiots they would have left us with the blankie.
I am not at all sure how best to deal with the conflict between terrorism and thye fourth amendment. As a beginning though, let me suggest that unless the president belivers in human right NO law is going to be effective.
Goldy: “I suppose you can just write it off as three of those ‘rare occasions’ when we dare to stray from party orthodoxy.”
Yeah. Pretty much.
Dare ya to say ANYTHING critical about your gal pal Darcy. C’mon… something more than “the shoes she wore at her last press conference didn’t go with the outfit” or “Darcy didn’t go after Bush / Reichert as aggressively as I would’ve.”
If they can write a satire piece about her ( http://nakedloon.com/politics/.....-rainbows/ ), you can surely find ONE thing wrong.
Let me suggest a very specific issue that may be worth a debate…I believe we need national ID cards to protect our freedoms.
The opposition to ID cards is that they facilitate government knowledge of where we are and what we are doing. While that is true, I suspect the current tools are already adequate to do that job without the clarity that might come from a process tied to an ID.
An ID would instantaneously solve 50% of the immigration issues. It would also gratly facilitate air travel. OTOH, strict laws in the use of the national ID would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
For example, under HIPPA, supposedly my identity is concealed in terms of my heath care. Big Fuckin Deal. Several national companies have cracked my identity and contacted me about drugs I use. They do legally by a meta analysis of data that is public or semipublic,
SJ @ 1 “I respect BHO because he is not doctrinaire.”
In what way?
I guess if you want to be technical, he doesn’t have any views of his own to conflict with…
He marches lock-step with the Dem Party and has all kinds of lobbyist (today’s NYT re: ethanol) and PAC (MorOn.org, etc.) influences.
As Peter Brown points out in todays WSJ:
if Obama isn’t elected, it should finally put an end to this Far Left lunacy. It’s a sad thing, but reading Obama’s positions on issues makes me long for the days of Bill Clinton.
@1
I do not know how he made his decision in re FISA, but one guess may be that the court hnever did actually do its job.
Well, the court basically approved every request it was sent. That could mean that it was just a rubber stamp, or it could also mean that none of the Presidents since 1978 tried to spy on people they shouldn’t be spying on. But despite that, Bush still circumvented it. Why would Bush circumvent something that has essentially been a rubber stamp? Who knows? But it should concern you that Obama thinks that what Bush has done should now be legal.
@2: Yes. I am so tired of your endless posts criticizing Reichert. When will you give it up?
Mark @2,
Why should I desperately search for something negative to write about Darcy, when there are so many glaringly obvious negative things to write about Reichert?
Proud @6,
To be fair, it is “Mark the Redneck” who is the welching loser, not “The Real Mark.”
“I do not know how he made his decision in re FISA, but one guess may be that the court hnever did actually do its job.”
Well, that’s one guess. There are, of course, millions of others that are equally inane.
Post #6 edited to correct a bad case of mistaken identity and foul language.
“An ID would instantaneously solve 50% of the immigration issues.”
Only half? Is that a glass half full, half empty, or half-baked?
Hey Cynical! I hope you kept NOV! I did! NOV is up $6 today as the oil situation continues sliding into Hell. I just woke up and crawled out of my burrow to find out I made $1,500 in the stock market this morning while the trollfucks were burning the $4.50 gas I sold them to commute to their blue-collar jobs! Monday, Monday … oh beautiful Monnnndaaaaay mornnnninnnng!!! Monday, Monday … !!! HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR
PTBA @ 6
As a
greatman once sort of said:Why should I desperately search for something negative to write about Reichert, when there are so many glaringly obvious negative things to write about Darcy?
re: Roadkill @ 12
Is anyone going to tell Roger that the orderlies only installed a trading simulator on his computer to keep him entertained?
So why did that meeting with the Saudis yesterday fall apart? Why didn’t the Saudis agree to boost production? Because they can’t! They’ve been lying to the world for years about how much oil they’ve got and how much they can produce. The Empty Quarter is empty!! There’s nothing but sand in that fucking desert. Anyone who knows the first two cents about investing in oil stocks knows that all of the Persian Gulf’s oil is in a narrow strip of land straddling the Persian Gulf’s shore and the rest of the Arabian Desert is an empty fucking desert. And that 90% of Saudia Arabia’s Ghawar Field has already been produced, and that what used to come up from Saudian Arabian oilfields as 3 parts oil to 1 part seawater now comes up as 3 barrels of seawater for every barrel of oil. The Saudis are going tits up! Man are my stocks gonna be hot when oil hits $500 a barrel! You stupid humans should have built electric cars, oh, about 20 years ago. Instead you stupid humans bought SUVs and Hummers! Fun! Fun! Fun! You’re about to become extinct, then rabbits will run this place, and I’ll be their king! Meanwhile, I’m building up my royal treasury.
SJ @ 12: I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion, also, that we need a unique identifier (other than the social security number, which is re-used), and a national ID card.
The reason I came to that conclusion is that attempts to keep the government ignorant of our identity and location is pretty much ignoring the fact that horse has left the barn, quite some time ago. The social security number is no longer a unique identifier (they re-cycle the numbers), and there is no way to cross-check the data.
As someone who deals with databases frequently, I know how important it is to keep data integrity by making sure that each data set can be checked back to it’s original source.
Ever wonder why identity theft wasn’t a big deal until a decade or so ago? I remember as an undergraduate in the 1970’s my college ID number was my social security number, and we were required to recite it before we could pick up our registration packets (in front of several student aids and untold others in line behind us). This was based upon the rather faulty assumption that nobody would go to the trouble to memorize somebody else’s social security number, I guess. But nobody was worried about other people knowing the number, because there wasn’t much they could do with it. It had no value at the time, except for eventually claiming social security benefits.
So what is different now? It’s not the internet. It’s that credit card companies will issue credit cards without making any attempt to know who is applying for the card. All they need is a name and a social security number. Even if the date of birth and address fails to match the credit reports, they will still issue the card, because they figure it is more cost efficient to require the victim of identity theft to sort out the mess afterwards than it is to reject credit card applications or perform anything more than a cursory check.
In one test, someone took a credit card application sent to their home, tore it up into small pieces, then taped it back together and filled it out using their own name (which was pre-printed on the application), but crossing out the address and instead writing his brother’s address. A couple of weeks after mailing it back, his brother called to say he had received the card in the mail – showing how the companies which process those applications will ignore obvious signes of identity theft in order to process the applications. When asked by a reporter, the company processing the applications explained that they are paid to put the data into the computer, and they receive a small fee for each application. They are not paid for applications they reject, nor are they expected to investigate suspicious ones.
Likewise, social security numbers are bought and sold among illegal immigrants who merely need to produce a reasonable facsimile of a social security card, plus photo ID of some sort, in order to get “above-the-table” employment. When the government receives social security taxes being paid for two different people in different states, it holds one or both in abeyance (no credit given), but makes no attempt to sort out the problem, because it has received no funding to do so. In light of the Republican insistence that “something” be done about illegal immigration, this is rather perplexing, since it seems like a simple step which could have been taken at any point between 2000 and 2007. Of course, businesses which regularly hire illegal aliens and don’t want to have to ask too many questions while doing so, tend to vote Republican, so I guess it’s not so perplexing after all.
Then you have the Evangelical community, which is very resistent to national identity cards. You see, the Evangelical interpretation of the Book of Revelation says that in the last days, you cannot buy or sell without taking “the Mark of the Beast”, which would condemn you to an eternity in hell. They believe that any surviving Christians would have to lead an underground (survivalist) life during that period of tribulation. Some believe that a national ID card would prevent them from hiding from the government during that time, or that the ID card itself would be the “mark of the Beast”. Some believe that by resisting adoption of these measures (some objected to bar-coding of food items for that reason), they can delay the end days. So with many Evangelicals so resistent to a national identity card, no Republican President or Congressman can safely ignore them and the voting & donation base which they provide.
But I’ve never understood why Evangelical Protestants, who believe in the miracle-working powers of God, believe that they can delay the Second Coming of Christ by obstructing the issuance of bar codes or national identity cards. These same people use credit cards and driver’s licenses daily, insist on legislation requiring a driver’s license in order to vote, and otherwise fully integrate themselves into the fabric of modern society where anonymity is scarce.
Failing to issue a national identity card isn’t going to do a thing to protect our identity or prevent the Second Coming of Christ. All it does is make it less efficient for us to confirm who somebody really is, for a variety of very understandable purposes.
re 11: The other 50% of immigration problems could be solved by throwing a few CEO’s in jail for a few years.
5. Lee, actually Sen. Obama has said that there may well be illegalities and that they should be prosecuted.
As to whether FISA made sense, I really do not know. It certainly sounds as if it did not make sense but I have enough respect for BHO to want to hear more. Frankly, what I would like is a supreme court ruling overturning the unconstitutional assertion of executive privilege.
I think Madison AND Jefferson (maybe not Hamilton) would scream out loud if someone told them that today we claim the Prexy is immune from ordinary law.
@11 PTBAA
A national ID would immediately stop most employment of illegals. With no employment, the incentive to immigrate would go away.
What is inane about that?
15 Gee whiz, does that mean the Saudis are about to go back to being a tribe of impoverished goat herders?
Naaaah…now they own big chunks of so many American corporations and financial institutions, they’ll just collect on all our collective IOU’s for the next century or so. Including the couple trillion or so Shrub and his pals have managed to add to the national debt.
@19: They come here because to stay is untenable. A fancy ID card does nothing to change that situation. A fancy ID card can be faked. Unscrupulous employers who could care less and pay cash would continue to do so.
But mostly, I was curious how the number “50%” was derived. Hard statistical evidence? Citations from peer reviewed journal articles? Mad magazine?
I suspect you just guessed.
7 – The point is that you DON’T have anything negative to say about The Darcy. Nothing! She’s been your public jerk fantasy for 2 years. Its one thing to support a candidate, its quite another to have that support fueled by a romantic crush on said candidate. It really is creepy!
16 Hey, I wouldn’t mind it if an undocumented alien were to “borrow” my SSN to sign up for a job, as long as it meant that their FICA deductions would go into my benefits…
As to the evangelicals, I’ve watched their story for the last several decades, as they’ve, shall we say, “adjusted” it to current events to rationalize their claim that Armageddon is only a heartbeat away. Mind you, if you’ll ask any of them about that, you’ll get a blank stare or some mumbo-jumbo about how you just don’t understand “Biblical reality”.
@13:
Are you sure about that? Goldy’s posts about Reichert are always backed up with quotes, facts, analysis, and argument where all you and the other Marks ever seem to do is blandly accuse Darcy Burner of being stupid, or inexperienced. Seems to me you’ve hurled some insults (clumsily), but have come up with nothing substantive against Burner.
SJ and others, Ben Franklin was right. Both on “essential liberty” and “a republic if we can keep it.
We’re seriously compromised on the first and are close to losing the other.
Stop it like the state ID or requiring a federal social security # stops it?
You are counting on the government to do it’s job. That is silly.
YP @ 24
The core of my argument against Darcy isn’t “provable” because you can’t prove a negative. The fact is that she is a lightweight. It is up to HER (or her personal “Dwight Schrute,” Goldy) to prove that she has what it takes. So far, she’s tried to pass off others’ work as her own (her PR firm writing the (ir)Responsible Plan), tried to inflate her resume (MS “executive”) and got caught blatantly lying about Reichert in a TV ad during the last election.
@20 “15 Gee whiz, does that mean the Saudis are about to go back to being a tribe of impoverished goat herders?”
Exactly! They could own all the real estate in America but they can’t move it to the desert and what are they gonna do after our government devalues all of assets down to zero! Herd goats!
@27: I’m not sure the point is to prove something mathematically, but to produce an argument instead of the usual name-calling.
I’m sure Reichert has never lied in an ad, or inflated his resume, and has had nothing but the utmost integrity in office.
But you’re right, it’s for Darcy Burner to show that she has what it takes.
YP @ 29
Fair enough.